Sponsored Post - This is a sponsored post and contains sponsored links Sweepstakes casinos couldn’t be any more popular in the US at the moment, offering users the chance to play casino-style games for rewards like gift cards and cash transfers. They’re a big hit with casino fans, casual gamers, and even board game fanatics, and the good news with sweepstakes casinos is that they’re jam-packed with plenty of table games. You can play them for free using ‘Gold Coins’ or for prizes with ‘Sweeps Coins’, so let’s unpack which sweepstakes casino table games you should try out first. What is a Sweepstakes Casino? According to industry experts SweepsKings.com, a sweepstakes casino is a new type of online casino with a unique twist: no direct cash wagers. Instead, you play with entirely virtual coins: ⛁ Gold Coins let you play any of the available games for free and climb fun leaderboards ⛁ Sweeps Coins are more valuable and can be exchanged for prizes, such as cash transfers to your bank or gift cards (for example, you might exchange 100 SCs for a $100 cash transfer) These casinos also come with features like daily missions, challenges, free-entry tournaments, giveaways, and more, so they’re much more fun and interactive than regular online casinos, which is why Gen Z and Millennial players have been signing up in huge numbers. Once you actually sign up with a sweepstakes casino, you’ll find that most of them have at least 1,000+ games. Slots are by far the most popular category, but there are also plenty of table games on offer, too. These are the ones we rank at the top. Best Sweepstakes Casino Table Games 1. Roulette Roulette is an absolute must-play game in any sweepstakes casino. You simply pick red or black, or odd or even, and wait to see where the roulette ball lands. It couldn’t get much easier, and you can even pick from different variations of it depending on which sweepstakes casino you’re playing in. Sweepstakes like WOW Vegas offer Live Roulette, Auto Roulette, Gravity Roulette, Royal Roulette, and other top picks, so you don’t have to play the same version of roulette each time. If you’re a beginner player, it’s especially recommended you start out with roulette. 2. Baccarat With Baccarat, you have an incredibly easy card game where only three types of bets are possible: Player, Banker, or Tie. During the game, two cards each are dealt to the Player and the Banker, and whoever’s hand is closest to 9 wins. The probability of the Player’s hand winning is 44.6%, the Banker is 45.9%, and a tie is 9.5%. You can pick any outcome you think is going to happen before the game starts but you’ll generally find that most players in your lobby go for either the Player or the Banker to win rather than betting on a tie. 3. Keno Have you tried Keno before? It’s a lottery-style game that the likes of Chumba Casino have now started offering, giving players a pool of 80 numbers to pick from (you usually select up to 20 of those from a grid). You then win based on how many of your chosen numbers match the drawn ones, and payouts increase the more numbers you successfully get right. It’s a great game for lottery fans to play, as well as those who want something fun and simple to play inside sweepstakes casinos. 4. Poker Poker is the hardest table game to play in any sweepstakes casino. It requires thought, strategy, and knowledge of all the different poker hands, so make sure you only play with Sweeps Coins after you’ve practiced with Gold Coins first. A great starting point is the exclusive Stake Poker from Stake.us, which even has tournaments for you to enter. And whichever sweepstakes casino you use, you’ll generally find that a typical lobby, whether you’re playing with GCs or SCs, will have between 3 and 8 players. Prize pools tend to be bigger than any other sweepstakes table game as well, so if you brush up on your poker skills, it’s absolutely worth playing. 5. Blackjack If poker is a little too difficult for you, blackjack is the perfect step down. It’s just the right blend of skill, strategy, and knowing when to make the right move, with the aim being to get a hand total closer to 21 than the dealer’s. The dealer will have 1 card face up and you’ll be dealt 2 cards at the start of the game. You can then Hit or Stand until you go bust. Our top tip is this: never Stand on any hand below 17 if the dealer shows an Ace, K, Q, J, 10, or 9. Exchanging Sweeps Coins for Prizes When you play blackjack, roulette, or any of the other popular table games in sweepstakes casinos, you might get into a position where you’ve collected enough Sweeps Coins to start redeeming prizes. Typically, you need at least 20 SCs to do this. Once ready, you can then follow these steps: ● Go to the ‘Redeem’ section of your sweepstakes casino ● Select from any of the available prizes, such as a cash transfer, gift card, or piece of merchandise ● The Sweeps Coins will be deducted from your available balance ● You’ll then receive the prize within 24 to 48 hours on average, although it ultimately depends on the operator you’re using Let’s say you’ve got 200 Sweeps Coins sitting in your balance. You might then pick a $100 cash transfer and two $50 gift cards. Or, you might only redeem a small prize and opt to keep most of your Sweeps Coins so that you can keep on playing with them. It varies from player to player, although most prefer to redeem the majority of their SCs whenever prizes become available. Remember, Gold Coins can never be redeemed for rewards in sweepstakes casinos. Instead, it’s only Sweeps Coins that can. Gold Coins are just for entertainment purposes and climbing leaderboards, so you unfortunately can’t redeem those for prizes. Which Table Game is Best for You? The sweepstakes casino table games you pick ultimately comes down to your own skill set and personal preferences. If, say, you’re a casual beginner player, you’ll want to go with table games like roulette and baccarat, as they involve no skill at all and are essentially games of pure luck. On the other hand, if you prefer strategy-based table games, you can pick from the likes of blackjack and poker, both of which require a significant level of skill and knowledge to get wins (this is especially true in the case of poker). And it’s also important to remember that all available table games can be played for free using Gold Coins at any time, meaning you have a great platform for practicing until you feel confident enough to play with Sweeps Coins. How to Get Free Sweeps Coins Before Playing Table Games For those short on Sweeps Coins, the good news is that sweepstakes casinos make it incredibly easy to get your hands on free SC. How does it work? Multiple different free SC methods are available, including: ● Collect sign-up bonuses ● Do Daily Logins for bonus coins ● Refer friends so that you both get rewarded ● Complete mail-ins asking for free SCs ● Take part in social media giveaways ● Use bonus codes when they become available ● Look out for daily prize drops Throughout the year, it’s technically possible to get hundreds of free Sweeps Coins just by doing these different methods. Once you get your free coins, they can then be played across different table games. The playthrough requirement is usually at least 1x to 3x on free Sweeps Coins, though, so you can’t automatically redeem them for prizes until they’ve been bet in games. Verdict Sweepstakes casinos are available in 33+ states and almost all of them come with table games and live dealer games for you to pick from. The prize chasers should look to play with Sweeps Coins, while casual players can stick with Gold Coins if they’re only playing for fun. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the playing experience and bag plenty of prizes along the way.

