Wombats are herbivorous solitary nocturnal mammals native to Australia, and — here’s the part you knew was coming; nay, hoped was coming — they poop in cubes. And stack them. Why? I dunno. Darwin was pulling a goof that day.

Now Wombat Poo is a stacking board game by Phil Walker-Harding. Why? We know why. Because poop is funny, that’s why. But is Wombat Poo funnier than its opening joke? I think so. A little bit.

On a surface level, Wombat Poo is about stacking cubes. There are three sizes included in the box: small, smaller, and smallest. Maybe that sounds like a complaint. To be sure, I’ve dinged certain dexterity/stacking games in the past for featuring such light components that their edifices collapsed at the slightest exhale, never mind a hand tremor. Fortunately, while the cubes in Wombat Poo are quite small, they have enough heft that the tower isn’t doomed past its first inch. Not right away.

But what makes Wombat Poo function isn’t its stacking. I mean, yeah, without the stacking there isn’t a game. But the stacking is really the backdrop for a compelling system of wagers. Basically, when your turn rolls around, you decide whether to poo or wipe. Each player even gets a double-sided card for announcing their position on the matter. If you poo, that means flipping a card from the deck to determine which size of poo you must stack. If you’re unlucky, maybe you’ll even need to stack two poos.

The other option, wiping, backs you out of the round, while also scoring a point for every cube in the stack.

This is unexpectedly clever for a game that might otherwise seem somewhat single-ply. The thing, you see, is that your fortunes aren’t entirely based on your own prowess at squattie-piley. The decision to stay in the round is also an investment in the other players at the table. If someone in your group suffers from the shakes — as does one of my oldest friends and game-night regulars — they might still remain competitive, building their score by surviving their occasional, um, movements, and letting others do the bulk of the hard work. Conversely, their natural weakness at dexterity games may well translate into everyone else’s natural weakness as well. When the tower topples, the player who did the toppling loses two points. A meager sum. Just enough to prevent somebody from overturning the tower out of spite. But when that happens, those who stayed in the round score nothing at all. It’s only by wiping in time that you’ll accrue a winning score. How’s that for a rule to live by?

This transforms Wombat Poo into a surprisingly forgiving experience. Its central question isn’t “Can you stack this?” so much as, “Can you stack this, plus can the next couple of players also stack their cubes atop your wonky-ass placement, so you can get out while the getting’s good.”

Which is a considerably more interesting question than those posed by most stacking games. For adults, anyway.

At the risk of sounding highfalutin’ — not to mention deeply unserious — Wombat Poo proved too subtle for my twelve- and six-year-old children. An unexpected outcome, given the game’s cartoon wombat and topicality. Those kids were cracking poop jokes literally the evening before we broke out the game for the first time. Then, somehow, overnight, they went from “Poop is the funniest thing in the universe” (juvenile) to “Poop is not funny at all” (adolescent), without quite reaching “Poop is funny unless it’s awful, then it’s even funnier” (mature).

There were other factors. The smallest of the cubes were a bit too light for the six-year-old’s fingers. Maybe it doesn’t help that the notion of playing with one’s fecal matter had been painstakingly ingrained as taboo for years by yours truly, lest this leaking ship we call a home tip over the edge into total disaster. And, yes, the scoring wasn’t quite as immediate as that of, say, Rhino Hero.

Look, I know how I sound. Arguing that Wombat Poo is a mature game for adults isn’t really what I’m trying to say here. I’m sure there are sufficiently advanced children who can also manage it, and some of them will have sufficiently arrested parents to stack poops with. I hope so. In my experience, though, Wombat Poo has become an adult filler, a strong contender for those moments when you just want to heap up some cubes, but with more to the rules than penalizing whichever player makes the tower plunge.

In other words, Wombat Poo is the thinking man’s poop-stacking game. Not David Hume level or anything. Voltaire, though? Yeah, Voltaire might stack some poops.

And that’s all there is to say about that.

 

A complimentary copy of Wombat Poo was provided by the publisher/designer.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

I no longer think of Volko Ruhnke as a man, but as a machine purpose-built for stamping out novel conflict simulations. COIN, Levy & Campaign, that older one where the terrorists have the efficacy of ’90s movie baddies, and now Hunt for Blackbeard, an unexpected romp that’s as much about setting the record straight as it is about blasting pirates with grapeshot. I now know more about Blackbeard than at any point in my life. Which is to say, I know a lot less, given the man’s outsized legend.

Almost everything we know about Blackbeard is wrong, or at least embellished from later sources seeking to cash in on the pirate’s notoriety. That he learned his trade under the legendary Captain Hornigold — unconfirmed. That he braided his hair with smoking fuses — not exactly the sort of fire hazard a man who worked with gunpowder would accept. That he murdered a swath across three seas — well, there was some murder, that’s true. But not as much as previously reported. Not when a pirate’s work required most crews to throw down their arms.

If anything, the Edward Thatch we come to know in Hunt for Blackbeard is something of a sad sack, at least when placed alongside his outsized legend. His great vessel has been stripped. His plunder has been sold down to its last few barrels and crates. His crew has been reduced to a couple dozen hands. Even his most infamous companions are on the outs; Stede Bonnet’s surviving crewmen are likely informers rather than allies, and Israel Hands, Blackbeard’s long-time second in command, may soon be sent on a doomed mission to allow the captain to claim his portion of their remaining goods.

Some of these details are relegated to the historical notes, and this, being a production from Fort Circle Games, provides excellent timelines and essays. But the diminished status of the infamous captain is on display right there on the board as well. For one thing, there’s the scope of the hunt. Confined to the sounds, towns, and islands of North Carolina, this pursuit is leagues away from the Caribbean waters that usually dominate pirate yarns. And then there’s the scale. Blackbeard’s fleet has become one ship, the Adventure, ill-fitted and undercrewed. His pursuers have only two ships, both of them relatively small, plus a band of hunters who travel by land to check the colony’s towns and inlets. These are, in a sense, an invading force, commissioned and outfitted by the governor of Virginia. But as invading forces go, sending bounty hunters from one colony into another isn’t an excursion into foreign territory.

For his part, Thatch behaves more like a cornered rat than a pirate king. Hunt for Blackbeard opens with the pirate standing at an intersection. Rather than expend the resources to hunt down every last offender, the Crown has offered a pardon to all who will renounce the pirate’s life. Most in the colonies have already accepted. Thatch, too, has taken the offer, only to return to the sea to seize some easy plunder. Now the hunters are coming for him, and while he has relative shelter in North Carolina thanks to his largesse with colony officials, the ensuing game of cat and mouse has the mood of a deepening sunset rather than a crescendo.

There are two sides in Hunt for Blackbeard, hunter and hunted, but Ruhnke’s virtuosity at game design clutters and blurs those roles.

Both sides, for instance, are gluttonous for information. In the case of the Hunters, that means Blackbeard’s location — whether that of the famed captain, his lieutenant, or the camp he might periodically visit to resupply or lick his wounds. But for Blackbeard, word of his pursuers’ deeds is every bit as precious. The Hunters are always visible on the map, but how far their reach has extended, where their informants have told them to search, or whether they have a particular stretch of the sea under surveillance, those details may be concealed or laid bare depending on context and choice.

The same goes for the question of which side is hunting whom. Nominally, the Hunters are, well, the hunters. As soon as they’ve outfitted their vessels, they depart from Virginia and begin the chase. But all the while, Blackbeard is laying preparations of his own. Looting vessels, preparing the Adventure, buying off witnesses. When the time comes for the spark to touch powder, it’s entirely possible that Blackbeard will sink the competition.

What Ruhnke produces, then, is a double-blind game of entrapment. First there’s the race. Blackbeard hurries to gain or spend his treasure, whether to reestablish himself as a great pirate captain or to secure another pardon. The Hunters hustle to outfit their vessels before the trail goes cold. But then, over the course of the ensuing rounds, the fierce dance between predators.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Hunt for Blackbeard is its speed. The game only lasts four rounds. And these aren’t the drawn-out bullet-point-ridden rounds of something like Here I Stand. While there are still bullet points to tick off, the phases pass at a brisk pace, bouncing between sides so rapidly that there’s hardly a moment of downtime. First, the Hunters interview informants, giving them a glimpse at Blackbeard’s potential location — a step that requires Blackbeard to avert his gaze, lest he learn what the Hunters have gleaned. Second, Blackbeard spends his time preparing his ship, sailing, and planning any piratical activities. Again someone must close their eyes, although it’s the Hunter player this time. After that, the Hunters take their turn proper, moving their ships and perhaps picking up their quarry’s trail. Only then does Blackbeard actually accomplish any pirating, a step that may well have been interrupted by the arrival of the Hunters.

