Ah, Veiled Fate. It’s been a while since we encountered IV Studio’s game of spurious divine parentage. At the time, it was dearly close to becoming a favorite, but its shortcomings were sufficient that the possibility was as scuttled as my own Olympian provenance. Now the team behind the original game — Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, and Zac Dixon — have revisited the concept via not one but two separate titles.

Today, we’re looking at the one that recasts the whole thing as a lane-battler. What could possibly go wrong?

The first time I played Pillars of Fate, it seemed like a stroke of genius. Maybe two strokes of genius folded together into an omelette of genius.

The idea is wonderfully simple. There are three lanes between players. Each lane has two separate scoring values. In all cases, one is higher than the other. Most of the time, the distance between them is so great that the lower range dips into negative points.

Into these lanes both would-be divinities play cards whose strength determines which side wins the contest. Obviously. So far we’re evoking, what, every lane-battler? What’s less obvious is that those cards also determine which scoring value the lane will trigger. Play feathers, the game’s symbol for its “light side,” and that’s the scoring that’ll be awarded to the stronger player. Conversely, a greater number of scorpions means the stronger player will earn the points on the “dark side” of the card.

To be clear, there’s no hard correspondence between “light” and positive points or “dark” and negative points. It’s entirely possible that feathers will spell negative points and vice versa. This introduces the first and most notable of a few graphical issues. Namely, that the points themselves are not color-coded. Whether feather or scorpion, light or dark, positive or negative, the points are rendered in the lane’s neutral hue. In our experience, it’s a missed step that bore rotten fruit on more than one occasion, making the lanes that much harder to read. And, in some cases, to reach the conclusion of a round and realize we’d made an early misstep in our understanding of a particular lane’s stakes.

Oops. Oh well. That’s on us, I suppose. Back to the grindstone.

Over the course of three rounds — more epically entitled “ages” — those spills of positive and negative points veer back and forth. Sometimes you win a coup, others you find yourself toppled from heav’n’s lofty pillars.

Again, it initially feels genius. There’s room for subtlety. Each lane can accommodate a face-down card per player, allowing both sides to conceal their motives. Is your opponent trying to win that lane with their best cards, or nudging it toward a negative scoring value in the hopes that you’ll invest all your strength there instead? Most cards are straightforward strength values and feather/scorpion icons, but their possible range — as low as one strength, as high as nine — is enough to ensure some major swings.

And then there are the demigods. There are twenty of these special foil-embossed cards in all. (Although only their backside is so visibly rendered, another misstep of design that makes them a little harder to pick out from the crowd than I would have preferred.) Both players receive three at the beginning of the game, and then, after swapping a couple, can only deploy one per age.

As you might expect, the demigods are potent indeed. There’s the Mother of All, a real jerk who awards ten points if you lose all three lanes in an age — a blow that’s significantly lessened if by “losing” you really mean “your opponent just received thirteen negative points.” Or Naka, a demigoddess who has to be played face-up, but allows your other two lanes to hold two face-down cards instead of only one. So much for your rival’s headspace. Others are dead simple, like Vesper and Penance, both of whom have zero strength but so many feather or scorpion icons to single-handedly determine the status of a lane.

Despite this potency, not every member of this demipantheon is equivalent. Some cards are harder to utilize than others, and how. One, Hadria, dings your opponent five points if they win that lane, but boasts a hefty seven strength, forcing you to measure your other deployments carefully. The Steward alters the scorpion/feather composition of lanes bordering his holy self, but not by very much. These cards are still powerful if deployed smartly, but can also threaten to detonate in your face, making them as mercurial as Hercules was a family man. (Too soon?)

This probably sounds good. Smart. Possessed of a spirit of genius. It did to me as well.

But there are problems, and not all of them are as minor as the game’s graphical omissions. Take, for example, the way cards are parceled out. Both sides have an identical deck of 32 champions, the little non-demigods that make up the bulk of your army. As noted earlier, the range on these cards is extreme. Some have strength as low as one. Others stretch up to nine. And while there’s some correlation between a card’s strength in battle and its capacity to manipulate the value of a lane, this isn’t always the case.

Put another way, Pillars of Fate is unusually subject to the vagaries of the draw. Missing out on a high card or two can prove disastrous. And that goes double if you find yourself poorly armed and holding the first-player token. Because let me tell you, going first in Pillars of Fate is the pits. Every turn leaks another crucial missive to your rival, letting them play reactively and with such precision that each and every one of your moves becomes Sisyphean. Play a card, watch it get countered. Play a card, watch it get countered. Fill a lane, watch your opponent take their sweet time responding. Really, you’ll almost certainly fill all three lanes in advance of your opponent. This often proves disastrous.

And there are none of the mitigating systems that have found their way into other lane-battlers. There’s no ability to withdraw a bad hand, as in Jon Perry’s Air, Land, & Sea. John Clowdus’s Omen: A Reign of War fills its war-torn cities with so many special units that they’re effectively all demigods, producing wild swings that can’t be entirely countered. Even The Old King’s Crown, itself a freshman design by Pablo Clark, understands this problem, asking players to assign cards to their lanes simultaneously rather than let trailing players repeatedly one-up the leader.

The result is a lane-battler that feels bad as often as it feels brilliant. That makes its face-down cards such potential swings that they’re agony to reveal at the age’s conclusion. That generally goes to whomever held the first-player token least. Somebody will, by the way. Hold that accursed token the least. The game is three ages long, remember. Even something as small as a fourth age might have mitigated the worst of the game’s imbalances.

To be clear, these issues don’t ruin Pillars of Fate. The game’s smartest touches are still present and accounted for. In particular there’s the way lanes can be manipulated to turn a rival’s momentum against themself, the points-tallying equivalent of judo. Oh, you’ve deployed your most strong-armed champions to this distant battlefield? Oops, the only prize here is a cornucopia of spoilt meat. In those moments, the game shows itself at its most devious.

At some level, I even feel the same way about the demigods. I wish they had been a little more level, ability-wise, so that some weren’t such obvious picks compared to their siblings. But the game’s restraint in only allowing one per side per age is noteworthy, keeping the contests a little tighter than they might have been otherwise. Sure, the huge gap in their strength — in all units’ strengths — makes outcomes a little harder to preempt and keeps the game’s fickleness intact. But when things are going right, those become strengths rather than frustrations. It’s just hard to know which way the game will go.

My greatest reservation, really, is that there are so many excellent lane-battlers right now. I’d rather play any of the titles I mentioned earlier. I’d rather play Compile. I’d even rather play Riftforce or An Empty Throne. It doesn’t help that Pillars of Fate somehow misses out on its predecessor’s potential. You aren’t a god pushing around progeny. You’re a big dude with an army of your own. That’s fine enough, but as another stab at what made Veiled Fate so interesting, it travels toward an entirely separate heading, and a much less interesting one at that.

Okay, here’s one way in which Pillars of Fate recaptures that spark. If you remember Veiled Fate, you might recall that sometimes its contests were determined by the flip of a coin or the turn of a card. There are no coin-flips in Pillars of Fate, but the wildness of those champion decks and the testiness of its demogods often results in a similar caprice. After all this time, one’s fate might still hinge on whether they’re holding the right cards. And a first-player token.

Here’s the good news: Pillars of Fate isn’t alone. Its sister title, Scales of Fate, offers another attempt to make good on the promise of Veiled Fate. We’ll take a look at that one tomorrow, but I’ll tip my hand right now: that one got it right.

As for this one… well. Despite its flashes of brilliance, sometimes even a genius can prove more trouble than they’re worth.

 

A complimentary copy of Pillars of Fate was provided by the publisher.

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The president of hobby games trade organisation GAMA, Nicole Brady, has failed in her bid to be re-elected to the role, with vice president Meredith Placko instead being voted in by the board of directors.

Brady, who spent two years as president of GAMA, had been a key driver of a plan for the organisation to become the “epicentre” of global tabletop gaming, underpinned by the unveiling of its first-ever 10-year plan last October.

She was also the organisation’s first female president on her May 2024 election, which at the time also saw the first all-women lineup for GAMA’s board officers in its then 47-year history.

New president Placko is the co-founder of hobby paint company Turbo Dork, and spent two years as CEO of Munchkin publisher Steve Jackson Games before resigning in April last year.

She began a two-year term representing publishers on the non-profit organisation’s board in March 2025, and was elected as GAMA vice president by the board of directors a month later.

Critical Role marketing manager Ross Thompson was elected as the new vice president at yesterday’s board of directors meeting, while Southern Hobby Distribution‘s Tiffany Reid and Red Racoon Games‘ Jamie Mathy were both re-elected as secretary and treasurer respectively.

Speaking to BoardGameWire about her win, Placko said, “I want to thank Nicole Brady for her work as president over the last few years, especially for establishing the strategic vision.

“I applaud the work that has been done on that 10-year vision. The next step is to turn it into a strategic plan. I do believe it will need evaluation and tweaking, as it very much is a living vision. As GAMA’s needs change, we must be prepared to adapt. 

She added “As a trade organization, we should focus on strengthening and expanding the core elements that benefit our industry.

“GAMA is at a critical juncture: we’ve seen turnover in the last year, we’re about to start the executive director search, and our industry has endured more than its share of crises, including tariffs and economic uncertainty.

“When I pitched myself to my fellow board members, and now to the membership at large, my experiences as an executive and leader in business and the news industry have prepared me to help turn our goals into a solid foundation for which the organization can continue to grow.”

She added, “I applaud the work that has been done on the 10-year vision. The next step is to turn that vision into a strategic plan. I do believe it will need tweaking and evaluation, as it very much is a living vision. As GAMA’s needs change, we must be prepared to adapt.

“Another important issue for me is that as a trade organization, we must lead the way on critical industry matters. Everything from timely updates and actionable measures regarding tariffs and related issues.

“To keep our members informed about domestic and international regulatory changes. And educating and organizing membership on how to advocate for the issues we face at local and federal levels.

“But, none of this can be done by one person alone. It’s imperative that the board works together on all of this. And we work with our committees and leadership at GAMA to turn these ideas and needs into actionable items.

“While I may have a strong vision for what GAMA should be as a trade organization, the decision is not mine alone. The board, the staff, and most importantly the membership drive this organization and make it great.

“Ultimately, one of my most important jobs is ensuring the board is part of the process every step of the way.”

Brady told BoardGameWire she was proud to have created “a strong foundation that future leadership will be able to build on”, despite “people throwing tack strips on the road in front of me”.

She said, “I am proud of the many things I have done to help advance the organization, including making history as GAMA’s first female president.

“My greatest accomplishment as president was spearheading GAMA Vision 2035 at the fall 2024 strategic planning session. We put together a big picture of what we wanted for the future and that focused on becoming the epicenter for tabletop gaming.

“It included expanding internationally and domestically in a meaningful way, creating large scale marketing initiatives (think ‘Got Milk?’), building partnerships, launching a speaker’s bureau, establishing a 501(c)(3) for charitable work, providing educational certification and so much more.”

Brady told BoardGameWire last year that the Vision 2035 ten-year plan was an attempt to get the organisation away from “playing whack-a-mole” on important issues rather than managing them in a long-term strategy.

The array of plans spread across the next decade include boosting its membership within both hobby games and the mass market, expanding itself into a global organisation, shifting its finances away from the current heavy reliance on the annual GAMA Expo and Origins shows, and leading the conversation on sustainability within the industry.

Brady also highlighted her work push GAMA towards global lobbying, legislation and advocacy, over and above initiatives such as the organisation’s trip to DC last year to lobby against the US tariffs situation.

She added, “As treasurer, I called for an audit to address concerns I witnessed. That audit has finally wrapped up thanks to our current Treasurer taking over the project when it stalled and will result in changes that improve the record keeping and financial practices.

“Even with people throwing tack strips on the road in front of me, I was able to create a strong foundation that future leadership will be able to build on.

“I know I have made a lasting positive difference. Many people have shared publicly that my leadership is the reason they joined GAMA, renewed their memberships or have renewed faith in the future of GAMA.

“I did a lot of relationship repair behind the scenes. Seeing positive news instead of constant negativity is a testament to that hard work.”

The GAMA Board of Directors is comprised of twelve individuals elected to represent the six voting membership groups – publishers, retailers, wholesalers, production, media and events, and creators – with half of the cohort up for election each year.

That board in turn elects GAMA’s four officers – president, vice-president, treasurer and secretary – from among themselves each year, with the winner requiring a majority of the 12 votes available.

The current board of directors also includes John Stephens from Total Escape Games, Drew Wehrle from Wehrlegig Games, Heather O’Neill from 9th Level Games, former president Eric Price from Meijia Board Game Factory, Michael Maggiotto Jr from BEST Human Capital & Advisory Group, LegalWATCH’s Eartha Johnson, and Danny O’Neill from Mood Publishing.

GAMA is currently working to secure a permanent replacement for its previous executive director John Stacy, who left the association last October just after the ten-year plan had been revealed.

Leadership consultant Zaria Davis was named as interim executive director last November, while GAMA hired its first COO last September in Melinda Prickett.

Placko told BoardGameWire, “I want to give credit and thanks to Melinda Prickett, GAMA’s COO, who has stepped up in so many ways since John Stacy’s departure. She and the GAMA staff are doing an incredible job.

“Many changes have occurred at the operational level and much work is happening behind the scenes. Melinda and the staff have taken to it all with such earnestness and gusto.

“While the board may have seen a change in leadership, we are a small piece of the GAMA puzzle. I want to make sure Melinda, and the staff who are doing the heavy lifting of this organization, get the recognition they deserve.”

Last month GAMA’s board of directors apologised for some of its elected leaders being “rude and disrespectful” during a “heated” annual general meeting at the recent GAMA Expo trade show.

This year’s GAMA Expo sealed another record attendance, ahead of its planned move to Baltimore in 2027 to contend with rapidly growing demand.

More than 3,820 attendees showed up to this year’s event in Louisville, Kentucky, up almost 12% on last year’s previous record of 3,425 – which had already left the show pressed for space across the exhibition hall and its extensive programme of seminars.

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French board game designer association SAJ has renamed itself to make its title more inclusive to women and non-binary people, as well as to better underscore its status as a union.

The Société des Auteurs de Jeux – which translates as society of game designers – was formed in 2017 through the merger of three separate groups, and currently represents more than 800 individual designers.

The organisation has now been rebranded as the Syndicat des Auteurices de Jeux – the Union of Game Designers – following a vote at its annual general meeting at the Festival International des Jeux in Cannes.

SAJ president Audrey Bondurand told BoardGameWire, “We wanted to change this name for two reasons: first, we have officially been a union for several years now, and we wanted our name to reflect that.

“Second, in French, ‘auteur’ is not a gender-neutral word, but a masculine one. ‘Auteurice’ is a contraction of ‘auteur’ and ‘autrice’ (the feminine form). We chose this neologism to include women and non-binary people.”

Bondurand, who worked in a board game cafe and in distribution before publishing her first game, Draky, said part of SAJ’s remit was advocating for the recognition of board games as cultural works, something which is “unfortunately still not the case today in France or in Europe”.

