Panda Flip WBG Score: 7 Player Count: 2-5 You’ll like this if you like: Simple, cute, push your-luck games Published by: Helvetiq Designed by: Michael Diechtierow, Carsten Rohlfs This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Panda Flip is not trying to reinvent the card game. It is not trying to melt your brain with clever combos, long-term planning or layers of strategy either. What it is trying to do is give you a cheap, cheerful little push-your-luck game that can be taught in a minute, played almost anywhere, and enjoyed without much thought, and on those terms it works rather nicely. It is also worth remembering the price. At under £10, this is the sort of game you can chuck into a bag, take to the pub, bring on holiday or use as a quick opener before something meatier hits the table. The box is small, the artwork is fun and the whole production has an appealing, playful charm, even if the panda theme itself does not really extend much further than the cards. How to Play Setup could hardly be simpler. Shuffle the deck and place it face down in the centre, then reveal four cards and place one above, below and to either side of it, creating a little cross. Players then take turns looking at the symbols around the edges of the top card of the main deck and choosing one of the available predictions. Those symbols can be a Panda, Clover, plus or minus. Panda and Clover mean you are predicting which of those two symbols will appear on the card you are about to reveal, while plus and minus ask whether its number will be higher or lower than the card in the corresponding discard pile. Every normal card has both a number and either a Panda or Clover symbol, with the Heart and Poop cards acting as the exceptions. Get the prediction right and the revealed card goes onto that discard pile. You can then either stop and claim the entire pile for points, or keep going and make another prediction. Get one wrong and your turn ends without claiming anything, so the heart of the game is deciding how long you are willing to keep pushing before banking what you have earned. Push It or Pocket It There is not a huge amount of agency here, and Panda Flip makes no attempt to hide that. If your available choice is Panda or Clover, you are fundamentally making a 50/50 call. But it is not entirely blind, because you can look at the cards already revealed and use a little probability and memory to judge what may be left in the deck. That is probably the most interesting part of those symbol guesses. If you have already seen a lot of Pandas, perhaps Clover is becoming more likely, or perhaps enough cards remain that it still barely matters. You can certainly use logic to improve your odds, but at some point you still have to make the call and accept that luck may immediately prove you wrong. The plus and minus predictions give you a little more control. Higher than a one feels considerably safer than lower than one, and the opposite applies near the top of the numerical range. Even then, this is still higher-or-lower territory, so seemingly sensible decisions can collapse instantly because the deck simply decided not to cooperate. A Little Bit of Chaos Two special cards add some extra personality. The Heart effectively acts as an extra life, allowing you to survive a failed prediction and continue your turn, while the Poop card simply ends proceedings immediately. Neither introduces much strategy, but both suit the breezy nature of the game and create the occasional fun moment around the table. There is also a small take-that rule when luck really smiles on you. If your prediction is wrong but the number you reveal matches the number on the pile you chose, your turn still ends, but you may force another player to return two of their previously won cards beneath one of the discard piles. It is a tiny wrinkle, but it adds enough interaction to stop everyone simply staring at their own score pile. The game ends when the main draw deck runs out, and whoever has collected the most cards wins. Every card is simply worth one point, so scoring takes seconds and you can immediately shuffle up and go again. That speed is important because Panda Flip works best when nobody expects it to carry an entire evening. Simple by Design This is where I think you have to judge the game fairly. Panda Flip is extremely simple. There are not loads of meaningful decisions, you cannot construct some magnificent strategy, and sometimes the best available prediction is little more than an educated coin toss. But that does not automatically make it a bad game. Plenty of games are designed to be quick, accessible and disposable fun, and Panda Flip understands exactly what lane it is in. You make a prediction, laugh when the obvious choice betrays you, push your luck one time too many, and then somebody else has a go. It also means the frustrations rarely have time to settle. A bad draw can ruin your turn, but another turn arrives quickly and a whole new game is not far behind. There is something refreshing about a game that does not demand forty minutes of concentration before giving you anything back. Tennis ball for size comparison! Pros Very easy to learn and teach. Cheap, compact and genuinely portable. Push-your-luck decisions create some fun table moments. Nice artwork and an appealing little production. Cons Very limited strategic depth. Panda and Clover predictions can feel like simple 50/50 guesses. Luck plays a significant role in the outcome. The theme is cute but fairly superficial. Final Thoughts Panda Flip is not a game I am going to pretend has hidden depths. It is light, luck-heavy and occasionally offers very little more than picking the most sensible option and hoping the next card agrees with you. If you want meaningful control or interesting long-term strategy, there are plenty of small-box card games that will give you far more. But I still like it. There is enough probability reading, higher-or-lower judgement and push-your-luck tension to give the game a little bite, while the whole thing moves quickly enough that its simplicity never becomes especially troublesome. It is particularly well suited to pubs, travel, family play or those ten spare minutes before a bigger game starts. For under a tenner, that feels perfectly reasonable. Panda Flip knows exactly what it is: a cute, quick and uncomplicated little card game designed to create a few laughs rather than clever stories about your tactical brilliance. It achieves that, and sometimes that is more than enough.

This is a preview copy sent to us for our early opinions. No money exchanged hands. Some art, rules or components will change in the final game. Find out more here - this is an affiliate link. Meaning that if you click on this and then pledge for the game we will get a small fee paid to us in return. There are games that arrive with a clear pitch, and then there are games that arrive looking like the opening chapter of something much larger. Trials of Maya is firmly in the second camp. This is a bright, ambitious, card-driven arena battler set inside a wider narrative universe, and even my preview copy came with a novel set in the same world, featuring the same characters and mythology. It immediately gives the impression that the board game is only one part of what Department of Lore wants Maya to become. That ambition is visible everywhere. The box is huge, the artwork is bold and colourful, the characters are highly distinctive, and there is a lot going on before you have even moved your first miniature. It can initially feel intimidating, but underneath all that terminology, iconography and world-building is a surprisingly clean tactical game built around a very clever card system. Welcome to Maya In the fiction, Maya is a sentient network designed to predict fate. Every person in the world of Neh is connected to it, and Maya runs endless simulations, or Trials, using echoes of legendary Champions pulled from different timelines. Every battle, victory and death becomes another data point in its attempt to understand causality and predict what happens next. That framing works particularly well because it explains why Champions can repeatedly die and respawn without the game having to wave away the contradiction. It also gives the whole thing a strong videogame flavour without simply pretending the tabletop experience is something it is not. The world feels deliberately designed to support repeated arena combat, multiple characters and future expansion. And expansion certainly feels like part of the plan. Even within the core game, Champions have species and class traits, unique abilities, starter decks, upgrade paths and different tactical identities. The wider universe then gives all of that somewhere to grow, which makes Trials of Maya feel less like a one-off box and more like the start of a system. Cards on a Conveyor Belt The best part of Trials of Maya is the card system. Each player has three Action Cards sitting across their player mat, and at the start of every round those cards slide one space to the right. The card leaving the far side is discarded and generates energy, while you add a new card face down into the newly empty left-hand slot. Then everybody reveals their new card simultaneously. The card with the lowest eventual energy gain gives its player the best initiative, so you are constantly weighing future resources against acting earlier now. That is a wonderfully simple decision with a surprising amount of tactical depth because the card you choose affects not only your current options, but also future turns and future energy. Once it is your turn, you spend energy to activate cards already sitting on your mat. You can use the actions on that card in any order, but once you activate another Action Card, you cannot return to unfinished actions on the previous one. That creates some genuinely satisfying sequencing puzzles without bogging the game down in excessive admin. And this is where Trials of Maya really surprised me. You can have a lot of options available to you, but turns remain quick and snappy. You might move, attack, defend, push an enemy into a wall, trigger a passive ability, equip a Relic or play a Spell, yet the structure keeps all of that moving forward rather than turning every activation into a 15-minute think. Fighting Smart Movement takes place across a hex-based arena, and positioning matters. High ground adds extra attack damage, walls block movement and attacks, spikes hurt anyone moving through them, and Void spaces are completely impassable. The actions themselves are straightforward. You can Move, Attack, Defend, Draw, Pull and Push, with modifiers adding range, projectiles, piercing attacks and area effects. Push in particular is good fun because smashing someone into terrain or another unit can cause collision damage, making positioning an offensive weapon rather than simply a means of getting within range. This is also where the Champion asymmetry starts to shine. Some characters are better at taking punishment, others thrive on mobility or explosive damage, while some want to build around specific traits and card combinations. Playing efficiently means understanding not just what your cards can do, but what your particular Champion wants those cards to become. Level Up Your Trials of Maya The other major system is progression. Objectives sit beside the arena and reward XP for completing specific feats during your turn, but each Champion can complete only one Objective Card per round. If you are first to complete a non-starter objective, you receive its full reward, while subsequent players generally get a reduced pay-out. XP can then be spent at Upgrade Points to improve your Champion. You can increase maximum health, improve future energy gain, unlock additional trait symbols, or unlock and upgrade Champion-specific skills. Those skills can eventually branch into one of two Level 2 versions, giving players some genuinely meaningful development choices during the game. I really enjoyed this layer because it gives each match a sense of progression without feeling like a campaign game. You are not merely playing your Champion, you are shaping them as the battle develops. Two games with the same character can go in different directions depending on which objectives appear, what your opponent is doing and which weaknesses you decide need fixing. Minion Business Minions add another strategic layer. Neutral minions can be provoked by damaging them or simply ending your turn too close, at which point they retaliate. Kill one, however, and you can take control of it and later spawn it as an allied unit. Even better, the damage you deal to minions becomes an HP bank that can later be used to bring captured minions back onto the board. This creates a nice little economy around deciding how heavily to invest in them. A captured minion can become another meaningful tactical piece, and suddenly you are no longer controlling just one Champion but an increasingly useful little fighting force. It also helps Trials of Maya feel properly like a tabletop MOBA. Minions, objectives, levelling, map control, towers and respawning are not simply terminology borrowed from videogames. They are interconnected systems that genuinely affect how you approach the arena. Pick Your Fight There is plenty of variety in how you actually play. Siege can be played 1v1 or 2v2, while Headhunters provides a more free-for-all style experience focused heavily around minions and scoring. Different player counts use different arenas and structures rather than simply squeezing the same game into fewer seats. That is important because it gives the box a sense of flexibility. If you primarily want a two-player tactical duel, there is a game for that. If you want team-based play or something more chaotic with additional players, there are options there too. Then there is deck construction. Every Champion comes with a ready-made starter deck, which is absolutely where I would begin, but experienced players can build custom decks of between 24 and 40 cards using cards that share traits with their Champion or their unique Signature Cards. That should give the game serious longevity for players who enjoy exploring builds. The starter decks teach you what each Champion is trying to do, while the wider card pool gives you the opportunity to bend that identity into something more personal once you understand the system. The Wall Around the Arena There is, however, a fairly substantial barrier to entry. This is a big box with a lot inside it, and there is a significant amount of terminology and iconography to absorb. The actual game is nowhere near as difficult to play as the rulebooks initially make it appear, but you still need to learn what a large number of symbols, statuses, traits and effects mean before everything starts flowing naturally. The good news is that Trials of Maya does an excellent job of supporting you. Player aids are genuinely useful, terminology is clearly referenced, and there is separate reference material available when you inevitably need to check exactly what something does. I found that answers were generally quick to locate, even if I was locating them fairly frequently during those opening games. And that distinction matters. This is not a game where the fundamental mechanics remain confusing after multiple plays. Instead, the core loop becomes straightforward surprisingly quickly, while the challenge comes from remembering the vocabulary surrounding it. It took me a while to properly settle into Trials of Maya. Once I did, however, the effort felt worthwhile. Pros Excellent card system that combines action selection, energy management and initiative in one clever mechanism. Huge Champion variety, with meaningful asymmetry, upgrades and custom deck construction. Fast, exciting turns despite players having plenty of tactical options. Bright, vibrant production and world-building that makes Maya feel like the beginning of something much larger. Cons A substantial initial learning barrier, with plenty of symbols, traits, keywords and terminology. Big box, big commitment, and this is clearly unlikely to be an inexpensive proposition. The breadth of options means your first few games involve a fair amount of reference checking, even though answers are usually easy to find. Enter the Arena Trials of Maya is an ambitious game. In fact, ambition might be the single word that best describes the entire project. The designers have created a tactical arena battler, a deck-building framework, multiple game modes, highly asymmetric Champions and an entire fictional universe around them, then wrapped all of that inside a presentation that wants you to believe there is much more still to come. Most importantly, though, the card play works. It is varied, exciting and surprisingly quick, giving you opportunities to pull off clever combinations without forcing everyone else to sit around while you do them. The sliding card system also gives Trials of Maya a genuinely distinctive tactical identity rather than making this simply another game of moving miniatures around an arena. The question is whether you want to climb over that opening wall. If you want a lightweight fighting game you can unpack, explain in five minutes and immediately throw onto the table, this probably is not it. If you want a deep, card-driven fighting game with asymmetric characters, lots of player-count options, tactical development and what appears to be an entire future universe being built around it, Trials of Maya could potentially become something very big indeed. And if that sounds like your sort of thing, there may be something rather appealing about getting involved right at the beginning. Check out more about the game here. Preview copy provided free of charge with no obligation to provide positive coverage. This article is based on a pre-release version of the game, so components, rules and content may change before final publication. You can read our full review policy at WhatBoardGame.com.