Sponsored Post - This is a sponsored post and contains a sponsored link The interest in tabletop gaming hasn’t declined despite the rise of digital gaming, and the growth of SPIEL Essen 2026 is a testament to the industry’s continued growth. Why SPIEL Essen 2026 Is Becoming the Biggest Event in Tabletop Gaming History Source SPIEL Essen has held a very special place for decades as far as tabletop gaming goes. The world’s largest board game convention now appears to be entering an entirely new era in 2026. It is growing beyond its traditional identity as a hobbyist gathering and is turning into a highly influential, global entertainment event. Taking place in October of 2026 at Messe Essen in Germany, the event is expanding significantly. It goes beyond just featuring your everyday board games and rather acts as the cultural centre of tabletop entertainment. Considering the industry’s rapid worldwide growth, SPIEL Essen 2026 is slated to come with expanded exhibition capacity, additional venue infrastructure, and record publisher demand. How SPIEL Essen Reached Record-Breaking Scale in 2026 The organisers for the event this year confirmed that the exhibition space sold out earlier than they had expected. This led to long waiting lists for interested publishers and exhibitors. To accommodate the demand, the event had to be expanded into Hall 8 at Mess Essen, which increased the total exhibition area to 81,200 square meters. This also required the addition of a new entrance system and waiting hall to ensure proper visitor flow. SPIEL Essen Growth Indicators Recent Development Venue Space Expanded to approximately 81,200 m² with the addition of Hall 8 Visitor Reach Expected to break the previous attendance records of 220,000 visitors International Presence Attendees from 80+ countries Publisher Participation Record exhibitor demand and waiting lists for booth space Game Releases A large number of new tabletop titles are showcased annually Industry Role Primary launch event for major board game publishers All previous records of attendance are expected to be broken this year as tabletop gaming expands internationally. It’s not only enthusiasts who visit this event but also publishers launching new titles, testing audience reactions, and more. One reason for the ever-increasing scale of the convention is its unique role in the tabletop calendar. Several publishers see Essen as an unofficial world premiere season for board games. New titles across various game categories frequently debut at the event before being released internationally. Why Tabletop Gaming Is Experiencing Massive Global Growth Source SPIEL Essen’s growth reflects a wider transformation in how people engage with games and social entertainment. The board game market is expected to grow at an annual growth rate of over 10% until 2034. This shows how tabletop gaming isn’t limited to dedicated enthusiasts anymore and has become mainstream entertainment embraced by families and young adults alike. Modern tabletop games have changed significantly as well. The variety of games available today has widened the audience considerably: Cinematic Storytelling Games Corporate Experiences Educational Systems Solo-Friendly Titles Strategic Competitive Titles All this has taken tabletop gaming into more homes, events, and even offices. The industry has also benefited from global online retail, influencer coverage, and streaming communities. The Rise of Board Games Beyond Traditional Hobby Source Tabletop gaming has also expanded because of its move into mainstream culture. Titles like Catan and Wingspan have introduced millions of casual players to modern board gaming by offering social and strategic experiences. Other reasons for this rise include: The increase in board game cafes Many titles are being displayed alongside books and toys in retail stores. The nostalgia that inspires adults to introduce younger generations to the titles they grew up playing Social Gaming in the Digital Era Source It’s no secret that the digitalisation of games has taken over the world. This isn’t limited to just board games but extends beyond into multiple industries. For example, the number of online platforms offering mobile slots is growing, and the selection of games of this kind, which allow users to play and win directly from their phones, is also becoming broader. Despite this trend, the need for authentic social experiences still thrives. People still crave direct interaction, and board games offer just that. The normalisation of remote work has accelerated this trend further, as people look for experiences that encourage communication and entertainment simultaneously. Ironically, digital culture itself has helped with tabletop growth. Social platforms and online streamers have brought board games to millions in a completely new light. This makes discovering new titles and their rules easier while preserving the offline nature of play. What Makes SPIEL Essen Different From Other Gaming Events Source SPIEL Essen differs from other gaming conventions due to its interactive nature. Visitors are not here to merely watch presentations but rather actively play games. They can test prototypes, learn the rules directly from the publishers, and try out new titles before they’re launched. The atmosphere is also very different, thanks to a community-focused energy. The coexistence of multinational publishers and independent creators leads to an environment where innovation and experience thrive. For publishers showcasing unreleased titles, SPIEL Essen offers a look into the potential success of their work. Positive reactions from players and retailers can determine which games are likely to become international hits when they’re released. International Community and Fan Experience Visitors travel to this event from dozens of countries. This transforms the convention from an everyday event into a multicultural hub for discussion and cultural exchange. This, combined with the fact that visitors take part in live demos, tournaments, workshops, and creator meetups, makes SPIEL Essen a tabletop event like none other. For many, it acts as an annual pilgrimage and a chance to reunite with friends who share the same passion. The Future of Tabletop Gaming After SPIEL Essen 2026 The overwhelming interest in the upcoming convention reflects how consumer demand for participatory experiences is growing, as opposed to being satisfied with passive consumption. Tabletop gaming is positioned to remain among the fastest-growing forms of interactive entertainment, as audiences increasingly value connection and community. Publishers are also experimenting with hybrid trends by combining traditional mechanics with new technologies like augmented gameplay and online community-building. This is likely to bring tabletop to even younger crowds, leading to long-term adoption. Conclusion SPIEL Essen 2026 is no less than a turning point for tabletop gaming. It represents a cultural shift, as something that was considered a niche hobby has turned into a mainstream global industry. With the expanded venue space, record exhibitor demand, and growing international attention, this year’s event is expected to be larger than ever. At this point, SPIEL Essen isn’t simply the biggest board game fair in the world but rather a defining cultural event in the world of gaming.

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. Some games arrive on the table quietly. Space Junkers does not. Space Junkers lands like a battered freighter crashing out of hyperspace, lights flickering, alarms blaring, aliens in the vents, security bots booting up, and six suspiciously familiar sci-fi rogues all trying to grab the best loot before anyone else does. This is a fast, loud, 3D sci-fi scavenging game from designer Mark Prentice and Next Dimension Games, coming to Gamefound on 14 July. Find out more here. It plays two to six players in around 30 to 45 minutes, and puts you aboard the Deep space Horizon, a long-lost freighter drifting in space for 57 years. Naturally, this derelict ship is full of salvage. Also naturally, everyone else has turned up at the exact same time to nick it. What follows is a messy, tactical, sometimes ridiculous race to grab loot, complete missions, avoid danger, and, where possible, launch your rivals directly into space. Think Colt Express meets Red Dwarf! As this is a preview, everything I played was in prototype form. Components, balance, rules and presentation may all change before the finished game arrives. But even in prototype form, Space Junkers already has a huge amount going for it. I mean, check out the 3d Multi-tier board! The first thing you notice is the ship. Space Junkers uses a three-tiered 3D board, with different decks stacked above each other to create the interior of the Deep space Horizon. It is instantly eye-catching. This is not a flat board pretending to be a spaceship. This looks and feels like something you are exploring. Players each choose a character, (two each in a two player) and each character has their own asymmetric ability. The art is bright, colourful, silly and full of personality. Some characters may also remind you, completely coincidentally I am sure, of famous sci-fi faces from film and TV. Each player also takes their own board, action dice, reputation marker and starting pieces. Salvage tokens are placed around the ship, the alien starts lurking somewhere unpleasant, the event deck is prepared, and players begin outside the ship. That last bit matters. Everyone is not just racing to collect loot. They are racing to get inside, pick a route, use the lifts, dive through airlocks, and work out where the best opportunities might appear before someone else beats them to it. Missions can also be added, giving each player a specific place on the ship to head too, and I would recommend playing with them from the off, they are great! They give players extra objectives and make the game feel more personal and cinematic. Space Junkers Board Game Preview - How To Play Each round begins by establishing the first player. On the first round, this is the youngest player. After that, it is the player with the fewest salvage tokens, which is a nice catch-up touch that keeps people involved even when they have had a rough round. In a two player, just rotate it round. Everyone rolls three action dice, although that number can drop if your reputation gets too low. The scum of the earth roll less dice. Then each player secretly chooses one die and locks it in. Once everyone is ready, all dice are revealed at the same time. That chosen die determines what you can do this round. You may get movement, the ability to move the alien on board the ship with you, a wild action that can be used for movement or salvage, a ship system action, healing, and crucially your combat rating for the round, which will be one to six. The lower your rating, the more actions you can do. What you choose may not always work out as planned because players before you may do things to stop your plans. But the lovely part is that you can resolve the symbols in any order. That gives every turn a small but satisfying puzzle rather than the often annoying dead turn seen in other programming games. Can you move first, grab salvage, then use a room effect? Should you shove someone away before they can act? Can you reach the airlock and trigger something horrible? All fun and often hilarious choices! The ship systems are some of the most entertaining parts of the game. From the bridge, you can steal salvage previously collected by other players. From the med-bay, you can recover reputation. From engineering, you can activate the airlocks and blast players out if they happen to be standing in the wrong place. This is a game where positioning matters, but also a game where your position is never quite as safe as you think. And again, its often hilarious! Combat is optional, but always present. Your chosen die gives you your combat rating for that round, so sometimes you are quick and slippery, and sometimes you are better prepared for a fight. If you attack