The organisation also offers contract reviews, mediation, accounting advice sessions and general support for designers in the industry, much like its US-based peer the Tabletop Game Designers Association and Germany’s SAZ.

Bondurand added, “Regarding the use of AI, we openly support the position of the CIL (our illustrator colleagues) in opposing generative AI in our published games.”

SAJ said a new website featuring its rebranded title is currently under construction, with the organisation’s existing email addresses currently operating as normal.

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At this point, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to crown Josh Wood the king of tableau-builders. Yes, yes, like a trampler of horse glue I’m invoking Santa Monica yet again, but the more relevant touchstone today is Let’s Go! To Japan, a lovely, if flawed, game about planning a vacation to Tokyo and Kyoto.

Let’s Go! To France is Wood’s follow-up to that latter title. It tackles every single one of my reservations with that game, and then goes on to produce one of the most delightful, evocative, and grounded tableau-builders I’ve ever played. Maybe it helps that I’ve actually been to France. More likely, it’s that Wood knows precisely what he’s doing with every mechanism, component, and locale.

It’s going to be hard to not turn this into a comparative review with Let’s Go! To Japan, so let’s open with the basics. Let’s Go! To France is a game about planning and executing a trip. Not just any trip. A two-week trip to Paris and some portion of wider France, undertaken day by day and hour by hour.

For all that, there’s an elegance to the whole thing. Turns are presented as simple drafts. You receive some cards. One or two of them will get scheduled into your itinerary. The rest are passed around the table. The cards each present a different activity in Paris: visiting a museum, snacking on delicacies, touring a park, shopping at an open-air market, finding an overlooked nook that you’ll boast about to friends for years to come.

Each card has four main components. Victory points — self-explanatory — some icons that increase the appeal of your trip on a numbered track, the amount of time required to fully visit that card, and lastly a scoring opportunity that will only trigger if this is the final event scheduled on any given day. Your objective is largely about optimizing scoring. To offer but one example, visiting the National Archives earns three points for every history icon you placed on that day. That’s a tremendous opportunity if you’ve arranged a day full of tours, but is easily dismissed if you’re planning on shopping or eating instead.

Those other considerations are no slouches, either. It’s possible to absolutely cram a day with activities, but your energy level will suffer, possibly resulting in subtracted points. There are also ideal conditions for each day, earning little bonuses for visiting the park when it’s clear outside or stuffing yourself with pastries on what I imagine is your cheat day. And if nothing appeals, Wood returns with a trick he deployed to great effect previously, letting any card flip to its reverse side to become a generic “Explore the City” activity.

If you’ve played Let’s Go! To Japan, this likely sounds familiar. Indeed, nearly everything here resembles Wood’s previous title, but has become the beneficiary of little tweaks that mark this as the far superior outing.

For instance, there’s the way those Explore the City activities are handled. Previously, exploring Tokyo or Kyoto resulted in your tableau receiving a random card during scoring. This could make or break your day, interjecting some randomness into what was otherwise a carefully structured experience. Here, exploring the city is its own pleasure; one doesn’t need to stumble upon a museum or garden to justify their time spent in Paris. This keeps your tableau in check and feels more appreciative of what makes such a trip worthwhile. Just being here is enough.

Similarly, the ideal conditions for each day are now portrayed as guidelines rather than dictates. It’s worth assigning activities to the corresponding days, but this is only mildly beneficial, and only the first two times you do it. Beyond that, you’re free to schedule your days as you see fit, without worrying that you’re missing out on another drizzle of points. It’s a small thing — basically, you’re earning a benefit just a little earlier than in the previous game — but it goes a long way toward letting you shape your own trip rather than ensuring there’s a history day, a food day, an architecture day, and so forth.

The larger change is more structural. Where the previous game saw your vacationer shifting between Tokyo and Kyoto, a system that demanded its own train-hopping minigame, Let’s Go! To France instead divides its trip into two portions. Your main tableau actually represents the second week of your vacation, resolved during scoring. As you place cards into your tableau, however, you might trigger tickets that move a pawn across the countryside. Depending on your destinations — and which region you’ve chosen for the group to explore — it’s possible to begin your week in Paris having already seen some sights, earned some tokens, or maybe even secured a special scoring condition or two.

At times, there’s a sense of vague translocation. You are, in effect, planning Schrödinger’s Vacation, the cards signifying events in both past and future. But it’s a mild discombobulation at worst, one that lasts maybe five minutes before everything snaps into place. The overall process is much smoother than the previous game’s swapping between cities, and provides ancillary benefits to the game’s usual procession of daily scores.

You might, for example, begin your week in Paris already tuckered out from your time in the Loire Valley, prompting you to take it easy for a couple of days or chow down on some crepes for a sugar rush. Or perhaps you’ll arrive already enculturated by old architecture, letting you take advantage of a daily highlight that requires a certain number of icons before awarding big points. Where previously these objectives would only pay out in the later portion of your trip, it’s now possible to assemble a more robust tableau, one that feels rewarding from start to finish.

As before, scoring is an active portion of the game, an event in and of itself where players walk through their trip one day at a time, tallying points and keeping track of their relative energy levels. This helps to digest the game’s point-salad fiber, but it plays an even more important role in contextualizing Paris as a geographic space with its own character and identity.

I’ve often praised Santa Monica as an ideal tableau-builder for the way it asks players to not only create a space, but also to inhabit it, to move around in it, to poke around its nooks and crannies. With Let’s Go! To France, Wood replicates the trick, albeit via an entirely distinct set of mechanisms and representations. This is Paris as a location out of time, the city that is at once a tourist trap and timeless. Around every corner there’s something new to see, some fragment of history that has been improbably preserved across the ages.

And that sense is communicated above the table as well. As one friend put it, you could take the deck to Paris as a reminder sheet of everything there is to see and experience. Playing this game, we found ourselves discussing the spots we’d seen and those we hope to see some day yet to come. The overlooked garden with the hidden entrance, where one friend drank wine and conversed with a farmer. The museum that sparked my imagination more than any other I’d ever walked. The sheer looming size of something. The joy of ducking into a random cafe and having one of the finest meals of your life.

The effect is magical. In a sense, Wood has created a transposition of his own, a game at once past and future, both reminiscence and future itinerary.

He’s also crafted a game that’s nearly without parallel. That its best comparisons are Wood’s own past creations is a testament to his skill with this particular medium, but also to the city he’s chosen for us to experience all over again. In improving on its predecessor in nearly every way, Let’s Go! To France deserves its peculiar punctuation. Let’s go, indeed.

 

A prototype copy of Let’s Go! To France was temporarily provided by the publisher.

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Poop! Spies! What do they have in common? Both are featured in board games designed by Jon Teixeira Moffat, naturally. On today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Jon to discuss the long development of both Night Soil and Burned, the hidden cost of labor, and cinematic hidden movement games.

Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.

TIMESTAMPS

00:36 — introducing Jon Teixeira Moffat
4:06 — Stone Circle Games
7:00 — Night Soil
21:08 — portraying labor
33:15 — Burned

 

(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!)

💾

Almost a year of uncertainty over the future of board game publisher Greater than Games has been partially resolved, with Flat River Group selling the brand name, and the rights for the Sentinels of the Multiverse titles, to Handelabra Games.

Video game developer Handelabra has a long history with the comics-themed cooperative card game, having spent more than a decade creating digital versions of the title and its expansions – as well as for Greater than Games’ best known release, Spirit Island.

Spirit Island is not part of Handelabra’s deal, however, which the company said only covers the Sentinels of the Multiverse games, the Sentinel Tactics range, the Sentinel Comics RPG, Sentinels miniatures and the cooperative deck-builder Galactic Strike Force.

Flat River laid off the vast majority of staff and suspended new projects at Spirit Island publisher Greater than Games in April last year, blaming “ongoing economic pressures resulting from the international tariff crisis”.

The distribution and e-commerce specialist was bought six years ago by private equity investor Guardian Capital Partners, which provided capital for a string of tabletop industry acquisitions.

They included an expansion into board game publishing in 2021 with the buyout of Greater than Games, which it followed a year later with deals for Canadian publisher Synapses Games and hobby game distributor Luma Imports.

Flat River sold Synapses Games to ACD Distribution last summer, at the same time as industry veterans Jules Vautour, Colin Young and Danni Loe left Flat River to revive Luma as part of ACD.

A statement from Handelabra president and CEO Jaye Handel said the company had made the GtG and Sentinels deal to protect its ability to make digital games in that IP, adding that it was “not interested in becoming a tabletop publisher”.

But the statement added, “But lucky for us, we know a lot of good people who are good at exactly that type of business…”

That is believed to refer to Greater than Games trio Christopher Badell, Paul Bender and Adam Rebottaro, who founded the company in 2011 and were the last remaining employees following Flat River’s downsizing of GtG last year.

Handelabra CEO Handel told BoardGameWire he was unable to share further details, but said that his company was “very excited about the future of Sentinel Comics on digital and analog tabletops and beyond”.

He added, “Handelabra Games’ and Flat River Group’s relationship with regards to Spirit Island has not changed.”

The company’s recent statement from Handel indicated it would be able to provide more information about Greater than Games’ future by April 28, which is National Super Hero Day in the US.

It said, “For your ongoing support and excitement, we remain eternally grateful. We just ask for a little more patience over the coming weeks as we have lots to share, and we can’t wait to embark on the next phase of this journey with you!”

Flat River did not respond to BoardGameWire’s request for comment on the future of Spirit Island or other former Greater than Games-published titles.

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FlipToons was designed by Renato Simões and Jordy Adan, the latter of whom gave us Stonespine Architects and Cartographers, but the real star of the show is Diego Sá, whose animated characters make me want to rate the game significantly higher than I would otherwise. Just look at those little dudes! The camel is two seconds away from winding up a punch. The rabbit wouldn’t feel out of place leaning in for a kiss, only to be rebuffed when the ostrich hides her head in the sand. The sheep is just is out there boppin’ to her tunes.

As a game? Oh, it’s pretty good. Clever at points, nice to play, the usual. My larger reservation is the way it makes me feel during and after a play.

FlipToons is a game of two halves. Two halves which, when hinged like an aquatic bivalve, form into a united whole that conceals an unexpectedly tasty muscle within. Okay, so I skipped breakfast. Point is, FlipToons is hard to discuss holistically without first establishing how its components function apart from one another.

The first part is the deck. When the game begins, you have six cards in total. Two caterpillars, each worth bupkis, but easily dismissed. One skunk, a utility card for winnowing your deck. One bee, worth a single pip of purchasing power. One snail, worth double the bee’s value, making it the single most precious card in your starting lineup. And one dragonfly. Ah, the dragonfly. This guy gives you one point for every unique adjacent card.

What this means requires some explanation. Every round opens with you shuffling your deck and then dealing cards onto the table in front of you to create a three-by-two grid. If you have extra cards, too bad, they remain in your hand. If you have too few cards… well, don’t do that.

Some cards may stack. Rabbits, ostriches, turkeys, these are your chance to get more than six cards into your grid at a time. Others, like sheep or monkeys, trigger benefits if they occupy a particular row or column. Some cards flip, others compare values against other players or the market, and a few, like the pig, are traps that can be gifted to rivals to subtract from their tally.

That tally, then, is taken to the market to shape your deck. Since you’ll only use six-ish cards at a time, keeping your cast trim is a good idea. Fortunately, unlike most deck-builders, the ability to dismiss toons is inbuilt in FlipToons, always available for the low cost of five points.

The toons on display, meanwhile, adjust in cost according to their relative ranking. This ensures that something is always available, and if you’re lucky it’s possible for something unusually precious to slip down in cost. Of course, the opposite often also proves true, with low-value cruft sometimes overwhelming the market.

Regardless, you take your purchases and/or dismissals, shuffle your grid back into your hand, and begin all over again. Bit by bit, your cast improves. That measly starting five to six points becomes twelve, then sixteen, then you break twenty and flip your little tally card to its opposite side. The goal is to score thirty.

Okay, not quite. Your actual goal is to score the most on the final round. Hitting a tally of thirty is how you trigger the endgame, and there’s a small plus-three advantage if you’re the one to bring it about, but that’s no guarantee luck will be on your side for the last flip. So, then: hit thirty to lock the game into one final pull of the lever, then hit the jackpot.

The slot-machine analogy is apt here. FlipToons is to deck-building what Balatro was to poker. The titular flip of FlipToons is devoid of decision points. You turn cards in order, left to right and top to bottom, until you’ve produced that three-by-two grid.

There’s more going on in the market portion, but these are minor choices rather than a vast menu. There are five cards available at any given moment, and even when you’re flush with cash in the late-game, you’re limited to two purchases. (And dismissing a card from your deck qualifies, so no double-dipping.) This keeps everyone at the table more or less bungee-corded at the hip, which is probably the right decision for such a light game, but also prevents the table from launching the exponential bottle rockets that were Balatro’s core pleasure.

But about those pleasures…

I have my reservations about these sorts of games. The art and market purchases, while pleasant, aren’t far removed from the lights, illusory choices, and “theming” of a slot machine. I remember as a kid on a trip to Vegas, walking past a slot machine that leaped out of the crowd. I think it was based on Aliens, with those sleek oily monsters I had yet to witness on the screen for myself, but which my friends with the cool parents, the ones who let their kids watch R-rated movies in elementary school, spoke of as the scariest things they’d ever seen. My Dad traced the object of my interest and leaned down to whisper, “That’s how they get you.” It was like somebody had roused me from hypnosis. In that moment, my Dad — who suddenly struck me as cooler than those other dads, or at least cannier — had broken through the social programming of that cigarette-reeking hellhole.

And, look, I don’t think FlipToons is some sort of evil artifact. It isn’t the equivalent of a casino, with its fine-tuned odds to ensure the house always wins and your kid’s college fund becomes another rounding error in a billionaire’s high score. But it produces a similar daze, all submersion and dulled perception. It’s a far cry, too, from some of the sharper auto-battler board games, titles like Tag Team, with its emphasis on attention and preemption, or One-Hit Heroes, which requires constant input from its players. Here, the gameplay comes pre-loaded. All you have to do is pull the lever.

I mean, there’s more to it than that. Just not by as much as I would prefer. Certainly not by enough to make me want to play it more.

Because in the end, FlipToons is a pleasant enough diversion. It’s well-crafted, pretty to look at, and feels good to play. When it hits the table, the fugue it offers is dreamy and warm. But when it’s done, I feel like I binged on steakhouse butter in place of an actual filet. It lacks what brought me to the table in the first place. It doesn’t spark my imagination or help me appreciate my friends. It doesn’t teach me anything. It barely even makes a win feel different from a loss. Most of the time, I hardly remember how I spent the past twenty minutes.

But yeah, the art is lovely. Those lovable goofballs. Those scamps. That’s how they get you.

 

A complimentary copy of FlipToons 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!)

The American Tabletop Awards, an awards scheme launched seven years ago with the aim of being the US equivalent of Germany’s Spiel des Jahres, has unveiled its 2026 winners.

Racing games published by CMYK triumphed in both the Early Gamers and Casual Games awards this year, with Richard Garfield’s new implementation of Takashi Ishida’s 2003 design Magical Athlete scooping the former, and Jon Perry’s chaotic mascot racer Hot Streak the latter.