Fast Friends WBG Score: 7.5 Player Count: 2-8 You’ll like this if you like: Fast, fun, party games that are loud! Published by: Exploding Kittens Designed by: Ian Clayman, Ken Gruhl This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Some party games are built around deep strategy, cunning deduction and carefully constructed systems. Fast Friends is built around looking at the words “World…” and desperately hoping the person next to you also blurts out “Cup” before a loud plastic timer ruins your evening. It is simple, silly and very good at making grown adults behave as if correctly matching “Potato Salad” is the greatest achievement of their lives. The whole thing is wonderfully easy to understand. Two players see the same prompt, count down together and try to complete it with exactly the same phrase at exactly the same time. That is basically it, and rather than feeling undercooked, Fast Friends benefits enormously from refusing to complicate a good joke. How To Play Fast Friends The box contains 180 cards, 24 Life Tokens, a Card Holder and a timer, with the standard game supporting two to eight or more players. Everyone starts with three Life Tokens, the cards go into the holder, and the first player partners with whoever is sitting immediately to their left. Each card contains a word or phrase with room for completion. You might see something like “Fall in…”, “Searching for…”, “Jason…”, “Bird…”, “Beef…” or the alarmingly broad “…stuff”. The active pair check they are ready, count down from three, then both shout their full phrase and hope their brains have somehow taken the same questionable shortcut. If the answers match, brilliant, your turn is over and you pass the Card Holder on. If they do not, the card is discarded and you immediately try again, with no skipping and no pre-match conference where you suspiciously ask whether your partner has “been thinking about Jason Statham much lately”. The timer goes off randomly somewhere between 20 and 75 seconds. If it sounds while you are still the active pair, both players lose a Life Token, and once your three lives are gone, so are you. Play continues until only one player remains, although if exactly two players survive, they both win, which is frankly very wholesome after all that psychological warfare. Say What I’m Thinking The real game is not knowing the obvious answer. It is knowing what the other person thinks the obvious answer is, which is a subtly different and much more dangerous skill. “World…” feels incredibly easy until one of you confidently shouts “Cup” while the other goes with “War”, at which point you learn something mildly concerning about your friendship. That is where most of the laughs come from. Sometimes two people instantly land on the same phrase and celebrate like they have discovered telepathy. Other times you get three, four or five completely different answers in succession and begin wondering whether you have ever truly understood this person at all. The best prompts are the ones with just enough ambiguity to make you second-guess yourself. “Beef…” might be burger, stew, jerky or Wellington, and suddenly your entire relationship is being judged by how confidently you both shout meat-based vocabulary at one another. It is ridiculous, but it works. Fast By Name, Fast By Nature Fast Friends moves beautifully quickly. There is almost no downtime, failed attempts disappear immediately, and the Card Holder keeps moving around the table before anyone has time to start checking their phone. Even when you are not playing, watching someone else completely fail to mind-meld is entertaining enough to keep you involved. That pace is important because there is not a huge amount of mechanical depth here. Thankfully, the game has absolutely no interest in pretending otherwise. It turns up, gets everyone shouting nonsense, creates a few big moments, then leaves before anyone starts wondering whether “World Cup” really deserved such a dramatic reaction. And that means it doesn’t outstay its welcome, which is one of its biggest strengths. You can play one quick game, reset in seconds and go again, or just keep going while everyone is laughing. There is no grand arc to complete and no commitment beyond “do we fancy another one?” The Timer Has Chosen Violence My one real issue is the random timer. I completely understand why it is there, because not knowing whether you have 20 seconds or 75 absolutely adds tension. Unfortunately, it also means one pair can leisurely explore several cards while another pair gets approximately enough time to say “Ready?” before being punished. The game is already difficult enough when your partner somehow thinks “Jason…” obviously means “Bourne” while you are standing there proudly yelling “Momoa”. I would personally rather every pair had a consistent amount of time, keeping the pressure but making the competition feel slightly less like judgement by an angry kitchen appliance. Interestingly, the two-player mode already uses a fixed 75-second timer. That version works perfectly well, which only strengthens my feeling that a fixed multiplayer timer would have been a nice alternative option. Just The Two Of Us Two-player Fast Friends becomes a cooperative score attack rather than an elimination game. You are permanent partners, play three 75-second rounds and count how many cards you successfully matched, with the rulebook grading your performance from “Really bad at this!” all the way to “The Fastest Friends!”. It is a nice variation because it turns the game into something closer to a shared challenge. You can try to beat your previous score and, in theory, gradually become better at predicting one another’s brains. Whether that represents deepening friendship or simply learning that your partner says “World Cup” every single time is probably best left unexplored. I still prefer Fast Friends with a bigger group because the rotating partnerships create more variety and more opportunities for spectacular misunderstanding. But the fact that two-player feels intentionally designed rather than awkwardly stapled on is definitely a positive. Pros Incredibly easy to explain and get playing. Creates genuine laughs and surprisingly big moments. Fast turns with almost no downtime. Works with a huge range of casual groups. Cons The random timer can feel more unfair than exciting. There is deliberately very little depth. Some prompts will naturally land better with certain groups than others. Final Thoughts Fast Friends is a very good example of a party game understanding exactly what it needs to do. The rules disappear almost instantly, the cards generate the situations, and the players create the entertainment. When it works, it produces those brilliant little moments where two people yell the same ridiculous phrase and briefly believe they share one brain. It is also one of those games that is very easy to get to the table. You can explain it in seconds, play it with almost anyone and stop whenever the energy starts to dip. That makes it ideal for family gatherings, parties, warm-ups or those moments when someone says, “Can we play something quick?” and everyone quietly fears somebody is about to suggest a three-hour strategy game. I would still prefer a fixed timer, because the randomness occasionally makes failure feel imposed rather than earned. But that is a relatively small complaint in a game this light, and Fast Friends is fast, funny, accessible and smart enough to know that sometimes all you need for a good time is two people shouting “Potato Salad!” at each other.

There are board games about movies, trivia games about movies, and party games that happen to use films as their subject matter. MovieDEX is trying to do something considerably broader: put an entire movie-themed games night into one box. Built around a shared deck of 120 films, it contains eight different games covering bluffing, auctions, deduction, performance, trivia and tactical interaction. It is an ambitious idea, but after spending time with this pre-production version, the impressive part is how coherent the whole package feels. That starts before you have played anything. MovieDEX looks and feels like it wants you to walk into a 1990s video rental store, grab something from the shelf and settle in for the evening. The presentation, graphic design and components are lovely, while the movie-card artwork and overall visual language give the box a strong identity rather than making it feel like eight unrelated games bundled together. Players: three to eight Age: 14+Learn time: around five minutes Play time: 20 to 90 minutes, depending on the game Games included: eight Find out more here - KICKSTARTER Eight games, one deck The central idea is wonderfully straightforward. MovieDEX contains 120 Movie Cards, with each film carrying information including its genre, release year, cast and various ratings or statistics that different games use in different ways. Rather than learning one sprawling system, you choose whichever of the eight games suits the people around the table and the amount of time you have available. Those games fall into different styles, with the two largest experiences being Awards Night and Streaming Wars. Around those sit the faster party games Ultimate Charades, Spotlight and One Take, followed by the more movie-knowledge-focused Clue Rush, Credit Crawl and Auction House. Player counts, playing times and scoring systems change between them, but the same deck remains at the centre of everything. That breadth is probably MovieDEX's defining feature. There are straightforward movie-knowledge challenges here, but this is not simply a giant box of trivia questions. Across the eight games you will find bluffing, simultaneous clues, auctions, betting, set collection, deduction, acting, drawing and direct player interaction, so films provide the common language rather than dictating one single type of experience. Setting up MovieDEX There is no universal setup because you are effectively choosing one of eight games whenever MovieDEX reaches the table. You take the shared Movie Cards, board and whichever additional pieces your chosen game requires, then follow that game's individual setup. Most of the games are deliberately quick to get moving, which fits the wider concept of choosing an activity for the group rather than committing everyone to a lengthy rules session. That modular approach is important because MovieDEX clearly expects different games to appeal to different people. A group wanting something loud can jump into Ultimate Charades, while people who know their cinema can dig into Credit Crawl or Clue Rush. If you want something with more conventional board-game structure, Awards Night and Streaming Wars provide the deeper end of the box. How do the eight games work? Awards Night Awards Night has players secretly nominating movies for increasingly valuable award categories before trying to influence the table's vote. Nobody knows who nominated which film, so you can campaign for your own movie, attack another or bluff completely while attempting not to reveal your hidden interests. Nine nomination rounds eventually feed into semi-finals and a final, with points coming from successful movies and later voting. It is one of the clearest examples of MovieDEX using movie knowledge as a starting point rather than making it the entire game. Knowing films helps you make persuasive arguments, but reading the table, bluffing and judging what everyone else might support are just as important. It is essentially your own increasingly questionable awards ceremony, complete with campaigning and suspiciously passionate speeches about films you definitely do not secretly own. Streaming Wars Streaming Wars is the most traditionally strategic game in the box. Each player runs a rival streaming service, maintaining a nine-film catalogue while moving around an 18-space action track that allows them to improve their collection, protect movies inside a Vault or interfere with opponents. Build, Attack, Defence and Destiny cards introduce actions ranging from acquiring better films to stealing cards and attempting to hack somebody else's protected collection. After everyone completes the circuit, players divide their nine movies into three sets and compete across People, Critics and Awards statistics. Destiny cards can further modify those scores before points are awarded for each category. It is still firmly on the lighter end of the strategy spectrum, but there is considerably more tactical decision-making here than you would normally expect from something carrying a movie-party-game label. Ultimate Charades Ultimate Charades is probably the easiest concept to explain at a crowded table. Teams attempt to identify movies, but a die determines whether the performer must describe, mime, draw, use exactly one word or communicate through sounds and movement. The harder methods earn more points, creating a simple risk-versus-reward system without burying proceedings beneath additional rules. The sixth face of the die is Wild, and this adds a nice little moment of bravery. When Wild appears, the performer gets to see the movie first and then chooses whichever mode they want, scoring that mode's normal value. You could therefore play it safe with Describe, or decide that this is absolutely the moment to mime something horrifyingly difficult in front of everyone you know. There is also a once-per-turn opportunity to abandon an awkward movie before the timer begins, although doing so reduces the reward if the replacement is guessed correctly. It is fast, familiar and clearly aimed at groups who want to start playing almost immediately. Of all eight games, this is perhaps the easiest one to imagine appearing midway through a party after somebody says, "Let's play something." Spotlight Spotlight turns the attention from movies to the people appearing in them. Teams create a shared Session Deck of films, then repeatedly work through that same collection across three rounds with increasingly restrictive communication. The first round allows relatively free clues, the second permits only one word per actor, and the third removes speech entirely. Because the same films keep returning, familiarity becomes part of the game. Something that required several detailed clues during the first pass may later be communicated with one carefully chosen word or a ridiculous facial expression. Players can switch which cast member they are describing or skip a particularly troublesome card, adding enough flexibility to keep the 60-second turns moving. One Take One Take asks everyone except the active player to look at a movie and secretly write down a single-word clue. Those clues are revealed simultaneously, but matching or closely related answers cancel each other before the active player gets to see them. The guesser then receives whatever unique clues survived and gets exactly one attempt at identifying the movie. It produces an interesting little problem because the most obvious clue is often the worst one to write. If everyone sees Jurassic Park and immediately thinks "dinosaur", that apparently perfect clue may disappear completely. Successful guessers earn two points while everyone whose surviving clue contributed earns one, meaning you are simultaneously trying to be helpful and sufficiently original. Clue Rush Clue Rush is the closest MovieDEX comes to competitive movie deduction. One player secretly holds a film and reveals its genre and year, while everyone else bets on how few additional clues they think they need to identify it. Those clues can include ratings, awards information, the director and members of the cast. Lower bets give you an earlier opportunity and potentially more points, but confidence can backfire. After an incorrect guess, other players may jump in using the information already revealed, creating pressure around whether to commit early or wait for something more useful. The standard game ends when somebody reaches 30 points, making this one of the purer tests of film knowledge in the collection. Credit Crawl Credit Crawl spreads films across the table as players attempt to connect newly placed cards to those already present. A card can touch several others, and players score separately for each valid connection they can justify. Those links range from simple printed similarities such as genre or decade to thematic connections and genuine shared cast or crew credits. The stronger and more specific the connection, the more points it can earn, but opponents are allowed to challenge questionable claims. Higher-tier credit connections can even be checked using a phone under a short time limit. This is probably the game where deeper film knowledge has the greatest opportunity to shine, particularly when somebody suddenly remembers that two apparently unrelated movies share an actor, director or production credit. Auction House Auction House turns the deck into a market. Players have a fixed budget of 50 and secretly bid for films one at a time, with the highest bidder paying their offer and adding the movie to their public collection. There is no additional income, so every expensive purchase reduces what you can compete for later. At the end, films are organised into sets of exactly three sharing either a genre or decade. Better-quality cards can improve the value of those sets, meaning you are not simply bidding for famous films but trying to construct combinations that will actually score. Because everyone's collection is visible, it quickly becomes apparent when one particular card is far more valuable to one player than everybody else. Something for everyone? With eight games available, MovieDEX is clearly attempting to provide something for almost everyone around a movie-loving table. I think it largely achieves that, although "everyone" should be understood within the context of what this product is. Someone looking for a heavyweight strategic experience is unlikely to replace their favourite two-hour Euro with Streaming Wars, but somebody buying a movie-themed collection probably was not expecting that in the first place. What is notable is how often the designs move beyond straightforward trivia. Auction House adds bidding and resource management, Awards Night introduces hidden ownership and bluffing, Clue Rush builds risk into your own confidence, while Streaming Wars incorporates attacks, defence and catalogue management. You can absolutely sit down and demonstrate who knows more about movies, but MovieDEX repeatedly finds ways to make that knowledge part of a game rather than simply asking questions until somebody wins. The variety also means different parts of the box should work with very different groups. One evening could revolve around shouting, acting and laughing through the casual games, while another could see committed film fans trying to remember obscure credits in Credit Crawl. MovieDEX is therefore less about discovering one definitive game inside the box and more about having a collection that can change depending on who has turned up. A movie theme park in a box The publisher describes MovieDEX as a "movie theme park in a box", and that actually explains the concept rather well. You are not supposed to experience everything simultaneously, just as you would not visit eight attractions at once. You pick the ride that suits the group, play it, then either stop or move somewhere else. That is why I keep coming back to the idea of MovieDEX as a toolkit. It gives you the ingredients for a movie-themed evening and lets you decide whether tonight calls for auctions, acting, bluffing, deduction or straight-up film knowledge. Having eight options also means a game that does not quite land with one particular group does not define the entire box. Lights, cards, action The prototype presentation I have seen is extremely polished. The component design, board layout and overall aesthetic support the theme strongly, and the visual identity runs consistently across the different games. There is a deliberate retro-video-store quality to it that, as someone who loves movies, makes