successfully, by moving into a room with another player with a lower combat score than you, you can gain reputation and move your opponent to another room. Scuppering their plans and lowering their own reputation in the process. A double whammy! That movement can be the real prize. Pushing someone away from loot is good. Pushing them towards an alien is better. Pushing them into a situation where the ship itself finishes the job is chef’s kiss chaos. There can be some real chaos combos here. And, yes, you guessed it, its often hilarious! At the end of each player’s turn, they update their salvage total and draw an event card. These events can change the board state, bring in new threats, drop more salvage, activate the security bot, or generally make everyone rethink their plans. The game ends when the salvage runs out or the event deck is exhausted, with players scoring salvage, completed mission bonuses, and adjusting based on reputation. A ship worth boarding The 3D ship is the immediate star. It looks brilliant on the table and gives Space Junkers a real toy-factor charm. You are moving through decks, using lifts, slipping through airlocks and watching trouble unfold above and below you. It helps sell the fantasy in a way a normal board simply could not. There is a small practical downside. Because the ship is stacked, it can sometimes be fiddly to get your hands into certain areas without nudging pieces elsewhere. That may improve with final production, and it was never enough to ruin the game, but it is worth mentioning. The table presence is fantastic, but it does come with the usual 3D board trade-off: it looks amazing, and occasionally your fingers feel like they are performing surgery in a phone box. The artwork also helps a lot. It is bright, vibrant, playful and full of comic sci-fi energy. The characters are fun, the world is instantly understandable, and the whole thing leans into the ridiculousness rather than pretending to be serious space opera. This is not solemn sci-fi. This is “grab the shiny space junk and try not to get eaten.” One die, many problems The dice selection is clever. You only choose one die each round, but that one die does a lot. It gives you actions, flexibility, possible combat strength, and sometimes access to powerful ship systems. Because everyone chooses secretly and reveals at the same time, you are never fully sure what the board will look like by the time your turn comes around. There is a little Colt Express-style feeling here. You may plan to move into the next compartment and grab a lovely bit of valuable salvage, only for the player before you to wander in first and take it. Or move the alien. Or push you somewhere awful. Your plan is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening on a collapsing spaceship full of greedy idiots. That makes turns quick, but keeps you invested when other players act. You are always watching. You are always adjusting. You are always hoping the player before you does not ruin everything. They often will. The good chaos After your turn, you will draw and act out an event turn. These cards are one of the best parts of the game. They make the ship feel unstable and alive. In our first game, we were down to the final salvage token. Rather than grab it which is one way you can trigger the end, and final round, we started avoiding it for a few turns, trying to finish missions and squeeze out extra points elsewhere. Then an event card suddenly dumped a load more juicy salvage onto the ship, completely changing the state of the game. That was brilliant. It created a proper story moment. The issue is that once you have seen that card, you know it can happen. The event deck in the prototype felt like it could use more variety. I wanted more surprises, more weird ship malfunctions, more “oh no, not that” moments. The system is strong. I just wanted more of it. I think the game would be a lot better with more cards so you don't always see the same ones, just in a different order. The same goes for some of the balance. The character powers are cool and give everyone a slightly different flavour, but some felt more immediately useful than others. That may well be adjusted before the final game, and it is exactly the kind of thing prototypes are for. But as played, a few powers seemed easier to exploit, while others felt more situational. Missions need a little more love My biggest question mark is around missions. I like them a lot in theory. In fact, they were probably my favourite way to play. They make the game feel more thematic and give you a reason to do something beyond hoovering up space trash as quickly as possible. The problem is that salvage currently feels like the main and most efficient route to points. Completing missions is more fun, more involved and more story-driven, but it can feel like a lot of effort for less reward. If I have read the rules correctly, you only score a mission if you fully complete it. That means you could complete three out of four tasks and get nothing, which feels harsh. I would love to see missions use a sliding scale. Give players something for partial completion, then a bigger bonus for finishing the whole card. That would make them feel less punishing, while still rewarding players who fully commit. There was also one late-game token worth 1000 points that created a huge swing. You can steal it through combat, so there is counterplay, and I do love the jeopardy it brings. But if it appears late and there are only one or two turns left, that is a massive points shift that may come down to whether anyone has the right dice at the right time. Exciting? Definitely. Potentially too much? Also yes. Final thoughts Space Junkers is fast, funny and packed with memorable moments. It has a wonderful table presence, quick turns, bright artwork, lively interaction, and just enough tactical planning to stop the chaos from feeling empty. You can sneak, race, fight, steal, heal, shove, sabotage, and occasionally send someone into space, which is always fun unless it happens to you. It still feels like a game that may benefit from some tuning. I would like to see more event cards, a closer look at mission scoring, and some balancing around character powers and big late-game swings. But the core is already strong. The 3D ship is not just a gimmick. It genuinely makes the game more engaging. The dice system keeps things moving. The player interaction creates stories. And the whole thing has that lovely “remember when you pushed me into the security bot?” energy that good chaotic games need. Space Junkers will not be for people who dislike take-that, randomness or having their carefully planned turn ruined by another player. But for families, casual gamers, sci-fi fans and groups who like loud, interactive games with plenty of table drama, there is a lot to enjoy here. In space, no one can hear you scream. Around this table, everyone absolutely can. Find out more here.

Moytura WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 1-2 You’ll like this if you like: A War of Whispers Published by: Bitewing Games Designed by: Trevor Benjamin, David Thompson (I) This is a review copy. See our review policy here By Steve Godfrey Moytura is a semi cooperative game in which you and your opponent are trying to keep the Fomarians from trying to take over your land whilst simultaneously trying to take over the land for yourself. It’s like if someone takes over the desk between you and your office rival and you both agree to force them out by slowly taking over their desk space until they give up and move out but the fight for who gets the most space on the empty desk is still on. How to work together, while also stabbing each other in the back. First choose which enemies you’ll be playing with. You have the basic ones that all expand the same way or the asymmetric ones. You can use all of one type or you can mix and match but for your first game it’s recommended to use the basic ones. Set up by seeding the map with the chosen enemies and worship tokens as per the setup card you’re using. Take the deity tiles, shuffle them and place them randomly onto the slots on the board. Except Tuatha De Danann this will always go at the bottom. Each player then takes their player pieces and two worship tokens. Shuffle the enemy cards and deal five for the first scoring round and five for the second. The last two will go back to the box unseen. On a player's turn they’ll take an action using the following steps. First activate a deity. The bottom two are always free and the top three will cost you either one, two or three worship tokens. If you activate one in one of the top two positions you can upgrade them by putting one of your tokens on their tile in the indicated spot. These upgrades will give you extra followers to put out every time you activate them from then on. You then take the number of followers printed next to the deity you're using, plus any you get from upgrades. You’ll always choose a space with your followers to expand out from and then follow that deity's rules for placing your new followers on the board. You can’t put your followers in spaces with the other players' followers. You can however place them in spaces with the enemies. When you do, a conflict occurs. These are nice and simple. Remove the players followers and the enemies tokens on a one for on basis until one or no faction has tokens left on that space. Any tokens you beat on your turn will go into your supply and when you have three you can trade them in for a worship token. Once both players have taken a turn, it’s the enemies turn. Flip over the top card of their deck and follow their rules for placement. Find the largest connected group of that colour and then place as many of the enemy followers as indicated on the card into spaces adjacent to that group then resolve any conflicts. After five rounds there’s a scoring phase. Go through each area and the factions with the most and second most tokens in that area will score points. Even though there are three different coloured enemy factions they score as one faction. Play another five rounds and then another scoring round. Whoever had the most points wins and that includes the enemy faction. Not touching, can’t get mad. I’m sure I’ve said this before but one of the things l love about these two designers is their ability to take a game mechanism and do something different with it. If these guys were around when the olympics were first conceived they'd have been the ones that looked at the 200 metres and went “nah, too easy, lets stick some hurdles in it” With Moytura they've decided to try jump those hurdles themselves by making a semi co-op game! From my experience this is a difficult thing to do well and do you know what? They’ve only gone and pulled it off! Now aside from the mechanisms label on BGG and mention of it in other reviews, this isn't overtly advertised as a semi co-op and maybe that's because of the less than stellar history of those style of games? At first the idea of not being able to directly interact and attack your opponent felt like it was going to be a massive detriment of the game, however, you’re often so focused on dealing with the enemy and trying to plan your own takeover of an area that you don't notice it. In fact I’d argue that if you were able to attack the enemy it’d overwhelm a relatively simple game and you'd find your spread too thin. It stands to reason then that all of your aggressive energy will focus on the enemy. Which is handy because much like a gang war between old school new reporters, they can escalate quickly. Every flip of an enemy card brings that sense of dread for where they're going to expand next. Questions over if you’ve got enough troops to be able to fight off the enemy or if your long fought take over of an area is going to be suddenly scuppered start flying round your head. Being a random card draw this is either going to work in favour of your game or the same colour is going to expand twice in a row and give you that same panic when you spill a drink and see that puddle slowly