ATTA’s Early Gamers award is focused on titles suitable for younger gamers and players new to modern board gaming, while the Casual Games awards looks at games suitable for all experience levels that can be played in 30 to 60 minutes.

This year’s Strategy Games prize went to Matt Leacock’s pandemic spinoff The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, while the Complex Games title went to Jo Kelly’s and Cole Wehrle’s design Molly House, which explores the joy and fear experienced by gender-defying Londoners in 18th century society.

CMYK was the standout publisher with two wins out of the four categories. Asmodee studios won one award and picked up three other nominations, while Flatout Games picked up recommendations for both Cascadia Junior and Knitting Circle.

Alex Cutler was the only designer to appear twice among the finalists, scoring a nomination for his co-design Critter Kitchen and a recommendation for co-design A Place For All My Books.

The ATTAs are voted on by members of the US board game media, who each submit up to five games from the previous calendar year, which are then ordered according to ranked-choice vote.

ATTA’s committee includes GAMA president and SAHMReviews.com founder and owner Nicole Brady, Jessica Fisher, the co-founder of Gameosity and the Tabletop Game Jobs Facebook group, and Good Time Society pair Ruel Gaviola and Becca Scott.

Awards co-founder Eric Yurko, who runs board game review site What’s Eric Playing?, said, “The past few years have been great for games, and 2025 was no exception.

“There were great moments and releases throughout, so we’re very excited to present these awards to the best games we played in 2025.”

Last year’s ATTA winners were Captain Flip, The Gang, Let’s Go! To Japan and Fromage.

The 2026 American Tabletop Awards finalists

Early Gamers
Winner: Magical Athlete – designed by Richard Garfield and Takashi Ishida (published by CMYK Games)
Nominated: The Sandcastles of Burgundy – Stefan Feld and Susanne Feld (Ravensburger)
Nominated: Splendor Kids – Marc André and Catherine André (Space Cowboys / Asmodee)
Recommended: Cascadia Junior – Fertessa Allyse and Randy Flynn (Flatout Games)
Recommended: Duck and Cover – Oussama Khelifati (Captain Games)

Casual Games
Winner: Hot Streak – Jon Perry (CMYK Games)
Nominated: The Fellowship of the Ring – Trick-Taking Game – Bryan Bornmueller (Office Dog / Asmodee)
Nominated: 7 Wonders Dice – Antoine Bauza (Repos Production / Asmodee)
Recommended: FlipToons – Jordy Adan and Renato Simões (Thunderworks Games)
Recommended: A Place For All My Books – Alex Cutler and Michael Mihealsick (Smirk and Dagger Games)

Strategy Games
Winner: The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship – Matt Leacock (Z-Man Games / Asmodee)
Nominated: Critter Kitchen – Alex Cutler and Peter C. Hayward (Cardboard Alchemy)
Nominated: Kinfire Council – Kevin Wilson (Incredible Dream)
Recommended: Knitting Circle – Emily Vincent (Flatout Games)
Recommended: Moon Colony Bloodbath – Donald X Vaccarino (Rio Grande Games)

Complex Games
Winner: Molly House – Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle (Wehrlegig Games)
Nominated: Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders – Tim Eisner and Ben Eisner (Druid City Games)
Nominated: Covenant – Germán P Millán (Devir)
Recommended: Above and Below: Haunted – Ryan Laukat (Red Raven Games)
Recommended: Galactic Cruise – TK King, Dennis Northcott and Koltin Thompson (Kinson Key Games)

The post Hot Streak, Magical Athlete race to wins in this year’s American Tabletop Awards first appeared on .

Sea Salt & Paper sure was hot a couple years back, huh? I didn’t think much of this thing the first time I encountered it, perhaps a symptom of having only played it with a single partner; in contrast to some, I find it needs room to stretch out. Perhaps it helps, too, that the expansions, More Salt and More Pepper, both give the game a small kick in its folded shorts.

For those who haven’t played Bruno Cathala and Théo Rivière’s small-box card game, Sea Salt & Paper opens with the gentlest of all possible choices: from where to draw? Your options, in this case, are either the deck proper — in which case you’ll draw a pair, keep one, and toss the reminder into either of two discards — or the top offering from one of those castoff piles. Either way, you gain a single card.

Over the course of multiple turns and multiple sessions, however, this choice begins to take on some depth. First, there’s the possibility of playing a duo. Some cards, when paired with a mate, can be deployed to the table. The pair is worth a point either way, but their coming-out provides some small benefit: crabs that let you dig through a discard pile for something previously buried, boats that start your turn anew, a shark and swimmer that swipe something precious from a rival’s hand.

But while duos are potent, there’s more to your picks than pairing cards. There’s the color of the card, entirely separate from its icon, which can amass points as you gain more of a particular hue. Or there are offerings that pose a risk, like octopuses and penguins, worth nothing at first but gradually accumulating points as you build sets — while, of course, signaling to your opponents that you’re angling for something.

Or there’s the risk of throwing away something worthwhile to the others at the table. More than once, I’ve had to take a worthless shell because Adam, who tends to sit to my left, hoards shells by default. If I throw one out, he’ll nab it for certain. And fortune favoring him, he probably already has three in hand.

This is all to say that Sea Salt & Paper is an unassuming little thing. Its choices are diminutive, but no less crucial for their stature.

Where the game gets interesting, though, is in its scoring. Played over multiple hands, the objective is to accumulate some number of points. Say, thirty points with four players. But rather than ending any given hand at a certain threshold, here players are allowed to keep playing until somebody elects to go out. And then they’re offered another little choice that bends the proceedings. They can declare the hand is over, at which point everybody scores according to what they’re holding and/or the duos they’ve revealed. Or the goer-outer can announce that they have the high score at the table and nobody can match them.

Aha! The contest is on. And the stakes are high. If the player who went out has the highest score, they earn all their points plus a color bonus, points worth the sum of their highest-held suit. That might be a lot or a little, depending on their priorities that round. Everyone else, meanwhile, earns only a color bonus. Again, that might be a tidy sum, but it will almost certainly be less than their normal score. But if the opposite holds true, the pendulum swings the other way. Everybody else scores their hand points, while the shouty player earns nothing but the color bonus.

Like everything else in Sea Salt & Paper, this decision is understated. But it represents a potentially major swing. I say “potentially” because, well, this is a game of subtle wagers and sudden swings, and it’s entirely possible for somebody to quietly amass a solid bar of colors and come out ahead either way.

This gives it a sleepy atmosphere. I might even call it boring, in a largely pleasant way, the sort of game you play with your grandmother while sharing some light chit-chat. In that regard, it reminds me of something like Mexican Train or countless trick-takers played with a regular deck. It doesn’t exactly knock me out of my socks, but it was never meant for sock-rocking. It’s there for quiet evenings on the seaside, the air heavy with the inrush of atmosphere, a storm coming but still out on the horizon. It’s a bedtime game.

The expansions give it some much-needed kick. The first, Extra Salt, adds only a few cards, not enough to upset the delicate ecosystem of the original game, but sufficient to add at least a few decisions. Extras like a lobster or a jellyfish pair with previously-obvious offerings to produce new effects, while a seahorse makes certain sets more worthwhile and starfish can be added to a duo to drop their ability in exchange for some extra points. The game is still sleepy, but the decision-space is a little denser.

Next is Extra Pepper, the more interesting offering. Every round, an event card is drawn that alters the proceedings. A change to how a certain set is formed, a higher scoring threshold, only needing three mermaids to win outright rather than the usual four… that sort of thing. Everybody plays according to this altered rule, but then — and this is the smart bit — then the winning or losing player receives the event card as a permanent addition to their repertoire. This varies by card, with handicaps going to trailing players and hurdles to winners. Either way, the game receives a nudge that corrects toward the median ever so slightly. Or, better yet, allows somebody to manipulate the rules in their favor by tanking an early session to nab something ultra-potent.

In both cases, the expansions benefit the core game by adding a little more to the turn-by-turn proceedings. If I had to identify an issue with the game — which, again, I’m not sure this is the sort of game that bears a deep critique — it’s that the decision-making process is so muffled. There’s a gap between good and bad play, but good and great play? Eh. I’m not convinced. To their credit, the expansions offer a few more of those small decisions that make it such a pleasant, if still sleepy, game for late nights.

On the whole, Sea Salt & Paper is a game that’s nice to play with family, as a filler, or when everybody’s too tired for anything heavier. That’s a crowded field, but, well, this just so happens to be one of the games that’s succeeded in that arena. Call it the king of the sleepers. I doubt Sea Salt & Paper would even take it as an insult.

 

A complimentary copy of Sea Salt & Paper 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!)

Asmodee arm Fantasy Flight Games is discontinuing the latest iteration of its veteran dungeon crawler Descent, citing rising manufacturing costs, “global economic shifts” and the expense of developing the game’s companion app.

FFG launched Descent: Legends of the Dark five years ago as the successor to its popular 2005 release, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, and a more streamlined second edition from 2012.

All three games featured large amounts of plastic miniatures, cardboard terrain pieces and map tiles, while Legends of the Dark also leaned into an integrated companion app to help manage campaigns and individual scenarios.

A statement from FFG announcing the end of the game said, “Simply put, the game is too expensive to make. Between ever-increasing manufacturing costs, lengthy and pricey app development timelines, and global economic shifts making everything more expensive to produce, it became abundantly clear that continuing to make this game is just not feasible.

“This is far from the outcome we wanted – again, we all love this game and hoped to see it grow for years to come – but even if we were to sell every last copy, we would still ultimately be doing so at a loss.

“In a fiercely-competitive board game industry, that simply isn’t sustainable, and because of circumstances outside of FFG’s control, there are no adjustments we could make that could lower costs enough to continue printing the game.”

That competition for Descent has come in the form of huge crowdfunding successes for titles such as Gloomhaven and Frosthaven – the latter of which sealed one of the biggest Kickstarter campaigns of all time by raising almost $13m in 2020.

Other competitors in the space have included CMON’s Massive Darkness series – based on its huge-selling Zombicide system – which has raised more than $10m across a trio of crowdfunds since 2017.

Using crowdfunding for those large-scale, component-heavy games has helped publishers Cephalofair and CMON reduce the risk of developing expensive titles by being able to accurately gauge demand, as well as receiving financial backing for the projects up front.

Even with that data, however, both publishers have run into problems amid the heavy global economic uncertainty over the last couple of years – especially around volatile US tariff policy aimed at countries such as China, where the vast majority of board games are manufactured.

CMON is currently battling enormous losses from the past two years, while Cephalofair has had to navigate significant delivery delays alongside the frequently shifting import taxes situation, which last year saw US tariffs on China whipsaw as high as 145% before being reduced to a still significant 30%.

Asmodee has almost entirely avoided crowdfunding for its own games to date, with its only launched campaign believed to be Lookout Games’ Kickstarter for the Grand Austria Hotel: Let’s Waltz! Expansion & Deluxe Upgrade, which raised about €383,000 during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Its only other prior exposure to crowdfunding is thought to be via the company Exploding Kittens, in which it made a strategic investment short of a buyout in 2021. That business has since raised more than $977,000 in a Kickstarter campaign for Hand to Hand Wombat the following year.

But the board game giant is currently preparing to dip its toes into crowdfunding proper through a Gamefound campaign for Zombicide: Dead Men Tales, having picked up the IP from financially-troubled CMON last summer.

The campaign follows Asmodee bringing in David Preti, the former COO of CMON, in May last year to head up a newly-launched crowdfunding and miniatures operation.

Both Zombicide and fellow CMON acquisition Cthulhu: Death May Die – a series which has raised almost $10m via crowdfunding – are now part of Fantasy Flight alongside Descent, although Asmodee is yet to reveal if the future of the latter title revolves around crowdfunding campaigns.

Its statement about the end of Descent: Legends of the Dark said, “While we don’t have anything to share at this time, there is always a possibility that we will revisit Descent in the future.

“It would take a different form and would not be Legends of the Dark, but this game universe is near and dear to FFG’s heart.

“The future is always uncertain, and even though we have to close the book on Descent today, we hope that, someday, we’ll be able to dream big with it again.”

FFG’s other major titles currently include collectible card game Star Wars Unlimited, ‘living card games’ Marvel Champions and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, heavyweight space opera board game Twilight Imperium and veteran bluffing and negotiation game Cosmic Encounter.

The company said that although Act III of Descent: Legends of the Dark is no longer in development, the company would continue to support the game’s companion app for the first two acts of the game, albeit without any new content being added.

In February Artefacts Studio unveiled Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent, a video game set in the Descent universe which FFG said “captures the classic dungeon-crawl feeling of the Descent board games in a whole new medium”.

The post Fantasy Flight calls time on Descent: Legends of the Dark, saying rising costs mean it was selling at a loss first appeared on .

Here’s a situation for you. It’s the last decade of the 1700s. Far across the sea, a rebellion has ousted the British from thirteen of their prize colonies, leading to the adoption of a new constitution. Revolutionary fervor is sweeping the continent, throwing France into turmoil and the old regimes into paranoia. Your union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, has seen its star faded by entrenched nobility and foreign partition.

And now there’s an opportunity to draft a constitution of your own.

That document — historically the Constitution of 3 May 1791, although you might instead draft any number of parallel constitutions in its place — is the topic of Rex Regnat, Edward Damon’s sharp-as-a-tack title about uncomfortable politics and doomed alliances. Part trick-taker, part parliamentary simulation, and part rumination on a union whose constitution would only last 19 months before it was divided out of existence until the First World War, Rex Regnat is one of the finest political games I’ve played all year.

At first glance, Rex Regnat is a game about tracks. The board consists of ten of the things, six for various issues facing the assembled sejm — think “parliament” and you’ll be close enough — and another four for the agitation taking place across Polish–Lithuanian society during the drafting of its constitution.

For the most part, those issues should be familiar to passing students of history. They raise questions about who should be allowed to vote, the status of serfdom, Catholicism as a state religion, and whether the king should be subject to common law. Boilerplate stuff for the Age of Revolution. The two remaining issues are harder to peg without some understanding of this peculiar union’s context. First is the Liberum Veto. This bad boy allowed any deputy of the sejm to nullify the entire legislative proceedings, a terrible idea even in peacetime, but a downright suicidal one when neighboring titans like Russia and Brandenburg could bribe any old noble to veto any reform that might impede their foreign agenda. Next is the hereditary nature of the monarchy. That only makes sense when you realize that kings were elected — and, as a result, tended to function as a stump for their noble electors.

Okay, so the basics are easy enough to understand. You’re one of the factions hoping to mold the constitution to your liking. Handily, the tracks label your intentions. The Regime — which means the nobility and its sway over the monarchy more than the king himself — wants to further entrench their privileges, placing their icons on the right side of the three tracks they care most about. But this can prove slightly deceiving. As those currently hoarding the lion’s share of their country’s power, the Regime would also be content to allow affairs to remain as they already are. Thus they score points for securing their privileges, but also for keeping those tracks — all six of them this time — firmly seated in the middle. This marks them as right-wingers and centrists at the same time. Which is always the case, deep down, but the phenomenon is especially pronounced here.

