The original Fallout — the original original, the video game, the one from so long ago that they refused to sell it to me at the media section of my local grocery store because it was rated M for mature and as a twelve-year-old they suspected I didn’t qualify — it had a time limit. After a certain number of in-game weeks, the quest failed. Sayonara, Vault 13. Sorry about the terminal dehydration.

You know what else has a time limit? My life. Your life. All of our lives. I was once advertised a wall calendar that would count down the weeks in the average lifespan. It was perhaps the grimmest thing I’ve ever seen, one’s life scratched off week by week. Fallout: Power Play is that ghoulish product in board game form. It is a waste, the subtraction of every minute in its presence keenly felt. If the function of art, as Tarkovsky noted, is to harrow the soul and prepare it for death, then Fallout: Power Play is anti-art. It is a game that makes me unready for the beyond, incurious to receive the answer to the great mystery that awaits us all. It makes me resentful and crabby. It makes me want to claw those minutes back from the felt and stuff them red-nailed into the craw of whichever anonymous designer retched forth this slouching antichrist.

I do not recommend it. Not ironically, not for a sake of a lookie, not to release its carbon back into the atmosphere through combustion. Stay away. The radioactive skeleton has been thus mounted atop the dump, its meaning undeniable. If you enter here, you will leave poorer.

The distant appearance of a lane-battler.

Ostensibly, Fallout: Power Play has the outward appearance of a lane-battler. The wasteland is presented as a series of locales, theme-park destinations like the Brotherhood Airship, the War Camp, the Trading Post. Generic and safe, like every Fallout after the first two and New Vegas, strip-mined for maximum return on investment.

Into these locales you will deploy — you will maybe deploy, but we’ll circle back to that — the populace of your faction. There are four in all. Most familiar even to outsiders is the Brotherhood of Steel, those much-fetishized techno-cultists, in their iron suits that smell of piss and incense. They are matched by the Enclave, the baddies of the series, although only in the sense that they are slightly less nostalgically laden; the Super Mutants, greenskin crazies shorn of the cognitive internality that marked their earliest incarnations in the video games; and the Raiders, who one suspects were included because the designer was running out of ideas but had been tasked with shoehorning in loony-bin scavengers for the sake of marketability.

Ostensibly — there’s that word again — these factions go about the business of deploying their scientists and tin-can warriors and yellow-toothed scavvers and greenskin mooks into these locales, with the aim of securing influence and therefore victory points one pip at a time.

Only, as you might have guessed, this is not what happens. No sir. No ma’am. Not even close. Balance isn’t something I usually fret over. It’s a coward’s concern, the birthright of those mewled into comfort from infancy. Balance? I might as well bellyache about fairness!

But in Fallout: Power Play, we are reminded of just how good board games have gotten over the past decade. I speak not of the balance between decks, between factions, because it’s impossible to get that far. Rather, the issue is wholly internal. These decks are so lopsided that there are hardly any troops to deploy. Those boots that must be placed on the ground, which indeed are required in order for the game to function, are the exception rather than the norm. In place of manpower, all four decks are top-heavy with everything else. Missions, which seed little objectives that, surprise surprise, require the troops that you only occasionally have access to. Powers, which, what do you know, also riff on the troops you may or may not have deployed to the wasteland’s many sunny destinations.

Signs and signifiers, devoid of the soul.

As a result of this crooked state of affairs, most turns are spent waiting around. Passing. As in, literally telling the table “I pass,” like a kid who forgot their homework, only in this case the teacher neglected to hand it out yesterday, but has, in their cruelty, still insisted that their pupils collectively pass their papers to the front. “I pass,” you say. “Pass,” says the next player. Someone else dumps three troops into a location. Luck of the draw. “I think I will pass,” says the next player, and then, in an attempt to interject some levity into this torment, they add, “But I am choosing to pass. I am not passing because I don’t have any cards to play.”

They are lying. Lying to themselves that this experience could be buoyed. Lying to themselves that they might reclaim these misspent minutes.

Is this a commentary on the unfairness of war? Of how war never changes, parroting the catchphrase that has become self-parody? If only. I might stomach a game that wanted to teach me something, even if it were as badly done as this.

But Fallout: Power Play cannot keep its own story straight. The cards urge their players to trigger activities that are impossible. Bold keywords that go unexplained, their meanings only guessed at, peer back from the cardstock like the unblinking eyes of the abyss. Other cards sport instructions that the game declines to enable or explain, the equivalent of an apocalyptic warlord who amuses himself by playing games with his prey. When the player is told to “choose a quest,” how are we intended to denote such a thing? Memory? A nonexistent token? A tapped card? Do we announce the choosing, or leave it secret? Can we cheat? Can we change our minds? What if the quest is removed? What if upon its removal it reappears? Is there bluffing in this game? Is there a soul, some form-space version only accessible within the sulci of the designer’s mind? If so, how might we access it? Would a surgical drill suffice?