encompass the table as you frantically scramble around for a towel. Much like that situation, you need to keep the enemy under control and that's where most of your focus will be. I’m not fighting them, you go and fight them. The co-op element is, from my games anyway, a relatively silent affair. We both know that the enemy needs dealing with but there’s not so much of a discussion between players of how and who is going to do what but you just know something needs to be done and you just kinda get on with it. That doesn’t mean that you can take your eye off your opponent though since they’ll be dealing with the enemy, but in a way that benefits them. Well you would, wouldn’t you. As much as you don't want to lose to the other player, neither do you want to lose to the enemy. It creates this beautiful balancing act in which you're trying to be seen to play your part in defeating the enemy whilst surreptitiously gaining a majority in an area whilst doing it. It’s not always the majority you're trying to get though. I’ve had games where I've chosen not to take out enemy tokens and instead moved into a space just to tie with my opponent and stop them from scoring full points. It can be sneaky and manipulative and I love it. The game reminds me of A War of Whispers. In both games you have the potential to just sit back and let your opponents do the dirty work for you and all you do is walk in after the chaotic dust has settled. Of course all this backstabbing is made all the more interesting by the deities. Each one has their own ways of spreading your followers around the map. What's brilliant is that you can’t just spam the same one each turn. The expanding cost as they move to the top of the list means that you’ll need to manage your worship tokens to have more options on your turn. There are generally no bad options when it comes to the deity’s. Sure sometimes you won't be able to afford the one you ideally want, but all of them will give you good options. Then there's upgrading. You want to try and upgrade something as soon as you can because each follower you get is equally as important for defending as well as attacking. I love that the choice of deity and that worship token economy goes hand in hand. It gives just enough stickiness to your choices. For example, the worship tokens dotted around the board can be just enough of a distraction to pull you in one direction over another. The prospect of getting them by collecting enemy tokens could even be the thing that actively draws you into a fight. There’s a decent amount of replayability in the game. There’s a changing board set up and the addition of different Formarians with asymmetric abilities and you can mix and match these as you want. I would have loved a couple more deities though. I know you can get them in an expansion but even a couple more in the base box to be able to mix things up would have been nice. Personally I’d try to add in at least one of the asymmetric Formarians as soon as you're up for it. They add a lot more unpredictability to the enemy movement and make for a much more dynamic game. Plus I've had games with the base enemy where we’ve rendered at least two of them a non threat and while it then becomes a land grab between the two of us it does take out a big part of what makes this game what it is. Moytura is another great two player game from David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin and another that comes in a fairly small box. I seriously think they’re trying to corner the market in the perfect couples getaways games and I’m absolutely here for it. Right I need to go, I’ve gotta get into work early. I’ve been slowly shifting my stuff onto the other desk an inch a day, it will be mine!!

Lost Ruins of Arnak: Expedition Leaders WBG Score: 9 Player Count: 1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Lost Ruins of Arnak & variable player powers Published by: Czech Games Edition (CGE Designed by: Elwen, Mín This is the reviewer’s copy. See our review policy here By Steve Godfrey Explorers journal, 7th June 1964. It wasn't long ago that I was almost begging for some leadership because Lord knows we need some organisation in these expeditions. That was until we met this bunch. They’re so focused on one specific thing it's bizarre. Like, one is obsessed with taking us to the scariest and most dangerous places on the island. He can’t have passed basic health and safety training can he? They’re all obsessed with one thing, if it’s not snacks it’s their flippin satchel or money. I tried to complain but I was simply told “that’s just management for you” So, Basic Stuff First This expansion comes with a load of new item and artifact cards, new idols, guardians, assistants and level 1 and 2 sites. Simply shuffle these into your base game since they're more of what you know and love. There’s also an artifact card and an assistant that need to be swapped out with new versions for balancing purposes. Follow those tracks. In this box you’ll find a new double sided research track. You can use this with or without this expansion. Simply pick your preferred side and overlay it onto the original track. Both tracks have new research costs, bonuses and point values but they each have their own new twist to them. The Monkey Temple track has space for an artifact card in the middle of it. At set up draw artifact cards until you come across one that costs 3 compasses and put it in the space on the track. Only your magnifying glass can and must move onto this space and when it does you may activate the card without paying the tablet cost. The Lizard Temple has space for a guardian on it. When a player's magnifying glass first reaches this space, populate it with a random guardian tile. Now no player's tokens can move past it until one player has overcome it in the usual way. All players in the same space as this undefeated guardian at the end of the round will gain a fear card for each of their tokens in that space. Both tracks add some new variability to your games of Arnak and if you're looking to change things up but without adding anything in the way of rules complexity then these will do the job. Personally I prefer the Lizard Temple side. The guardian gives this nice tension of ‘who's going to overcome the guardian’. Whoever does gets the guardian and the points but it leaves other players that extra turn to get a step ahead on the research track. The Monkey Temple track is still worth exploring but since it relies on a random artifact card it could either be a great benefit to your game or the equivalent of stopping at the motorway services with the inferior coffee chain because the kids can't hold it until the next one. Now, onto the big one, the part of the review I’m sure you're all here for… You just can’t get the staff these days. That’s right, the new staff mechanism. This expansion comes with a new red moon staff. Use this in place of the regular staff and at the end of the round discard two of the artifact and item cards instead of the usual one. Yeah, I know it feels odd to need a new component just to implement a simple rule change. In some defence it is now printed on the staff as a reminder and it does make the rule stand out in the book by making it a component rather than a simple paragraph. Regardless, it’s a cool rule that gives more fluidity to the card market and you can absolutely employ that rule into your Arnak games without it. Right, that's it for this expansion I think. Oh, no, wait. There's something here about some leaders with variable player powers. I should probably talk about those briefly. Take me to your leader First thing to note across all the leaders is that they all come with their own special hand of starting cards. So use these instead of the regular cards but still add the usual 2 fear cards. Each of these starting decks will lean into that leader's special ability. You also get a really handy user guide that properly explains how your chosen leader and the cards work. Each leader also has their own Blue idol actions on their board which they can use when they use a blue idol slot. This is usually a bonus that coincides with their special ability. The Captain This is the easiest leader to grasp as he just has an extra worker. There’s also a space on his board to put a worker that lets them use the silver ability of one of the face up assistants on the board. Nice and simple and the one i’d suggest giving to a new player if you're wanting to use this expansion with new players. The Falconer She has an eagle token and track on her board. The token moves up the track one space at the start of each round. She also has a free action on her cards that will let her move the token extra spaces. During your turn you can gain the bonus of the current space that the eagle token is on. Move the eagle back to the start and use the effect. These effects are either free actions or actions that let you activate level one or two sites. This is another one of my favourites. I like the track and those more powerful spaces at the top are great late in the game and can be a life saver when you really need resources. The Baroness At set up, put one coin on the 2,3,4 and five spaces of the round track. At the start of each round the Baroness will gain that coin. She also has a special delivery card. This has a different back and will always go into your hand at the start of the round and will count towards your five card hand. When you buy or gain an item card you can play the special delivery card which allows you to put the gained card directly into your hand. I think the Baroness may be my least favourite of the bunch. Don't get me wrong, she's still useful but I’ve never used a tool card heavy strategy so that's why it has less appeal to me. The fact that the special delivery card takes up a space in your initial card draws makes it feel a bit limiting, especially if you don't buy any cards that round. However the ability to put a card straight into your hand can be incredibly useful and it makes up for the missing card in your hand and gives you control over what that card is. The Professor The Professor has a Suitcase token that will be used to hold tablet and compass tokens. At setup put a compass token on the 2nd and 4th space of the round track and a table at space 3 and 5. The professor will gain these at the start of those rounds and they will go straight on his suitcase token. Draw three artifact cards at the start of the game and put them in front of you. Certain cards in your deck will give you resources that will go to your suitcase. The Professor is all about artifact cards and tokens in your suitcase can only be used for artifact cards. Only you can buy the artifact cards in front of you. There is a card in your starting deck that will let you swap a card in front of you with a card from the row, effectively reserving it. The professor is a step up from the Baroness for me. I tend to use the artifacts more than the tool cards so it fits in more with how I'd like to play the game. The dedicated tokens for the artifact cards are a nice little limiter. I can't tell you how many times I've spent compasses on something only to see the perfect artifact card come out and not be able to afford it. With the professor if you can’t afford it you can at least reserve it until you can. The Explorer The explorer has only one explorer but she has three snack tokens. Place two of these on your board at the start of the game and the other one on space three of the round track. The snack tokens can be used in a couple of different ways. When you’ve put your explorer on a site you can use a snack token to reuse the explorer on another turn. First pay the cost on the snack token (either free, one coin or a compass) and place it on the site your explorer is leaving. Then put your explorer on a new unoccupied site following the usual placement rules. You can't go back to a space with a snack token that round. She also has two cards in her hand that need a snack token to activate. One lets you activate a campsite and the other one gets you a