Opposite the Regime is Reform. This faction wants a constitution that will bring the Commonwealth into the modern world. The Liberum Veto? Out. Serfdom? Out. Total enfranchisement? Hold on a minute. The Reformers aren’t insane. Incremental change, that’s the path forward. Maybe, and this is a maybe here, Reform could grant a few cities free status. Just to prevent the troubles in France from happening here, you understand. But beyond that? Let’s not lose our shirts.

If you’ve ever studied a revolution, you can probably already see the hairline fractures forming at the foundation. Rex Regnat can be played with two players. In such an event, Regime and Reform are the principal actors. But as an experience, Rex Regnat shines with four. That’s because there are two more factions to consider. As ideologies, their role was limited in the historical sejm that oversaw the declining years of the Commonwealth. But they existed, they agitated for their own alterations to Polish–Lithuanian governance, and they played a crucial role, as radicals always do, in popularizing which issues can be discussed in the first place.

These factions, then, are even further to the right and left than the mainstays. First we have the Radicals, also known as Reform on steroids. Whatever Reform wants, the Radicals want double. Whatever Reform is hesitant to grant, the Radicals are ready to throw a Parisian Moveable Feast to take for themselves. But then there’s their opposite number, Reaction. Think of them as the incel podcasters of the 18th century. They want a stronger monarchy, an empowered military, maybe an alliance with those treaty-breaking Prussians next door. If this should spell annexation… well, reactionary movements have never been especially good at thinking long-term.

Now, you might be thinking that I’m spending a lot of time discussing tracks and factions. True enough. But these dynamics are at the heart of Rex Regnat. Reform and the Radicals, Regime and Reaction; these are the natural alliances, albeit uncomfortable and shoehorned alliances, that dominate the table. They’re Rex Regnat’s version of the Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists from Alex Knight’s Land and Freedom, or the awkward three-way race that defines Mark Herman’s Churchill, or the squabbling powers of Herman and Geoff Engelstein’s Versailles 1919. These comparisons are not ones I invoke lightly. Rex Regnat resembles those games not only because they’re all games with tracks, but also because it intends to put players in the same diplomatic headspace. It’s about trading favors, talking your friends into doing things that benefit you just a little bit more than they benefit them, and maybe, in the end, risking everything on a coup de grace that’s really just a literal coup.

Which is why the tracks are important, but not all-important. Each faction has other aims to consider. The Regime derives most of their points from the tracks, which makes sense, given how badly they want things to remain the same. But they also care about tamping down societal agitation and keeping control of the gavel, the marker that dictates who picks the issue up for debate. Reform, meanwhile, is happy to be included at all, so any issue they win becomes political currency, even those that have nothing to do with them.

The Radicals and Reaction go further, as befits their status as outsiders determined to get a foot in the door. If the Radicals don’t get their way, they can instead foment outrage, possibly leveraging the upset of the people to seize control outright. Reaction, meanwhile, alters its objectives ever so slightly between rounds. In the first half, Reaction wants as many cabinet positions as possible. They’re infiltrating offices. Securing funding. Finding their audience. In the second half, they want to push those outrage tracks up as far as possible. Suddenly, their interests are aligned with the Radicals, but only in the sense that they want a riled-up population. They’re here to co-opt everybody’s justified anger for their own purposes.

Just as those other political titles I mentioned had their own methods for resolving the debates and issues of the day, Rex Regnat finds its footing in the most expected of places… because, yes, this is a trick-taking game. Another trick-taking game. All I play anymore is trick-taking games.

But while Rex Regnat is a trick-taker, it’s quite unlike its peers. The first and most visible difference is that each player always has three face-up cards. This is their “bench,” and these are the only cards they can play into any given trick. Right away, this has a few consequences. The first is that there’s a great deal of manipulation to the proceedings. If I see that you have the highest-ranked card in a particular suit, I’m not likely to initiate a debate over an issue in that suit. Unless, that is, we can come to an agreement.

Or unless I want you to win that issue. First of all, it’s entirely possible to force an opponent to shed a powerful card on an issue that doesn’t really benefit them right now. If you’ve already secured Catholicism as our state religion, letting you expend your strongest card to thump the table about God and Country is a boon that keeps on giving. Go ahead. I don’t mind. Shout about our duty to Christendom. Tell it to the rafters.

But more than that, there are plenty of little overlaps in the scoring conditions, and not only between natural allies. Needling the Regime into stripping the Radicals of an outrage issue is valuable even if it doesn’t benefit me directly. All the better if I can force you to burn a potent card and deprive a leading opponent of their strongest source of points.

But even more than that, precise rankings matter in Rex Regnat. The winner takes and resolves the issue, the natural outcome of any debate. Last place earns the gavel, their backroom politicking letting them dictate the future issue under discussion. But second and third place also get their say, shifting the suit of their played card up on the outrage track. Depending on the sequence — which, again, is often manipulable thanks to the face-up cards on everyone’s bench — it’s possible to ensure that you shift such a track at the precise moment it will confer some advantage. Such as, say, an influence token, worth points to all factions. Or a token that will conceal one of my bench cards, making it all the harder to guess at my next move. Or a shift on an issue track that isn’t directly tied to a debate. No matter the precise debate being undertaken right now, there’s always some way to get ahead.

The result is a form of trick-taking that’s played openly (most of the time) and allows for an unusual degree of control (again, most of the time) and encourages the aforementioned horse-trading and wheedling. While many of the genre’s touchstones are present and accounted for, trump suits and sloughing and tactical tiebreakers, they tend to fade into the backdrop of the game’s politics. Your bench is a set of cards, but it’s also the dignitaries and arguments your faction has ready right now. Your hand becomes blackmail and backrooms deals and side hustles, almost ready for the oven but in need of a bit more leavening. Even smaller incentives, like the royal offices that transform ordinary cards into kings, become opportunities to flex your political clout.

I have a great deal of affection for games that use abstraction to speak a deeper truth about the topic they present. I’ve already mentioned a few of them. In Land and Freedom, Alex Knight compressed a complex and drawn-out civil war to a few fronts, some negotiable values, and the squabbles and purges between three factions that couldn’t set aside their differences to save their lives. The result was a game about the shortcomings of revolution and democracy. Churchill’s military fronts were also tracks, linear near-inevitabilities that assume the Axis will collapse, but it’s anybody’s guess who will inherit the world; the outcome was an examination of the war-behind-the-war that produced the remainder of the 20th century. High Treason established its courtroom drama as a series of icons that might or might not be worthwhile, their relative value always slightly out of reach. Justice, Alex Berry argued, was a matter of guesswork and who was seated in the jury box.

With Rex Regnat, Damon pulls a similar trick. Rex Regnat reveals a political system in the throes of reform, but one that might have shambled along for too many decades to carve out a future for itself. Is it possible to pull back from the brink of a monied class that believes its only hope of holding onto its privileges is denying them to anyone else, from electoral power that excludes those it deems too ill-mannered, from foreign interests that incite violence rather than stability? God, I hope so.

That Damon does this without presenting a single map is nothing to sneeze at. Rex Regnat includes design notes, but fewer players will read them than the rules. In place of textual rhetoric, Damon instead has to leverage smaller touches: considered victory conditions, the placement of icons on tracks, an ideological impression rather than a dramatis personae or timeline of events.

I daresay it works, at least in the broad strokes. As a springboard to learning about the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’s final decade, there are none better. Crud, half the people I’ve introduced the game to weren’t even aware that the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth existed, let alone that it attempted a series of radical reforms in its final months.

But attempt it did, and succeed it did, at least for a time. The 1791 Constitution didn’t last, but it became a model. For the Poland that would recover its independence 123 years later, it became a model of their enduring identity; for the coming constitutions that weren’t throttled in their cradles, it became a model of possibility. In capturing the dynamics of its fraught composition, Rex Regnat offers one of the finest works of abstract ludic history I’ve played in a long while.

 

I’m adding a note here just in case somebody actually wants to buy this thing, because it’s hard to acquire: you need to go to the Damonic Designs website and email him, at which point he will offer to sell and ship you the game. Yes, this is convoluted.

A complimentary copy of Rex Regnat was provided by the 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!)

I am an animal nut. While I could do without snakes and some bugs, the rest get the full measure of my affection. It helps if they are cute, but they don’t even really have to be. I mean, pangolins are weird-looking, but still lovable in my book. When I learned there was a board […]

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Are wacky races the new zombies of board games? Probably not, but it strikes me as wild that I’ve played four distinct wacky race games within the span of a single year, yet nobody within my circle agrees on which one is the forerunner. Dino Racer, the third of those four, was designed by Marceline Leiman, who gave us the lovely High Tide and Nebular Colors (née Heavenly Bodies). This time, the racers aren’t hot dog mascots or magical athletes. I think you can guess what they are.

(They’re dinosaurs.)

When we first played Dino Racer, the whole thing seemed broken. Thanks to a small rules error, the outcome of the races was all but foreordained, the wagers were obvious, and not even Eric Hibbeler’s charming dinosaur portraits could do much to make up the gap.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t such a “small” error on my part. But the point stands. Even something as minute as reshuffling the deck in between matches, rather than letting it run its course and thus tweak the odds from race to race, was enough to scuttle this one. Fortunately, the right rules transform it into a zany good time — albeit one that might prove too light for some enthusiasts.

At the outset, Dino Racer seems like as much a spectator sport as its peers in the wacky race club. When the round begins, five dinosaurs stand hip to hip at the starting line. T-Rex has the best stamina, with diminishing probabilities of success for Raptor, Steggy, Tri-Top and Bronto. These odds are represented by each dino’s quantity of cards in the deck, not to mention their relative tiebreaker positions, but they’re close enough that the outcome isn’t wholly set in stone. T-Rex has one more card than Raptor; Raptor has one more than Steggy; and so on down the line. It’s enough to give some dinosaurs a statistical advantage, but such a slender one that upsets aren’t outside the realm of possibility.

The race itself is resolved in much the same manner as those in Jon Perry’s Hot Streak. Somebody picks up the deck, flips a card, and moves the corresponding dino one space closer to the finish line. Some of that game’s possibilities are left by the wayside; there are no trips or reversals, just a steady forward momentum.

For the most part, anyway. As soon as every dino has reached a column, the checkpoint card at the top of the track gets flipped over. These might produce new opportunities, such as a burst of speed for Steggy, a sudden stumble for Raptor, or a swap between the racers in first and fifth place. What initially seemed like a straightforward foot-race becomes… well, still a straightforward foot race, but one in which the racers’ fortunes are much tightly corded than they previously appeared.

The game’s bigger revelation is that it isn’t a spectator sport at all. Unlike Magical Athlete and Hot Streak, where the bulk of the decision-making occurs before the firing shot, players in Dino Racer are active participants the entire way through. As soon as a certain number of cards have been flipped, the proceedings pause while players take turns selecting from those same cards.

These are the game’s wagers, and they’re informed enough to make smart decisions, but not so settled that you don’t run the risk of losing everything when a loser sprints to the head of the pack. Every detail becomes important. The relative standings between dinos. The cards they’ve burned in previous races. The stronger payouts for less-favored runners. Even the number of remaining checkpoints that are likely to throw the race into disarray. For all that, the way Leiman keeps these decisions constrained to only a few cards — one more than the number of players in the game — prevents anyone from fretting too hard over which dino to pick. It’s possible to play well, but we’re talking about play in aggregate more than turning players into Jurassic match-fixers.

It’s a real holler. Literally. I’ve watched crowds of staid players transform into screamers, bellowing at Steggy to pick up the pace or cheering as another Bronto card flips from the deck. My daughters complained that some of our guests were keeping them up at night; the game under consideration was Dino Racer. A week later, my kiddos gave it a try and screeched like banshees when their favored T-Rex cratered on his snout.

Is it a perfect game? Oh, I have no idea. I’m hesitant to do a compare-and-contrast to its peers. My wife has informed me in no uncertain terms that it’s better than Magical Athlete, which initially struck me as bananas, but I could see preferring it to Hot Streak, which sometimes I favor over Magical Athlete, so at this point it’s all one ouroboros biting precious calories from its own tail.

Because the thing is, these games aren’t actually all that similar. Hot Streak is about obsessive gambling and manipulating the odds. Magical Athlete is about the draft and rolling with the punches. Dino Racer, by contrast, is about placing smart bets, but not especially difficult bets. It’s the lightest of the trio, rules-wise. My kids, aged twelve and six, can play without worrying about special abilities, but there’s still enough for the adults to think about that nobody is getting bored.

It helps, too, that it’s so fast. There’s always something to be said for games that don’t overstay their welcome, and Dino Racer is downright skittish in that regard. Twenty minutes and it’s done. Even if I weren’t in the mood to watch a tableful of people scream at a Triceratops to pick up the pace, it would be over before the headache could form. I don’t even mean that as faint praise. Just, where a session of Magical Athlete means settling in for a while, possibly even a long while if the players settle into a feedback loop, I know what to expect from Dino Racer.

Screaming. That’s what I expect. Provided you get the rules right. Which shouldn’t be a problem, darn it, so I’m not sure why it was that one night. Done right, this game is worth every decibel. It’s cute, it’s fast, and it provides more meat than it might seem from a distance. That’s all good stuff.

In the end, Dino Racer is about the highest volume one could pack into such a small box, plus a lovely addition to the expanding roster of wacky race games. It displays Leiman in yet another register, all shouts and immediacy, a far cry from the more intimate pleasures of High Tide or Nebular Colors, and even more finely tuned. Just writing about it makes me want to put it on the table all over again. I hope to do so with some regularity.

 

A complimentary copy of Dino Racer was provided by the designer.

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French board game publisher Fentasy Games has launched a new platform aimed at providing publishers with a more affordable way to get their higher complexity titles into the hands of retailers and gamers.

Company founder and CEO Florian Gigot told BoardGameWire Fentasy had scored several successes since launching towards the end of 2024, including localisations of complex titles El Burro and Stephens – but said its major challenge in that time had been “the structural reality of the traditional distribution model”.

He said, “We realised that for a small publisher, a ‘critical success’ doesn’t always translate to a ‘financial success’ once the middlemen take their cut. The same applies to many of my partners around the world.

“…between squeezed margins, production costs, and trade discounts, even a popular game can become a financial failure. For an independent publisher, this means increasing difficulty in funding subsequent projects – and ultimately, a real risk of going out of business.

“In this context, profitability is no longer a secondary objective, but a condition for survival.”

He added, “This might seem counterintuitive, especially at a time when a game like [Brass: Pittsburgh] is thriving on Gamefound. But that is the exception. So many other expert ‘hidden gems’ deserve a chance to exist.”

Gigot hopes newly launched platform BoardGameCommerce will give publishers of higher complexity games with smaller print runs – of between 500 and 1,000 units – a more sustainable financial option than the traditional board game industry distribution model.

He described BGC as an ‘evolution’ of the P500 scheme successfully employed by wargame and strategy game specialist GMT for more than 20 years, which allows gamers to pre-order still-in-development titles, which then begin final art and development once they reach 500 orders.