opening the box feel a little like walking into a Blockbuster in the 90s and wondering what you are going home with. The whole package feels well thought out and highly thematic rather than simply decorated with film references. That matters when you are selling an experience built around the idea of movie night, because the box itself needs to help create that atmosphere before anyone has answered a question or placed a card. From the presentation through to the breadth of games available, MovieDEX seems very aware of what kind of evening it wants to create. The publisher has also been open about its production process. AI was used as one tool in creating the artwork for the 120 Movie Cards, with the team stating that the images were subsequently art-directed, curated, interpreted and finished internally rather than reproducing existing posters, stills, characters or studio artwork. The publisher states that the game concepts, mechanics, rules, graphic design and campaign film were created by its team. Pros Eight genuinely different games use the same movie deck across party, bluffing, deduction, auction and trivia-style experiences. Excellent thematic presentation makes the complete package feel cohesive rather than like a random compilation. A broad range of complexity and group styles gives MovieDEX plenty of flexibility for different movie-night crowds. Cons Some games will inevitably suit your group more than others, so most owners are unlikely to play all eight equally. Movie knowledge can create uneven match-ups, particularly in games such as Clue Rush and Credit Crawl. Heavy strategy gamers are not the primary audience, despite several games incorporating more tactical mechanisms. Final preview thoughts MovieDEX is an unusually ambitious proposition because it is asking one deck of movie cards to support eight substantially different experiences. From the prototype, what impresses me most is not simply the quantity but the thought that has gone into making each game use the same information differently. It feels cohesive, highly thematic and designed by people who clearly want the evening surrounding the game to matter almost as much as the mechanics themselves. For movie fans who also enjoy games, or groups looking for something that can become the centrepiece of a film-themed evening, MovieDEX offers a lot of possibilities inside one box. It will not replace a dedicated heavyweight strategy game, nor is every one of its eight games going to become every group's favourite, but that rather misses what the box is trying to achieve. MovieDEX is a movie-night toolkit, and with bluffing, bidding, trivia, auctions, performance and deduction all waiting inside, there are considerably more films showing here than at your average multiplex. MovieDEX is scheduled to launch on KICKSTARTER on 1 September 2026. Anyone interested in following the project can find the upcoming campaign on Kickstarter when it goes live. As this is a preview of a prototype rather than a finished retail copy, components, artwork and rules may still change before production. MovieDEX was provided as a free prototype review copy with no obligation to provide coverage or a positive opinion. You can read the full What Board Game review policy on WhatBoardGame.com.

There is ambitious game design, and then there is deciding to build an entire Wild West sandbox full of expanding families, resource production, land disputes, gambling, hunting, education, starvation, bandits, sheriffs and real-time gunfights. Pioneers in Peril is very much the latter. It is a sprawling two-to-four-player frontier game in which you arrive in the town of Peril with very little, then attempt to turn your small group of settlers into something resembling a successful life before somebody starves, gets arrested or discovers that challenging a neighbour to a shootout was perhaps not the wisest financial strategy. What makes this project particularly interesting is where it has come from. This is an intensely independent production, with this premium wooden edition being produced on a small scale by the designer using laser-cut components rather than rolling off some enormous anonymous production line. That inevitably affects the price, but it is also a huge part of the appeal. There is something genuinely exciting about seeing somebody attempt a project this ambitious and then physically make so much of the thing themselves. Want to find out more about the game, read on or click here. Welcome to Peril - Pioneers in Peril You begin with two Pioneers standing in the centre of town, $20, six Food, a Revolver, and a single Bullet. Around them are the Bank, Saloon, General Store, Church, School, Jail, and Blacksmith, but most of the wilderness does not exist yet. Instead, the landscape gradually emerges as players explore, placing random hexagonal Land Tiles and transforming the table into a frontier of forests, mountains, pastures, fields, rivers, deserts, and considerably less inviting terrain. There is a real sense at the beginning of each game that you could create something exciting and unique, and that sense of discovery for me is a real thrill. Your eventual goal is to reach 20 Pioneer Points, although becoming the last player with a surviving Pioneer also gets the job done. Each living Pioneer is worth one point, Buildings and Homesteads are worth two, and Diplomas add another point each. The rulebook even suggests lowering the victory threshold if everyone agrees, which should tell you something about the deliberately open-ended nature of the experience. That win condition sounds straightforward, but getting there is anything but. Pioneers in Peril continually asks you to balance expansion against survival. More people mean more actions and more potential points, but every additional mouth (including horses!) also needs feeding, every valuable property is another thing worth protecting, and every bit of success makes you increasingly attractive to everyone else. Setting up the frontier Setup centres the Town Tile on the table, places the Sheriff in Jail, prepares the Bandit's Hideout at the edge of play and leaves the shuffled Land Tiles ready to create the unexplored frontier. Event, Prayer and Shootout decks sit nearby alongside resources, buildings, Diplomas, Tools and an impressive quantity of assorted tokens. Each player chooses a Pioneer family represented by one of four symbols and places their first two family members at the General Store. There is a lot in the box because there is a lot happening in the game. Cattle, timber, coal, rye, food, ammunition, tools, horses, money, claims, buildings and characters all have jobs to do, and the wooden production gives the whole thing a wonderfully handmade frontier quality. It is not a minimalist game pretending otherwise, but once the table is populated, that abundance becomes part of its personality. The physical presentation also helps sell the theme. The town starts compact and civilised before the wilderness spreads outward, while the Bandit begins far away on his numbered Hideout track and slowly works towards everybody's increasingly valuable properties. Even before the mechanisms start interacting, the table is telling a little story about people trying to establish themselves somewhere inherently dangerous. Feeding time Every turn begins with the least glamorous part of conquering the frontier: feeding everyone. Each Pioneer requires one Food, and a Horse requires one too. Feed a Pioneer and they normally receive two actions; fail to feed them and they are restricted to one. Fail to feed the same Pioneer on two consecutive turns and they die. That simple rule gives the game much of its pressure. Expanding your family sounds fantastic because every additional Pioneer can potentially perform another two actions each round and get you more points, but those extra bodies immediately increase your food requirements. A huge family can become an extraordinary engine when everything works, but a couple of poor turns can leave you suddenly scrambling for supplies. After feeding, you roll the Deadwood Die. It might grant an extra action, add another Land Tile to the frontier, or trigger an Event Card. Events can help or hurt, with some affecting only you and others changing circumstances for everybody, so there is always a degree of uncertainty before your carefully planned turn actually begins. Two actions, plenty of choices Every fed Pioneer then takes two consecutive actions, and this is where the sheer breadth of Pioneers in Peril becomes apparent. You can... (deep breath in) ...move, explore, buy, sell, trade, claim land, build, hunt, process resources, pray, expand your family, gamble, dispute claims, obtain Diplomas, hire the Sheriff, or employ Laborers. Unfed Pioneers still function, but their single action makes inefficient turns painful when everyone around you appears to be achieving twice as much. And of course, you know they are only another unfed turn away from being out of the game. Movement uses a D6, with Horses doubling the number rolled, while exploring allows new Land Tiles to appear around your Pioneer. You can even move directly off the explored map and reveal a tile underneath yourself, immediately ending that movement as you discover what you have stumbled into. Draw impassable terrain and your brave pioneer effectively discovers that the route was a terrible idea and retreats back where they came from. The impressive part is that despite the long action list, most of it makes immediate thematic sense. Want a Mine? Find suitable land, stake a claim, build the Mine and equip yourself with the right Tool before processing its Coal. Want more family members? Build Homesteads, bring two existing Pioneers together and "expand". Romantic! Need money? Sell Resources, trade with another player or head to the Saloon and make a catastrophically irresponsible wager. That thematic logic makes a seemingly rules-heavy(ish) game considerably easier to absorb. There is a lot to remember, but much of it follows the question, "What would I logically have to do first?" The game rarely feels like you are converting a blue cube into a yellow cube because a spreadsheet told you to. Not that I don't love that sort of thing! Building something worth stealing The economic loop is one of the clearest parts of the design. Certain Land Tiles support particular buildings: Forests take Sawmills, Mountains take Mines, Pastures support Ranches and Fields take Farms. Building one of these generates an initial supply of the corresponding Resource, which can later be processed if you own the appropriate Tool. Those resources then become money, trade goods or useful assets, and Laborers and specialist Diplomas can increase your output. There is even a wonderfully mean rule allowing another player to process Resources sitting unattended on somebody else's Building if the conditions are right. Pioneers in Peril repeatedly gives you ways to become more efficient while simultaneously ensuring that efficiency creates something worth stealing. Homesteads work slightly differently because they support your growing family. No Homestead supports the two Pioneers you begin with, but additional Homesteads raise the maximum to three, five and eventually eight family members. Suddenly that quiet little frontier game has become a logistical exercise in feeding eight people while wondering why you ever thought children were a good victory-point engine. Get yourself educated Pioneers can visit the School and obtain a Diploma, effectively turning that individual into a specialist. There are professions covering agriculture, ranching, forestry, mining, business, finance, land management, law enforcement, metallurgy, theology and more. Only the Pioneer holding the Diploma receives its abilities unless the rules specifically say otherwise, so your family gradually develops distinct roles rather than becoming one anonymous collection of workers. Some of these abilities substantially change what that Pioneer can do. Land Management improves exploration and claiming, Metallurgy effectively provides the relevant Pioneer with all Tools, Law Enforcement helps protect against the Bandit, and Finance makes buying Pioneer Points more flexible. It is another example of the game's maximalist approach. Pioneers in Peril could have stopped at exploration and resource production, but instead it starts asking who in your family should become the town's banker, preacher or blacksmith. There are lots of routes to pursue, and the game seems happiest when players start specialising rather than following identical plans. The Bandit is everybody's problem Once your Pioneers have finished their actions, your turn still is not over. You now effectively take control of the Bandit, rolling to determine how far he moves and which player's Pioneers become his target. He starts outside town and gradually closes in before roaming the frontier, robbing people and generally ensuring that prosperity never feels entirely comfortable. This is one of my favourite thematic ideas in the design. Rather than having a completely automated enemy, the game lets each player participate in directing the threat at the end of their own turn. There are restrictions governing his movement and targeting, but there is still enough agency to create those lovely moments where someone suddenly takes a very keen interest in why the Bandit would logically prefer your ranch to theirs. If the Bandit reaches a Pioneer, you face a Holdup. You can surrender and potentially lose money, or decide that today is the day your wooden cowboy earns their place in history. That means a shootout. Quick on the draw Shootouts may be the mechanism people remember most because Pioneers in Peril suddenly stops being an economic frontier game and becomes a reflex contest. Players take Attacker and Defender decks, secretly determine how much ammunition they are willing to commit, shuffle one another's decks, count down and then begin flipping cards one at a time as quickly as possible. The first player to reveal a Hit and shout "HIT!" wins. Real ammunition matters because your number of Bullet Tokens limits how many cards you can reveal, and the attacker and defender decks are deliberately not identical. It is wonderfully silly, surprisingly tense and completely unlike anything else you have been doing for the previous hour. The consequences are not particularly forgiving either. A Pioneer losing a player-versus-player gunfight can die outright, while defeating the Bandit lets you loot his Hideout before he eventually returns. This will also be one of the game's most divisive mechanisms. Some people will adore suddenly turning a dispute over imaginary frontier property into a physical showdown across the table. Others may wonder why their strategic board game has unexpectedly asked them to prove who can flip cards fastest. I suspect you already know which group you belong to just from reading that description. The Oregon Trail feeling There is an unavoidable Oregon Trail comparison here, and it is useful as long as you do not take it too literally. Pioneers in Peril is not recreating that game mechanically, but it taps into the same pleasure of trying to build a better life while an alarming number of systems conspire to ruin your afternoon. Food matters, people die, the wilderness is unpredictable and survival never feels entirely guaranteed. What elevates it beyond a simple nostalgia exercise is how much agency sits around those hazards. You decide whether to grow your family, invest in land, educate a Pioneer, gamble your savings, challenge another claim or spend money protecting yourself. The frontier can be cruel, but quite often your biggest problem is that you personally decided to do something spectacularly risky five minutes earlier. That is where the game seems at its most entertaining. It wants players to make bold decisions, negotiate, interfere with one another and occasionally accept that the sensible option is nowhere near as interesting as the dangerous one. The rulebook itself openly embraces that frontier mentality, even including a "Deadwood Rule" encouraging groups to settle uncovered edge cases collectively rather than expecting every situation to have been exhaustively legislated. A very independent production It is impossible for me to separate this preview entirely from the story of how the game is being produced. There is something incredibly appealing about one designer attempting something on this scale and then personally manufacturing a premium wooden edition using laser-cut components. It feels more like somebody building the game they desperately wanted to exist than a product reverse-engineered from a marketing meeting. That independence comes with realities, and price is one of them. A small-run wooden production cannot compete with a mass-manufactured cardboard game purely on pounds-per-component efficiency, nor should anyone pretend otherwise. Whether that premium makes sense for you will therefore depend partly on how much value you place on craftsmanship, unusual production and directly supporting an ambitious independent creator. I actually think that is worth saying clearly rather than hiding it inside the usual value conversation. Pioneers in Peril is not just asking whether you want this particular collection of mechanisms. It is also asking whether you want to support this particular kind of board game project. For some people, that story will add considerably to the appeal, while others will reasonably decide they only care about the game relative to similarly priced alternatives. Pros Huge thematic scope, with exploration, survival, family growth, economics, professions, negotiation and combat all supporting the Wild West setting. The expanding landscape and player-driven stories give the game a genuine sandbox quality rather than pushing everybody down one optimisation path. The handmade wooden production is distinctive, particularly for players who enjoy supporting unusual independent projects. Cons There is a lot happening, and despite the thematic logic, this is still a long game with a substantial rules footprint. The real-time shootouts will divide players, especially those who dislike dexterity or reflex mechanisms inside strategy games. The premium small-run production comes at a cost, and buyers will need to decide how much the craftsmanship and independent nature of the project matter to them. Have wagon, will travel Pioneers in Peril is one of those games where ambition is visible everywhere you look. It wants to be a frontier sandbox, an economic game, a survival game, a negotiation game, a family-building game and occasionally a saloon-table gunfight, and somehow most of those pieces make sense because everything is pulling in the same thematic direction. I have played cleaner designs and considerably tighter ones, but very few that appear quite so determined to let you actually live inside their setting. This is still a preview, so I am not putting a final score on it, and a game of this length deserves considerably more play before I would pretend otherwise. What I can say is that there is a fun, unusual and genuinely characterful game here, wrapped around one of the more ambitious independent production stories I have encountered recently. If you want highly polished efficiency above everything else, you may find the scope and price intimidating, but if the idea of supporting one creator building an enormous wooden Wild West sandbox makes you grin, then Pioneers in Peril is certainly worth riding into town to investigate. Just remember to pack some food. Dying because you lost a gunfight is one thing, but starving after building three ranches would be a particularly embarrassing way to become a pioneer in peril. Pioneers in Peril was provided as a preview copy with no obligation to provide positive coverage. This article reflects the pre-release version supplied and should be treated as a preview rather than a final scored review. You can read the full What Board Game review policy on WhatBoardGame.com.