tablet and an idol. She also has a card that lets you draw 2 sites when you discover a new site. This is another one of my favourites. Mainly because I like a good snack as well. Seriously, chuck a pack of chocolate hobnobs at me at the game table and I'll be like Gollum sat in the corner munching away. But also because she can potentially activate four sites in a round which could net you a load of resources depending on what's on offer. I also love that the cards have token spaces can help mitigate the fact that all sites may be taken or in the early game, undiscovered. The Mystic The Mystic laughs in the face of fear (which can get annoying as the game goes on) At the start of each round the mystic player will add a fear card to their hand, giving them six cards in their hand. The mystics cards have ways of excelling cards and when they do (by any means) these fear cards go into a special ritual space on their board. These won't be worth negative points at the end of the game. Rather than use the ability on their starting cards, they can instead be exiled to use a ritual. You spend an amount of fear cards from the ritual pile to use one of the listed bonuses. Spend two fear cards to gain a coin and a compass, three to gain an artifact card at a three compass discount or spend four to overcome a guardian for free. He also has five idol slots, two of which give you a fear card. The Mystic is certainly a leader that I wouldn't give to a new player. This is all about managing, gaining and exiling fear cards and while that’s not beyond the skills of a new player, I think having all the rules swimming in your head plus trying to balance out gaining and excelling fear cards could be a bit much. If you’ve got a couple of games under your belt however then the Mystic is a fun spin on the game. It feels weird actively trying to get fear cards and even weirder when you get excited flipping over a site and seeing a fear card on it. Playing as the mystic makes me feel like the brave Ace Rimmer version of me has waltzed in and taken over rather than my regular Rimmer self. This leader is all about balance and making sure that you can exile the fear cards as quickly as you can get them. There’s also an amount of tension and timing involved towards the end game. The last thing you want is to gain all these cards and then be frantically scrambling to exile them to avoid a load of negative points at the end of the game. Is this an example of essential upper management? This is a great expansion. The more stuff aspect is always gonna be welcome, I love anything that adds variety that I can just mix in, not think about and still use with new players. Because let's face it, for some of us this is the only way we can get a lot of expansions played. The new research tracks do that as well since nothing in them adds to the overall complexity of the game. The new leaders are the obvious star of the show and let’s be honest, when you go to a festival you're really there for the head line act and here that act is worth the price of admission alone. Each one adds new ways to explore your games of Arnak and each one will give you a little or in a few cases, a big nudge towards certain styles of plays. As much as I want to force myself to change my focus in my regular games I often find myself veering back to my old habits. These new leaders though tend to keep me in the straight and narrow, well as straight as you can be when you're stealing from an uncharted island and its guardian inhabitants. Whilst I tend to stick to the vanilla explorers from the base game when I’m teaching new players there are a couple in this expansion that I could teach to new people. For me this is an almost essential expansion with the caveat that you don't need this straight away. It's not an expansion that you need to buy immediately when you buy the base game. You can play many many games of Arnak before you choose to add this to the game but when you do you’ll almost never want to go back to the regular explorers. Right I’m off to find that Explorer. I had a box of snacks here last night and they mysteriously disappeared. It’s gotta have been her that nicked them…no, wait, turns out I ate them all. Man this is gonna be a long expedition now.

Lost Ruins of Arnak: Twisted Paths Expansion WBG Score: 9 Player Count: 1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Lost Ruins of Arnak Published by: Czech Games Edition (CGE Designed by: Elwen, Mín This is a review copy. See our review policy here By Steve Godfrey Off the back of this expansion I asked a paving company If they could lay twisted paths up to my front door. Apparently my front garden is too short and the best they could do was one mildly wavey path, which doesn't have the same ring to it when you're theatrically telling guests to “trek through the mildly wavey path to my door.” What with that and my “smoothly opening new front door” I’m seriously starting to rethink this year's Halloween haunted house. New tools of exploration. First lets get the simple stuff out of the way. This expansion comes with 2 new level 1 and level 2 sites, 4 new guardian tiles, 10 idol tiles and 8 new assistants. All of these can just be shuffled into your regular game and are just extras that are independent from the expansion boards. As a quick note, this expansion was designed to be used with the leaders from the previous expansions. You can play the game without them but as the rulebook says, you’ll be in for a more challenging game. For some that’s a friendly piece of advice and for others that’ll probably be a full on challenge. I’ve not tried it without the leaders so I can’t speak to how it works. The main event for this expansion is of course the new double sided board, each side having its own unique twist with both twists being focused mainly on the new research tracks on each board. Rather than just making new research overlays as in the past, the new boards mean they can populate them with expansion specific elements without the need for too much extra in the way of components and set up. The new board is a lot bigger than the regular Arnak board so if you brought this separately (rather than part of the big box) then it won’t fit into your base game box. For each of these I’m gonna assume you know how to play Arnak. If you don't you can either check out my original review for the base game for a brief overview (found here) or any learn to play videos scattered on the internet. The Owl Temple For this board you’ll need to take the new lantern token for each player which will go with your other research tokens. Then set up the new Owl Temple tiles as per the rulebook. These are jigsaw style pieces each with different point values, either 1,5 or 10. This board has two sections for exploring level one sites. One has the normal cost and the other will cost you three compasses and two coins but will also give you two idols for exploring them rather than the standard one. You move up the research track in the usual way but this track also holds secret passages at varying points up the track that only a player's magnifying glass can enter. When you reach one, you may pay the research cost to enter and take the reward which will be an Owl tile. The lower ones have the smaller points value on them while the further up you go their points value increases. Your magnifying glass is now locked in this space for the rest of the game and no one else can go into this particular slot. However, this will now unlock your lantern. It moves in the same way but yields different rewards on each space and will score their own points value in the same ways as the other tokens. Your notebook can now move up to you magnifying glass or your lantern, whichever is the higher. There are other spaces on the research track to collect Owl tiles from and to get these you simply pay the cost when you're at that level with one of your tokens. So what do these Owl tiles do? Well, when you've got two of them you can fit them together and they create an extra slot for your idol tokens to go on. As per usual you can use an idol for one of the slot effects but you can now place it on this newly created slot rather than the regular slot on your board meaning that you won't have to sacrifice those points on your board. Owl be quick about this one. At first I wasn't thrilled with the idea of giving up my magnifying glass. It feels very counter intuitive, especially when the reward for giving it up can feel very slight if you take the lower of the owl tiles on the track. Yes, in the long run it can go to bigger things but at the time giving up all those potential rewards on the research track for (at minimum) a point token doesn't feel like a great exchange. In fact, gambling on trying to race up the track to the higher point temple tile just adds to your decision space. However, they’ve made those lantern rewards so tantalising that maybe jettisoning your magnifying glass early might just be worth it? I really like that this adds to what could already be a tense race up the research track. There are some nice 10 point tiles at certain points on the track and two in quick succession of each other and boy is it tense if more than one of you is racing to get them. Since it’s more than likely that most of you will essentially be going up the research track for a third time it can push the game time up. Of course a lot of this depends on how quickly people activate their lantern and how efficiently they play. As for the new Idol slots, I like the idea of them. The fact that they're worth points at the end just makes the higher points ones more juicy to go for, coupled with the fact that they stop you from losing those precious points on your main board. It does kind of take away the risk of using the idols though which is one of the aspects I like in the base game. In a lot of sense I’m torn. I like the idea of that loss / reward aspect of the base game, but then I really like the satisfaction of getting more “free” resources to allow me to do even more things and make more combos. Granted a lot of the extras you get will more than likely be moving the lantern token. This board seems to encourage players to balance out their games a bit more and do a bit more of everything. If you explore and gain a lot of idols then getting the owl tiles from the research track is gonna be worth it. On the flip side, if you get some of the tiles then you may as well try and make use of them by doing more exploring to get the idols. You won't necessarily be at a disadvantage if you don’t, but it gives both aspects more synergy. The Spider Temple. The only new thing you’ll need for this side of the board is the new dark tablets. Place two per player in each of the slots for them at the bottom of the board. Each slot from left to right will have an increasing negative number on it. There are two ways you can collect these tablets. Either from research spaces or from site spaces on the board. When you activate one of those sites you can pay the cost to take a dark tablet from the left most space at the bottom of the board. You can use dark tablets in the same ways as regular tablets and when you spend them that way you put them back in the rightmost empty space. The other way to use them is to invoke an altar on the research track. At the start of the game alters are empty spaces on the research track that can fit a card. First you must have a research token above the altar. If the altar is empty then take an artifact card from the display, put it in that slot and activate its ability. Then put that dark tablet in your coloured space below it (you can have three max of your colour under each one.) These cards are now locked in those spaces and now any player can invoke those cards in the same way as long as they have a token in any space above that altar. At the end of the game any unused dark tablets on peoples boards go back to the supply filling in right to left. The negative number on the right most empty slot will be the number you need to worry about because at the end of the game every dark tablet players