Playing through these steps, a few thoughts spring to mind.

First, there’s an essential tactility to Hunt for Blackbeard. The actions themselves are brief, but the need to physically turn the blocks gives every movement a sense of growing unease. When I played digitally, the entire session took perhaps a third of the duration, but in its haste lost its sense of place. It’s one thing to click an icon; another entirely to hover one’s fingertips over the block, stomach knotted into a fist as you try to deduce whether an earlier clatter had come from here or there, or was perhaps your opponent shifting a few components as a ruse. This process elongates the game, but is necessary: touching the pieces, straining your senses for clues, seeing the shadows cast by those monolithic blocks and wondering whether they conceal a trace of your foe’s passage or a flock of passing gulls, these are as much components in the game’s telling as the rules or the wooden ships.

As much as Ruhnke excels at designing macro-level systems, he still has yet to create a compelling method for resolving combat. Perhaps the game’s biggest disappointment is the moment of battle, when, after all those preparations, both sides roll a couple dice to see who hits the higher number. It’s fitting, I suppose, given the chanciness of naval combat. The historical Blackbeard managed to rake one of his pursuers with grapeshot, effectively removing their ship from the fight, before the trap was sprung and he was overwhelmed during a boarding action. But after all those steps and countersteps — after that dance! — it wouldn’t have gone amiss to put some showmanship into the last struggle. What could have been a wall of thunder instead comes across as a puff of smoke.

Lastly, however, the game leaves me in awe of the way board game excel at representing history. I’ve read about Blackbeard. Not a lot. Just enough to know we don’t know much. But it wasn’t until seeing it rendered this way that I understood some of the words on the page. The intimacy of the space. The smallness of a man whose legend has outgrown him and now nips at his heels. The small invasion of a neighboring colony, one governor determined to rid himself of a pest that his peer next door has decided to indulge. Piracy was always caught up in the history of empires, and nowhere is that clearer than here, with official pardons and corrupt commissioners in the balance, populated by enemies and victims, but also imperial troops crowding into spaces that were once open, with safe havens where an infamous pirate acted as a patron rather than a danger to be cut out with the point of a saber. To play this game is to grasp the history a little more tightly.

Is it disappointing that Hunt for Blackbeard operates better as history than as a plaything? Oh, maybe. A little bit. Especially when the game concludes with a wet fuse rather than a discharged cannon, I can’t help but feel some letdown.

But I’m impressed with the trappings that surround that climactic battle. Once again, Ruhnke has created a system that will hopefully earn emulation; once again, Fort Circle has crafted an enviable representation of American history, one that complicates and deepens its subject matter rather than frocking him in smoking fuses.

 

A complimentary copy of Hunt for Blackbeard 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!)

I would describe my feelings toward Regicide as “appreciation,” despite it finding dedicated fans all around me. For years it was in regular rotation on my wife’s phone; my sister-in-law bought the fancy custom deck rather than just using a generic deck of playing cards. My own interest had more to do with the game as an act of repurposement: the clever casting of face cards as mad royals who needed to be put down, the suits transformed into character classes for blocking attacks or repairing injuries.

Regicide Legacy, designed by the same trio as the original — Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale — is very nearly the exact opposite of the original game, at least in terms of form factor. Where the previous Regicide could be played with any old deck scrounged from a vacation bag, this edition is something of a throwback. It’s a genuine legacy title, for one thing: torn cards, stickers, micro-expansions, all of it. Its cooperative/solitaire campaign is generous. Moreover, it’s hard, significantly harder than is the norm in our current obliging hobby. It isn’t uncommon for a chapter to take two, three, half a dozen tries before your band of mercenaries is permitted to move on to their next target.

Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I can squarely say that the ordeal was thrilling, brilliant, and exhausting.

If you haven’t played the original Regicide… first, maybe give it a try. The rules are freely available, and as noted earlier you can play with a deck of cards that costs five bucks at the supermarket. That’s if you don’t have one handy already.

Regicide Legacy begins with Regicide. As in, its first chapter is the base game with only the slightest of modifications. Your crew, a band of adventurers, comprises the forty non-face cards of an ordinary playing deck, plus perhaps one or two goblins depending on player count. Their strength ranges from one (for an ace) to ten, across four classes that have been given their own iconography rather than repeating the regular French suits.

The face cards, meanwhile, become a deck of targets. First you’ll face the jacks, then the queens, then the kings, ideally lining them up for the guillotine. This is no easy feat. Each royal has a sturdy pool of health points, and punches back after each attack, requiring you to spend cards from your hand to absorb the blow.

The cardplay is impressive. Depending on your chosen attacker, your crew avails themselves of an ability. Warriors deal double damage to your target. Paladins block return damage. Clerics cycle discards back into your deck, which Bards then use to refill everybody’s hands. There’s a life cycle to this process. Some cards can be paired, such as aces, here styled as animal companions, or duplicate ranks whose strength would sum to ten or less. Success demands a delicate balance, between offense and defense, between healing and aggression, between risk and caution.

It’s pretty much inevitable that you will lose.

That inaugural failure, though, demonstrates the ways that Regicide Legacy intends to depart from its predecessor. Rather than shuffling the cards and giving it another try, you’re invited to open the first of the set’s many boxes. Within, you discover mercenaries: multi-rank cards that can be readily paired with more of their peers than usual, heavy hitters, maybe an extra goblin or two. Each merc has a cost in its corner. One loss means you have one gold to spend.

So you buy a card, add it to your deck, and take another stab at toppling the divine right of kings.

Again, failure is largely inevitable. It’s just a little less inevitable than before. Second loss, two gold. You grab a couple new fighters. Shuffle. Again.

Another loss. That’s three more gold. Now your company is becoming noticeably tougher. Maybe you were struggling with damage output; some extra Warriors will make up the difference. Or perhaps you found it difficult to manage your hand; that’s where Clerics and Bards come in. Whatever your particular weakness, there’s a patch for it.

At some point, the odds turn in your favor. Inside the first chapter box there is a sealed booster pack with its own instructions. Your mercenaries depart. New cards are introduced. Another chapter presents a new set of bosses, each tougher than the last.

Along the way, a few things become apparent.

First, Regicide Legacy wants you to succeed. Even if only belatedly, after spending heaps of gold on up-powered mercenaries who round out your company’s deficiencies. Where the original game bordered on the misanthropic, booting you back to the beginning at even the slightest trip, the ability to pad your deck with repeat failures is a wonderful tool. Some make it easier to pair cards, or add wild aces, or, eventually, strip even the toughest bosses of their natural immunities to your character abilities.

Next, Regicide Legacy earns that second ligature. This is a legacy game through and through. In its earlier stages, this means variable card sleeves. To offer only the lightest of spoilers, the members of your company can become corrupted, adorning themselves in the thorn-framed sleeves usually reserved for royals, and incurring a penalty when played. Not long after that, you’ll encounter more transformative effects. Stickers that dual-class cards, minigames for randomly determining which character succumbs to a story beat, and, yes, eventually the dreaded moment that was so transgressive back in Risk Legacy, the command to rid yourself a card for good.

Go ahead. Tear it up. Don’t let your squeamishness show. Don’t let your fingers tremble. Don’t check how much the reset box costs. Uh oh. You looked. That’s as much as, like, fifteen decks of playing cards. But who would buy that many playing cards? You’re here for the drama, baby, and there’s no drama quite like drama that inflicts lasting damage.

The main highlight is the procession of new character classes that are added to your ever-expanding band. To the original four — the original six if you count animal companions and goblin jesters — there’s enough to more than double the roster. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the way your deck morphs from one thing into something else entirely is quite the sight to behold. There’s wild magic to be uncovered, risky operators who might help or hinder your goals, heroes who always seem to show up in the nick of time, and complicated figures who require constant reminders.

Because Regicide Legacy, already a tangled, difficult game, only grows more tangled and more difficult as additional chapters are unlocked. More complicated, too. Sequencing matters. The subtle distinctions between two defensive classes matter. Whether cards are discarded or banished, which abilities a boss blocks, how cards are shifted across the board in this particular scenario — everything matters.

In our case, we played nearly the entire campaign four-handed. There was me, of course, plus my wife and sister-in-law. I doubt I would have survived by excluding the fanatics. We were also joined by my mother-in-law, a veteran of countless trick-takers. Her inclusion highlighted both the game’s strengths and its weaknesses.