Aberration WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count:1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Tense co-ops with a monster theme! Published by: Ghostfire Gaming Designed by: Peter Lee This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. A tense cooperative survival game that feels brilliant in the moment, even if its long-term staying power is less convincing. There is a point in almost every game of Aberration where the board looks manageable, the heroes feel capable and everyone believes the village might actually survive. Then a Shadow reveals something horrible, Influence takes away another section of the map and a monster suddenly barrels towards the centre. Within minutes, the group has gone from calmly discussing options to desperately trying to prevent four different ways to lose at once. It's delightful! That is where Aberration is at its best. It is tense, dramatic and wonderfully good at making every action feel important, even though the individual decisions are often quite straightforward. It can feel like a ten out of ten while you are playing, but does it stack up to repeat plays? But why are we reviewing this game now? "It came out in 2025, and WBG only reviews the hotness, right!?" I hear you cry. Well, yes. This is the 2025 retail version. No extra miniatures or fancy upgrades. And that is available to buy right now. But there is also a fancy new version coming to crowdfunding soon, with new wooden tokens for the fire, stun, and damage tokens (which I really want!) as well as an updated box cover, revised rulebook (which it needs!) with some rules clarifications (no rules changes), and they are looking to tweak a few of the scenarios in the Scenario Booklet to make them a little more tense and exciting. Wait, more tense!!!!? Oh, and the miniatures now come as standard, all in one box!!! Well worth checking out I would say. But, back to this version, let's get it to the table for some fun! Setting up the nightmare Each scenario uses four map tiles arranged around a central village, with paths leading in from every direction. There are six tiles in total, and all double sided, so lots of variety. Vantage Points, fires, Shadows and scenario-specific elements are placed across the board, while the various enemy types (different for each scenario) are organised beside the Great Beast board. The setup is not especially difficult, but there is enough sorting and placement involved that it feels slightly disproportionate when playing one of the shorter scenarios. But after a few games, you will get a lot quicker at this. And the scenario booklet does a great job letting you know which map tiles, monsters, and other things you need for each set up. Players each combine one of six Heroes with one of six Classes, creating 36 possible combinations in the core game. Your Hero provides a unique powerful ability (including original stuff like dice re-rolls!), while your Class determines most of the actions available during play, each with their own ubique combination of powerful actions. Mainly - fightin'! The included standees are perfectly good, easy to read and attractive enough that I never felt the game needed more plastic with the minis, but I would obviously prefer them. The artwork is lovely throughout, the dark fantasy setting is immediately clear and the map gradually becoming corrupted gives the table a suitably grim sense of collapse. Setup, everything looks great. Deeply thematic. And very appealing. Drawing plans from a bag At the start of each Hero turn, you move one Action Chip from your Ability Board into your bag. Removing that chip may improve one of your attributes or reveal an Item reward, while adding it to the bag gradually alters the actions you are more likely to draw. Put in a red strength chip, and your strength will grow from two to three fairly quickly. Also, with an extra red chip in the bag, the chances you will pull a red chip and be able to use your strength to fight will also grow. It's a lovely symbiosis. You then pull chips equal to your Intellect, so three to start with, or four in a solo game; and spend them on matching actions from your Hero and Class boards. Whites count as wild. Blacks, which are added due to various bad things happening to you, can only be used as your top wild action, which generally will be to move or fight. But each time you draw a black, you take one more damage. The four main colours cover Intellect, Strength, Speed and Command. These broadly govern manipulation and traps, melee damage, movement and ranged combat, and assigning Villagers to useful jobs. Every Class also has flexible top actions that can be paid for with any chip, which means an awkward draw rarely leaves you unable to contribute. This bag-building system works well because every chip has two purposes. Moving one from your board improves your character while also shaping future turns, forcing you to decide whether you want stronger statistics or a more focused bag. The system is clever and satisfying, although the development arc is relatively restrained and your turns do not transform as dramatically as the visible progression initially promises. But each game, you need to tailor which chips to add to your bag, based on the scenarios requirements, and your characters strength. Items help add some flexibility. Each one can either provide a larger benefit on your turn or be discarded for a smaller reactive effect - shown on the bottom of the card, such as preventing damage, rerolling dice or adding to an attack. You can play item cards anytime, on any players turn, helping yourself, or any other player. These shared interventions create some of the game’s best cooperative moments, especially when another player produces exactly the card needed to rescue an apparently doomed plan. Something moves in the dark Enemies usually enter the map as facedown Shadow tokens rather than visible monsters. A Shadow is revealed when it meets a Hero, encounters fire, or is exposed by a special effect, at which point it may spawn one or more Aberrations and trigger an additional penalty. You know something is approaching, but not whether it is a manageable Horde, a dangerous Monstrosity, or another chunk of Influence waiting to ruin the landscape. Sometimes, it may even just be a lonely returning villager. The fog-of-war element is one of the strongest parts of the design. Placing fires is not merely a defensive convenience, but a way of controlling when and where threats become visible. Heroes who can reveal Shadows safely feel genuinely useful, particularly once the available enemy standees are already on the map and another reveal could cause existing creatures to activate immediately. There are a lot of knock-on affects like that in the game, where one bad token flip and boom! Disaster. Influence is even nastier. It permanently removes spaces from the board, pushes future enemies closer to the village, and can corrupt secured Vantage Points. Fill an entire map tile with Influence, and the game ends immediately, so the forest itself becomes another enemy that is gradually closing around you. Influence is added by various effects, mainly the aberrations appearing themselves, and also the end of round Great Beast cards. More on that soon. Defence is only half the job Despite appearances, Aberration does not feel like a traditional tower defence game. Monsters move towards the village and must be stopped, but simply killing everything will not win the game. Victory comes from advancing the Survival track by completing Objectives and securing Vantage Points, which makes this feel more like a tense turn-optimisation puzzle wrapped in tower defence clothing. Fighting the monsters can be secondary in most games. Crucial, unavoidable, fun, and tense. But secondary. That distinction matters because the most important decision is often not which monster to attack. You may need to ignore an approaching creature so that someone can reach a Vantage Point, assign a Villager or complete the current Objective before the Great Beast deck runs out. Every turn becomes a question of how much danger the group can tolerate while still making progress towards the only actual victory condition. Because if you don't focus on that, the game will defeat you. Time is very much of the essence in this game. Vantage Points are particularly effective because they offer both immediate and ongoing rewards. Securing one grants Survival (the only way to win the game) and unlocks another Villager assignment, potentially allowing the group to heal, draw Items, reveal Shadows, place fire or attack enemies. Villagers return to the centre each round, so allocating them becomes a small but useful worker-placement puzzle layered over the main crisis. Objectives are more uneven. Many encourage behaviour that fits naturally with what the group already wants to do, but others can feel much easier or harder depending on the current board state and player count. Because Survival depends so heavily on completing them, a favourable Objective can accelerate a victory while an awkward one may leave the group spending precious actions to replace it. Some items cards let you switch them out though, and in truth, most are easy enough so that even the troublesome are completed and replaced without too much hassle. Everything is fine until it absolutely is not After every Hero has acted, all visible Aberrations activate, followed by every Shadow. The Great Beast then strengthens an enemy type, resolves an event and usually throws more Shadows onto the map. These turns move quickly, but they can undo an entire round of careful planning with frightening efficiency. Each enemy piece moves one step closer towards your village, and if it enters it, you gain fear. You have very little fear to play with, and reach the top threshold - game over. There are numerous ways to lose. Too much Fear ends the game as we just mentioned, but so too does a full tile of Influence, if ever one of the four main tiles that make up the b are full of Influence tokens. Also, the death of any Hero ends the game and running out of Great Beast cards ends the game. You will only ever have four to nine of these cards, which equals the total number of rounds in that scenario before, yes you guessed it, death and failure! Deaths can arrive suddenly, especially when several enemies activate in sequence or an unlucky Shadow reveal causes another chain of attacks. The Great Beat cards are drawn at the end of each round, and each show three main things. First, which enemy is boosted. Such as above, on the Rapid Corruption card where you can see the level one cards are increased. These means switching the card shown to represent this card up a level. Each enemy has six levels and moving up through them will increase their attack, defence and special powers. You can see this below with the Raging Bear, through their level one, three and six cards. The Great Beast card will then show you a specific action to do, generally bad—but some can help, such as the final card here, which asks you to move a Strength chip into your bag from the discard, which may help your next turn. But of course, if you don't have one, damage! Finally, new enemies are spawned. So even the most effective team, who cleans up all Aberrations each round, will find new monsters to fight and occupy their time away from survival-gaining missions and objectives every round. And each enemy has only three standees for it, just one for the Monstrosities! And if you have to spawn one when you have no available standee to place, all other monsters of that type already on the board will activate, which will be three when a Horde. Activate means fight or move closer, so the knock-on effects really do escalate if you don't keep things under control. Taking damage is not entirely negative because Heroes gain Transformation cards as their health deteriorates and they reach certain milestones in their failing health. These mutations usually provide a useful new ability alongside an immediate penalty, creating a neat thematic tension between becoming stronger and moving closer to defeat. It is a clever system, although the harshest transformations can feel like another problem added to a situation that was already going badly. The result of all this is a game that frequently feels one mistake away from disaster. That pressure is exciting, and the group satisfaction when a plan comes together is genuine. Winning is less a huge cinematic celebration and more a collective exhale after squeezing through a rapidly closing gap. It can often be seen coming a few turns away, after a real tension that precedes that, so can sometimes fall a little flat. But losses often come completely out of the blue from a series of unfortunate cascading events! A long night, perhaps too many nights The scenario book is ambitious, with 16 scenarios of different lengths and complexity. Different enemy combinations, layouts, and special rules provide variety, and the Hero and Class system gives groups plenty of combinations to test. On paper, there is a substantial amount of game here. And eight games in, across six scenarios (lost a few and tried them again, you don't have to, but I am a completionist!), I can say I am quite hooked. I am less convinced that many groups will play enough sessions to see everything. The core rhythm remains largely unchanged, and the available actions do not vary dramatically from turn to turn. You move, attack, assign Villagers, reveal Shadows and attempt to complete Objectives, with the pressure changing more than the basic decisions. That repetition becomes clearer when several games are played close together. Aberration remains enjoyable, but the sense of discovery can fade a little. Longer scenarios give the bag-building and character progression more room to develop, although they also make the repeated action structure more noticeable. I enjoyed it immensely throughout, but I can see how others may not. There are other things to do: build barricades, escort villagers, secure outposts. It's a bit like Pandemic in this way. It's a co-op game. You and your friends against the board. You won't always have the exact same puzzle to work out, but it won't ever be that different, and your turns won't change that much. But you need to optimize your moves to win, and if you do, the sense of satisfaction can be great. If you enjoy that sort of thing, this could be for you. Pros Excellent tension, with several credible ways to lose and very little room for wasted turns. Strong integration between the theme, Shadows, fire, Influence and the collapsing map. Flexible Hero and Class combinations supported by satisfying bag building and cooperative Item use. Attractive artwork and perfectly serviceable standees in the standard edition. Cons Setup can feel lengthy compared with the duration of shorter scenarios. Actions and tactical patterns become repetitive across multiple plays. Objective difficulty can be uneven and may affect different player counts inconsistently. Reaching the end of the Survival track can feel more relieving than climactic. Final thoughts Aberration is a highly enjoyable cooperative game that understands how to create pressure. Its overlapping threats, hidden enemies and narrow victory path keep everyone involved, while Items and Villagers give players enough ways to help each other without drowning the game in complexity. The theme fits the mechanisms beautifully, and watching the forest physically disappear beneath Influence is both clever and deeply unpleasant. Its weaknesses appear over time rather than during the first few games. The scenario book promises considerable longevity, but the repeated actions and modest character development make me question how many groups will genuinely experience all of it. This is a game I would happily return to, but I would avoid playing it too frequently and exhausting its best tricks. Perhaps three scenarios at a time, each time. While it is on the table, though, Aberration is tense, engaging and often excellent. It may not deliver a thunderous final showdown, but surviving by the narrowest possible margin still feels like an achievement. Sometimes saving the village is less about glory and more about making sure nobody becomes the Beast’s evening snack.