Gigot said BGC differs, however, in that Fentasy commits to producing the game the moment it goes onto the platform, saying, “We don’t ask the community to carry the industrial risk – we carry it ourselves because we believe in the project.”

He said that model helps Fentasy and other publishers measure real demand for their titles, as well as giving visibility to game makers that might not be possible amid the plethora of new games battling it out through traditional distribution.

Gigot added that BGC also offers retailers “a professional interface to secure limited stock with high margins of up to 55%”, with no payment required until the game is ready to ship.

He told BoardGameWire, “I absolutely see this growing. In fact, BGC is designed to be an agnostic platform. We are already in talks with other small publishers who face the same ‘strangulation’ within traditional distribution.

“We want to offer them the same resilience we built for ourselves – bringing everyone together on a single, global platform. It makes it much easier for gamers and retailers to find exactly what they are looking for in one place.

“The icing on the cake is that all publishers using the BGC platform have access to a shared licensing ecosystem. For example, if Publisher A adds a game to BGC and is looking for a partner to localise it, Publisher B can check the available licenses for their country and initiate a business discussion immediately.

“BGC takes 0% commission on these deals – the goal is simply to be stronger together.”

Gigot said Fentasy aims to release between three and five titles each year, with about half going through BGC and half, such as its localisation of Animal Rescue Team and upcoming strategy title Microlonies, through traditional distribution.

The publisher’s first release through BGC is Iron Games’ Mesopotamia-themed territory builder Papyria, with future titles set to arrive on the platform before the end of next year including Martin Wallace space exploration design Casus Belli and Masaki Suga’s chocolate industry strategy title Bean to Bar.

Other Iron Games releases available through BGC include Discordia and its Magna expansion, Pandoria and Ploc, while Fentasy’s French localisation of Uwe Rosenberg design Kanal – previously Oranienburger Kanal – is also present on the platform.

But Gigot added, “Titles like Animal Rescue Team and Microlonies will still follow the traditional distribution model. We aren’t abandoning big distribution – we are simply choosing the right tool for the right game.

“There is no ‘hostility’ toward the traditional model – it just isn’t built to sustain niche titles effectively.”

Gigot said Fentasy’s biggest successes since its late 2024 launch have included Kikai – Bricolage Heads, which he said moved more than 4,000 copies “in a short window for a game of its complexity”.

He added that 2026 release Microlonies “is following the same successful path. It proved that a hungry audience exists for deep, high-production-value games”.

Fentasy’s success to date has persuaded Gigot – who runs the company as “a small, agile core team of one person” – to expand its scope internationally, with him telling BoardGameWire the business is moving towards a 60% international / 40% France split.

He said, “We are always looking for new partners to localize our games in their countries and to localise their games into French.

“Our goal for 2027 is to achieve a synchronized BGC launch for our expert line across Europe (Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain) and Canada, China, allowing local publishers / retailers to bypass the heavy costs of international imports.”

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I like weird games (derogatory) almost as much as I like weird games (complimentary).

Belinda’s Big Bonus is a weird game (weird).

Having your game designed by Amabel Holland sets certain expectations, despite any difficulties in pinning her down to a single genre or register. Similarly, basing a game on an erotic novel series, in this case Belinda Blinked by Rocky Flintstone, also sets certain expectations. Yet Belinda’s Big Bonus isn’t especially erotic. I wouldn’t call it funny, either, although it’s possible I’m just not in on the joke. Neither does it strike me as “so bad it’s good.” Mostly, it’s twice as complicated as one would expect from a licensed game. It reminds me of nothing so much as one of those business guys whose entire life is conducted through Google Calendar invites.

First of all, we should open with a disclaimer. I know very little about Belinda Blinked. I considered reading the first one as research for this review — “research,” I say — but decided against it. Sometimes knowing less is knowing more. That’s our motto here in the United States. It’s written on our dollars and everything. While scant few people are going to play this thing sans foreknowledge, I happen to be one of them, and if there’s any one quality a critic requires, it’s the resolute belief that one’s experiences are valid no matter how uninformed. Here I stand.

Which is to say, perhaps Belinda Blinked is about managing one’s schedule, suffering from jet-lag, and mixing up which actions cost which payment. Maybe. In which case, may I offer my deepest apologies to Holland, Flintstone, and Belinda herself. Forgive this prude, for he knows not what he do.

At the game’s outset, players step into the not-yet-broken-in business shoes of interns at Steele’s Pots and Pans. Their task is to earn some millions of pounds for the company. They do this by…

Look, this is the first problem with Belinda’s Big Bonus, and it’s a doozy. As any gaming evangelical knows, it’s hard enough describing a board game to newcomers, and Belinda’s Big Bonus is no board game for newcomers. There are mechanisms aplenty in this trunk, packed together like someone mixed the first-aid kit with the snack bag. There’s a calendar timekeeping system, the kind popularized by Martin Wallace titles, and cards that may exist either in a market, your hand, or a tableau, with interactions dependent on their current source — except sometimes they can be spent from two of those places, and the rulebook is conversational and, although it’s amusing, this doesn’t lend itself to learning the damn thing.

Here’s the short version. Turns are variable, conducted by whomever is farthest back on the calendar. On those turns, you spend some amount of time to make connections — which is to say, put cards into your tableau from either the market or your hand — do spy stuff — gain cards into your hand, from the deck this time — rest to refresh the cards in your tableau, make a business deal by throwing away the cards you painstakingly contacted or spied upon — and, in the process, try to persuade your fellow players to spend some of their cards instead, because these business deals are often collaborative and dole out benefits to multiple players — or perhaps visit a calendar event on the appointed date to gain some advantage.

If that sounds confusing, try teaching it. I’m no stranger to Holland’s more tangled designs, but this one found the most uncomfortable spot on the seesaw between complexity and anticipation: the fulcrum. Belinda’s Big Bonus feels like it should be a light game, looks like a light game, has that licensed light-game air to it, and then, kapow, but a kapow more like a punch to the schnoz than something erotic, it smacks you with a clutter of ideas.

For all that, there is an interesting game in here. The gist is that you need to build out your tableau and hand in order to spend those same cards to make business deals. Along the way, your characters provide something like an engine.

There’s even a narrative to the whole thing. Sir James Godwin makes it easier to attract Bella Ridley to your work group. Meanwhile, James Spooner, the Laird of Gretna Green, brings Cosmo Macaroon into the fold through some act of espionage. Later, your connections to Bella and Cosmo will help you make a deal in Texas, USA for nine million pounds sterling. Unfortunately, that same deal enriches a rival intern by five million pounds, so you try to squeeze some contribution from so-and-so at the table rather than merely handing the commission to whichever competitor is sitting in last place.

Those are genuine dramatic and narrative beats! Along the way, though, Belinda’s Big Bonus is burdened by bloated bits. It’s easy to paint oneself into a corner, for instance, by spending too many cards on an eager deal. This can leave one player sitting around with very little to do but play catch-up. And, hey, that’s their fault, right? If we were playing one of Holland’s cube-rail games, such a possibility would act as evidence of the game’s forthrightness. But here, the possibility comes across less like an honest appraisal of the perils of betting everything on some bad stock tips, and more like an unexpected heel-turn on the game’s part.

Here’s another example. Belinda’s Big Bonus includes the possibility of a traitor moment. When the game concludes, the player in last place might reveal that they now hold the majority of connections to Steele’s rival firm, Bisch Herstellung. This turns them into “the special one” and wins the game in a sudden coup. Cool!

Except, like everything else in Belinda’s Big Bonus, the rules governing the reveal are so text-heavy that it doesn’t feel like an amusing capstone. It’s closer to checking a technical manual to see if you’ve successfully told a joke. It isn’t hard, exactly. Nothing in the game is hard. But it’s less fluid than it ought to be, keeping everybody’s attention on these mismatched processes rather than on the parade of characters and situations strutting across the table.

Then again, maybe I’m not in on the joke. Maybe a Belinda Blinked game should be more complicated than most licensed titles. Maybe it should buck common sense by being an erotic game with no eroticism, a business game with no head for business, a whimsy with lots of rules printed on the board. Maybe it should be a big meta-joke at my expense. Maybe this game doesn’t exist for anyone but me, and it was sent to me solely so that everybody could point and laugh and say, ha ha, you took our prank earnestly, you big stupid fool, you moron, you lame-o.

That would be okay. I don’t mind. In the game’s cast of characters, I feel most like the guy anxiously cleaning a stain from his tie. I don’t need to get everything. Sometimes, I even revel in how little I understand. For example, I’ve had a lovely time not understanding Belinda’s Big Bonus. Maybe you’ll have a lovely time not understanding it as well. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

A complimentary copy of Belinda’s Big Bonus 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

The German branch of high IQ society Mensa has unveiled its full slate of nominees for this year’s MinD Spielepreis.

Mensa in Deutschland has run the awards contest since 2009, and has operated a ‘shorter games’ category for more than a decade and lighter two-player games prize since 2019.

This year’s ‘shorter games’ category will be fought over by titles including 2025 Spiel des Jahres nominee Krakel Orakel, as well as Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel’s design Zenith and Take Time from Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière.

Word chaining game Next by Verena Wiechens and Lukas Setzke is also up for the shorter game prize – which focuses on titles that play in well under an hour – as is Maldón’s design El Camarero (published in Germany as Chaosteria), and Wilmot’s Warehouse from David King, Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg.

In the two-player games category, Bruno Cathala’s design Kamon is up against Niwashi, from Gautier de Cottreau and Baptiste Laurent, Junghee Choi’s Orapa and Tobias Tesar’s Perfect Murder.

Playball, designed by David Florsch, will also compete in that category, as will Strategeti by Ignasi Ferré and Suna Valo, designed by Andreas Odendahl (who goes by ode.).

Mensa Deutschland revealed in January that it was changing up the ‘complex games’ category of the awards to focus entirely on expert-level titles, in order to fill what the organisers saw as a gap in the industry.

Jochen Tierbach, who has been organising the MinD Game Award for 16 years, said at the time, “There are already various awards and prizes for family and connoisseur games.

“But for expert games, the really tough ones, there is no such thing in Germany yet. And we feel that the industry wants it.”

The long list of more than 20 expert-level titles was whittled down to six challengers for the complex games award this year: Galactic Cruise, Luthier, Shackleton Base, Speakeasy, Thebai and Thesauros, all of which have been released in Germany since Spiel Essen last October.

Last year’s MinD award for complex games saw Tomáš Holek’s space exploration eurogame SETI add to its array of prizes, while Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi’s Nucleum triumphed in 2024.

The most recent holder of the MinD shorter game award was 2025 Spiel des Jahres winner Bomb Busters, while 2024 SdJ champion Sky Team was last year’s winner of the best two-player game prize.

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When I play Inkwell, I think about other games. That isn’t a slight on Inkwell’s quality, necessarily, nor a reflection on my fidelity to whichever title happens to be on the table at the moment. It’s just the sort of game that sets the mind to wandering. I have yet to play it without somebody mentioning Azul, for instance, and Sagrada isn’t a distant touchstone either.

The big one, though, is Alf Seegert’s Illumination, an overlooked quip from five years back that also dressed up its players as monks illuminating manuscripts under the stern eye of a passing abbot. And while it might seem like the parallel is entirely in the setting, it’s really the gentleness that does it, the warmth, the do-no-harm-ness of the whole thing. As a game, Inkwell isn’t only about monks; it’s downright monkish.

It begins with a page. Not quite a blank page, although one imagines the parchment fresh. For the sake of gameplay, the page is scrawled with the outlines of what will soon become vibrant illustrations: saints and angels, wreaths and knots, lions penned by someone who has clearly never seen a lion, scenes of Eden, holy babes that appear twice of age of the Lord at his crucifixion. Touching these illustrations are squares, each the size of a small wooden cube. Sometimes these squares appear in other spots, too, free of any illustration, but still ready to accept daubs and brush-strokes.

Your goal is to fill that page with color. Reds, blues, yellows, greens, deep charcoal blacks. Maybe some gold leaf. Gold is wild, capable of making up a shortfall elsewhere — because it’s gold, obviously — but it’s also sometimes required in special circumstances. Some spaces are blank, beckoning for leftovers. That or scoring multipliers.

These cubes must be drafted from the central mat, itself represented as a swirl of ink-pots. There are three types to draw from. Circular pots hold the most ink, three cubes at the beginning. Star spaces hold gold, but usually only a single cube’s worth, marking them as a tradeoff between quality and quantity. Diamonds are the most interesting, offering a meager two cubes, but also technique cards, special abilities that gradually hone your monk’s abilities.

One turn at a time, players go around and select which inkwells to draw from. There’s some potential for blocking, but it’s a relatively remote concept here, especially in the page’s early moments when any color will serve. The effect is trancelike, meditative, as close to multiplayer solitaire as design collective Jasper Beatrix has gotten thus far. The most burdensome restriction is that you aren’t permitted to draw from an inkwell unless you can actually use every last drop and employ every technique card. This makes blocking even less likely, instead reinforcing the game’s gentle proceedings. It’s possible to grab as many cubes as possible, but that might make the page difficult to fill. Better to proceed steadily, like the proverbial tortoise.

There is some pressure, however light. Whenever one of those varieties of inkwell is depleted — circle, star, or diamond — the abbot marches one step across the mat. He’s here to oversee your work, and at various points he may force the table to turn the page. This scores all those illustrations and color cubes, potentially leaving some work undone. It’s better to turn the page of your own volition, at the time of your choosing, but it’s hard to say exactly when the abbot will peek into the scriptorium to ensure the commissions are being fulfilled.

Over time, your accumulated techniques produce little engines, to use a game-word that would have meant something very different to our monks. But there’s some spark of the Latin gignere to these flashes of talent, reflected in the way they speak to an artistry now long displaced. Some techniques bestow extra cubes, perhaps when a specific color is drawn or the abbot marches down the hall, evoking the scribe, bent over his masterwork and taskmaster at once, carefully measuring every drop to its uttermost potential. Others let you claim cubes as a one- or two-time bonus, the medieval equivalent of double-dipping. Others still let you store a few cubes to the side, or rearrange them on the page, saving your palimpsest scrapings for reuse elsewhere.

In some ways, Inkwell is also itself a palimpsest. There are traces of other games here, possibly better or more interesting games. The most pronounced is Azul; it’s impossible to look at the circular inkwells and not see that game’s rounded factories and Starburst-sized ceramics. There are other traces, too, impressions on the parchment that can still be made out despite the game’s clean presentation. Playing Inkwell, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’ve gone through these motions before.

Of course we have, if only because nothing under the sun is new. None these actions are wholly novel. But Inkwell feels a little closer to its peers than some games. Especially Jasper Beatrix games, with their penchant for novelty and mechanical introspection. Inkwell is no Pacts, with its dissection of I-split-you-choose gameplay, no Here Lies with its decoupling of detective games from rigid logic, no Signal and communication, no Scream Park and tableau-building.