have under alters will lose that many points for each one. The player with the most tablets at each altar will win the printed number of points above it. This is my favourite of the two maps. I love that it gives the research track access to much stronger abilities but it's all player led. It also ramps up the tension on the race up the research track because it's not until you're above an altar that you can activate it. So if you want to be the one to choose the card you need to get a shift on, especially if you want to put out artifact cards that are going to compliment your current play style. The genius of this board though is how seemingly cheap they've made using those artifact cards, just one dark tablet! Obviously it’s there to tempt you into taking that leap because the benefits, depending upon which cards are being used, could be huge for your game and at the start of the game it’s almost a no brainer to do it. It’s just one little altar and the first tablet space on the board isn't even empty so you're not even losing points for it yet, It'll be fine right? Of course! That is until other players follow your lead and that's when it starts to escalate. As others start using those altars and the dark tablet supply starts to dwindle, then starts the race for the majority points as you desperately try and claw back potential lost points at the end of the game. The problem is, the more you add a tablet to get a majority, the more it dwindles the supply at the bottom making those lost points more devastating. It's a big addictive tug of war, except the harder you pull the worse you're making it for yourself and it’s brilliant. I love the psychology at play here though because as you desperately fight for the majority you soon realise that you'll probably be better off just not adding more tablets. Except there's a part of your brain that really wants those positive points. Is it worth getting Twisted?...sister With ‘more stuff’ and two new boards, each with different vibes that will appeal to different play styles. If you’ve already got the leader's expansion and just want more Arnak goodness that you can throw in with little fuss then this is a no brainer. For experienced players each board is a five minute teach for each board and then you're away and back in this world that you already love but with all new ways to explore. Right, this wavy path needs to be more spooky so I’m gonna break it up into pieces to make it, I dunno, more, crazy? Huh, crazy paving, I think there might be something in that!

Payback WBG Score: 6.5 Player Count: 2-6 You’ll like this if you like: Simple card games Published by: Payback - Self Published Designed by: Karel Psota This is a review copy. See our review policy here What happens when someone puts Sh*thead in a box? Every gamer has at least one classic card game they learned long before they discovered modern board games. For me, and probably many of you reading this, it's Shithead. You know, the one where you deal three face-down cards to each player, and then three face-up on top and a hand of three, and you just have to get rid of your cards? Although it has many other names too, like Palace, Shed, Karma, or China Hand, plus many more! The classic shedding game has existed in countless forms for decades, spreading through schools, pubs, family holidays, and university common rooms with little more than a battered deck of regular playing cards and a handful of house rules to playfully argue over. I spent hours playing this with my school friends at every break time in my mid teens It holds a lot of fond memories for me. That's what makes Payback such an interesting proposition. It isn't trying to hide its inspiration. Instead, it asks a simple question: can you take a game that almost everyone already knows and make it better? And more importantly, make people pay money for it! Before writing this review, I reached out directly to the designers because I had seen criticism online suggesting the game was little more than a commercialised version of a classic game anyone can play with a deck of cards. To their credit, they were completely open about the inspiration. Here is designer Karel Psota: "To be upfront: Payback is directly inspired by Sh*thead, Idiot, or Palace. We took the core mechanics, simplified them for beginners, and added new mechanics to better balance the gameplay. We've always credited it: it's on the website and in the subtitle and opening line of our Board Game Geek description. So it's never been something we've tried to hide. It's worth noting that game mechanics aren't protected by copyright. Only the name, artwork, and wording. As for the negative feedback you've seen, I think some of it comes from people spotting the similarity without having checked the BGG description first. Totally understandable, and it's exactly why we appreciate reviewers like you who dig into the full picture before publishing." The influence is acknowledged and I never got the impression they were trying to pass this off as an entirely original invention. The comparison is unavoidable, but it is also one they seem perfectly comfortable with other people making. Because its true! Personally, I am 100% fine with this. There are plenty of other games out there based on classic card games that you could play with a normal deck, but I like the art, the theme, the twist on the rules, and the modifications. I like to support the designers who do this. As long as it is all open and honest, I am in. I wouldn't mind it being made clear on the box, but I get why they don't do that! How to set up If you've played Sh*thead before, setup will feel instantly familiar. Each player receives three face-down cards, three face-up cards and a hand of three cards. Nine in total. You can switch the three face up cards with the three dealt cards in anyway you wish, in order to get the best three face up cards possible. High cards and special card are best. The objective remains exactly what veteran players would expect: get rid of all your cards before everyone else does and avoid being the unfortunate player left holding cards at the end of the game. The basic framework is so similar that experienced players will be comfortable almost immediately. Where Payback begins to separate itself is in the way it presents information. One of the enduring quirks of Sh*thead is that no two groups seem to play it quite the same way. Every family has its own version. Every friendship group has added a few house rules. I've played versions where sevens were low, eights skipped turns, kings reversed play and four of a kind burned the pile. And others, where all those things were wrong! The problem is that teaching the game often involves explaining which version you're using before you can even begin. Payback removes most of that confusion by placing the powers and effects directly on the cards themselves. Rather than memorising a collection of inherited rules, players simply read the cards in front of them. There are no suits, no misremembered or made up rules. Just do what the cards say. How to play The core gameplay remains reassuringly familiar. Players take turns playing cards onto a central pile, matching or exceeding the value currently in play. If you cannot legally play a card, you pick up the entire pile and add it to your hand, a punishment that can instantly undo several turns of careful progress. Or you can draw from the top of the pile, and try to use that! If it matches or beats the top card, all good. If not, you take that along with the pile into your hand. You can play multiple cards of the same value, and after you play, you must draw back up to three cards. Once players have emptied their hand, and the draw pile is empty they move on to their face-up cards before eventually being forced to rely on their face-down cards, often creating the most dramatic moments in the game as players blindly hope the card they reveal will save them rather than condemn them. So far, so Sh*thead. The biggest difference comes from the collection of special cards that give Payback its identity. These allow players to burn piles, reset values, skip opponents and generally interfere with one another in ways that traditional Sh*thead used to do with the various house rules. Just like standard Sh*thead this feels like a race where players are largely focused on managing their own position, whilst actively encouraged to look around the table and identify who is about to win so you can make their life miserable. The game earns its title because revenge is not merely possible, it is often the optimal strategy. OK, so still very much Sh*thead! This additional interaction creates conversation and laughs around the table. Players celebrate too early, make temporary alliances, plead for mercy and then immediately betray one another the moment an opportunity presents itself. The underlying structure remains familiar, and the overall atmosphere feels very much like the original too. Whether this is an improvement will depend on your tastes, but it unquestionably gives Payback its own flavour. Is it fun? The answer depends largely on what you love about Sh*thead in the first place. If your affection for the original comes from its simplicity, then Payback may feel slightly over-engineered and unnecessary. There is a certain beauty to pulling a standard deck of cards from a drawer and teaching a game in two minutes. No custom components are required, no special powers need explaining and everyone can be playing almost immediately. And you know if the people you are playing with enjoy it, they have the game at home already! On the other hand, many groups have spent years creating increasingly elaborate house rules to make Sh*thead more interactive and entertaining. Those players are likely to appreciate what Payback brings to the table. The special powers create memorable moments, the game becomes easier to teach to newcomers and there is far less room for arguments about which version of the rules should be used. Rather than replacing Sh*thead, Payback feels more like a polished and standardised version of the game that many groups have gradually evolved on their own over the years. I was also surprised by how much the dedicated deck helps with accessibility. People who have never encountered Sh*thead before often learn Payback faster because the information is presented so clearly. Veteran players may not need that assistance, but newcomers certainly benefit from it. In that sense, Payback succeeds in making a traditionally informal card game feel more approachable without completely losing the spirit of the original. I am a big fan of the big cards, the bright vibrant art, and overall packaging. I play games as I enjoy them, but I, like many of you, like nice stuff. This is just a way to make a simple classic card game I like, a little better. See it more as an upgraded component rather than a new game and you may just find you love this! Pros Makes a classic card game easier to teach and learn Special powers create plenty of interaction and memorable moments Eliminates the endless house-rule debates that surround traditional versions Various expansions for more variety Nice chunky cards Cons It's Sh*thead. You own it already with a deck of cards Final thoughts Payback's biggest challenge is convincing players that it deserves to exist alongside a game they can already play with a standard deck of cards. After spending time with it, I think it largely succeeds. The designers have never hidden where the inspiration comes from, and the more important question is whether the additions improve the experience enough to justify a dedicated product. Payback feels like the result of somebody looking at decades of accumulated house rules and deciding to build a cleaner, more accessible version that everyone could agree on. Traditional Sh*thead isn't going anywhere, and nor should it. It remains one of the most simple and elegant card games created. Payback simply offers a cleaner way to enjoy those same foundations. Want to try it yourself, you can buy from this link.