I adore games. Bad games, too. Like bad art — bad films, bad books, bad paintings — there is an earnestness that makes all of human endeavor worthy of investigation, even if only as a means to understand its impulse and methodology. I can play a bad game. I often do such, and have a wonderful time examining what makes the bad game bad, what makes it fall short of what-could-have-been. Even bad games are worth my time.

What I cannot play is a tossed-up wad of cardboard that has been struck before me with the intent to waste my time. I say “intent” because at least then Fallout: Power Play would have been produced with something like intention, something like deliberation, rather than this generated slopmess, this uneager unthinking unplay. I have been pranked by a trickster; that would be better than to have suffered so unwittingly. To unwit, then, the only object of curiosity in the entire package is the absence of the designer’s name. It is there. It can be found. But it is hidden, neither on the box nor attested on BGG. At least that speaks to some measure of dignity. A dignity denied to me, by the way, in the moments Fallout: Power Play has stolen, irrevocable and irretrievable, from the precious span of my life.

1 1000 51 6 500.

I want those minutes back. I am resentful, like the firefighters sent into Chernobyl, the authorities insistent that we are safe, this was a mere accident, the graphite on the ground has only charred our flesh because our lying senses are mistaken, now will we please whittle the oaken heartwood of our limited days on this bounteous Earth down to a flinty toothpick for the sake of somebody else’s error, somebody else’s neglect, and while the shavings pile up at our feet, minutes that will not be reclaimed, but will be stricken from those that might be shared with our children, their faces upturned to adore the parents whose lovemaking gave them life and who bounced them in their exhaustion until they could at last close their eyes and sleep, while those shavings mound to our knees, will this game forget that these objects are meant to be joyous reflections of our birthright as creatures who learn from our frolicking, who test gravity with leaps and who learn songs through atonal screeches that set our hearts afloat despite their assault on our eardrums, and this is life and what it could be, what it was meant to be, and this ungame, this hideous thing, should not be experienced by man nor beast, but consigned to the mulch of the soil until it enriches something for the first time since it was atomically the lignin of a great tree, now whittled to shavings, its compressed heartwood all in fragments on the floor, and there is no gluing together what was carved apart with sharpened iron and thoughtless conception.

Do not play Fallout: Power Play. I challenge you to never play it. I dare you to stay away. I beseech you, I beg thee. There are better ways to exhaust this one life you have been given by god or the universe. Write a poem. Draw a stick-figure. Design a game. But make it yours. Show me what you have made. It will be better than this, and I will receive it with eyes of joy.

A complimentary copy of Fallout: Power Play 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!)

Quinn Brander’s Rebuilding Chicago is one of the best polyomino-placement games I’ve ever played. That’s the lede, and I will not bury it. Even moreso than its predecessor, Rebuilding Seattle — not to be confused with Raising Chicago, which I do pretty much every time I say the game’s title aloud — this is a tight, smart, and addictive approach to city-building and competitive brinkmanship. The more I play it, the more I want to keep coming back.

The player boards are also where you build your district.

Lest this become a comparison piece with Rebuilding Seattle, let’s nudge the parallels out of the way. Yes, this is more or less the same system. But where Seattle had some baggy Ozempic skin wrapped around its bones, Rebuilding Chicago sees Brander screwing down every edge and flap until all that remains is a taut cable that bears so much more weight than its predecessor.

We begin with the usual tale. Chicago has burned down. Cow in the shed, fire fire fire, a hot time in the old town tonight. Now it’s up to you to transform the rubble into not only into a place people can inhabit, but one they might visit from afar. A World’s Fair city. A city that stands for a thousand years. Or at least a little over a century, barring any further catastrophe.

Right away, there’s a confidence to the whole thing. Your player board, festooned with trackers and laws only you can pass, also shows the first portions of your city district. Cleverly, this district is fragmented. There’s the main area, filled with food carts and gardens and public parks — a lot of rubble, too — where you will place the structures that govern your city’s progress. But there are also two smaller areas, way off to the left and right. You’ll bridge to these areas eventually, but until you do so they’re unavailable, just collections of spun-off decay that must be reached eventually lest they produce an eyesore from afar.

The card offer and scoring board is printed in base 17 for some reason.