Strengths first. Across the duration of the campaign, Regicide Legacy held our interest. Even my mother-in-law’s interest. Even when we were tired from battering ourselves against a particularly difficult chapter. (The worst offender, we discovered, had been nerfed post-release.) At our weekly dinner, the group was eager to see what came next. Not so much in the story, which is the usual fantasy muddle of proper nouns. But in the interplay of cards and abilities. In the composition of our deck. In which sticker would be appended to which character. In the developing shape of the thing.

But these strengths are attended by problems. Foremost, that Regicide Legacy soon gets too big for its britches. My mother-in-law spent the back half of the campaign showing her hand to whichever daughter was seated beside her, effectively requiring someone to play two hands simultaneously. She recalled the starting classes well enough, and even remembered a few of the later outliers. But as for the distinction between a Mage and a Reaver or between a Druid and a Chanter, no player aid was sufficient to fill every gap.

Perhaps this sounds like an issue of age. To some degree, it was, as my mother-in-law would freely admit. But even those of us inured to modern hobby games and RPG classes and this particular brand of cardplay sometimes found our minds snowed in by the game’s avalanche of intersecting triggers. It isn’t only the character classes; there are also the bosses to consider, plus the special rules that govern this chapter, plus, often, the lingering rules from last week’s session, finally cemented in time to be discarded with the previous tuckbox. Most of the time, I had to run the turn-by-turn action, and even then it wasn’t uncommon for someone to stab back that my reminder necessitated a counter-reminder because of such-and-such character or some lingering effect from the scenario instructions.

Is it too much? We finished the campaign. We survived. We succeeded. But we also stumbled along the way. Sometimes we realized two rounds later that we’d flubbed a rule earlier. More than once, we restarted a session altogether, the rules suddenly clear where previously they had been opaque.

Personally, this process was many things. Frustrating at times; exhausting at others.

But it was exciting, too, and exciting in a way that very few games have been before. We developed favorites — dual-classed Elashor, Vegarian the Vegetarian, my crush Lierin — and groaned at the appearance of others — Dinky, may you be damned to the underworld for eternity for how often you have betrayed us. We laughed a lot, especially when a new boss crushed us to powder, or when somebody stared at the problem before them, eyes glazed over, only for someone to recall the exact rule that would save us from a doomed situation.

The remaining question is whether we’ll return. Some of us already have; my sister-in-law has launched her second campaign with another group, spreading the good word to unwitting converts. There’s an entire post-game to tackle, justification for the potential waste of a discarded core box, and I can confirm that it’s a smart system, randomly doling out enemies and modifiers and boons that will test the hardy company that was forged over the previous thirty battles.

So. Will we? Return, that is?

I don’t know. Maybe someday. I plan to keep the box, despite my doubts that we’ll remember the class abilities if we go more than a month without a session. Even if we don’t, I can’t help but regard Regicide Legacy with fondness. I can’t remember a single story beat from the narrative. But the stories it told above the table — the way our deck transformed along with our aptitude as players, the inside jokes we developed, the characters whose named we pronounced five different ways — those are worth keeping around. That’s the real legacy here. That’s what makes me consider Regicide Legacy such an unlikely success. Torn cards? Stickers? Psh. I’m only interested in the stickers of the soul. The torn cards of our feelings.

And with those strained metaphors, I think that’s enough Regicide Legacy for one sitting.

 

A complimentary copy of Regicide Legacy 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!)

Let it not be said that I don’t take requests. A number of readers have pointed out that it’s been a long time since I’ve covered any print-and-play games. Too true. But there’s a reason for that. Voyages, the six-map design by Rory Muldoon and Matthew Dunstan and the launchpad title from Postmark Games, is both an illustration of my reticence and a roundhouse kick to that same reticence’s noggin.

This is how Voyages is supposed to look. Soft hues, perfect for covering with pencil marks. (Or, if you’re a consummate professional, a dry-erase marker.) Weathered at the edges, giving it the feel of a brine-worn map. Crisp, with sharply defined edges, all the better for making out the proper boundaries of everything, from the sea’s hexes to the spaces for tracking the depletion of your sailors.

And this is how my version of Voyages looks:

Gray. Somewhat dull. Concealed beneath a much-abused plexiglass. Dice not included.

This is a very good thing. Because my main hangup with print-and-play games is that I only own a black-and-white printer. It works roughly a quarter of the time. The ink is sold at a premium by a cartel with armed enforcers and semi-legal firmware updates that mark my bootleg cartridges as empty until I bend a plastic doohickey, perform a hard reset, and offer three Our Emperors to the Omnissiah.

Discussing business practices isn’t very sexy. There’s a reason I don’t talk much about the publishers or marketing schemes behind the games I feature here. But in the case of Postmark Games, the business practice is the format. Buying a game gives you access to a Dropbox folder. That folder includes assets for both high- and low-ink printers. It’s as indie as it gets. A little fly-by-night. Shabby, if you’re the sort of person who demands a custom link to everything.

But the beauty of this format is that it’s also easy to use. Even with my wonky printer, I was able to get everything working in about two minutes. After another hard reset, I even had the rules sheet and a few warm maps ready to go.

The gameplay, as befits a one-sheet roll-and-write game, is elegantly simple. You roll three dice and then assign them to three roles. One is your ship’s heading, which of six compass directions it will travel. The second is your speed, how far you’ll travel. You know, provided you don’t run aground on an island, hit a reef, or smack into the map’s edge. Between these two assigned dice, you’ll steer around the map to… well, it depends on the map.

Which brings us to that third die. This one governs your crew’s duties. But those duties differ from map to map. In the first map, this is a simple number-crossing game. If your third die shows a 3, you scratch off a 3 on your sheet. If this happens to finish a row or column, you earn a bonus. Easy.

But as the maps progress, the rules grow increasingly tricky. Not hard, exactly. Just tricky. Frankly, it’s impressive how much territory Muldoon and Dunstan are able to cover. Where one map sees your vessel racing to ignite beacons on lonely islands, another becomes a hard-bitten game of survival in arctic waters. The first map has some simple pick-up-and-deliver gameplay. Basic stuff. But another is all about catching the wind to drift between coral arches.

More often than not, these extra rules are handled by the die you assign to your ship duties. Repairing your vessel when it rams into icebergs or gets swatted by a whale. Tacking into the wind. Diving for treasure. Scavenging artifacts.

It’s a lovely system, surprisingly open-ended despite the stark limitation of three dice, and while there’s obviously a great deal of luck involved, it’s open to manipulation thanks to sailors who can be exhausted to ensure you don’t drift endlessly back and forth. More than once, I found myself thinking back to The Guild of Merchant Explorers, another flux-and-write game that threaded the needle between limitation and expression. That’s not exactly a coincidence, given that Dunstan co-designed that one with Brett Gilbert, but it’s notable how Voyages manages to produce an entirely different tale under similar constraints. To sail these waters is to be both buffeted by the winds and master of your own fate. It’s a wonderful paradox.

At first, my assumption was that Voyages would be a solitaire game. Because that’s what print-and-play games are for, right? And it is. A solitaire game, I mean.

But the solo mode is merely okay, a race to unlock three objectives (out of five) before sixteen turns have expired. Personally, I found that goal not only achievable, but usually laughable, barring a series of becalmed rolls. Anyway, what’s the fun of rushing all the time? The seas are full of things to discover. I’d rather take the time to poke around a corner before darting off to the next objective-indicating star.

Where Voyages shines is in multiplayer. The race element is still present, with those aforementioned objectives triggering the conclusion of the session, but the emphasis on scoring feels more natural to both the format and the setting. In this mode, there’s room to explore some more, everybody keeping one eye on their own heading and another on their opponents’ progress toward those objective stars. There’s also the pleasure of seeing what someone else did with the same rolls that caused you so much trouble. I was delighted by how quickly Summer picked up those first couple of maps, sailing gracefully from one isle to the next, scooping up sailors from their rafts and weaving between hazards. Compared to my bumbling from one island to the next, it was quite the sight. Also, her dry-erase lines are really sharp. Apparently I smush the felt into the plexiglass like some sort of ape.

If Voyages shines with multiple hands, it really glows when strung together in a campaign. This adds a little bit of everything. There are moonshot objectives to pursue, like visiting every single special zone on a single map or ensuring a half-dozen members of your crew upgrade to elite status. Stars can now be exchanged for upgrades, adding new ways to score points or mitigate a bad roll. And these newfound abilities are offset with the presence of a nemesis that adds increasingly difficult restrictions to the rules.