An Age Contrive: Folklore & Pilgrimage WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Anachrony, Tzolk'in, Le Harve Published by: Bellows Intent Designed by: Chris Matthew This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. This review is for the Core version. An Age Contrived was one of my favourite games of 2024. More importantly, it was one of those rare games that improved every time I played it. The more I understood the systems, the more I appreciated the decisions. So when Folklore & Pilgrimage arrived, I wasn't looking for the game to be fixed. I didn't think it needed fixing. What I wanted to know was whether it would make an already excellent game even better. The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is that it depends on which part of the expansion you're talking about. You can read the review of the main game here. And we previewed the expansion here. Now, in full, is our complete review for this expansion, which just gets better and better with every play. And in fact, my opinion of this has changed a fair bit since the preview. How to set up An Age Contrived: Folklore & Pilgrimage The expansion is split into three distinct modules. Two new asymmetric characters, the Folklore module, and the Pilgrimage module. The good news is that none of them significantly increase setup time. The new characters simply join the existing roster and can be selected as normal. The Folklore module adds a small player board extension, a deck of Folklore cards from which you choose three cards from, three artefacts that you place into your new mini board, and a tracking cube to each player area. Pilgrimage introduces a slim side board that you can place alongside the main board along with additional shrine components that you can group and place together at the bottom of this board. There are new Pilgrimage miniatures for each character, place each one in the game at the starting space on this new board, and a handful of supporting doubler tokens that slot alongside the main board. Everything integrates surprisingly cleanly into the existing game. If you already know how to set up An Age Contrived, you'll have no trouble incorporating the new content in a few moments. How to play An Age Contrived: Folklore & Pilgrimage The core game remains exactly the same. You'll still be advancing your Transmuter, managing energy, constructing monuments, upgrading actions and pursuing multiple scoring opportunities while attempting to create increasingly efficient turns. The expansion layers additional systems on top of that framework. The two new characters each offer their own strategic twist. Chronari specialises in manipulating time and the position of Transmuter tiles, allowing for additional activation opportunities. Valimod interacts heavily with the Tile Pool where he counts as two energy, teleporting around the board through the use of Wild energy and creating unique movement possibilities. The first few ties you play as them you may struggle to successfully integrate their powers into the game, but they are very useful if used efficiently. The Folklore module introduces artifacts and encounters. As you recharge your Channel Marker, you can now, if you choose, prepare artifacts on your new mini board, moving them from their unprepared spaces to the prepared spot, one at a time. Later, after any movement of your main character on the main board, if you end on a non-bridge location, you can place one prepared artifact there. Doing so allows you to trigger Folklore cards that provide new actions, benefits, and interactive opportunities. These can be activated on your own turn or through the actions of your opponents. If someone builds on a location where you have an artifact, you get to run an action from a previously played card, and they now get to take two actions. Pilgrimage introduces an entirely new side objective. Players contribute energy towards Shrines in a similar fashion to monuments, but rather than binding energy and scoring in familiar ways, they advance pilgrims across a dedicated board to unlock benefits and end-game points. Any time there are two energy from the same player here, then a Shrine can be built. There are multiple shrines to choose from, each with a different power. After you build it, you can then move your Pilgrim mini here up the number of spaces as per the number of energy you had there, plus your movement points. Your movement points start at one, but can be increased to two using your recharge power. When you move your Pilgrim up, you can move onto the newly built Shrine to activate their powers. The higher up you finish this track, the more end-game points you will get. It creates another strategic avenue to pursue alongside everything already happening in the base game. The new characters The two new characters are a welcome addition. Neither fundamentally changes the game, and if I’m being honest, I don’t always make full use of their powers every time I play. However, that’s not really the point. What they offer is choice. They create different strategic approaches, encourage you to think about familiar systems in slightly different ways, and provide another reason to come back for just one more game. In a game built around replayability and experimentation, that is valuable in itself. And a new expansion for a game with asymmetric characters without new characters would be a miss. Folklore: the gentle expansion The real stars of the expansion, however, are the Folklore and Pilgrimage modules. Both have earned a permanent place in almost every game I play, including games with new players. They integrate so naturally into the existing design that they never feel like additional complexity for complexity’s sake. Instead, they simply provide more opportunities, more decisions, and more ways to approach the puzzle. The first game with them both in, and you may feel overwhelmed, but now if I take them out, I feel the game is missing something. You can't ever do everything, but I like that in a game like this. You need to pick your strategy and run with it. And to have that choice, and see your specific progression based on your strategy, feels rewarding to me. Of the two, I particularly enjoy the Folklore module. One of the most common discussions around the base game was whether movement on the main board mattered enough. Personally, I never considered it a problem. An Age Contrived was already an excellent game without this expansion, and I certainly wasn’t sitting there wishing movement was more important. What Folklore does isn’t fix something broken. It enhances something that was maybe just not that important, but now can be. Before adding Folklore, my eye naturally went to the monuments in play, my own Transmutation Device, and the immediate scoring opportunities around me. That's what I focused on and in truth, yes, the wider map did become irrelevant to me. I didn't move my character much or make much use of the bridges. The map was always there, and it was always beautiful, but I found I was often looking at specific pockets of it rather than the whole thing. With Folklore in play, that changed. Suddenly I was studying the board differently, plotting routes for my character, thinking about where I wanted to end my movement, and considering how those spaces might matter later. You want to run into the other players to build on their spots, or have them build on yours, so you track them too. It is a significant change, but it makes the board feel more alive. You are no longer just admiring this gorgeous expanded landscape in the background. You are using more of it. My attitude to this changed a lot the more I used this expansion and I now see the benefit of this in a big way. Simply looking more at the overall game board may sound like a small or slightly strange point, but it genuinely changed how the game felt to me. By encouraging you to look across more of the board, Folklore makes An Age Contrived feel bigger and more of an event. Not heavier. Not more fiddly. Just broader, richer, and more connected. It gives greater purpose to movement, while also making better use of the wonderful table presence the game already had. It feels like a visual size and "vibes" expansion, as much as the new elements, strategy, choices, and components. Pilgrimage: the star of the show Pilgrimage achieves something similar, but in a different way. It introduces another scoring avenue, another area of competition, and another balancing act to manage throughout the game. Like the best parts of An Age Contrived, it constantly asks you difficult questions. Do you invest here or elsewhere? Are you doing enough? Are your opponents doing more? The result is a module that feels meaningful without ever feeling intrusive. And of course, the game now cannot end until all the shrines are built, as well as the monuments, so it does make the game a little longer, and there is more agency about how the game ends now. But as you build the shrines with just two energy, it happens pretty quickly, and the extra powers you gain from moving up the track mean you can progress in other areas a little quicker, so it all evens out. It's just more choice, more action, more strategy all within the same delightful package. If you already love An Age Contrived, I think this expansion is an easy recommendation. It doesn’t transform the game into something radically different, nor does it try to. Instead, it adds more depth, more purpose and more interesting decisions to a game that was already one of my favourites. That’s exactly what I wanted from an expansion, and exactly what Folklore & Pilgrimage delivers. But if you want a much bigger, epic, choice filled experience, put all the modules together and the overall package does feel just bigger. Pros Pilgrimage adds meaningful new decisions and scoring opportunities Both new characters feel distinct and enjoyable Integrates seamlessly with the base game without bloating setup Folklore maps you experience the full map Cons Adds complexity to an already complex game Unlikely to convert players who disliked the base game Final thoughts The best expansions don't fix broken games. They make great games even more interesting. That's exactly what Folklore & Pilgrimage achieves. The two new characters are fun additions that provide fresh strategic options and increase replayability, even if they won't fundamentally change every game. The real success story, however, lies with the two modules. Both have become permanent additions to my copy, and both feel so natural that it's hard to remember what the game was like without them. What impressed me most is that the expansion doesn't simply add more mechanisms. It changes where your attention goes. In the base game, I often found myself focused on my player board, my engine, and the monuments immediately around me. Now I'm constantly looking across the entire map, planning routes, assessing opportunities and paying attention to areas of the board that previously sat in my peripheral vision. The result is subtle but powerful. The game feels bigger. The world feels more alive. That beautiful board becomes an even more important part of the experience. Most importantly, none of this comes at the expense of what already made An Age Contrived special. The expansion doesn't clutter the design or weigh it down with unnecessary complexity. Instead, it adds more meaningful decisions, more strategic depth and more reasons to keep exploring a game that was already exceptional. If you already love An Age Contrived, I think this is an easy recommendation. Not because the base game needed fixing, but because this expansion does what the very best expansions do: it gives you more reasons to love a game you already couldn't stop thinking about.