I wanted to clarify the review policies we work to here at WBG. Any questions, please reach out to me directly at jim@whatboardgame.com I will happily answer any questions or concerns. 1. We do not accept payment for reviews or previews anymore, but did so on three occasions. I have in the past accepted payment for previews. It was for three Kickstarter prototypes that wanted coverage as a time priority. It was during the pandemic. I did not have the usual financial security from my day job and I accepted a small figure to create content for the publishers. It did not feel right and I have not done it again since, nor do I expect to ever do so again Although if that changes I will make that very clear. But I have to be honest and say a big part about why I accepted the money on these occasions, was that it was flattering that anyone would consider my channel worthy enough of payment. There was some vanity present, no doubt. I declined the reviews initially as I was too busy and they then replied and said, what about if they paid. In the coverage I did for them, I have marked all posts, reviews, and YouTube videos with very clear notifications. This is what it says. This is a paid preview. The publisher paid for this preview to be made. The payment did not affect our opinions but we want to acknowledge the payment here. This is at the very top of the preview and the title also included the word "Paid". The money did not make me feel more inclined to be favourable to the game, but I was aware of the unconscious bias it may have on me. I therefore offered minimal opinion and gave the games no score. As this was a preview, not a review, this would have been the case anyway. The content was really just a rules run down. In my opinion, all the money did was bump the game forward in the queue for me and force me to do the work sooner. I always have a long list of games I want to review or preview, and these three payments made me work on these games sooner as I felt obligated to get the content out asap for the publisher/designer as they had paid. But it did not make me say anything that I otherwise would not have said. This is another reason I don't want to accept payments again. It adds an unnecessary time pressure I would otherwise rather avoid. Other people who accept money for previews do so for their own reasons, and I have no issues with that. For me it is not an issue as long as it is declared. I just personally don't want to do this anymore. I love games and enjoy writing about them. That is why I am here. The website has a significant cost for hosting, domain names, email, etc. But that is my choice to pay. No one else should have to cover that, in my opinion, as this is not my job. If it were, that would be different. I sometimes accept sponsored posts about things that are not games and not reviews to cover these costs, which I always clearly mark as SPONSORED. 2. Our Previews have no scores and minimal opinion. If I am not playing a final copy of a game, where things may change, I feel this should be a preview and not review. The distinction for me means I cannot rate the game, and should avoid as much opinion on the game as possible. Simply as it is not a finished product. Although I do want it to be helpful, so I do include what I currently like and dislike about the game but mention where possible, parts of the game that may change in the finished version if I have that information. 3. We do receive free review copies of games. I personally cover hundreds of games a year and I could not afford to do that if I only reviewed the games I paid for myself. There are multiple review networks on Facebook where publishers reach out to people like me and ask for help. I also get contacted directly via email and on Instagram. I have also created relationships through meeting designers, publishers, and distributers at various conventions which leads to conversation where I am offered games. I accept these game under zero obligation other than to cover them on my channels at some point. I accept them so I can offer more reviews here than what I could otherwise afford. The increased reviews mean increased traffic to the site, but the site is not monetised in anyway, so it makes no difference to anyone or to me financially. I do get a kick out of our growth from a personal pride level, and feel a lot of this is down to the quantity of posting. Which is assisted in a big way by the review copies. So there is that benefit I suppose. But free review copies do not change my stance on a game. They do not compromise my integrity. They do not sway me either way. But I appreciate if others think they must. All I can say is that they don't do so consciously, but I am mindful of the unconscious bias. When I accept a review copy, I do not promise what I will do with the game. I do not promise timings, or any favourable opinions. Or any specifics on anything. I simply agree to post something, at some point. But the free game has to affect me somehow, right? Unconsciously, or consciously, there is some extra bias created here based on the gesture alone. However, I am mindful of that, and I am not about to sell my integrity for the price of a game. I second guess every point I make to make sure I mean what I say. Generally speaking, I can see the good in most games, although we have plenty of low score reviews on this website. But I think my main bias is my love of the hobby. I like a lot of games as I like games. The free game for me doesn't affect the score consciously. The fact that I have played a game, with friends or family, and got away from screens and work and the stresses of life. That is my biggest bias and would affect any game. When I see a game that looks bad, or simply appears to be not for me, I generally decline the opportunity to review it if one is presented to me. I do not have time to review every game. So, I pick and choose the ones that look good to me, or interest me in anyway. I am not always right with this early assessment, and some games I think may be great, turn out to be disappointing. Others I turn down, turn out to be great. But this early filter does mean that the majority of games I review are games I want to play and think are probably going to be good. I see it as my duty to find what makes each game enjoyable for a certain type of person when I review but never to the point of ignoring what doesn't work in the game. I will happily comment on any problems when I see them. But most games I review do OK here as that early filter gets rid of most of the bad games. I also feel there is way to much negativity in this hobby for what is essentially just adults enjoying a pastime playing with toys. Let's be honest. I love games. But I don't want to over analyse them. This is how I like to think when I review a game. What's good about them? What is bad? Is it fun? Who might this be for? That is how I like to cover games. I feel it gets to the core of a review a lot more quickly. I feel a review serves one main purpose. Helping people decide if a game is for them or not. There are obviously lots of other side benefits, but this is the one I want to focus on here. So this is why I do it like I do it. I would welcome any comments on the above. And am sure things will change and adapt as I learn more. Jim Cohen. May 21st 2023. Updated April 2024 Updated August 2026

Realm Of Reckoning WBG Score: 8/10 Player Count: 2-5 You’ll like this if you like: Rising Sun, SETI, and dark boards! Published by: IV Games Designed by: Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, Zac Dixon This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. Realm of Reckoning is a game that looks complicated, sounds complicated, and initially feels complicated. Then, somewhere during your first game, the noise begins to settle and you realise the core is surprisingly clean. You draft a card, gain something useful, tuck it into your player board, and prepare for the next reckoning. That simplicity sits beneath one of the more interesting scoring systems I have encountered recently. Players do not begin the game knowing exactly what will score, because those conditions are introduced gradually through the placement of monuments. You are not merely reacting to the rules of the game, you are actively helping to decide them. This is a game for two to five players, although three or four feels like the natural sweet spot. But I did enjoy the two-player variant. It plays across three ages, with only a small number of cards drafted during each one, so the whole experience moves much faster than the board and component count might suggest. My games have flown by, even when everyone has spent time agonizing over the reckonings. Which can happen. More on that soon! How To Setup Realm Of Reckoning Setup begins with the large central board, divided into five regions linked to the five pillars of the realm. Claim tokens are placed around these regions, monuments are arranged beside the board, and the various decks are prepared according to the player count. There is a fair amount to place, but the storage makes this easier than it first appears. Each player chooses one of the five factions and receives a player board, scoring markers, acolytes, a bidding dial and their starting resources. The factions begin with slightly different combinations of influence, wardens and acolytes, although the asymmetry is fairly light. And you just copy the images on your board so its all very simple. These differences provide a useful opening direction without locking anyone into a specific strategy. The action decks are then prepared for each of the three ages, with reckoning cards shuffled into them. A public final reckoning is also revealed, giving players some advance warning of one region that will definitely matter. Place the two-player tokens into the bag if you have two players only and set up the cards as in a three player game. Once the first hands are dealt, the game is ready to begin, although new players may still be studying the board and wondering where half the scoring spaces are! How To Play Realm Of Reckoning During each round, every player chooses one card from their hand and reveals it simultaneously. Cards are either action cards or reckoning cards. Once all cards are actioned, players pass their cards to the next player and choose one new card from their new hand. Action cards provide a central reward such as coins, acolytes, wardens, or mercenary cards, after which the card is tucked beneath the top or bottom of the player board. Each card gives you two options. The chosen side determines which influence track advances and which scoring symbols are collected. For example, below you can see the first card will let you add three acolytes to the board, anywhere you like, but ideally to places where there will be reckonings this era. And then you can tuck it either on the blue or red part of your player board, gaining the symbols shown. I won't go into the details of that here, but it's all about end-of-era scoring. Moving up different scoring tracks, and also scoring multipliers. Such as the blue scoring which could be about open eyes as seen on this first card, or closed eyes, as seen on the card on the right below. Only one of these will score. It could be neither, but cannot ever be both! Influence can also grant access to powerful artifacts, which provide ongoing bonuses while you remain ahead on the corresponding track. These can improve actions by granting extra coins, cards, acolytes, or influence, and they are often worth fighting over. This is done by moving up each of the area's tracks with these icons, and when you reach space three or higher, you can gain that area's artifact and begin to use it. But if another player catches you up or overtakes you, or you fall below two, then you will lose it. Reckoning cards pause the normal draft and trigger a hidden auction in a particular region. Players secretly bid using influence, acolytes, wardens, mercenary cards and coins, with the highest bidder choosing first from the available rewards. Players assess who bid the highest, and then they can chose their chosen reward in bid order. The most significant reward allows a monument to be placed, permanently introducing a new scoring condition that will trigger at the end of the current and future ages. Secondary rewards include coins, points, and places acolytes onto the board. The third place spot will often lose money, cards, or points. Play continues for three rounds. With a reckoning at the end of each round, and then each point-scoring monument placed thus far is scored. Therefore, a monument placed in the first round will score three times, whereas ones scored in the final era only score once. Game Experience of Realm Of Reckoning The player-defined scoring is comfortably the best part of Realm of Reckoning. A game may become focused on area control, influence tracks, coins, wardens, mercenary cards, or collecting sets of icons, depending entirely on which monuments are built. The timing matters too, because a monument placed in the first age will score three times, while one placed late may only matter once. But it changes each game; it's up to the players in the game. And it makes winning the bid on the reckoning so important, and every decision feel crucial. This creates a brilliant sense of ownership over the shape of each game. You can invest heavily in a resource and then attempt to make it score, but everyone can see what you are doing and may block you during the draft or outbid you during a reckoning. Alternatively, another player may introduce a condition that suddenly makes something you ignored painfully important. Or, they could just score the opposite of what you were building! The reckonings themselves are tense and clever, especially because coming second can still be perfectly acceptable while finishing last may carry a meaningful penalty. In the two-player mode, a neutral bidding token provides extra competition, escalating across the three ages and preventing the auctions from becoming predictable. It is simple, effective, and forces both players to respect every reckoning, even when the other player appears unable or unwilling to compete. Coming second is okay, coming third is bad! But winning is everything! Especially in the early rounds when you can set the agenda. But also, in the later rounds when the final scoring becomes so tight. That said, reckonings can feel like an interruption to the otherwise fast and enjoyable flow. The card draft moves quickly, turns are short and the game has a satisfying rhythm, only for everything to stop while players calculate their maximum bids and consider the rewards when the reckonings come. They are essential to the design and create its best moments, but the transition into them can still feel slightly awkward, and sometimes annoying. The production is excellent, even in the standard retail edition. The wooden components are chunky, attractive, and satisfying to handle, the player boards work beautifully, and almost everything arrives ready to play without sheets of cardboard to punch. The player boards are dual-layered underneath, so you can slide the cards into each spot in a very simple and satisfying way. That said, that's the first card. When it comes to adding the second, third, and beyond, it does start to get a little less simple and clean. As you can see above, they start to look less clean and tidy. And putting extra cards in is frankly annoying. You do need to see the icons, especially on the reds, and they slip about a but. It's not a big problem, just the effort into making the first card slide in perfectly versus how it feels for multiple cards does jar for me. Another exception to the otherwise wonderful production is the central board, which is dark, busy, and initially difficult to read, and it took me around three games to properly notice every monument space and scoring area. At first glance, it was just a mess of "things." It is now clear to me, but for players' first games, you do need to spend some time explaining the scoring options as well as the game, as that is such a huge variation and sets your strategy from turn one. Missing this from the teach can ruin a player's game if they don't understand the available options. And the dark, cluttered board does not help this at all. The places you can add a scoring monument are the square-shaped blank spaces with the brackets on the top and bottom. Just look below at how many there are, how scattered they are, and the amount of text around some of them explaining how they work. Pros Dynamic player-controlled scoring makes every game feel genuinely different. Reckonings create tension, interaction and meaningful resource decisions. Fast turns and only three ages keep the game moving quickly. Excellent components, storage and standard retail production. The two-player bidding system is clever, simple and surprisingly effective. Cons The central board is dark and initially confusing to read. Scoring locations and monument options take several games to fully absorb. Reckonings can interrupt the smooth rhythm of the card draft. Bidding can encourage calculation and analysis paralysis. Some scoring conditions may feel easier to exploit than others. Final Thoughts On Realm Of Reckoning Realm of Reckoning is a clever, interactive strategy game built around a genuinely strong central idea. Allowing players to decide which systems will score gives every action more weight and ensures that no two games develop in quite the same way. It rewards planning, but it also rewards flexibility, awareness and the ability to react when another player changes the rules beneath you. The game looks heavier than it plays, although it takes time to become fully comfortable with the board and its many scoring possibilities. Once that visual confusion fades, the underlying structure is fast, accessible and satisfying. The reckonings occasionally break the flow, but they also provide the drama and difficult decisions that make the game memorable. Three or four players is probably the ideal count, offering enough competition without stretching the playtime too far. However, the two-player mode works far better than I expected and still creates meaningful tension around every auction. Realm of Reckoning is not flawless, but it is inventive, beautiful and highly replayable.