In the case of our campaign, our nemesis was Scar. Early on, he threatened to snipe any sailors we rescued from the water. Not too bad, given his shoddy marksmanship. But in the campaign’s later stages, he sent us sailing straight through islands rather than stopping automatically and eventually turned our three dice into a measly pair plus a duplicate. At the apex of our power, we found ourselves forced to wring every advantage from our abilities just to make a pit stop or sail the proper currents. The result was another careful dance between limitation and permissibility, stretching the system but never so far that it snapped.

On the whole, I came away deeply impressed. With the business model, with the design, with the way the game actually came out okay on my cartel-operated printer. Crud, even with the way Voyages manages to be a roll-and-write that isn’t just sums and filling in test-sheet bubbles. As much as I enjoy some of those titles, free-ranging movement has its own organic appeal. I’ll go where I want, winds be damned.

Or tacked into, anyway. As I’ve noted before, Voyages is a masterclass in the way board games excel when they lean into the limitations of their medium rather than trying to escape them altogether. Voyages is something special. It seems I’ll be getting back into print-and-play games.

 

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

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

Considering how often the supervillains incarcerated at Arkham Asylum mount successful escapes, we’d do better to confine them inside a Chuck E. Cheese. At least that way they’d have to contend with food poisoning and sticky benches.

Still, the idea behind DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum is a strong one. Designed by Geoff, Sydney, and Brian Engelstein, this is another entry in the “wacky race” genre, marking it as the fourth such title in the past year. How does its coterie stack up against bun bangers, slippery bananas, and underdog brontos? I’ll put it this way: in any other race, it might have won a medal.

DC Breakout opens with one heck of a great idea. Rather than having everybody out for themselves, what if our supervillains decided to work together? Not all together, obviously. These are the bad guys. If cooperation was their strong suit, they’d have stomped the Bat decades ago. But two at a time? A three-legged race? Evil duos temporarily setting aside their differences to escape the slammer? Sure. They can do that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the game’s pitch was that you’re playing Magical Athlete with two characters at a time, because that’s pretty much how events proceed. During setup, everybody receives a hand of supervillains. There will be two races, with the winner of the first receiving some advantage in the second race. Now you pick your duos and head for the starting line.

As openers go, this is as good as they come. There are heaps of villains to choose from. Forty. That’s the number. Forty villains, each with their own ability. It helps, too, that Batman’s rogue’s gallery is probably the most recognizable in comics history. This gives the Engelsteins room to play, but even more importantly ensures that the abilities are able to map to what we expect of any given character.

More or less, anyway. Some are more familiar than others. The Riddler, for instance, turns his movement roll into a bluffing game. Sure. That’s Riddler shit. Talia al Ghul can flip her die to its opposite side. Sure. She’s tricky. Hugo Strange lets other players reroll their dice, but earns extra movements whenever they take him up on the offer. Sure. He’s always manipulating people to get ahead. Scarecrow rotates the tile he’s on, flipping the leader to the reverse and anyone in the rear forward. Sure. That’s his fear toxin causing hallucinations.

Others are less direct. Catwoman takes an extra turn when she ends on a triangle space. That one requires some explanation. Basically, Arkham Asylum is a series of shaped rooms. Most are squares, fewer are circles, and fewer still are triangles. So Catwoman is there to play the odds, hoping to land on the rarest of spaces in order to leap forward again. Which, yeah, that’s kinda Catwoman-ish, I suppose. Close enough.

But what does it mean when Cluemaster moves another team forward to add one to his roll? Or when the Penguin massages his die roll up or down by one pip? Or when Killer Moth… look, I’m not going to pretend to know who Killer Moth is. But what about Condiment King? Why does he get extra movement when he’s trailing? Is this a condiment thing? Is pickle relish associated with losing? Don’t answer that.

Of course, what these abilities mean is that there’s only so much creativity that can be crammed into the system presented here. Fair enough. Not every supervillain can be transformative. For every Joker, there’s gonna be an Egghead. Except the joke’s on us, because the Joker is sort of a bummer in this one. He forces other teams to reroll. I guess the Joker is about chaos. Still, that’s not exactly what I was hoping for from the Clown Prince of Crime.

To be fair, there’s a huge range of abilities on display. Some villains use henchmen. Calendar Man, for example. He starts with one henchman, and can set his die to however many henchman he has at the current moment. If he does, he adds another henchman. Aha! He’s progressing through the days of the month! Good thing we locked him up. Poison Ivy, meanwhile, spends her tokens to force rival duos to move toward her instead of toward the finish line. Cleavage! The strongest of the fundamental forces.

Simultaneously, there are gadgets to consider. Gadgets are single-use powers that can be earned whenever you stop on an armory space or by earning a solid placement in the first race. There are quite a few of these. Fewer than the number of villains, but still, for a deck without any duplicates, there’s a solid range to potentially draw.

Which brings us back around to that core idea. Two villains. A handful of gadgets. A simple roll-and-move race to the exit. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s tempting to say “plenty,” but the more honest answer is that DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum is surprisingly solid. It’s just that it isn’t as solid as its competitors in this unexpectedly crowded field.

At heart, DC Breakout is about breaking the game. With the right combination of villains and tools, it’s possible to… well. I’ve watched as one duo created a near-unbroken loop of extra turns. Another duo was able to reuse items and draw a bunch from the gadget deck, permitting a series of teleports and adjusted rolls that was so unfair that its rivals were still way back at the starting line when it was peeling out toward Gotham City. These races were “unfair.” Hilariously so. Infuriatingly so. But they were also the result of previous prep work. Sacrifices in the first race to acquire extra gadgets. Or the opposite, a hard-fought initial race in order to acquire better tools and a boosted villain draft.

Or, right, dumb luck. DC Breakout is full of that. Again, fair enough. That’s the genre.

But what’s interesting to me is the way this game’s chance feels more chancy than the chance in something like Magical Athlete. Not only more chancy, but more irritating. Perhaps it’s the veneer of skill overlaid atop the dice rolls. Or maybe it’s the way gadgets intrude into the regular process of play. A bad roll is a bad roll. But when you get a good roll and another player deploys an item that overturns it? Or worse yet, flips the entire map around so that they’re in the lead? I’m not going to get mad about it. But a scrunchy face? Sure, I’ll make a scrunchy face. Wacky races, as a genre, are full of bullshit moves. But there’s bullshit and then there’s bullshit. DC Breakout is full of the latter.

Which is fine, as these things go. Part of the game’s fun lies in not only getting lucky, not only in building the right supervillain pairs, not only, even, in managing the micro-decisions that occur during the race. But also in bullshit-proofing your team from rival shenanigans. Some of those unsexy abilities start to look mighty tempting when you realize they boast a stronger immune system to outright cancellation. Most of my best combos, for instance, have arisen from characters I was only dimly aware existed. Cameos from video games, footnotes or curiosities, late-night fan-wiki deep-dives, those were often the characters I needed to leap forward to victory.

The result is a game that’s sometimes very good and sometimes so lopsided that it stops being interesting at all. When multiple players are breaking the game in sync, busted powers firing all over the place, it’s a hoot. But when one duo skip-teleports to the finish line while everybody else huddles around the office water cooler, the problem isn’t that the game is unfair. It’s that it’s boring. It’s like watching a race between a prize stallion and a certain unnamed sciatic board game reviewer. Also, the prize stallion just played a gadget that made the sciatic board game reviewer run backwards for ten seconds. Whee.

Which is to say, there are moments of real brilliance here. The range of abilities in the game’s generous cast. The delight of watching a guy with a ketchup nozzle defeat a mobster who was so uninventive that he named himself after his matte facewear. Even just the idea of pairing racers to become even more idiosyncratic and game-breaking. There’s a ton of good stuff in DC Breakout.

But it’s a game whose peaks don’t always justify its troughs. Not only in relation to Magical Athlete, Hot Streak, and Dino Racer — in relation to itself.

 

A complimentary copy of DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum 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!)

Under normal circumstances, it might seem a bitter irony that Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini’s partnership will be lauded for Toy Battle over the supernal Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. But these are no normal circumstances. Not when Toy Battle is currently up for a Golden Geek alongside its crunchier sibling, which I’m sure has infuriated a certain class of grognard, but strikes me as maybe the perfect encapsulation of that silly award. (If you needed further proof that the Golden Geeks aren’t especially rigorous, my podcast is also up for one. “LOL,” as the kids say.)