But for all its similarity to other games, there are still reasons to recommend it. For example, I appreciate the open-ended nature of its conundrum, one where each selection feels like another window into a broad decision-space, rather than a binary best or worst pick. It’s rare that a single inkwell feels like the answer to a puzzle so much as one more question. Another brushstroke, perhaps, another inlay of gold. Those other games use artistry as their backdrop; Inkwell, by contrast, feels like artistry. More specifically, it feels like that slender space between commercial reality — deadlines and managers, limited resources, coworkers who sometimes take the pigments you need without meaning any harm — and the aspiration to fashion something that will endure the centuries.

Where does that put Inkwell, in the end? It’s hard to say. As a game, it occupies a peculiar middle ground. It lacks the brain-tickling nature of its heavier inspirations, the emphasis on puzzling and position, but ventures a little closer to its source material than those games have ever managed.

More than that, Inkwell is reassuring. It feels like a weighted blanket, the game equivalent of a movie like The Taste of Things, all soft sensation and creamy sunlight and lulled senses. The outcome is neither the strongest nor the weakest of Jasper Beatrix’s collective output, but offers a lovely and gentle visit to a faraway time and place nonetheless.

 

A complimentary copy of Inkwell 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

April is one of my favorite months due to Easter and the warming of the weather. And this month we got a good amount of newly baked wargames, still warm some of them because they are so new, for you to choose from. This month for the Wargame Watch I was able to find 28 games (including the 7 games from our sponsor VUCA Simulations). Interestingly though this was a cooler month for crowdfunding as I only found 4 different campaigns, which did contain a total of 6 games as one was a triple feature, featured on Kickstarter or Gamefound.

If you missed the March Wargame Watch, you can read that here at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2026/03/02/wargame-watch-whats-new-upcoming-march-2026/

This month again we have a sponsor for the Wargame Watch in VUCA Simulations. VUCA Simulations is a newer German publisher that is really crushing it with their graphics and production. Their games are also very good and we have really enjoyed several of their titles including Donnerschlag: Escape from Stalingrad, Traces of War and most recently New Cold War.

But I also want to point your attention to their In Development Section of their website to show you all of the great projects that they are currently working on. Here there are 7 different games listed with pictures of the beautiful covers and a description of the game itself. These titles include Thirty Years of Misery designed by Brian Asklev, Pacific Fleet designed Hiroyuki Inose, The Far Seas designed by Martin Anderson, In Fours to Heaven designed by Grzegorz Kuryłowicz, Gateway to Falaise designed by Andrew Glenn, 1916 – Prelude to Blitzkrieg designed by Paul Hederer and Saint-Lô – The Capital of Ruins designed by Clemm.

VUCA is really doing a great job with their games and we recently played one of their newest games in Imperial Elegy: The Road to the Great War 1850-1920 and it was a sublime experience. We only played 1 full hand with a full table of 6 players, but very much enjoyed what it was that we were trying to do and the production is just fantastic. Can’t wait to get this one back to the table soon!

But now onto the games for April!

Pre-Order

1. Company of Heroes – Desert Warfare Expansion + Reprint from Bad Crow Games Currently on Gamefound

Glitz. Bits. Content. Miniatures. If these things appeal to you and you like a tactical wargame experience then this is your chance. The well regarded Company of Heroes System has a Gamefound campaign for a new expansion called Company of Heroes – Desert Warfare Expansion and they are also offering the base game 2nd Edition as an add-on as you need it to play.

From the game page, we read the following:

The Company of Heroes – Desert Warfare Expansion + Reprint on Gamefound brings the Deutsches Afrika Corps (DAK) to the 2nd Edition board game, featuring high-mobility, mechanized, and elite units. This expansion enhances solo/co-op play with improved AI, offering a fast-paced, tactical tabletop experience with armored, hit-and-run tactics. The Deutsches Africa Corps adds specialized, agile desert combat forces with a focus on armored vehicles, Italian alliance units, and fast, bold maneuvers. The expansion includes a sophisticated AI for solo or cooperative play, featuring an AI commander, HQ board, action deck, and target selection priority cards. The AI is described as aggressive, frequently seizing objectives. The expansion includes new maps, units, and components to expand the core game experience. The campaign also offers a reprint of the 2nd Edition core box, required to play, featuring streamlined rules and high-quality components.

I am going to be honest here. I played the 2nd Edition. We enjoyed it but it wasn’t necessarily as amazing as I thought it would be. I mean the systems are interesting but it feels more Euro game like than wargame like and it is also extremely expensive. Now it is gorgeous and the miniatures, terrain and maps are very well done but I am not sure that this game lives up to the hype. Just my humble opinion.

If you are interested in Company of Heroes – Desert Warfare Expansion + Reprint, you can back the project on the Gamefound page at the following link: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/companyofheroes/dak

As of April 1st, the Gamefound campaign has funded and raised $948,465 toward its $100,000 funding goal with 1,928 backers. The campaign will conclude on Thursday, April 16, 2026 at 12:00am EST.

2. T-34 Leader: The World War II Ground Combat Solitaire Strategy Board Game from Dan Verssen Games Currently on Kickstarter

A good solitaire game is always very much welcome on my table. I usually start these entries about solitaire gaming by saying I am not a solitaire gamer. Well, after playing the Leader Series from DVG for the first time about 8 years ago, that statement no longer applies. I used to really only play solitaire games when I had no other choice or available opponents. But, when I put these games on the table, my whole opinion has changed. The Leader Series is a solitaire gaming system that recreates modern combat, including ground combat, air warfare and even submarine warfare and sees the player creating, managing and outfitting a group of soldiers/boats/planes over the course of a variable length campaign. Some of the games offer individual combat systems that are included in the overall game and each handles their theater with specific rules and equipment used historically. Originally, all of the games were designed by Dan Verssen but more recently other designers have been taking up the reigns of the series. Such is the case with their newest offering in the series T-34 Leader designed by Vincent Cooper.

From the game page, we read the following:

You are the commander of a Soviet army combat group in World War II. You will take command in the hardest fought campaigns from Operation Barbarossa (1941) to the Battle of Berlin (1945).

Each of your Campaigns involve both operational and tactical decisions. At the start of a Campaign, you select the Units and Commanders to make up your force. During each Week of the Campaign, you decide which Enemy Battalions to attack, which of your forces to allocate, and then resolve each Battle using the Tactical Battlefield. Your Commanders gain Experience with every Battle, but they also suffer Stress. Each Week you must decide how hard to push your men to achieve Victory. T-34 Leader is a great game for both experienced strategy gamers, as well as new players. Each Campaign takes around 30 minutes to set-up, and each Battle can be resolved in 15 to 30 minutes.

T-34 Leader has been designed from the ground up as a Solitaire wargame. It is not an adaptation of a 2-player wargame and the rules have been specifically designed for the solo player. As a Solitaire wargame, you can play whenever you have time, at your own pace. T-34 Leader is the latest Tank Leader game from DVG, following Tiger Leader and Sherman Leader.

With that look, I will let you know that I very much love Sherman Leader and the ground combat for me is where it is at and I would think that T-34 Leader will be more of the same but on the East Front. I have played Sherman Leader the most in the series, using both short and long campaigns, and really enjoy its systems, the structure of the AI and the management of your units and Commanders. Really engaging and enjoyable experience of ground combat in World War II.

Here is a link to my video review for Sherman Leader that you can view at the following link:

If you are interested in T-34 Leader: The World War II Ground Combat Solitaire Strategy Board Game, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danverssengames/dvg-t-34-leader

As of April 1st, the Kickstarter campaign has funded and raised $38,484 toward its $30,000 funding goal with 148 backers. The campaign will conclude on Tuesday, April 7, 2026 at 3:02pm EDT.

3. Chalice of Poison: The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 from GMT Games

We met Akar Bharadvaj while attending SDHistCon in 2023 and played his award winning design Tyranny of Blood: India’s Caste System Under British Colonialism, 1750-1947 and very much enjoyed the experience and talking with him about game design. Since that time, he has been working on another designer called Chalice of Poison: The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 from GMT Games, which was recently announced on their P500. Chalice of Poison is the first volume in a new series that models complex conflicts not only as clashes between adversaries in the air, land, and sea, but also as political struggles within the regimes and military forces fighting it.

From the game page, we read the following:

In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, hubristically expecting to achieve a quick victory in a few weeks. Instead, the war became a brutal slog that lasted eight years. During the war, both countries had to choose between political and military objectives, balancing between the power of their military forces and the stability of their regimes. In Chalice of Poison you will play as the heads of two very different authoritarian regimes that have structured their militaries to be excellent at forestalling internal threats…but less effective at fighting foreign adversaries. Can you reform your military so that it’s effective enough to win the war, without accidentally creating a force that threatens your power?

A unique game on the Iran-Iraq War, the longest conventional war of the 20th century, and a historically important conflict underexplored in tabletop gaming.

Designed by Zenobia Award-winning designer Akar Bharadvaj, and inspired by Dr. Caitlin Talmadge’s academic research on the fundamental weakness of so-called “strong-man” authoritarian regimes.

Simple mechanics create a tense, dynamic, and meaningful decision space with an exciting narrative, capturing the dilemmas faced by regimes faced with both internal and external threats.

A two-player game that also plays well with four players on competing teams.

Includes two solitaire modes: A simple-to-operate “Al-Jazari” bot that offers a challenging non-player opponent. A more complex “Kissinger mode”—inspired by Mark Herman’s Peloponnesian War—in which the solitaire player represents both sides in the conflict. This mode abstractly models the international community, which cynically supported both sides in the conflict, ensuring a lengthy war in which neither country could win a decisive victory.

“At its most interesting, Chalice of Poison simulates warfare as a social battle as much as one involving tanks and bullets…This might sound complicated, but Bharadvaj presents these fluctuating power levels with refreshing clarity…Even at this early stage it’s an impressive and ambitious plaything. And its critique is unexpectedly timely, highlighting how strongman governments weaken their nations in the name of strengthening their regimes.” ~ Dan “Space-Biff” Thurot

If you are interested in Chalice of Poison: The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, you can pre-order a copy for $69.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1225-chalice-of-poison-the-iran-iraq-war-1980-1988.aspx

4. Pericles: The Peloponnesian Wars 460-400 BC 2nd Printing from GMT Games

We are admitted Mark Herman fanboys! I am not ashamed of that statement as he is a very good designer and such an interesting person. He has designed a series of games called The Great Statesman Series and there are such fantastic mechanics at play that create a very interesting non-traditional wargame feeling such as Churchill. The 2nd game in the series is called Pericles, unlike Churchill, pits 2 sides, the Athenians and the Spartans against one another. The real game-changer is that each side is made up of two factions. As such it plays best with 4 players, each working to not only have their side win, but to have their faction within that side end with the most honor, and thus be victorious overall. The good news for most of us, is that there’s bots for solitaire, or 3 player games and there’s a fascinating 2 player variant, where each player plays a faction on each side. GMT just put a 2nd Printing up on their P500 and I am so very glad that this game will get some more attention as it is a really great game.

From the game page, we read the following:

Pericles is a ‘sandbox’ (unscripted) wargame that covers the ENTIRE period of conflict described in Thucydides classic history on the Peloponnesian wars. Pericles is a 4-player game, where two teams of Athenian and Spartan factions fight for Hegemony in 5^th Century Greece. Each team of two represents a faction vying for control of their City States, strategy, and honor. Athens sees the Aristocrats debate issues with their opposing Demagogues, while in Sparta House Agiad and House Eurypontid contend for royal dominance.

Pericles uses elements from the Golden Geek best Wargame of 2015, Churchill, to simulate war as the extension of politics by other means. In the War portion of the game, it is US versus THEM (Athens versus Sparta), where each team implements their collective strategy to dominate Theaters of War, build economic strength, and fight battles to win Honor. In the respective Political assemblies, it is ME versus YOU (faction versus faction), where the battle for government control has to be balanced by your common interests in a series of wars that must be won, or all is lost.

Pericles uses an Issue Queue preplanning mechanic that the play testers have described as ‘insanely fun’. After your Political assembly has debated and won issues, these issues (military, league, diplomatic, oracle) are secretly placed on the military map in one of the twenty Theaters of war. If you or your opponents place a second issue into a Theater, it creates a queue of issues. Once all issues are placed, they are revealed and resolved one at a time. The order of issues in the queues and the order in which they are resolved across all Theaters tells YOUR story of the Peloponnesian wars.

Strategy in Pericles unfolds in how you create combinations of issues to achieve the historical narrative. Do you want to conduct a Periclean raiding strategy? Then you would play two military issues into a Theater to first move forces into position, then raid. Do you want to build a base in the enemy homeland (historically Pylos or Decelea)? Then you would conduct a military expedition, followed by a league issue. Do you want to raise an opponent’s ally in rebellion? Then you would deploy a diplomatic mission, and sow treachery for immediate or future advantage. It is in the placement, order, and resolution of the issues that the game allows you to explore and experience the broad range of historical situations without a script. 

What would a game of Hoplites and Triremes be without a battle mechanic? Battle in Pericles is based on armies and fleets being led by the classic generals of yore, represented as Strategos tokens. During the Political assembly, each faction uses historical personalities to acquire Strategos tokens. Use the Spartan general Brasidas and gain four Strategos tokens, while Epitadas only generates one. Strategos tokens can be thought of as military capital that is spent in the war to lead and move forces. If you send forces to a Theater with enemy forces, a land or naval battle will occur. All players then secretly commit Strategos to the battle. Then, the commanding general of the military expedition and their teammate reveal their Strategos commitment and move wooden land and naval units to the battle. Now the defensive commitment of Strategos is revealed, each side then reveals a random battle card value, and the winner is decided. The winner of the battle now has the option to fight a subsequent naval or land battle. The outcome of these tactical decisions determines if any fortified bases are destroyed by assault or siege. Then the next issue is resolved. Winning battles awards and reduces honor.

Here is a link to our video review that was created when we were younger, had more hair and were not very polished in any part of what we were doing:

If you are interested in Pericles: The Peloponnesian Wars 460-400 BC 2nd Printing, you can pre-order a copy for $71.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1223-pericles-the-peloponnesian-wars-460-400-bc-2nd-printing.aspx

5. Silver Bayonet: The First Team in Vietnam, 1965 – 25th Anniversary Edition 2nd Printing from GMT Games

We have had a great experience playing Silver Bayonet a few times over the years and I am glad that it is now getting a 2nd Printing of the 25th Anniversary Edition. Silver Bayonet: The First Team in Vietnam, 1965 – 25th Anniversary Edition is a revamping of their first ever game released all the way back in 1990.

From the game page, we read the following:

Silver Bayonet recreates the pivotal November 1965 battle between a full North Vietnamese Army Division and the US 1st Air Cavalry Division in the Ia Drang Valley. NVA expertise in lure and ambush tactics resulted in significant US casualties. US mobility and the ability to bring massive amounts of firepower to bear quickly virtually destroyed the attacking NVA division and forced a change in NVA tactics.

This re-issue of GMT Games’ 1990 CSR Award winning title that started it all keeps the original operational system, but streamlines to it to include innovative combat resolution integrating maneuver combat, close assault, artillery bombardment, and support from gunships and air sorties. 