Origin Story: Heroes & Villains WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Origin Story, trick-taking games, greater variety, and expansions that improve a game without complicating it. Published by: Stonemaier Games Designed by: Jamey Stegmaier, Pete Wissinger This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. Origin Story was already one of the more interesting modern trick-taking games. It combined familiar card play with tableau-building, stamina-powered abilities and a surprisingly effective superhero theme, letting you gradually construct the character you would become. You can read my review for the base game here. Heroes & Villains does not attempt to redesign any of that. Instead, it takes one small part of the game, adds considerably more variety, and makes the final chapter of your story feel a little more appropriate. This is a mini-expansion in every sense. It adds just 21 cards, introduces no major new rules and costs only £6/$7. However, those cards target the area of Origin Story that was always most likely to become familiar after repeated plays: the final superhero reveal. What Does Heroes & Villains Add? In the original game, each player received two superhero cards at the beginning of the game. These remained hidden as reference cards until the final round, when you chose one, revealed your completed identity and gained its ability. There were only ten superheroes in the base game, meaning regular players would inevitably start seeing the same identities again. Heroes & Villains adds seven new superheroes and 14 supervillains, increasing the identity deck from ten cards to 31. All of the old and new cards are shuffled together, and players are now dealt three possible identities rather than two. You still make your final choice at the beginning of round five, once your Story tableau is complete and you have seen your final hand. That is essentially the entire rules explanation. There is no separate villain deck, no additional phase and no complicated system to remember. Shuffle the cards in, deal everyone one extra option and play Origin Story as normal. A More Suitable Ending The addition of supervillains makes immediate thematic sense. Throughout Origin Story, players secretly decide whether they will act heroically by attempting to win tricks or villainously by trying to avoid every trick in the round. Despite this, the base game always concluded with everyone becoming a superhero, even if their journey had been filled with underhanded choices and villainous behaviour. Heroes & Villains allows those darker stories to reach a more fitting conclusion. You are not forced to become a supervillain simply because you previously chose the villain alignment, but having that possibility makes the identity system feel more complete. It closes a small thematic gap without changing how the game itself works. This is not a huge storytelling transformation, and the expansion never pretends that it is. You are still primarily playing a strategic trick-taking game rather than acting out an elaborate comic-book narrative. However, revealing a villain after spending several rounds manipulating tricks, avoiding victories and frustrating the heroes around the table simply feels right. More Choices, More Variety The most meaningful improvement is the increased variety. Moving from ten identities to 31 is a substantial increase, especially when each player sees only three during a game. It will take far longer before the final cards begin to feel repetitive, and multiplayer games no longer burn through such a large percentage of the available identities every time you play. Receiving three cards instead of two also gives you more flexibility. You can examine your possible final identities from the beginning, consider how they might interact with the Story cards you acquire, and gradually build towards whichever option appears most useful. You are still dependent on the cards you are dealt and the Story choices you are offered, but that uncertainty has always been part of Origin Story. The new abilities explore different corners of the game without becoming more complicated than the original cards. Some reward particular Story types, some interact with discarded cards, while others encourage unusual changes in alignment or approach. They do not create an entirely new strategic layer, but they give established players more combinations to discover and more reasons to adapt their plans. There will inevitably be situations where one identity appears much stronger than another. Origin Story contains random hands, random Story cards and circumstantial powers, so perfect balance was never a realistic goal. The important point is that you can see your three possibilities from the beginning and delay your final decision until you understand how your tableau and last hand have developed. Small Change, Fair Price It would be easy to criticise Heroes & Villains for being slight, but that would ignore both its price and its purpose. This is a £6 mini-expansion, not a large boxed release promising new modes, mechanisms or hours of additional content. It identifies a part of the game that could use more variety and expands it in the simplest possible way. You may wonder whether some of these identities should have been included in the original box. More final identities would certainly have improved the base game’s long-term variety, and the option to become a villain feels so natural that its absence now seems more noticeable. Even so, the original game remained a complete and highly enjoyable experience without them. The expansion also avoids a common problem with additional content. It does not make Origin Story slower, harder to teach or more difficult to store. The new cards can simply remain shuffled into the identity deck for every future game, and there is little reason to remove them once added. Is It Fun? Heroes & Villains makes Origin Story better, but it does so quietly. It will not completely change how you feel about the base game, and anyone who disliked its mixture of trick-taking and variable powers will not suddenly be converted. What it does is make the final round fresher, broaden the available strategies and give villainous journeys a more satisfying destination. The larger identity deck also restores some mystery to the final reveal. You are less likely to recognise every possible ability or anticipate exactly what another player might become. That uncertainty suits a game built around evolving powers, hidden alignments and sudden changes to established trick-taking rules. Most importantly, the expansion provides good value. For £6, it adds cards that will be used in every game, significantly increases one of the base game’s smallest decks and requires almost no additional explanation. It is difficult to ask much more from a mini-expansion. Pros Significantly increases the variety of final identities Supervillains provide a more fitting conclusion to darker stories Integrates seamlessly without adding complexity Excellent value at only £6/$7 Cons The change is small and will not transform the base game Some players may feel this content should have been included originally Final Thoughts Origin Story: Heroes & Villains is a modest expansion that knows exactly what it wants to achieve. It does not introduce a dramatic new mechanism or attempt to rebuild a game that was already working well. Instead, it adds variety, improves the thematic logic of the final reveal and gives players more interesting possibilities to consider throughout the game. For anyone who already owns and enjoys Origin Story, this is an extremely easy recommendation. The impact is subtle, but the price is equally small, and the new cards can remain permanently mixed into the game without adding rules or slowing anything down. Heroes & Villains may not rewrite Origin Story, but it gives far more stories the ending they deserve.

Duel Of Meloch WBG Score: 9 Player Count: 1–2 You’ll like this if you like: Scythe, Expeditions, highly asymmetric two-player games, tense objective races, and substantial strategy games that play in around 40 minutes. Published by: Stonemaier Games Designed by: Jamey Stegmaier This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. Duel of Meloch sounds like an experiment that should collapse under its own ambition. One player effectively plays Scythe, the other plays Expeditions, and both use different components, actions and strategic rhythms on the same shared board. Somehow, the two systems clash cleanly without either losing its identity. And its brilliant. And in this Duel of Meloch Board Game Review we will get to the route of why. That is the game’s greatest success. The Scythe player develops a faction through familiar top and bottom-row actions, while the Expeditions player moves a mech, plays cards, clears corruption and uses workers to activate abilities. This is not a loose hybrid borrowing familiar names and artwork, but a convincing duel between two recognisable games. It's quite literally Scythe v Expeditions. Everything has also been compressed into something that sets up quickly and plays in around 45 minutes. For me, Duel of Meloch is better than Expeditions and sits only just below Scythe, despite requiring far less time and effort to reach the table. That makes it an exceptionally easy game to recommend. What Is Duel of Meloch? Duel of Meloch is a standalone game set in the shared world of Scythe and Expeditions. One player controls the Scythe side, while the other follows the systems associated with Expeditions. The box includes a new Scythe faction and player mat, a new Expeditions mech, character and companion, a double-sided neoprene map, and new cards. Everything you need to play this game. And you can then use these new factions in Expeditions and Scythe accordingly. You do not need to own either original game, but both players need to understand the rules of the side they control. Ideally, one person already knows Scythe and the other knows Expeditions, allowing everyone to focus on the duel rather than learning two substantial games at once. The included one-page guides are excellent memory refreshers. However, I still found it useful to keep the original rulebooks from both Scythe and Expeditions nearby because questions about individual actions or abilities not covered in the rules for this game occasionally arose. The summaries help you return to each system quickly, but they cannot cover every detail. At our table, Scythe is comfortably the more familiar game because we have owned it longer and played a huge amount through The Rise of Fenris. Expeditions has naturally received fewer plays, and I suspect that will be common among many groups. This creates the first challenge before the game even begins: who gets to play Scythe? How To Play Duel of Meloch The game takes place on a compact board containing only ten locations and two lakes. Both sides of the neoprene mat have different layouts, changing routes, access points and likely areas of conflict. The smaller battlefield keeps both players close and makes every movement important. Players alternate turns, but each follows the action structure of their respective game. Scythe chooses a section of its player mat and performs the familiar top-row action, bottom-row action, both or neither. Expeditions instead moves its action token to perform combinations of moving, playing cards, gathering or refreshing. Both exactly the same as the original games they are based on. The shared board supports both rulesets without forcing them into one system. Terrain, rivers, resources and the Factory matter to Scythe, while numbered locations, corruption and Gather benefits belong to Expeditions. It looks busy initially, but each player soon filters out the information that does not concern them. You focus just on what matters to you, and the matrix comes into complete clarity. The game ends immediately when someone places their fourth star on the Triumph Track. There is no final scoring, no popularity multiplier and no broad Expeditions point tally. Everything is focused into one direct and increasingly urgent race. The Triumph Track The Triumph Track is the heart of Duel of Meloch. Each side has different requirements for placing stars, but every Scythe objective is paired against one belonging to Expeditions. Once either player claims a category, the linked objective becomes unavailable to their opponent. If you are collecting Encounter tokens to try and get that star, and the other player claims it first, you are out of luck! The Scythe player may be trying to deploy all four mechs, complete upgrades, control enough territories, or reach a particular level of power, while the Expeditions player might instead chase workers, corruption, guile, solved quests, or developed cards. You are therefore always watching your opponent rather than quietly progressing along a separate track. They are different goals, but on a shared Triumph track with only one space for each star. An objective may not suit your current strategy, yet pursuing it can still be worthwhile if your opponent is close to claiming the paired category. This creates excellent moments where you abandon the most efficient action to deny something more dangerous. The race becomes as much about timing and disruption as personal progress. The two sides also place stars differently. Scythe claims one immediately upon meeting its requirement, while Expeditions usually needs to complete the condition and then use a Boast action. Combat is the main exception, allowing Expeditions to place that star immediately after winning. This gives the Scythe player the ability to accelerate suddenly. A player may appear behind before completing several developments quickly and placing stars across a short sequence of turns. The visible score does not always show how close Scythe is to victory. Every game I have played has ended with a margin of one star. The winner reached four first, but the losing player was always close enough to believe another turn might have changed everything. That creates tense finales where every action feels dangerous. The Meloch cards work brilliantly here. They help keep the race close by rewarding the player whose opponent has just placed a star. The trailing player draws a card, chooses its orientation, and gains the benefits facing towards them, which may include power, coins, or workers. Does Scythe Have An Advantage? Duel of Meloch feels balanced enough to create a close contest every time, but Scythe has won more often in my experience. I would not call the game fundamentally unbalanced because the margins remain so small. However, I do think it leans slightly towards Scythe when both players are similarly experienced. The clearest advantage is star placement. Scythe claims objectives immediately, while Expeditions often needs another action, the correct location or its special ability to Boast. In a race to only four stars, that extra step can easily decide the game. Combat also favours the Scythe player, because when using the Expeditions character, you will control only one mech and may therefore use only one combat card. Whereas, as Scythe, you can bring several mechs and its character into the same battle, potentially adding multiple cards. Expeditions must be far more cautious once Scythe develops a meaningful military presence. Fortunately, combat cannot dominate everything because only one or two stars are available from fighting, depending on which side of the Triumph Track is used. The Expeditions player also compensates with stronger movement and can cross rivers without the same development Scythe requires. Its mech can reach map tokens quickly and gain their immediate rewards. Even there, Scythe appears to have the easier associated objective. Expeditions needs more map tokens, while Scythe may claim the paired category after only two encounters, and I have seen Scythe win that race in every game so far. The Expeditions player still gains the token benefits, so those actions are never completely wasted. Corruption creates another difficult decision because the included mech may spend it to Boast, Meld or Upgrade. Those actions are extremely useful, but every spent token makes the corruption objective harder to complete. You are constantly choosing between long-term progress and immediate momentum. Combat And Control Combat matters more here than in a standard two-player game of Scythe. The smaller map forces both players into each other’s path, while a battle may award one of the four stars needed to win. Even players who prefer to avoid conflict will struggle to remain separate for long. I have seen many games of Scythe run without much combat, if any. Here, there is always at least one battle. Sharing a location does not automatically start battle. Scythe must finish a movement action alongside the Expeditions mech and choose to attack, while Expeditions initiates combat through Vanquish. This gives both players some control over when confrontation occurs. Players secretly choose how much power to spend and may add combat cards, with the attacker winning ties, just like in the original Scythe game. Those cards can also be discarded outside battle to gain a separate benefit printed in the corner. That dual use creates good decisions between immediate utility and future protection. The system still favours Scythe once several mechs are deployed, but the advantage usually shapes movement rather than deciding the whole game. Expeditions may change route, abandon a location or delay an objective simply because Scythe is nearby. The threat of attack often matters as much as the battle itself. Scythe And Expeditions, Only Faster Scythe is one of my favourite games, but its standard two-player experience has never shown the design at its best. The original board is large enough for both players to remain apart, reducing pressure around territory and combat. Duel of Meloch fixes that by shrinking the battlefield and making every objective directly competitive. The Scythe side feels sharper as a result. Its familiar engine remains intact, but every development has a more immediate purpose because it advances a star, denies a category or threatens the opponent. It reaches the interesting decisions far faster than full Scythe. This is not better than Scythe for me because