It helps, too, that Toy Battle is a tremendous little plaything. I’d even say it’s good in much the same way that Old Boney’s Battlefields is good, threading an uncommon needle between strategy and chance, heft and approachability. Or maybe I’m just saying that because it’s colorful, feels great on the fingertips, and my twelve-year-old can give as good as she gets.

For those who aren’t in the know, Toy Battle is effectively Toy Story 6, a joke that will grow even further out of touch when in a half decade they wheel Tom Hanks and Tim Allen out of the crypt for yet another unexpectedly delightful coming-to-terms with mortality. Basically, the toys have mobilized for war. Why? They are toys. War is their raison d’être.

From its very first moments, Mori and Zucchini pack the box — which is surprisingly small — with so many goodies that to call it a toy chest would be appropriate, if far too cute for any self-respecting critic. In addition to two full armies, staffed by mismatched rubber duckies, painted unicorns, green army women, and many others besides, there are eight full maps to wage conflict over. It’s nothing if not generous.

The basic concept is so simple that it would only clutter the game to describe. My six-year-old figured it out from two minutes of standing on the sidelines. But in short, toys can be placed on any space that traces ownership back to your base, but only if their target space is empty or, if occupied, their strength exceeds that of any unit already there. There are two main ways to win, whether by chaining your toys to your opponent’s base or encircling spaces to earn a certain number of star badges. Both approaches are viable, and indeed may prove distractions from their opposite number, prompting little tussles where a rival is so busy with logistics that you merrily gobble enough stars to sweep the rug out from under their feet.

In every case, this feels wonderful. Everything about Toy Battle feels wonderful. Every map has its own special rule, like a cursed cemetery that keeps popping units out of your graveyard or a volcanic jungle where untimely eruptions frighten troops into hasty retreats. The same goes for the units. There are eight types in rotation — with plenty of duplicates, naturally — and there isn’t a single extraneous member in the entire roster. There’s a monkey that paratroops behind enemy lines, a fire-breathing tyrannosaur whose entire thing is that he’s a fire-breathing tyrannosaur, a punch-robot for slaying enemies and a wind-up robot for slaying enemies but in the opponent’s hand rather than the battlefield. Some, like the skeleton, seem brittle until they circle around to being exactly the tool you need for the pickle you’re in at this very moment.

It’s tempting to leave the game there. Toy Battle doesn’t require belaboring. It has that childlike spark to it, the quality that makes me recoil ever so slightly when I see people discussing the breadth of its strategies or the unexpected combinations it permits.

But those are a not-insignificant portion of its elegance. Because while Toy Battle straddles the line between adolescence and adulthood, it doesn’t feel like it was designed for the under-fourteen demographic. Not only for them, at least. There are real considerations here. Logistics, for instance. Having to trace a line back to your base in order to keep the troops rolling out is every bit as relevant here as in a denser wargame, and as prone to disruption, too. I mentioned the airborne monkey, right? These stuffed apes aren’t the toughest grunts in your roster, but as delaying and disrupting tactics, they can’t be beat. There’s also a plastic army woman named Cap’n, whose combat number is the second-lowest in your company, but who permits another unit to be added to the map afterward. She’s effectively her own Red Ball Express, especially if you can deploy multiple copies to swiftly encircle multiple objectives.

In its own way, the game even includes resources and the need to rest your army before another push, though in this case both concepts are represented as the troops in your tray. Most turns consist of placing a unit, but you’ll see plenty of pauses to draw a pair of new tiles. If this were a WWII game with periodic breaks to refuel armor columns, we would laud it for its careful modeling of the operational situation. Instead, you just recruited a rubber ducky that can defeat anything on the table and a unicorn with light reinforcement potential. Special forces and combat engineers, anyone?

Of course, I’m half-joking about the game’s potential as a Serious Battlefield Simulator. The half that’s not joking is the part that believes this to be a surprisingly deep experience despite all appearances, which I hope you don’t think I’m knocking, and its sub-ten-minute duration. For example, I just played a four-minute session on Board Game Arena to make sure I wasn’t misusing a particular piece. I won the session by bum-rushing the enemy base and then hoovering up badges while my opponent scrambled to regain territory. Like everything else in Toy Battle, it felt great. Even the randomness of the draw, while not inconsiderable, is one of the game’s highlights. In this case, I sincerely hope the randomness eased the thrashing I delivered to my foe. It wasn’t your fault, Tristi7. It was the pieces you drew. Promise.

Honestly? I hope Toy Battle sweeps the wargame category in the Golden Geeks. Not out of spite, mind you. Popularity contests serve a special purpose in any hobby, and I don’t begrudge the Golden Geeks for that.

Rather, it’s because Toy Battle is every bit as smart and as forward-thinking as Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. It’s a game that feels obvious in retrospect, a perfect little gem that must have always been there, only it took many decades and two veteran designers at the top of their game to fashion one of the best expressions of both childlike delight and groggy combat simulation. This one is perfect. I think I’ll tackle another five-minute session right now.

 

(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!)

Certain words set my teeth on edge. “Content” is the worst offender. If you want to tell me you don’t care about something, call it content. The other is “influencer.” Michael Barnes, once the finest critic of board games and the source of my first gig writing paid reviews, would sometimes call me an influencer. I never knew what to make of that. I figured he was joking. I hope so.

Wendybuxxx leans into both terms and understands intimately the hard-edged meanings they carry. As a game it’s an enigma. Combine one measure new-media crossover, another bitter satire, and a third earnest arrested metamorphosis, and the slurry would look something like Wendybuxxx. It carries deep redolences to its author’s previous title — that title being Molly House, the author Jo Kelly — but calls to mind sickly-hued films like I Saw the TV Glow and Love Lies Bleeding. It’s a fascinating artifact. Provided you can get past the purposely confounding cardplay, that is.

Where to begin?

Maybe it begins with a story. Wendybuxxx is the tale of influencers brought to life through strange science to sell necrocurrency, the titular wendybuxxx, at the behest of their grave-digging matron, Wendy Miasma. Over the course of three episodes, they will generate content both positive and negative, court controversy — not so much as to get canceled, not so little as to be perceived as tedious — and ultimately burn out bright, millions of adoring fanatics watching oh so parasocially through smartphone screens across the globe.

Maybe it begins with outward appearances. Wendybuxxx arrives in an old VHS rental case from peak-epoch Blockbuster, all milky plastic and dulled edges. There are two boards, one folded in half and the other segmented like an accordion, and cards in five colors with the contrast pumped up until they clash like jagged teeth. The characters are embodiments of dislocation. There’s Holly, the Cyber Witch, winking behind cyberpunk-esque shades, and Dr. Jonas, Bonerologist, eagerly describing the wonderful world of boners. The Eyes have seen too much, the Queen of Hell has shaped gender into a razor-edged weapon, and the Skeleton Salesperson reminds me of the old friend from elementary school who asked if he and his wife could have an important conversation with me, then began his sales pitch with a fumbling, “So, you might have noticed that we wear nice clothes and take care to present ourselves in a certain way…” After fifteen minutes of preamble, his embarrassment caught up to him and he refused to tell me what he was selling. I wish I was making this up.

Or maybe it begins with the way Wendybuxxx crosses mediums. This isn’t only a board game. One supposes its fathoms might not even be limited to the ten-track album that accompanies the game. What else is down there, through the mirk? Is this a lifestyle? Is this a pale reflection of who we have become as a culture? No, not that. This is no pale reflection. It’s a direct mirror, sunlight beating through the window, not even a smudge of toothpaste on the glass to distract from the full vision of who we are. We stand naked before the brass, and tremble with the knowledge that were we to see ourselves without the benefit of reflection, our terrible beauty would render us statuary.

Or maybe it begins with a description of how this dang thing functions.

Imagine a hand of cards, their five suits each representing a different form of influencer/content/slop that’s intuitively familiar to we global beings of bytes and filament. There’s Ascetic (poverty porn), Charitable (donation porn), Everyday (tradlife porn), Decadent (glitz porn), and Billionaire (pretending a bottomless bank account does anything other than wring out your soul until it resembles a cactus porn).

These cards govern everything in Wendybuxxx. In your hand, their sum represents the embodiment of your personal brand. (“Brand.” There’s another word I despise.) When played to the “content strip,” they become parcels of content ready for the consumption of the masses. When played to your offshore account, they become negative content. Notably, negative content is only distinct from positive content in how they’re advertised.

Turns are simple, but the life cycle of content is anything but. Turns consist of two actions, one public, which other players are then given the chance to replicate, and the other private, for your lonesome alone. There are only three actions to speak of: one for drawing new content into your hand, another for developing positive content for the numb masses, and a third for concealing negative content in your offshore account.