Rebuilding Chicago, then, is a polyomino game in two layers. Underneath it all are suburbs, oddly shaped pieces that don’t always fit together easily, each providing the same icons that dominate your main board. Once adjoined to the rest of your city, these then provide the foundation for everything else.

It’s a little bit like building one jigsaw atop a different, mismatched jigsaw, with certain pieces you’d rather not cover because all those hot dog stands will provide income at regular intervals. But given how tight the game’s geography tends to be, sacrifices will have to be made. It isn’t uncommon, for instance, for your pitiless district councilperson to glean the benefit of those local hotspots, only to then immediately eminent domain them into new shopping centers.

There are seven types of structure in all, but three of them are given outsized attention: shopping, nightlife, and dining. These are your amenities, and unlike the banks and train stations and everything else, they’re given special trackers for both their quantity and quality. This is crucial, because at certain points someone, whether yourself or one of your rival district bosses, will trigger these amenities to score. When that happens, you check their position on your trackers against how many dissatisfied citizens are living in your district, subtract any shortfalls, and then earn victory points and hard-earned cash on the result.

Those gaps in your city are entirely legal.

In addition to your ongoing construction projects, Rebuilding Chicago contains a whole series of interlocking systems, but never so many that the game becomes complicated to cluttered.

To start, there’s the drafting. You select buildings, bonuses, amenity perks, and everything else via a market draft. Each card offers both structures and some other bonus, forcing players to make hard decisions almost every turn. Meanwhile, the market doesn’t refresh unless you pay some cash to do it. This can feel restrictive at times, especially when you’re scraping the till for every last nickel, but also prevents the table from churning through the decks — of which there are three, one per era of the city — until they get precisely what they want.

Overlaid atop everything else is an event system that’s purposely frustrating in all the right ways. Claiming an event awards some minor bonus to the triggering player, while also applying a broader effect to everyone at the table. In many cases, though, the best outcome is to let some other rube trigger them so you can benefit without having to spend the turn.

These events run the gamut: new suburbs, cash for hot dog stands, scoring checks, even occasional bids to ensure your city is visible on the world stage. There are subtleties aplenty to consider, especially since events tend to be scattered among the usual card-drafting and city-building, producing little windfalls that punctuate the action. The result is a circadian rhythm that propels the game through both ups and downs. Sometimes players are flush with cash, other times events provide necessary infusions. It’s significantly more organic than the systems found in some tableau-builders, where everyone has resources until they don’t. Here, everybody is involved until the last event has been claimed. Then it’s time for the next round.

Events are powerful, and dictate the duration of the round.

Perhaps best of all, Brander’s vision of a city on the rise is pleasantly nuanced. The amenities are the clear show-stealers, with their periodic checks and windfalls. But every project receives its due in some manner. Trains allow access to distant suburbs, making expansion all the easier, although at times the additional responsibility can prove overwhelming, especially in the game’s early stages. Schools reduce the number of grumpy citizens, making it easier to appease your population via amenities. Financial institutions make money, special landmarks trigger sweeping bonuses that can alter your approach to scoring, and even single-square monuments serve to beautify your urban landscape and pave over unsightly messes.

It helps, too, that each player is given control over their own district, complete with its own starting benefits and unique laws, the game’s term for special abilities you can trigger once per round. The Loop, with its easy access to transportation, tends to expand rapidly, while River North feels a little more scrappy and Lincoln Park is thick with cash potential. There are six districts in all, and rather than settling for my usual three plays I couldn’t help but give them all a try, observing how Brander invests his system with distinct puzzles despite making only the barest of tweaks. My personal favorite, Hyde Park, leans into the education strategy to quell its citizen-grousers, but there are other approaches, all valid, with their own advantages and drawbacks.

Which is to say, it’s a stunningly rich system for so few rules. Perhaps that’s to do with how it always returns to its core considerations: the draft and how your rivals can steal precisely what you were looking for, the events that might occur one turn shy of their maximal benefit, and above all those wonderful skylines, all Tetris pieces and larger landmarks and monuments spackled into the cracks. This is one of those rare games that asks to be looked at for a moment, to be beheld, before everything gets sorted back into the box.

Hey, I’ve been to there.

In the end, Rebuilding Chicago realizes the promise of Rebuilding Seattle and then some. Where that game played it loose with every detail, this one cinches up its suspenders. The result is a mighty fine game in every regard. As a drafter, as a race, as a series of accidental or snitty thefts between players, as a positional puzzle to use every last acre of a city in metamorphosis. Here’s to a second round with each of those half-dozen districts.

A complimentary copy of Rebuilding Chicago 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!)