Increased accessibility to primary and secondary source material has made it possible to make changes to more accurately represent both sides’ unique capabilities without significantly altering or breaking the base game system. The major changes involve patrols, ambushes, landing zones, and the 1st Cav Brigade HQ, while minor changes tweak movement, combat, and coordination game mechanics to showcase radically different strengths and weaknesses the FWA and NVA force brought to the battles in the Ia Drang Valley.

If you are interested in Silver Bayonet: The First Team in Vietnam, 1965 – 25th Anniversary Edition 2nd Printing, you can pre-order a copy for $48.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1224-silver-bayonet-25th-anniversary-edition-2nd-printing.aspx

6. I, Napoleon 2nd Edition Update Kit from GMT Games

As you probably know, normally Ted Raicer designs hard core hex and counter wargames such as The Dark Valley: East Front Campaign, 1941-45, The Dark Sands: War in North Africa, 1940-42 and The Dark Summer: Normandy, 1944. These games are fantastic experiences that are true wargames. But, he also has an eclectic side to him and has designed one of the classic card driven games on the subject of World War I in Paths of Glory. So when I heard that he had designed an interesting looking card based historical role-playing game the first thought that came to my mind was “How is he going to accomplish this feat?” Last year, I played I, Napoleon and did enjoy what it was doing even though it felt like it fell a bit short of its ultimate claim. But there is more of the game now and they are doing this Update Kit in case those who want to the updated cards don’t wish to order the Limits of Glory Expansion.

From the game page, we read the following:

For our customers who own the 1st Printing of I, Napoleon and want to upgrade to the 2nd Printing without purchasing the Limits of Glory Expansion, we’re providing an Update Kit.

This Kit includes:

• 60 Updated Cards
• 2 Divider Cards (1 New, 1 Adjusted)
• Rulebook
• Playbook
• 8.5″x11″ Player Aid
• Sticker Sheet (4 stickers to update the Game Board)

NOTE: The Limits of Glory Expansion includes the updated Cards, Divider Cards and Sticker Sheet, as well as a Rulebook, Playbook and Player Aid that can be used with both the expansion and base game.

I wrote a fairly in-depth First Impression style post on the game and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2024/10/16/first-impressions-i-napoleon-from-gmt-games/

I also did a review video and you can watch that at the following link:

If you are interested in I, Napoleon 2nd Edition Update Kit, you can pre-order a copy for $21.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1226-i-napoleon-2nd-edition-update-kit.aspx

7. Paper Wars Magazine Issue #116: Roma Invicta: The Roman Republic 400-50BC from Compass Games

Wargame magazines can be a bit hit and miss with their games. But, Paper Wars seems to really pick some great topics and systems to highlight in their pack-in games and this month there is a new pre-order for a game called Roma Invicta: The Roman Republic, 400-50 BC designed by Paul Kallia who did Roma Victrix: Campaigns of the Roman World from Compass Games.

From the game page, we read the following:

Roma Invicta: The Roman Republic & the Western Mediterranean by Paul Kallio is a 2-player, scenario-based design depicting several historic conflicts that occurred in and around the Roman Republic between 400 and 50 BC. This is a systemic brother design to Paul Kallio’s Roma Victrix boxed game. Each game turn represents one year. Infantry unit types include legions, heavy infantry, auxiliaries, and barbarians, and represent about 5,000 men each.

BONUS GAME MATERIAL:  This issue will include two new scenarios for play with WWII Campaigns: 1940, 1941, and 1942. For 1941, we have Festung Stalingrad. It covers the German counteroffensive to try to save the Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad in December 1942. For 1940, we have the Operation Matador variant scenario by David Meyler.

Article highlights include previews of Rise to Glory and Iberian Tide, a work-in-progress report on Island Infernos, a Bitter Woods AAR, an alternate start scenario for Desert Tide, and a new optional fuel dump rule for The Last Gamble.

If you are interested in Paper Wars Magazine Issue #116: Roma Invicta, you can pre-order a copy for $41.95 from the Compass Games website at the following link: https://www.compassgames.com/product/issue-116-magazine-game-roma-invicta/

8. Limits of Glory: Campaigns VI & VII – Jersey New Jersey and A Strong War: The Conflict for North America 1755-60 from Form Square Games Coming to Gamefound April 7th

A few years ago, we became acquainted with Andrew Rourke through his Coalitions design from PHALANX that went on to a successful crowdfunding campaign and has recently been delivered. He has since been a busy guy with starting his own publishing company called Form Square Games and also publishing the first 5 designs in a new series called Limits of Glory that will take a look at the campaigns of Napoleon and other contemporary conflicts. In Campaign I, which is called Bonaparte’s Eastern Empire, the game is focused on the campaign of the French in Egypt between 1798 and 1801. Campaigns II, III and IV was Maida 1806 and Santa Maura & Capri. Campaign V was Donning the Sacred Heart which covers the Vendee Civil War and just recently fulfilled as I have my copy sitting on my gaming table awaiting and unboxing video.

And now, recently, he has announced came out about the next entry in the series which is a two-fer with Campaigns VI and VII called Jersey New Jersey and is set during the American Revolutionary War but also a 2nd game called A Strong War set during the French & Indian War. I think that these games are well timed with this year being the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and I look forward to playing and exploring both of these games. I have also reached out to Andrew to see about him as well as the design duo of Mark Kwasny and John Kwasny for A Strong War doing another interview to give us a look inside the design and get more information for you to digest before the campaign kicks off on April 7th. But at this point the games look great and I love the art and the covers are very eye catching for sure!

From the game page, we read the following:

For the 2 games in the Limits of Glory Series:

Two exciting games in one box, Jersey covers the little known 1781 invasion by the French of the Island of Jersey as part of the American Revolutionary War. The game examines the impact of luck on events and challenges the skill of players to use their commanders to influence these events.

New Jersey covers the famous crossing of the Delaware and the battles of Trenton and Princeton using the same Limits of Glory System to test players ability to mitigate what luck throws at them by the skillful use of commanders and troop positioning.

Limits of Glory represents military campaigns at the highest command level, players take the role of theater commander and must manage their resources of men, material and skill to emerge victorious.

And for the other game in the offering called A Strong War: The Conflict for North America 1755-60:

The title, A Strong War, refers to the type of war the Abenaki Nation threatened to unleash on the land-grabbing British in 1753. The sparks of war, ignited in 1754 near Fort Duquesne by an obscure colonel of Virginia militia, George Washington, spread quickly; soon, flames engulfed the entire globe as England and France vied for control of empire. Over the next 5 years, Regular regiments from the French and British armies, American and French-Canadian provincial units, and Native warriors all fought in a chaotic and violent series of campaigns and frontier raids that culminated in the British conquest of French Canada and the defeat of the Native Nations (most of which had sided with the French).

A Strong War brings this war to life in a simple, fast-playing game. The map (covering the region stretching from Louisbourg to Alexandria, and from New York to Lake Erie) uses point-to-point connections to highlight the key locations that were targeted during the war. Using wooden cubes to represent the different types of forces used (French and British Regulars, British Colonials, French-Canadian Marines, French Bush Rangers, and Native American warriors), each player has only a few pieces (maximum 13 for the British and 10 for the French) to use each turn (one turn = one year, so there are 6 turns/years total).

The heart of the game is the unique combat system where players can deploy forces to a chosen battle and then commit them one by one; or they can call off the battle if it goes badly and save some of those forces for use later in the year. The types of forces committed also play a critical role in combat – the British want to mass their Regulars but the French want to bring in a mixed force to take advantage of the different skill sets each provides. Thus, tension is created in trying to decide if/when (or where) it is best to commit one’s forces: do you avoid combat completely; do you call off a combat that is going badly; or, do you go all in and commit your entire force? But if you lose a battle, initiative then swings to your opponent who may then launch an offensive.
Each player has several paths to victory, leading to a “different” game each time, and forcing players to choose between different strategies each turn. Finally, it is a quick game, taking just a couple of minutes to set up, and usually taking less than an hour to play to completion. The game also plays well solitaire, though there is no dedicated solitaire system.

If you are interested in Jersey New Jersey and A Strong War, you can learn more about the project on the Gamefound preview page at the following link: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/form-square-games/jersey-new-jersey–a-strong-war

9. Campaign: Operation Bagration from Catastrophe Games Currently on Kickstarter

A few years ago, I played and very much enjoyed a cool little solitaire WWII card-driven game called Campaign: Fall Blau from Catastrophe Games and designer Martin Melbardis where the player attempted to breach the Soviet defenses on the East Front in the pivotal German summer campaign of 1942. The game system is very playable and simple, but has some strategic depth to it as the player has to make a lot of choices about what to go after, how to manage their scarce resources (fuel) and what generals to use to take advantage of their special abilities to amass enough VP to claim victory over the Soviet Union. They now have the counter punch of that game in a new entry in the series called Campaign: Operation Bagration and it is currently being offered on Kickstarter.

From the game page, we read the following:

Campaign: Operation Bagration is the follow-up to Campaign: Fall Blau, the acclaimed solo experience of trying to seize Stalingrad and the prized oil fields beyond. In this game the shoe is on the other foot, as you will be pushing the Red Army to retake the center of the occupied Soviet Union, setting up the capture of Berlin. Stalin is expecting fast results though, so once again you will be racing against the clock trying to achieve enough objectives before your supplies (and Stalin’s patience) runs out.

Campaign: Operation Bagration is a solitaire wargame that takes place during WWII and puts the player in charge of the Soviet summer offensive of 1944 against Army Group Center, code named operation Bagration. Pick your three generals and use your resources wisely in order to obtain your campaign’s objectives.

One month turns. Decide which card (objective) to go after, each with a unique set of Soviet defenses. Manage supplies required for each offensive, or choose to take an operational pause. Receive random event cards that are mostly beneficial but a few are Soviet counterattacks that can throw a serious monkey-wrench into your plans. Play continues until fall begins, and you must report to Stalin with your success or failure.

In order to meet Stalin’s expectations you need to be relentless, while carefully marshalling your troops and material. Drive too hard, and the Germans will crush one of your wings, and your push will stall out. But if you move too slow you know you will be summoned to a special meeting with Stalin, and that is a grim fate.

If you would like to learn more about how the game plays you can read through the rules document found on Board Game Geek at the following link: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/317786/draft-rules-as-of-feb-26

Also, by way of comparison, you can check out our preview video for the first game in the series called Campaign: Fall Blau:

We also published an interview with the designer Martin Melbardis and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2022/10/24/interview-with-martin-melbardis-designer-of-campaign-fall-blau-from-catastrophe-games-on-kickstarter-october-25th/

If you are interested in Campaign: Operation Bagration, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/campaign-fall-blau/campaign-bagration

As of April 1st, the Kickstarter campaign has funded and raised $1,138 toward its $500 funding goal with 14 backers. The campaign will conclude on Monday, April 20, 2026 at 8:51pm EDT.

New Release

1. VaeVictis Magazine Issue #185 Game Edition: Storm on the Ménez Hom 1944 from VaeVictis

VaeVictis is a very fine wargame magazine and they always have very interesting looking pack-in games on various subjects. This month, they have featured a scenario involving the 1944 attack on the Ménez-Hom peak on the Crozon peninsula in a game called Storm on the Ménez Hom 1944. But there is more as the magazine features articles on various wargames including Hubris from GMT Games, La Der des Ders from Hexasim, Thunder on the Mississippi from Multi-Man Publishing, Italia 1917-1918 from Nuts! Publishing, New Cold War from VUCA Simulations, Werwolf from Legion Wargames and many more.

From the game page, we read the following:

During the siege of Brest, the coastal batteries on the Crozon peninsula, on the southern shore of the harbor, were hindering the advance of the US Army. It was therefore crucial to silence them. To achieve this, the barrier closing off the peninsula had to be breached: the Ménez-Hom peak, rising to 330 meters. This mission was entrusted to the FFI-FTP battalions of central Finistère. It took three weeks, from August 12th to September 1st, 1944, and the reinforcement of a US cavalry brigade to finally defeat the German, Russian, and Caucasian defenders.

If you are interested in VaeVictis Magazine Issue #185 Game Edition: Storm on the Ménez Hom 1944, you can order a copy for €16.50 ($19.12 in US Dollars) from the VaeVictic website at the following link: https://www.vaevictismag.fr/en/special-game-issue/287-vaevictis-185-game-issue.html

2. The Coming Storm II: Quadrigames of the Fourth Coalition: October 1806-June 1807 from Operational Studies Group

Large Napoleonic wargames are always interesting. Operational Studies Group does some big games on the subject and their newest offering is called The Coming Storm II: Quadrigames of the Fourth Coalition: October 1806-June 1807 and deals with four different battles including Jena-Auerstadt, Pultusk/Golymin, Eylau and Friedland.

From the game page, we read the following:

These four games explore the major battles of 1806–07, where the French Army encountered two different opponents with different capabilities, from the leadership-challenged Prussians in Saxony to the chaotic battle conditions in winter against the Russians. Based on OSG’s Special Studies, which provide a turn-by-turn narrative of the four battles. Each game shows the approach to the battlefield on the day before battle. The Jena-Auerstadt game has both battlefields on one map and allows both sides to redeploy before battle.

We are offering a new edition, with new maps—not too much different in detail—but rendered in Charles Kibler’s naturalistic style. TCS2 will be updated to use the Universal Deck and latest series rules (deck not included). With few exceptions, the counters will be identical to the first edition.

This is a very popular series of games amongst Grognards and I have heard many people recommend these titles to both of us. We have yet to take the plunge and get one but one day we will…one day!

If you are interested in The Coming Storm II: Quadrigames of the Fourth Coalition: October 1806-June 1807, you can order a copy for $140.00 from the Operational Studies Group website at the following link: https://napoleongames.com/products/the-coming-storm-ii

3. The Maid Ascendant: The Siege of Orleans, October 1428-May 1429 from High Flying Dice Games

Paul Rohrbaugh and his company High Flying Dice Games is a designer I love to follow. He is always doing games on smaller or lesser known conflicts and I just find his work to be superb and really draws me in. Recently I saw where he was releasing a game on the Siege of Orleans and I do like siege games! The game is called The Maid Ascendant and really looks pretty interesting and is definitely a unique subject for a game.

From the game page, we read the following:

The Maid Ascendant is an introductory level wargame on the siege of Orleans. The siege marked the debut of Joan of Arc as a military commander, and a campaign that would see the English eventually evicted from France and the end of the Hundred Years War.

“Begone, or I will make you go!” – Jeanne d’Arc’s command to English and Burgundian troops besieging Orleans.

If you are interested in The Maid Ascendant: The Siege of Orleans, October 1428-May 1429, you can order a copy for $16.95 from the High Flying Dice Games website at the following link: https://www.hfdgames.com/maid.html

4. Mr. Lincoln’s War from Compass Games

You can’t have enough good American Civil War games and Compass Games has been working to bring out a new edition of a classic called Mr. Lincoln’s War designed by Mark McLaughlin.

From the game page, we read the following:

Mr. Lincoln’s War is a historical game which captures the epic struggle of the American Civil War. From their first major battle at Bull Run in 1861, through the campaigns of Vicksburg, Gettysburg and Atlanta and until the final days at Appomattox in 1865, the armies of the Union and the Confederacy raged across America wreaking havoc and bloodshed on a scale never before or since witnessed in the New World.