The import of these actions requires a few rounds to clarify, which is another way of saying that while Wendybuxxx is dead simple to play, it’s a real beast to play well. I’ve found that it’s easiest to teach in reverse. Like so:

(IV) At a round’s completion, the tally in my hand determines which type of content I’ve made my personal brand. For example, if I’m holding a sum of three to four wendybuxxx, that means I’ve made Everyday content my whole deal. I have remade my image into that of the divine tradwife, perpetually pregnant and clad in fetish sundresses, walking barefoot through campylobacter-ridden chicken dung as I grin toothily through my denim prison bars.

(III) To churn Everyday content into as many millions of followers as possible, I want to ensure the right cards find their way to the corresponding space on the content bar. This is usually done by generating lots of positive content, but in a pinch heaps of negative content will do. Negative content also has the additional bonus of being secret. No meddling from rival influencers!

(II) However, negative content may generate controversy. Although the cards in my offshore account will be added to the content bar alongside the positive stuff, their sum, if too high, will cause me to lose followers. Basically, I did a boo-boo and got canceled. Then again, too little controversy and my followers will ditch me out of boredom. The goal is to walk the tightrope of public opinion. It’s one thing to forget about the father of nine I locked inside an abandoned mall to see if he could survive for a month in exchange for fifty grand, but another thing entirely to share a negative opinion about the latest developments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

(I) Turns, then, are all about building a brand that will score high, ensuring you’re holding the right cards to score it, and keeping your controversy levels smack dab in the middle.

See? Easy!

Fine, fine. But while Wendybuxxx isn’t easy to describe, it’s easier than you might think from description alone. Like the card manipulations in Molly House, Wendybuxxx is all about motion. If two influencers are dumping loads of content into the billionaire category, there’s a good chance their hands are stuffed with enough cards to qualify them as billionaires. Maybe you can get in on the fun by scrounging up enough cards to nibble at their extras. Or maybe splitting an audience isn’t your style, so you focus on something totally different, instead blinging yourself out in jewelry. Or maybe it’s time to sabotage their efforts by tweaking the other categories upward, turning billionaire into the social pariah it deserves to be.

Point is, the cardplay in Wendybuxxx takes a few rounds to really wrap your head around, but once you’ve internalized the way the cards move, shifting from place to place in little bids and attacks, the game reveals some unusually sharp gameplay. It’s nasty without being direct. Snitty, even. Which is precisely what it should be, given that it’s basically depicting what would happen if the CrunchLabs guy decided to suffocate Mr. Beast in elephant toothpaste.

(Golly, I hope in twenty years nobody knows what the hell I’m talking about. Wouldn’t that be great.)

This satirical slant is simultaneously Wendybuxxx’s sharpest corner and its bluntest instrument. Rolling around in the muck of online content creation is fine and dandy, but lifestyle influencers are self-satirizing. I know they’re ridiculous. You know they’re ridiculous. The only people who don’t know they’re ridiculous are so far gone that there’s no reaching them, no matter how many board games with ten-track albums we stack on their kitchen table.

Fortunately, while the superficial details are every bit as abrasive as millionaires who pretend to live in repurposed shipping containers in coniferous forests, that isn’t all there is to Wendybuxxx.

At its deeper reaches, this is also a game about remaking oneself. It isn’t enough to forge a personal brand. No matter how solid your initial bid, the game will throw a wrench into your plans. Rivals will bring you down. Controversy will dog your heels. Winning lifestyles will go out of fashion. And so the wheel turns. You are one thing. And then you are another thing. In both cases, the game only permits you to become the wrong thing, another clout-chaser, another hollow person who yearns to feel something but has been brainwashed by the internet and late-stage capitalism to make number go up. Wendybuxxx doesn’t wind up as a cautionary fable about lifestyle influencers. It becomes a question mark. What are you. What will you be. Who is it that you must become. Not on the table. But above it. To play Wendybuxxx is to see your worst self realized again and again.

And, in the seeing — in the playing — maybe Wendybuxxx becomes an opportunity to decide to become something else.

Or maybe not. Maybe Wendybuxxx is none of those things. That’s would also be all right. Because at worst, Wendybuxxx offers some incisive satire, some sharp card-play, and some eerie color in a world where drab people would drain us dry to fill the black holes in their bellies. As a game, it’s worth the effort.

Either way, I hope this content has influenced you. Remember to like, subscribe, and share.

Wendybuxxx will be on Kickstarter tomorrow.

 

A complimentary copy of Wendybuxxx 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 don’t know what I expected Tom Lehmann to design next, but Dominion on Adderall wasn’t on the list. That’s as short a summary as I can muster for Dark Pact, and it’s a surprisingly apt comparison, right down to the action limits and buy phase that marked Donald X. Vaccarino’s genre-defining title. Like the version of Dominion you’d get if a moody teenager popped a double dose and spent six hours scribbling demons in their spiral-bound notebook.

Is it good? Yeah, it’s good. Is it great? Hm. It sits somewhere near Res Arcana in Lehmann’s ludography, sans that game’s brevity, plus a bit of Justin Gary’s Ascension in its flowing market and excessive tallying. Great might be a stretch. Perhaps it would be fairest to say that it contains moments of greatness.

At a setting level, Dark Pact is about striking a bargain with a demon. I don’t have any experience in such a discipline, but it seems as close to otherworldly binding as Dominion was to Medieval villages. There’s a moment in the game, usually about five minutes into a session, when I can still appreciate Dug Nation’s woodblock-styled illustrations. Five minutes after that, those illustrations have faded from view, along with the remainder of the game’s trappings. All that remains is the machine I’m hopefully streamlining into something aerodynamic enough to drag two dozen cards into motion.

If you’ve played Dominion, you can play Dark Pact. By now the five-card hand has become industry standard, but even a few of Dominion’s other hallmarks return intact. By default you only receive a single action. That’s one card played to the table to activate its effect. Often that card will provide another action. Then its followup provides another two actions and some draws. Then the next card lets you retrieve something from your discard pile and, baby, you’ve got a stew going.

Also returning is Vaccarino’s market phase. After your actions are done, you’re allowed to play as much treasure as you can and purchase new cards. There are a few wrinkles this time around. For one thing, there are none of Dominion’s limited buys. If you want to split up your gold to purchase five cards, well, go nuts. For another, the market is now an ever-shifting offer rather than Dominion’s static display. What you see this turn may well disappear into your opponent’s deck before you get another stab at it.

Unsurprisingly, this is where Lehmann dives in with full gusto. There are cards aplenty to grab, with heaps of effects, and all of them are useful for one objective or another. But there are two in particular that transform Dark Pact from spooky-art Dominion into something that feels distinctly Lehmann-esque.

The first is the pacts. The dark pacts. Of Dark Pact fame. There are thirteen in all, all of them shuffled into the deck, and all offering a game-winning condition that initially sounds impossible. You might, in the course of your demonic experimentation, uncover a dark pact called Diverse Learning that will let you win if you have 15 unique cards in play. Or perhaps you’ll pursue Secular Power, the card that wins if you enter the market phase with 40 unspent coins. Or Great Potential. That one wins if you have 19 cards in hand.

For Lehmann-heads, dark pacts aren’t far off from the monuments and places of power in Res Arcana. It’s just that they’re hidden in the deck like your average demon-summoning ritual or cursed ring, get shuffled into your deck, and present conditions that let you win outright rather than offering spills of points. If their targets sound intimidating, that’s deliberate. When the game opens, most dark pacts are well out of reach. Especially, remember, because you only get one action per turn, five cards per draw phase, the usual limitations.

That’s where the second special card comes in: multipliers. They’re… multipliers. No spooky gauze this time. Just a simple 2x or 3x. These also circulate through your deck, and can be attached to any card to amplify the effects of its printed numerals. Gold coin? Now it’s worth two or three times more. Summoning circle? Now you can nab a card worth 16 or 24 coins rather than a measly eight. Generous spirit? Enjoy your six extra actions and nearly your entire discard pile popping back into your hand.

Things really get bonkers when you discover that multipliers multiply multipliers. Before long, some turns are transformed into those obnoxious order-of-operations social media tests. (“Only one in thirty people can solve this equation!”) The effects can be staggering. Thanks to multiple 3x cards stacked atop some silver, I once generated something like 70-ish coins in a turn. I wasn’t even holding the pact that let me win from having so many coins. It was so much that I could have bought out the entire market. I didn’t do it, of course. Winnowing is every bit as worthwhile in Dark Pact as any other deck-builder. It’s possible to over-stuff your card pool, so I reined myself in. But I considered grabbing all ten cards on offer for the lifetime accomplishment award.