the original offers a broader strategic arc and a stronger sense of developing an entire faction against others trying to do the same. However, Duel of Meloch captures enough of that experience to feel remarkably satisfying in around 45 minutes. That is a significant achievement. Components And Presentation The production is excellent, with excellent miniatures, clear cards and attractive wooden pieces throughout. The new Constantinople faction fits naturally into Scythe, while Voyager, Nikte and Nohoch look entirely at home in Expeditions. Everything reaches the polished standard expected from Stonemaier Games. The double-sided neoprene board is particularly striking, with Jakub Rozalski’s artwork providing the same mixture of nature, machinery and unease found across the series. Both layouts offer meaningful variety by changing routes and tactical pressure points. This is not simply the same battlefield with different scenery. However, my mat curls when one particular side is used. Despite repeated attempts to flatten it, the edges still lift enough to be distracting during play. It may have benefited from being slightly thicker or heavier. That is my only significant production complaint. The iconography is clear, the box is well organised and much of the new material can also be used in Scythe or Expeditions. Existing owners therefore gain more than a single standalone duel. Replayability The two maps and double-sided Triumph Track provide useful variety before any outside content is added. Different objective pairings change priorities, while each layout alters movement and likely points of conflict. Repeated games should not follow exactly the same path. Existing Scythe factions and player mats can also be imported, while Expeditions owners may use different mechs, characters, companions and many original discovery cards. There are even variants for Scythe against Scythe, Expeditions against Expeditions and tournament play. As a purely standalone product, another Scythe faction or player mat would have strengthened the package. Expeditions gains natural variety from its cards, while the included Scythe setup may become more predictable. Pros Both sides genuinely feel like their parent game while playing in around 45 minutes. The contested Triumph Track creates tense decisions and consistently close finishes. Strong interaction, dramatic comebacks and meaningful combat keep both players involved. Excellent production and compatibility provide substantial replayability. Cons Scythe appears slightly favoured, particularly in combat and star placement. Expeditions has a smaller card market and a harder route to converting progress into stars. Both players need prior knowledge of their chosen system Duel of Meloch Board Game Review: Final Thoughts Duel of Meloch should feel like an awkward collection of incompatible parts, yet it becomes a remarkably cohesive two-player game. Both sides retain the identity of their parent design, while the shared map, contested objectives and combat system create enough common ground for a proper duel. The final result feels focused rather than compromised. Scythe builds an engine, develops a faction and places stars with increasing efficiency. Expeditions explores, manipulates cards, clears corruption and adapts to a more tactical puzzle. Both feel authentic, which is far more important than the novelty of seeing them together. The balance appears to lean towards Scythe, but every game I have played has remained extremely close. Expeditions is easier to learn but harder to master, while Scythe can turn progress into stars more efficiently. Those differences create tension rather than ruining the contest. For me, Duel of Meloch is better than Expeditions and only slightly behind Scythe. Its rapid setup and shorter playing time mean it may reach the table more often than either parent game. That is perhaps the strongest recommendation I can give it. Duel of Meloch compresses two substantial games into one small battlefield without losing what makes either compelling.

Altay: Seafarers Expansion WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count 2-4 You’ll like this if you like: Deck building, area control, asymmetric factions, exploration, and expansions that feel like the final piece of the puzzle. Published by: Ares Games Designed by: Roberto Di Meglio, Fabio Maiorana This is a free review copy of the game. See our review policy here Altay: Dawn of Civilisation was already a strong game. Its mix of deck building, area control, asymmetric factions and light civilisation development gave it a distinctive feel, even if the theme sometimes faded behind the cards and resources. I gave the base game an eight out of ten because, with the right group and faction mix, it offered an enjoyable race to expand, develop and get your settlements onto the board before anyone else could do the same. You can read about that here. Seafarers takes that solid foundation and completes it. It adds a new board, proper sea travel, ships, crews, naval support, new cards and a fifth faction in the mysterious Waterfolk. None of these additions completely transform Altay into a different game, but together they fill a gap that was always visible on the original board. The sea is no longer decorative space sitting between the interesting parts. It becomes another route, another weapon and another opportunity. This feels less like an optional side module and more like the final section of the game arriving slightly late. What Does Altay: Seafarers Add? Seafarers introduces three major additions. The first is the Forgotten Sea, an entirely new board built around four sea zones and a collection of harbour territories. The second is a full set of seafaring rules, allowing players to build ships, move them around the board, travel between distant territories and support battles from the water. Finally, the expansion adds the Waterfolk, a completely new faction that manipulates the sea without using conventional ships or crews. They have Dolphins! The expansion includes ships for each of the original factions, crew tokens, Wavebending Dolphin tokens, new starting cards, additional market cards and new achievement cards. You can use these systems with the new Forgotten Sea board or add them to the original board, giving you a welcome amount of flexibility over how much change you want. The new board is the main event. It immediately gives the game a stronger sense of geography, with players beginning in harbour territories and looking across the water towards islands, remote land and potential targets. It also makes the board feel more connected. Areas that would previously have been far apart can now become neighbours through a shared sea zone, provided you have the ships, or Dolphins, to reach them. How Does Seafaring Work? Each original faction adds a Shipwright card to its starting deck. When played, this places one of your ships into a sea zone adjacent to one of your settlements. Ships can later be spent to build settlements on neighbouring lands across the shores, or launch attacks across the water, effectively treating territories connected to the same sea zone as adjacent. Travelling farther requires multiple ships, with one spent for each sea zone crossed. This allows you to leap across the map, reach isolated territories or threaten another player from a direction they may not have expected. It creates new possibilities without requiring a completely separate naval phase or a pile of additional rules. Ships can also support regular combat. Any ship in a sea zone adjacent to the battle can be removed to add one strength to an attack or defence. Ships used for sailing cannot also be used to boost that same attack, so you still need to plan ahead rather than simply throwing every boat into one giant assault. Crews make ships more efficient because you may remove the crew instead of losing the entire ship when it is used. This all sounds like it might turn Altay into a combat-heavy game, but it does not. Combat is not suddenly dominant, nor does every game descend into fleets smashing into each other. Each player only has three ships, and you use them for travel more than anything else. Instead, fighting becomes a little more interesting because the direction of an attack is less predictable. Players can posture from the sea, protect a coastline or create a route to territory that would previously have been inaccessible. The base game’s combat could occasionally feel blunt. You were next to someone or you were not, and your deck either supported a fight or it did not. Seafarers introduces more nuance. A ship might be used to travel, defend, threaten, settle or simply force an opponent to think twice. That extra layer gives the board more life without changing the heart of the game. The New Cards The additional action cards are built to support sea travel, but most of them have enough flexibility to avoid feeling completely useless when your plans change. Shipwrights place ships, while Sailors can move a ship, add a crew or act as Warriors during combat. Explorers are particularly useful because they can either provide three coins or resettle one of your settlements into an adjacent territory. That movement can be combined with sailing, creating some clever ways to relocate across the map without building an entirely new settlement. Astronomy gives players another route onto the water. Once completed, it lets you discard a card to gain a temporary sailing effect each turn, even without an available ship token. It is a useful piece of technology for players who want access to the sea without packing their deck with too many seafaring cards. Although, I did already have this form the Seafarers promo mini expansion. This does create a potential concern. Altay already asks players to manage a deck where the wrong combination of cards can leave you with resources or actions that do not line up neatly. Adding more card types risks making that problem worse. Some players have criticised Seafarers for increasing deck bloat without fixing those occasional dead turns, and that criticism is understandable. However, I did not find the new cards as disruptive as that argument suggests. Sailors have multiple uses, Explorers provide money when movement is not helpful, and the sea is relevant enough on the new board that Shipwrights rarely feel completely disconnected from the rest of your plan. You still need to build your deck carefully, but that was already true in the base game. The optional Trading rule is also compulsory when using the new board, which helps by allowing unwanted resources to be converted into coins. That does not remove every awkward hand, but it gives players another way to turn excess production into something useful. We always played with this anyway. The Waterfolk The Waterfolk are the expansion’s most exciting addition. They do not use ships or crews at all, instead controlling the sea through Wavebending tokens and their unusual starting cards. A Wavebender can place a token in one of your territories, an adjacent sea zone or another sea zone that already contains one of your tokens. Removing that token can then produce any resource or, when removed from the sea, create the same effect as spending a ship. The Wavesinger can either produce culture or replay an action card from your discard pile, giving the Waterfolk excellent flexibility and the potential to build a strong, healthy deck. Their strength is not simply travelling across the water. They are good at resource generation, recovering useful actions and making the most of cards that have already passed through their hand. They can feel smooth and efficient when played well, particularly once the discard pile offers several useful options. The Waterfolk feel balanced, but they are not identical in power or rhythm to the original factions. That is the point. Altay’s factions have always encouraged different approaches, so performance can vary significantly depending on your preferred style. A player who likes direct conflict may immediately understand the Firefolk, while someone who enjoys flexibility, resource control and deck efficiency may get far more from the Waterfolk. That variation is not a balance problem so much as part of Altay’s identity. The factions are meant to feel different, and the Waterfolk continue that philosophy rather than sitting safely in the middle. They also bring purple dolphin-shaped Wavebending tokens to the table, which may not affect strategy but are objectively delightful. A Better Board The Forgotten Sea board is a major improvement because it makes the entire game feel more purposeful. The original Altay board had islands and large areas of water, but without the full seafaring system, some of that space felt underused. I had already played with the earlier Seafarers promotional material, so I had seen a small part of what sea travel could contribute. The full expansion makes that idea feel complete. Starting from harbour territories immediately draws attention towards the water. The central islands and distant shores create obvious points of interest, while naval routes make expansion less predictable. A player can no longer assume that a strip of sea provides safety or that a distant opponent will remain distant for the entire game. This improves the race element as much as the area control. Sometimes the best use of a ship is not attacking another player but reaching a valuable territory before they do. The expansion gives you more ways to place settlements, collect conquest markers and chase the game-ending condition without making the experience significantly heavier. There are more decisions, but the rules remain straightforward. Build ships, move them, spend them to cross sea zones or use them in combat. Once everyone understands that basic loop, the additional complexity settles into the background. Does It Make Altay Better? Yes, comfortably. Well, its now an 8.5 for me, and was previously an 8! The base game already had the ingredients of something very good, but parts of the board and theme felt slightly unfinished. Seafarers brings exploration and maritime expansion into the centre of the experience, which makes Altay feel more like the civilisation game its presentation promises. It still remains a fairly light and abstract game. You are not managing complex trade networks, researching enormous technology trees or running a historical empire across several hours. The theme can still disappear when players focus on icons, resources and efficient card combinations. What Seafarers does is make that abstraction more interesting. Sea zones change relationships between territories, ships create new tactical choices, and the Waterfolk introduce a faction that genuinely approaches the game from another angle. It adds more variety without burying the accessible core beneath too many new systems. The expansion also improves interaction without making conflict overwhelming. Players have more ways to reach each other and more options when a fight begins, but warfare remains only one possible route. A strong player can still win by building efficiently, developing technologies and racing to place settlements. The Controversy Some players are understandably unhappy about the way this content has been released. There are claims that parts of the seafaring system were originally included with some copies of the base game, then removed and later repackaged as an expansion. I don't know if this was the full expansion we see here, or the small promo expansion I got with my copy. But it has caused some upset. I cannot confirm exactly what happened during production, and I do not want to present speculation as fact. However, it is easy to understand why players who already received some seafaring content might resent paying again for an expanded version of it. My own reaction is more straightforward. I already had the promotional Seafarers cards and had experimented with a smaller version of the system, but I am still glad to have the complete expansion. The new board, Waterfolk faction, crews and full selection of naval cards provide substantially more than those earlier promotional components. Whatever the production history, the game in front of me is better with Seafarers included. Pros The Forgotten Sea board makes better use of the water and creates more interesting routes. Ships add tactical depth without making combat dominant. The Waterfolk provide a distinctive and flexible fifth faction. Sailors and Explorers offer useful options beyond basic sea travel. Sea movement strengthens both the race and area-control elements. The expansion feels integrated rather than bolted onto the base game. Wavebending dolphins are excellent. Cons Additional card types can increase the risk of awkward or unfocused hands. Players who already own promotional seafaring content may feel they are buying some small parts of this twice. The factions remain highly dependent on player style and familiarity. Anyone who disliked the abstract nature of the base game will not find it transformed here. It adds another layer to a game some players already felt could suffer from deck bloat. Altay: Seafarers Review: Final Thoughts Altay: Seafarers is exactly what I want from an expansion. It does not replace the base game’s central systems or add complexity simply for the sake of having more things in the box. It looks at what was already there, spots the underused sea and turns it into something meaningful. Ships make travel, settlement and combat more flexible. The Forgotten Sea board creates better routes and more interesting relationships between players. The Waterfolk bring a clever new faction built around resource generation, Wavebending and using the discard pile to keep their deck working efficiently. There are legitimate concerns about adding more cards to a game where unfocused deck building can already create dead actions. There are also fair questions around whether some of this content should have been included from the start. Neither issue changed the experience enough to reduce my enthusiasm. The original Altay felt like a strong game with one conspicuous space still waiting to be filled. Seafarers sails directly into that gap and makes itself at home. The base game was an eight. With this expansion, Altay becomes an 8.5 out of ten for me.