This box set is organized into two sub-games, “Army of the Tennessee,” which deals with the war in the western theater, and “Army of the Potomac,” which deals with the war in Virginia. Each has four short scenarios that recreate the maneuvers and battles of Shiloh, Gettysburg, Atlanta, and other monumental Civil War contests. Campaign games enabling the players to fight the war in the West or East are provided with each sub-game. They may be combined to play the Mr. Lincoln’s War grand campaign that simulates the entire Civil War, on both fronts.

If you are interested in Mr. Lincoln’s War, you can order a copy for $99.00 from the Compass Games website at the following link: https://www.compassgames.com/product/mr-lincolns-war/

5. Volume II Civil War Heritage Series Army of the Potomac: Campaigns of 1862 and 1864 from GMT Games

Several years ago, Mark Herman designed a very unique and simple American Civil War game called Gettysburg that appeared in C3i Magazine #32. That game became the basis for his Civil War Heritage Series with the first volume being Rebel Fury that focused on five battles from the Chancellorsville and Chickamauga Campaigns. He has long mentioned working on the follow-up to that game and we finally are getting it with Army of the Potomac.

From the game page, we read the following:

Army of the Potomac: Campaigns of 1862 and 1864 is the second volume in the Civil War Heritage Series and the follow-up game to the innovative and acclaimed Rebel Fury. Army of the Potomac uses the same core rules as Rebel Fury, so players familiar with Rebel Fury will be able to jump right into the action. Each battle in Army of the Potomac is quick-set-up, quick-playing, and deeply interactive. The density of counters in each scenario is low, allowing you to see and experience the big picture of the battle.

Army of the Potomac covers the battles of Spotsylvania II, North Anna River, Cold Harbor, and the entire Seven Days battle (McClellan vs. Lee), including the prelude Seven Pines (McClellan vs. Johnson) when Johnson’s wounding brought Lee into the command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Each battle places you, the player, in the role of the Army Commander (Grant, McClellan, Lee, Johnson). You maneuver your army to find the enemy’s flanks, concentrate your forces for an attack, and determine where to commit your artillery assets.

I think that one of the most interesting parts is that this new game can be played with Rebel Fury as also included are two bonus scenarios to allow owners of Rebel Fury to fight Spotsylvania II and begin the Campaign scenario from Wilderness to Cold Harbor using their original Rebel Fury map.

Last summer, while attending WBC in late July, we sat down with Mark Herman and did an interview/overview of Army of the Potomac and you can watch that video at the following link:

If you are interested in Volume II Civil War Heritage Series Army of the Potomac: Campaigns of 1862 and 1864, you an order a copy for $77.00 from the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1108-army-of-the-potomac.aspx

6. Baltic Empires: The Northern Wars of 1558-1721 from GMT Games

This one is very much anticipated by me and I feel like I have been waiting in it forever since its announcement in 2022. Baltic Empires is a grand looking game that focuses on the conflicts between the states of the Baltic region during the early modern era. The wait is now over as they game is set to ship on April 17th.

From the game page, we read the following:

Baltic Empires is an approachable 2-5 player strategy game about conflicts between the states of the Baltic region during the early modern era, a transformative period of religious conflict, large scale warfare, and constant struggles for power. Players will have to develop their economy, strengthen their administration, secure trade hubs, and finally build armies to become the dominant power of the Baltics. Denmark-Norway, Sweden, Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and Prussia will fight for hegemony, using variable victory conditions that reflect their respective historical objectives.

During the 16th & 17th centuries, religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics swept Europe, vast colonies were established by the maritime powers, and a series of wars were fought against Louis XIV’s Kingdom of France to maintain the balance of power, eventually culminating in the War of Spanish Succession. While this history might be familiar to many, the related conflicts around the Baltic Sea that took place during these centuries are less well-known.

Where did the French, English, and Dutch acquire the materials they needed to build and maintain their vast navies that won them their colonial empires? Where did they acquire the food they needed to feed their sailors and growing populations? Where did the Swedish juggernaut that suddenly emerged and changed the course of the Thirty Years War come from, and why didn’t its great power status last? How did the Russian and Prussian Empires that became so powerful in later periods first emerge on the European stage? The Baltic region was crucial to the history of Europe, and the conflict for influence over the Baltic Sea was closely intertwined with the balance of power in Western Europe. The outcome of the wars and societal transformation in the Baltic region, from the collapse of the Teutonic Order in Livonia in 1558 to the end of the Great Northern War in 1721, shaped European and world history up until the present day.

Baltic Empires presents these less well-known conflicts in a fun and accessible format, while also doing justice to the fascinating history of the Baltic Sea region during this period. The game features 5 asymmetric factions with different strengths, forces, and historical objectives, along with the capacity to develop their states by investing in economic infrastructure and recruiting key historical characters that offer unique game effects. The game also includes several scenarios for variable player counts and durations, offering additional flexibility and replayability.

We published an interview on the blog with the designer Brian Asklev and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2022/03/28/interview-with-brian-asklev-designer-of-baltic-empires-the-northern-wars-of-1558-1721-from-gmt-games/

We also did a series of History Behind the Cards with Brian and you can read those posts at the following links:

#41 Tsar Boris Godunov and #33 Corfitz Ulfeldt

#29 Joachim Frederik Blumenthal and #6 Bohdan Khmelnytsky

#27 King Sigismund III Vasa and #9 Maurice of Nassau

#28 Thomas Roe and #37 Markus Fugger

#10 Janusz & Boguslav Radziwill and #12 Louis de Geer

#17 Georg von Derfflinger and #8 The False Dmitrys

#2 Tsar Peter the Great and #48 Tycho Brahe

If you are interested in Baltic Empires: The Northern Wars of 1558-1721, you can order a copy for $104.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-954-baltic-empires-the-northern-wars-of-1558-1721.aspx

7. Three Days of Gettysburg Deluxe Edition from GMT Games

A very popular series featuring one of the most gamed battles of the American Civil War! Quite the combination. And to add to that, a Deluxe Edition treatment with new counters, some new rules, new and updated maps and lots of scenarios. This is a great value for any gamer who wants to game one of the most iconic battles of the American Civil War.

From the game page, we read the following:

GMT Games and the GBACW design team are proud to announce Three Days of Gettysburg Deluxe Edition, the ultimate edition of the definitive game on the Battle of Gettysburg. First published in 1995, 3DoG has stood the test of time as one of the most popular games of the Great Battles of the American Civil War Series.

This series is one of the hobby’s longest-lived design concepts, springing from the legendary regimental level Gettysburg game—Terrible Swift Sword (SPI)—designed by Richard Berg in 1976. Under GMT, the rules system has remained stable but has shown remarkable flexibility to allow each game to smoothly incorporate additional rules to reflect the historical battles. The series relies on interactive chit-pull mechanics to simulate the often-chaotic nature of the 19th Century battlefield at the regimental level.

Three Days of Gettysburg Deluxe Edition will include ten plus scenarios. They range from small Skirmisher contests on half sized maps to the ultimate Gettysburg experience on four full full-sized maps depicting the entire battle, including the East Cavalry Battlefield! Other scenarios will depict both the first and second day of the struggle. Experienced players will be able to play many of the scenarios in one sitting. The 3DoG Deluxe Edition will include many exclusive rules to represent the special situations at Gettysburg, including new Skirmisher rules. However, many of the rules are optional, allowing players to decide for themselves what level of complexity they want.

New components and exclusive rules include new cavalry counters, CSA dismounted cavalry counters, corrected artillery types, two types of skirmisher units, artillery sections for some scenarios (Calef’s battery on the first day!), and artillery overshoot. The new maps continue to use Mark Simonitch’s beautiful artwork but include stonewalls, the Devil’s Den, and sloping hexes to better represent the unique terrain at Gettysburg. The large rock formations are represented differently from earlier editions, and artillery will find moving up the slopes of Little Round Top as difficult in the game as it was in the battle.

And just take a look at this big beautiful map of the game….by the talented Mark Simonitch!

If you are interested in Three Days of Gettysburg Deluxe Edition, you an order a copy for $108.00 from the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1057-three-days-of-gettysburg-deluxe-edition.aspx

8. Dreams of Empire Expansion Kit – Seeds of Empire: The Wars of South & Central India, 1730’s-1750’s from Red Sash Games

Red Sash Games have a reputation for very large, very long playing games that are focused on interesting historical events. This month, they announced their newest offering with their printing partner Blue Panther and it is an expansion to their Seeds of Empire game focused on the wars in South & Central India during the 1730’s through the 1750’s. The game is called Dreams of Empire Expansion Kit – Seeds of Empire: The Wars of South & Central India, 1730’s-1750’s and really looks to be pretty interesting.

From the game page, we read the following:

Seeds of Empire is the second in a series of operational war games covering conflict in India during the 18th Century, using Red Sash Games’ LaceWars rules. SOE extends the environment of Dreams of Empire to include the whole of Central India (the Deccan) and extends the timeline into the 1750s to cover the Second Carnatic War.

The expansion includes several new Powers, divides the Marathas into Clans, and adds Factions for the two — not one, but two — major succession crises simultaneously taking place in the Deccan and Carnatic. This is the period when John Company, the British East India Company, finally got involved in the geopolitics of the Subcontinent. It was the highwater mark of the French presence, and a watershed for the Maratha Confederacy, while for the Mughal Empire it was a period of steep decline.

Seeds of Empire offers eight unique scenarios:

1. The Second Carnatic War: this scenario uses only the original map set (most of the action took place in a very confined area). Featuring the return of Chanda Sahib and Governor Dupleix, with Bussy-Castelneau, Clive of India, Stringer Lawrence (Father of the Indian Army), and above all, Mohammad Ali Khan.
2. “Early Start”: An ‘early start’ variant of the same scenario in which Chanda Sahib has the opportunity to slay Anwar ud-Din (or vice versa). Historically the death of Anwar kicked off the Second Carnatic War.
3. “Capture of Devikotta”: An even earlier start that allows the players to simulate the EIC‘s capture of Devikotta from Tanjore under the guise of restoring the Raja.
4. “French in the Deccan”: A ‘French in the Deccan’ scenario using only the new maps, focusing on the war for control of the Viceroyalty of the Deccan and the activities of the various Maratha clans.
5. “Deccan + Dreams of Empire”: A 1740s Deccan sandbox scenario matching the timeline of the original DOE Campaign Game, showing what the Marathas were getting up to.
6. “Full Territory”: A Campaign Game for the Second Carnatic War that combines the maps.
7. “Both Carnatic Wars”: A Campaign Game for the 1740s combining the original DOE Campaign with the 1740s Deccan scenario. This scenario can be extended to create a Grand Campaign covering the period of both Carnatic Wars.
8. “Malabar War”: A small scenario set in Malabar, showcasing the continued expansion of Travancore against Cochin and its allies.

Like Dreams of Empire, Seeds of Empire assigns the various Powers to the players as and when they Activate. However, the Second Carnatic War also creates semi- permanent Alliances, with the French on one side and the British on the other, though only acting as ‘auxiliaries’ to the great Indian lords.

To help the players cope with the material, the original rules, scenarios, charts, and (some) displays have been duplicated, with the new material from Seeds of Empire inserted into the relevant places. The expansion also includes errata and small fixes to the game system.

This is not a complete game and will requires ownership of Dreams of Empire to play.

If you are interested in Dreams of Empire Expansion Kit – Seeds of Empire: The Wars of South & Central India, 1730’s-1750’s, you can order a copy for $240.00 from the Blue Panther website at the following link: https://www.bluepantherllc.com/products/seeds-of-empire

9. Ace of Aces: Powerhouse Series Deluxe Edition from Mr. B Games

A classic reborn is how I would classify the next offering on this list. With very unique mechanics trying to provide the experience of dueling it out with an enemy biplane over the fields of World War I, Ace of Aces is now making a comeback with the Powerhouse Series rebirth all the way from 1981.

From the game page, we read the following:

Ace of Aces: Powerhouse is an exciting game of World War 1 aerial dogfighting. Each player is the pilot of a fighter plane in the skies over France trying to shoot down their opponent. The players each have a book that shows the position of their opponent, and what maneuvers they can perform to line up their machine guns on their target. Through an innovative matrix system, the players can fly through the sky and attempt to drive away their enemy. Each game takes 15-20 minutes to complete!

The mechanic used in this series is a very cool little flip book called a Dogfighting Book that has various pictures representing the maneuvers of your plan and the enemies. These flip books are nicely crafted and there is one for both the German Fokker DVII and the British SPAD XIII.

If you are interested in Ace of Aces: Powerhouse Series Deluxe Edition, you can order (but it does still say pre-order) a copy for $99.99 from the Mr. B Games website at the following link: https://www.mrbgames.com/products/pre-order-ace-of-aces-powerhouse-series

10. Commander: Romans v Dacians – A Solitaire Wargame from Mike Lambo

Over the past several years, print and play solitaire wargames have gained a lot of traction in our hobby. A solitaire wargame that is very affordable at $10-$15 and can be purchased and downloaded online. What is not to like? And the name of Mike Lambo has been tied to a lot these games as he has designed 20+ of these titles and has built quite the rabid and loyal fanbase. His newest game is called Commander: Romans v Dacians – A Solitaire Wargame and can be downloaded from Wargame Vault.

From the game page, we read the following:

In the rugged hills and forests of ancient Dacia (today located in the European country of Romania) Rome fights a war unlike any it has faced before. The legions advance into a land of ridges, valleys and fierce tribal resistance, where every skirmish can turn the tide of battle. You command a small Roman force consisting of legionaries, praetorian guard, cavalry, archers, and spearmen, tasked with holding the line, breaking the enemy, or seizing vital ground before the Dacian horde overwhelms you. Opposing you are the warriors of King Decebalus – swift, unpredictable, ferocious and deadly. Cavalry smash into formations with startling power, warriors surge forward in wild charges, swordsmen hold the line with grim resolve, and archers and falxmen harass and surprise from the rear. Each battle unfolds differently as both armies are drawn at random, events disrupt your plans, and reinforcements arrive to mix things up.

This is a tense solo wargame of tactical decision making and battlefield chaos. Every turn demands adaptation and every clash counts. No two battles will ever play the same, and victory is never guaranteed until it is achieved.

In the game, the Player will be commanding the units of the Roman Empire as they battle a seemingly endless stream of fierce Dacian fighters.

This game is a solitaire wargame. You play the game, and the enemy is controlled by the game (or ‘AI’). You will need three standard six-sided dice to play. It is recommended that the counters provided on the final page of the game are used to play this game (especially for the units). Simply stick them to card and cut them out. A video demonstrating how generally to do this can be found on the Mike Lambo Games YouTube channel.

If you are interested in Commander: Romans v Dacians – A Solitaire Wargame, you can order a print and play copy for $11.99 from Wargame Vault at the following link: https://www.wargamevault.com/en/product/562242/commander-romans-v-dacians-a-solitaire-wargame

As usual, thanks so much for reading along and sticking with me this month as I navigated through the many websites and game pages looking for new and interesting games to share.

Finally, thanks once again to this month’s sponsor VUCA Simulations!

-Grant