At its best, these cards result in a deck-builder that’s incredibly familiar, to such a degree that it feels like a throwback to 2008, while also chucking everybody down a slip-n-slide to see who can break the game the fastest. In those moments, Dark Pact is Lehmann in top form. All the broken combos of Res Arcana. All the busted dice-assembling of Dice Realms. All the recursive triggers of Race for the Galaxy. All of it and more, wrapped in a tidy package that barely asks deck-building veterans to learn anything new. Truly, it’s impressive how smoothly the game riffs on the genre’s basics. When I say you can play Dark Pact if you’ve played Dominion, I mean it.

At the same time, Dark Pact sometimes feels one or two elements shy of a summoning ritual.

The biggest issue is duration. Basically, it’s often too slow for its own good. Turns are anything but simple, with one power begetting another, often after drawing from the deck, retrieving from the discard pile, and refreshing a segment of the market, all of which make it difficult to plan during one’s off-turn. It might sound like the exception to have a dozen cards trigger in sequence, but that’s the goal of Dark Pact, which makes turns sprawl more often than not. Even with only two players, the downtime and duration can be formidable. At three or four, they grow interminable. I would play the heck out of this game via an asynchronous app; on the table, it needs optimal conditions to thrive.

Meanwhile, I’m sure much will be made of the card balance. Multipliers are powerful, that goes without saying, and the early game often feels like a race to secure an economic engine that will springboard your longer-term plans. Fortunately, Lehmann offers a few solutions to sidestep the usual deck-building snares. Purchased cards go straight to your hand rather than first cycling through your discard and deck, and everybody begins with a few cards in their own private grimoire that can be purchased at their leisure, including, crucially, a deck’s second 2x multiplier. It’s a clever move that eases the whims of the flowing market without totally erasing what makes it interesting.

Personally, I’m more interested in the dark pacts. These don’t need to be balanced. I would go so far as to say they oughtn’t be. For all I know, they’ve been painstakingly playtested and algorithmically tuned. But some of them feel like a breeze compared to some others. Is this a problem? Only insofar as you make it one. It’s an open bar. If somebody nabs a pact that’s more reasonably completed than one you’ve taken, maybe it’s time to run interference. But there are some, maybe two, that feel so comparatively easy that I’m always going to give them priority. In a game this muscular, even the slightest flab seems especially visible, like a world-class bodybuilder with one sagging boob.

Sagging boob or no, Dark Pact is fascinating for how Lehmann has taken a familiar formula and made it new again. This is Dominion, but rather than coming across as goofy when the optimal deck consists of seven sentries and four throne rooms, Dark Pact’s flowing market and sheer busted nature make the process feel vibrant and alive. It’s funny to get excited about trashing a card after all this time.

Which is to say, yeah, there are downsides. Some cards feel mistuned. The downtime is considerable. Four players? Forget about it. But Dark Pact once again showcases Lehmann as a master at work. In his hands, cards become more than cardstock. They’re components in a machine, one that sputters to life with every shuffle, draw, purchase, and winnow. The game is its own demon, and whatever dark pact Lehmann has struck to summon so many bangers in one lifetime, let’s hope the price never comes due.

 

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Yesterday we looked at Pillars of Fate, a kinda-sorta remake of extended family reunion simulator Veiled Fate, and found it wanting for much the same reason as the original. The gods are capricious, everybody knows that, but their fickleness doesn’t exactly make them the most appealing playmates.

But here’s the thing. At the same time Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, and Zac Dixon were designing Pillars of Fate, another remake was, um, remade. On a superficial level, this one, Scales of Fate, resembles its namesakes. As in those other titles, dueling gods intend to deduce the identity of their rival’s offspring, minimize their impact on the world, and elevate their own bastards over everybody else. Basically, it’s a race to promote your nepo babies over everybody else’s at the family tire shop. And that tire shop happens to be the eternal mountain at the root of the world.

And it’s excellent. Scales of Fate just might be one of the tightest, nastiest deduction games out there. That it was built for two players only makes it the more impressive.

For first-timers, the board presented by Scales of Fate is wonderfully labyrinthine. I say “wonderfully” because just look at it. It’s colorful. The pieces slot together like joined fingers. There’s a topography to the whole thing. You can tell the elevated pieces will be more important than the pieces seated a few millimeters below them. Even when I had no idea what any of these components portended, I wanted to know. Needed to know. Were they gears? Would my demigods traverse them? Veiled Fate presented its map as a wheel. Pillars of Fate offered three lanes. Both are fine. Good, even. But I’ve seen wheels and lanes before. A series of interlocked cogs and risers is something new. That’s a metaphorical depiction of a landscape if ever there was one.

In practice, Scales of Fate is surprisingly easy to get a handle on. Turns consist of three possible actions. One of those, while important, functions more as an exception, an occasional bolt of lightning, than as business as usual.

The main two actions, meanwhile, immediately explain the function of those wonderful cogs and pillars. First, a demigod can be placed atop a pillar to trigger its ability. Whether it’s to smite another demigod down to the underworld to cool their heels, obtain the loyalty of a servant, or… well, that’s it. Rather than offering a wide menu of abilities, there are really only two to keep in mind. Sure, there’s some variety within those categories, but they fall into camps rather than cluttering the decision-space with branching paths.

The second action has to do with those servants. Placed along the edge of the board’s cogs, they trigger the quests that will increase or decrease each demigod’s renown. But to understand what that means, we need to back up a bit.

Okay, so you’ve fathered/mothered/sea-foamed two half-divine offspring. Their identities are determined in secret at the beginning of the game. Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.

You want to elevate your children. Doing so openly is a surefire way to attract the wrath of your co-pantheonists. So you work in secret. The problem is that every demigod’s current standing is shown on the renown track, visible to both players. When the game begins, all nine demigods share the middle space. That’s seven renown. Even before they’ve done anything interesting, your offspring are worth something by means of their divine parentage.

What will they accomplish? Rather than doing the obvious thing — say, by asking you to push them up the renown track — Scales of Fate makes a tantalizing offer. Your children score points in one of two ways. If they occupy the same renown space when the game ends, they score its value. If both are seated on their starting space, having neither moved up nor down, that means they’ll be worth seven points. That’s respectable. Polite. Not a bad score. But if they move to different spaces on the track, now they score equal to the distance between them. Ticking one child up a single space means their combined value is one point. On the other hand, if your children should do the twin thing by embracing entirely opposite ends of the spectrum, they’ll be worth a whole lot more.

This introduces a wonderful sense of risk and reward to Scales of Fate, not to mention fixes my hangups with Veiled Fate. In that game, players earned points for ensuring their holy bastard earned the most renown. But that made their identity almost trivial. Once any one demigod got too hot for their britches, everyone would work together to take them down a peg. It was simple. Too simple.

Here, their relative standing makes the family tree more tangled. With nine demigods in the world, they’ll be all over the renown track. But what does that mean? Are those clusters on the track actually siblings working in tandem? Are those gods at the farthest edges secretly growing into a hero-villain rivalry that will shake the foundations of the earth?

Of course, this is a deduction game, which means there are tools for producing those deductions. Some of these tools are subtle. With experience, I’ve made a habit of watching my opponent like a hawk and marking whenever they idly touch a piece or linger too long over a move. More often than not, some correlation can be drawn over time, hinting at favoritism or resolute neglect. (Similarly, I’ve developed the habit of studiously avoiding my own offspring. This, I’m sure, is a tell in its own right. If I reach out to tentatively brush the pink demigod, Isabel, before pulling back like my fingers were singed by her presence, you can reliably infer that I have nothing to do with her.)

But the game’s more explicit tool is provided each age. Scales of Fate takes place over three rounds, each of which provides a different criterion that will be checked at the round’s end. Early on, for example, you might be required to inform your opponent whether you have any demigods out of play. That means they weren’t sent to the board, whether to trigger actions or because someone blasted them down to the underworld. Later, your suspicions might be confirmed by evidence of divine parentage for any demigod placed on a highlighted action pillar.

Crucially, these cards ask yes/no questions rather than demanding specifics. If you’re clever enough to ensure that only one of your two children meets the current age’s criterion, you can simply say “yes” to their presence without giving too much away. For example, one first-age card asks whether one of your children is still seated at four to six renown on the track. Saying yes is almost worse than saying no, especially if nearly all of the demigods have yet to make a name for themselves.