Buy Here - Wingspan Pocket WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count:1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Monopoly Deal, Wingspan, Forest Shuffle Published by: Stonemaier Games Designed by: Elizabeth Hargrave This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. Wingspan has never exactly been a small game. It looks pretty and accessible, but its actually a low-midweight game. Good for new players, but I would not suggest you start people on this! I tried! But between the player boards, bird cards, food tokens, eggs, dice tower and enough avian artwork to fill a particularly ambitious nature documentary (especially with all the expansions!) it demands a fair amount of space and time before the first bird has even taken flight. Wingspan Pocket looks at all of that, trims away almost everything it can, then a little more, and asks a simple question: how much Wingspan can you squeeze into half an hour? The answer, rather impressively, is quite a lot. And I do mean 30 mins, max! So are we the baby birds in this picture? Wingspan Pocket is not simply the original game shoved into a smaller box. It keeps the familiar birds, eggs, food costs, tucked cards and tableau building, but reorganises them into a much faster, and surprisingly, sometimes more satisfying engine-building game. You build a single row of just six birds, activating that entire row on every turn. The result is a game that gets moving quickly, rewards clever sequencing and gives you the satisfying feeling of watching an engine fire repeatedly without asking you to surrender an entire evening. What Is Wingspan Pocket? Designed by the O.G. (Original Genus-spotter) Elizabeth Hargrave, Wingspan Pocket is a lighter and faster reimagining of Wingspan for one to five players. Games typically take between 25 and 35 minutes, although experienced players should comfortably bring that time down once everyone understands the iconography. I have had games in under 20 minutes already and I am only on game 8. Each card is double-sided, showing a bird on one side and food on the other. This is an elegant piece of design because the same deck creates both the birds available to play and the resources needed to play them. It cuts down considerably on the number of components while also creating meaningful decisions. Gone are the dice, dice tower, and food tokens. Cards replace them all. And it's the birds' cards back that did it. Genius. Every card taken as food is a bird that will not enter the game, while every bird added to your hand is one fewer resource available for future turns. You cannot switch them over. Meaning it will take a long time to see all of the 106 birds in this game. Stunning art as usual with the series You begin the game with six cards. In the standard game, two become birds and four become food. The advanced setup allows you to choose which sides to use, and this is comfortably the better way to play once everyone understands the basics. But for anyone who has played Wingspan before, I would start with this from the off. Your opening birds matter enormously because the earliest cards in your row will potentially activate on nearly every turn for the rest of the game. Choose which birds to keep from your opening hand wisely! Place each card face up on the direction you choose, in front of you. You will always have your "hand" face up on the table like this. Give each player a Nest card with one egg in it and place this above your hand. Next to this is where you will move cards from your hand into your active row. Give everyone a player aid, and set up two random goals (again if you are playing the advanced version, but go for it from the off I say!). You are now ready to play. How To Play Wingspan Pocket On your turn, you choose one of three straightforward brown actions on your nest card. You can play a bird by paying its food and egg cost, discarded accordingly, and playing your bird from your hand into your active row next to your nest or any previously played bird cards. You can also draw any two cards from the shared display, be that two food, two birds, or one of each and add to your hand. Or finally, you can lay up to three eggs on different card, so long as your cards have space for them. Each card clearly shows how many eggs it can hold. After resolving that action, you move along your entire row and activate each applicable brown bird power of any bird card you have played, even ones played this turn. Some birds provide food, others draw cards, lay eggs, tuck cards for points or interact with neighbouring players. Green abilities offer permanent benefits rather than activating each turn, such as allowing certain food types to act as wild resources or reducing the cost of future birds. Green powers often offers buying alternatives The crucial difference from traditional Wingspan is that the bird you have just played can activate immediately. You do not place it into your engine and wait for a future turn to enjoy it. It joins the row, triggers alongside everything else and begins contributing straight away. This creates a wonderfully immediate rhythm. You take your main action, run through your flock and collect a satisfying stream of little bonuses. As the row grows, each turn becomes more rewarding. A simple egg action might also provide food, draw a bird and tuck another card for points. By the final few turns, even the most basic action can spark a useful chain of effects. If you can get a good combination of cards! The end of the game is triggered when somebody plays their sixth bird. Everyone receives the same number of turns, then players score the printed value of their birds, one point for each egg, one point for each tucked card and any points earned through the optional scoring goals. You can track this easily but switching over the next card to the handy scoring side on the reverse. More space saving and clever game design! Small Flock, Big Engine - Wingspan Pocket Card Game Review The smartest thing Wingspan Pocket does is make six birds feel like enough. Initially, a row of only six cards sounds restrictive. Traditional Wingspan gives you three habitats to develop and space for considerably more birds, so reducing everything to a single short line could easily have produced an experience that felt thin. Instead, the constant activation of your row means those six birds work exceptionally hard. I do sometimes end a game wanting more turns, but the game is quick enough to rack up and go again! An early bird might trigger repeatedly throughout the game, providing far more value than many cards would in the original. This makes the order of your birds important. A food-producing bird placed at the start of your row might feed directly into another ability that spends that food to draw cards. A bird that draws a particular resource can be followed by one that tucks that resource for points. When these little combinations come together, Wingspan Pocket delivers a surprising number of those delicious engine-building moments in a very short space of time. Not for eating! There is also very little downtime within your own turns. You are constantly collecting something, converting something or preparing for the next bird. Some abilities also benefit opponents or copy powers from neighbouring players, helping everyone remain involved even when it is not their turn. Of course, it is not as expansive as Wingspan, but it is more immediate, a lot easier to get to the table, and way less down time. The original gradually develops towards its larger combinations. Wingspan Pocket hands you a small engine and encourages you to stamp repeatedly on the accelerator from turn one! A Clever Use Of Cards The double-sided cards are more than a component-saving gimmick. They produce some of the game’s most interesting decisions. When choosing cards from the display, you can take two birds, two food cards or one of each. Food cards frequently show more than one possible resource, giving you some flexibility when paying costs. Two unwanted food cards can also be exchanged as a wild resource, reducing the chance of becoming completely stuck. However, taking a card as food means its bird side has effectively disappeared from the game. You may later discover that the berry you casually collected was hiding the exact bird another player needed. Not every decision will feel that dramatic, but the system creates variety without requiring separate decks, tokens and dice. It also makes Wingspan Pocket incredibly easy to set up. Open the box, shuffle the cards, create the display and you are nearly ready to play. The player nests clearly show the available actions and double as scoring tracks at the end, while reference cards explain the game’s icons. It is a clean and impressively economical production. A Little More Luck In The Air The main cost of condensing Wingspan into half an hour is increased luck. Because your row activates so frequently, an excellent opening bird can provide a considerable advantage. A card that produces an egg or draws a flexible resource every turn will normally be more useful than one relying on a specific symbol appearing in the display. The advanced setup helps by allowing players to choose their opening birds, but it does not entirely remove the possibility of one player assembling a powerful combination earlier than everyone else. Some powers are also dependent on particular food appearing in the market. When the fish, grain or berry you need refuses to emerge, a bird can sit uselessly in your row for several turns. That does not ruin the game, especially when the entire experience is over in around half an hour, but it can make certain sessions feel noticeably less satisfying than others. The short duration is important here. A fortunate opening combination would be much harder to forgive in a two-hour game. In Wingspan Pocket, a weaker engine usually leaves me wanting another attempt rather than regretting the time spent playing. Luckier games will not suit everybody, but the speed keeps the frustration under control. Is It Really A Pocket Game? The box is certainly smaller than Wingspan, but the name may be making promises that most trousers cannot fulfil. More importantly, it is worth recognising that the game still requires a reasonable amount of table space. Every player can have six birds, several food cards, eggs and tucked cards in front of them, while the central display also contains separate rows of birds and food. At four or five players, this is not something you will be able to play on a train tray or a tiny café table. Classic and clear iconography from Stonemaier The double-sided cards reduce the size of the box, but food cards laid across the table can occupy more space than a small pile of tokens would. Wingspan Pocket is significantly more portable than Wingspan, but it is better described as travel-friendly than genuinely pocket-sized. That feels like a marketing line more than the truth. Does It Replace Wingspan? No, but I do not think it is trying to. Wingspan remains the richer, more varied experience. It gives you more birds, more paths to explore and more time to shape a detailed tableau. Add an expansion and it becomes a substantially deeper game than anything Wingspan Pocket is attempting to provide. Wingspan Pocket serves a different purpose. It is the version I would choose when I want the pleasure of building and activating a bird engine but only have half an hour. It is easier to teach, much faster to prepare and considerably less intimidating for new players. It may even suit some people better than the original. Players who enjoy Wingspan’s setting and card play but find the full game too slow could discover that this is exactly the version they wanted. The repeated row activations provide constant rewards, while the six-bird limit ensures the game ends before the system has time to drag. Experienced Wingspan players may initially stumble over some of the changes. Activating the whole row after playing a bird feels unusual, and the optional scoring goals are slightly less intuitive than they should be. Rather than simply scoring qualifying birds, many goals score the eggs placed upon those birds. It is not complicated, but it is easy to forget during an early game. The handy double-sided nest/scoring card Components And Presentation Wingspan Pocket retains the beautiful presentation associated with the series. The bird illustrations are colourful and detailed, the cards are clearly organised and the iconography becomes easy to read after a few turns. The card stock, as always with Stonemaier, is great. The small pink eggs have a pleasant sparkling finish, and the feather-shaped activation marker is a charming touch. The nests are particularly clever, acting as action references during play before flipping over to become scoring tracks at the end. There are 106 birds from around the world, so the game avoids feeling like a reduced selection pulled solely from the original box. There is still plenty to discover, even if the mechanical variety cannot compete with the enormous card pool now available for Wingspan. Pros Rapid turns with very little wasted time. Constant row activation creates satisfying engine-building combinations. Double-sided bird and food cards are clever and efficient. Easy to teach, set up and pack away. Early bird placement creates meaningful sequencing decisions. Feels distinct enough from Wingspan to justify existing alongside it. Maintains the artwork and presentation quality of the wider series. Cons More luck-driven than Wingspan. Strong opening birds can create an early advantage. Market-dependent powers occasionally fail repeatedly. The optional scoring goals can be easy to misunderstand. Uses more table space than the word “Pocket” suggests. Players wanting the depth of full Wingspan may find it too slight. So much info on one card, and yet it still looks elegant! Wingspan Pocket Review: Final Thoughts Wingspan Pocket understands that making a game smaller should involve more than removing components. It identifies the most immediately satisfying part of Wingspan, building a row of birds and watching their powers combine, then accelerates that experience until it fits comfortably inside half an hour. The result is fast, rewarding and far more substantial than its six-card tableau initially suggests. The double-sided cards are an inspired way of combining birds and resources, while activating the whole row every turn ensures there is almost always something enjoyable happening. It is luckier than Wingspan, occasionally restrictive and nowhere near as deep. It is also quicker to teach, easier to transport and often more exciting from the very first turn. It will not replace the original for players who love constructing a sprawling aviary, but it does not need to. This is Wingspan for lunch breaks, family holidays and those evenings when you want an engine builder without the usual commitment. In this Wingspan Pocket Card Game Review, we are not saying that you can now fit Wingspan inside an actual pocket, but it squeezes an impressive amount of game into that little box to make you feel that maybe you don't need bigger pockets.