In the meantime, nearly everything adjusts their standing on the renown track. When servants trigger quests — the cogs that surround the action pillars — the surrounding demigods shift up or down. When sent to the underworld, another action will determine the place’s magma forecast, thus providing feats or humiliations that also adjust their standing. Every little detail matters.

And we still haven’t talked about the game’s cleverest touch. Remember when I mentioned we would return to the question of your children’s parentage? Turns out this pantheon is rocking one big orgy, with all the problems it poses for any paternity/maternity/sea-foam tests.

In most deduction games, including the basic rules for Veiled Fate, holding a card means nobody else is holding it. In Scales of Fate, both sides have their own duplicate deck. Just because your children are Agamar and Saghari doesn’t mean your rival won’t have some personal interest in one of them as well. Maybe even both of them, although that’s unlikely. This adds no small amount of static to the ongoing deductions. When one of your demigods gets bumped off their current space, is that because your rival has figured out that they’re your kid and is trying to mess with you, or are they chasing an ambition of their own? Some of my favorite matches have featured duplicate offspring, and while this calls into question what’s so demi- about these so-called demigods, it’s a brilliant addition to a shared-control deduction game.

That goes for the entire package. To some degree, I wish I could play a version of this game that featured more than two players. The idea behind Veiled Fate was always one that appealed to me, and while it finds its best expression here, there’s a slightness to Scales of Fate that I wish would be transposed into a more robust framework. Of course, it’s entirely possible that this game only functions because its manipulations are so laser-focused. It’s generally possible to figure out your rival’s progeny. At least one of them. I’m not sure that would be the case if we had to keep an eye on three other players rather than staring down only one person.

Along the way, there are other little touches that elevate the experience. Like the game-breaking powers that let you smite anyone or swap two demigods, but subtract points from your final tally. Or the way the end-game deduction rewards a correct genealogical discovery but only penalizes you for not uncovering at least one of your rival’s kids. Like the board’s cogs and pillars, everything locks together into one elegant whole, resulting in a crystallized experience where nothing is out of place.

Honestly, it’s such a breath of fresh air. Not only that Scales of Fate is this good, but that it takes such a novel approach to almost every corner of its design. From the non-literal map to the way it uses relative proportions to signify importance, both on the board and between renown trackers. From the clever approach to shared control to the way players might find themselves accidentally co-parenting a demigod. It’s achingly smart.

More than smart, it feels great to handle, to push around, to study a rival and mark down a clue. When I first saw Scales of Fate, I knew I had to figure out how those pieces fit together. The beautiful thing is, their inner workings proved even better than they seemed from afar.

 

A complimentary copy of Scales of Fate 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!)

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.

(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!)

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.

(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!)

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!)

💾

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!)

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!)

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!)

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.

(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 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!)

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!)

Gods & Mortals, designed by William Borg Barthet and Artyom Nichipurov — the latter of whom brought us the excellent Trick Shot and even excellenter Guards of Atlantis II — happens to be one of my favorite things: a total theological dumpster fire. There’s a purity to Graeco-Roman Polytheism, with its wild gods that are best placated or avoided. It isn’t until Hebrew and Christian religion start bellyaching about God’s goodness that the pantheon’s previous badness became — clap your hands between each letter — P R O B L E M A T I C. What does it mean when the Creator places a wager with his court prosecutor for a man’s soul? It means a problem for how we understand the universe. A big spoiled amphora of a problem.

In other words, Gods & Mortals is Greek myth by way of the Book of Job. As you might expect, it’s incredible.

When Gods & Mortals opens, we receive a vision of the Aegean that’s half history and half myth. Humankind has split into four factions, each dominating roughly a quadrant of the known world. Proud Troy rules over one side of the sea, the Achaeans hold the opposite shore, the Minoans are doing the seafaring thing down south, and the northern land are ruled by the Amazons.

Don’t worry about keeping them straight. To you, an immortal, they’re yellow, blue, red, and green. You might as well distinguish between one species of beetle and another. The only reason you care that much is because the entire pantheon has gotten together and decided to wager some of their divine essence on the outcome of mortal affairs. Basically, you’re playing Age of Empires for money.

What follows is a freewheeling contest that plays out in two separate realms. On the table, mortal empires vie for control of territory, erect temples, and sometimes murder each other. Above it, the gods hoot and holler about their preferred sports team, trading wagers and nakedly calling for a rival’s star player to get benched. Betrayal is common. So is cooperation. Often those two go hand-in-hand, swapping places within seconds of the previous state of affairs.

It works like this. When the round begins, every god is allowed to invest a portion of their divinity into the insect human dramas playing out below. The rules are strict. Only two kingdoms can hold your favor at a time. These increments are slow, only permitted one or two ticks at a time. Only one god can hold each level of favor within a kingdom, making it possible to block the interests of their fellows.

Perhaps most crucially, increasing your favor with a kingdom requires a proportionate investment of your divinity. If the Achaeans have been driven back to their city-state while the Amazons control a map-spanning empire, well, you’re presented with a conundrum: either buy Achaean favor at fire-sale prices, or cough up a premium for the Amazons.

Or betray them entirely. The strategy of Gods & Mortals is one of tactical investment and withdrawal. In essence, human factions are the joint-stock companies of your average cube rails title. Buying into a faction requires more divinity as they grow more prosperous. But so does your god’s potential buy-out. It’s tempting to bestow your godly light on a faction in ascent, but that could prove costly; on the flipside, spending too much time on a failed empire might prove catastrophic. We could render this as folksy wisdom. Buy low, sell high. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Don’t date crazy.

And then, bets placed, the gods shift their attention to the mortal realm. You didn’t expect the gods, of all beings, to place a wager without leaning their thumbs and/or lightning bolts on the scales, did you? Even in the Book of Job, the foremost text on deities with compulsive gambling disorders, the spurned Creator sends a whole whirlwind to browbeat the poor guy into recanting his frustration.

This phase occupies the bulk of a round. Going around the table four times, each god takes turns manipulating the mortal wars, expansions, and offerings of the Aegean. As with the previous wagers, there are stark limitations. The short version is that you can manipulate mortal events quite broadly, but only provided you’re holding the right cards, the desired action is still available, and, if you’re going for one of the more powerful options, have enough sacrifices on-hand.

In practice, this strikes a tight balance. On the one hand, it’s exhilarating how transformative your powers can be. Some of this depends on your divine identity. Artemis can guide the bowstring of an anointed hunter to slay rivals in multiple foreign lands. Ares likes to sack rival temples, turning unprotected holy places into recruiting grounds for entire armies. Hades chews up souls and disgorges them as half-rotten Odysseuses. Most actions are smaller — troops marching from one space to another, a temple providing sacrifices to its patrons, a duel that kills both participants — but with the right timing and preparations, human affairs can prove surprisingly malleable.

But the other portion is social. Given the game’s stock-broker core, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that success often requires a deft touch with your immortal relatives. Control over the human factions is entirely shared, making it possible to meddle in surprising ways. I remember the white-hot fury that resulted when a carefully stocked military campaign entered a distant land only to, at the very beginning of the next round, turn around and march home before they could erect their intended temple.

More than that, it’s important to think about the long-term implications of each move. Will building that temple in Thebes lead to a long-term rivalry with Zeus? Is a volcano in Sparta a good way to ensure compliance with your plans, lest the little bondage-geared goofballs scream “This… is… ARGHHHH THE FIRE!!”? Or are there opportunities to trade favors? One session I won on the strength of collaboration, working with another player to reform the Achaeans from a measly two-territory kingdom into a sizeable empire. Theirs wasn’t the biggest faction on the board, in the end. But it had undergone the best growth, which meant the best total increase in our divinity. In my divinity.

All told, Gods & Mortals is a hoot. It’s a stock game, there’s no disguising that, but it’s direct and combative in a way that, say, cube rails is not. It would be tempting to say that this blunts that genre’s subtleties, but the more accurate summary is that it moves the concept in a new direction. The result is flashy but still measured, every god bending the rules in their own manner, but only after careful preparation and in clear sight of everybody else at the table. While it’s distinct from Nichipurov’s previous designs, it carries a few strands of familiar code: the emphasis on human drama, the tightness of a few outlandish actions, the sheer exuberance that comes from discovering each god’s inner workings.

As a bonus, yeah, it’s got that train wreck theology going on. How do we respond when the gods throw our lives into turmoil? Not much, apparently. Maybe, at best, we can place some bets on the outcome.

Gods & Mortals is on Gamefound right now.

 

A prototype copy of Gods & Mortals was temporarily provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read 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!)