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. Reviewing a prototype is always a slightly strange exercise. Especially one this early in development. The game is due to come out the middle of 2027. By the time Corebind eventually reaches publication, the artwork could be different, the iconography could be cleaner, cards may be rebalanced, and entire mechanisms could evolve. What I can say, though, is that after several plays of this early prototype, Corebind is a game I consistently wanted to get back to the table. At its core, Corebind is a deck-building race. Players are competing to stabilise four elemental cores before their rivals, all while the game itself imposes an eight-round limit. If that sounds familiar, that's because the foundations are rooted in classic deck-building design. You'll improve your deck, acquire stronger cards, build combinations and try to create increasingly efficient turns. What surprised me was how quickly Corebind established its own personality against the greats upon which its roots were grown. Learning the ropes I won't pretend the rulebook instantly clicked with me. But I must remember, this is an early prototype. On a first read, there are quite a few concepts to absorb. Different actions, different card types, stabilising cores, purging cards, exploring the Wilds. It initially felt like there was a lot going on. Then we started playing. Within a round or two, the structure suddenly made sense. The actions feel logical, turns move quickly, and before long you're making meaningful decisions rather than looking things up. In fact, one of my biggest takeaways was that the game flows much more smoothly than the rules initially suggest. How to set up Corebind Each player starts with an identical ten-card deck, four elemental cores, a player board and a reference guide. Shuffle your starting deck to create your draw pile, known as the Wellspring. Set up the shared Wilds deck, the Purge pile and three market rows containing Bronze, Silver and Gold cards. Finally, place the round tracker on round one and you're ready to begin your race to stabilise all four elemental cores before the end of round eight. How to play Corebind Corebind is a deck-building race where players are trying to stabilise all four of their elemental cores before their opponents or before the game reaches the end of round eight. At the start of each round, players draw five cards and then take turns playing one card and choosing one action. Cards can be used in several different ways, whether that's triggering special abilities, generating Essence to acquire stronger cards from the market, exploring the Wilds for new opportunities, or tying cards to your elemental cores. As you acquire new cards, your deck becomes more powerful and efficient, allowing you to create stronger combinations and make faster progress towards your objective. To stabilise a core, you must attach cards containing matching elemental symbols to it. Once a core has accumulated four matching element symbols, it is completed and removed from the game. The first player to complete all four cores wins. While building an efficient deck is important, Corebind is ultimately a race, and players who focus too heavily on engine-building can find the game ending surprisingly quickly as an opponent completes their final core and claims victory. On your turn, you can do one of five things. Channel allows you to play a card for its special ability, triggering the blue text on the card. Fuse is the main way you'll acquire new cards, combining the Essence generated by up to three matching elemental cards to purchase stronger cards from the market. Forage lets you explore the Wilds deck in search of useful new cards or recover previously Purged cards. Stabilise is how you progress towards victory, allowing you to attach elemental cards to your cores in an effort to complete them. Finally, Converge is a powerful all-in action that combines the Essence of your entire hand to make a large purchase, but at the cost of Purging every card revealed. Choosing when to use each action, and balancing deck-building with progress towards your cores, forms the heart of the game's decision-making. More than just another deck-builder The first thing that really grabbed me was a clever little idea that I haven't seen implemented quite like this before. As you acquire cards from different sources, they enter your deck with different card backs. That means when you're drawing through your deck, you often have some information about what's coming. If you've only acquired one card from a particular source and you spot that card back approaching, you know exactly what is waiting for you. Other times you might know you're about to draw something powerful, even if you don't know precisely which card it is. It sounds like a small thing, but it creates an unusual layer of planning that most deck-builders simply don't have. You're not just managing probabilities. You're reading your deck as it cycles and adjusting your plans accordingly. The second idea I really enjoyed revolves around Purging, which is Corebind's version of trashing cards. In most deck-builders, once a card is trashed, it's gone forever. Here, Purging often provides a powerful immediate benefit, but those cards enter a shared area where they can potentially be recovered by you or even stolen by other players later. That creates fascinating decisions. Do you cash in a powerful card now for an immediate advantage, knowing somebody else could claim it later? Or do you keep it safe in your deck? I found myself constantly weighing short-term gains against the possibility of handing opportunities to my opponents. The joy of discovery One of the biggest strengths of this prototype is simply the sheer amount of content. Corebind currently contains around 250 unique cards, and that becomes obvious almost immediately. In my first game, the biggest source of enjoyment wasn't optimising my strategy. It was discovering what was out there. Every trip into the market or the Wilds felt like opening another door. New effects appeared constantly. New combinations emerged. Cards I'd never seen before would suddenly appear and completely change my plans. By later plays, that experience evolved. I started recognising cards and understanding some of the stronger combinations. There were moments where I found myself hoping a particular card would appear because I knew how well it would fit into my strategy. The interesting thing is that it rarely mattered when it didn't. With so many unique cards available, another exciting option usually appeared instead. Rather than feeling disappointed, I'd find myself changing direction and exploring a different combination. That constant sense of discovery remained one of the game's strongest qualities throughout. Watch the finish line One lesson I learned very quickly is that Corebind is a race. I spent one game happily building what I thought was an excellent engine, feeling quite pleased with myself, only for another player to complete their final core far sooner than I expected. The game was over before I felt remotely ready for it. That's not necessarily a criticism. In fact, I think it's part of the tension that makes the game work. You cannot simply sit back and build the perfect deck. You need to keep one eye firmly fixed on what everyone else is doing. The ending can arrive abruptly, particularly once players know what they're doing. Table presence and pacing As a prototype, it would be unfair to spend much time discussing artwork or production quality because those elements will almost certainly change. What I can comment on is pacing. Corebind moves. Fast. Turns are snappy. Downtime is minimal. Even when players are considering multiple options, the decision space remains manageable. At lower player counts especially, I could easily see groups playing three or four games in a single evening. That's probably one of the strongest compliments I can give any prototype. After finishing a game, my immediate reaction was rarely "that was enough". It was usually "shall we go again?" Pros Clever deck-building ideas that genuinely feel fresh Excellent sense of discovery thanks to the huge variety of cards Fast turns and short playtimes encourage repeated plays Cons Rulebook needs a bit of tightening, sure that will come. Endings can arrive suddenly if you're not monitoring opponents Final thoughts Corebind is still very much a work in progress, and plenty may change before release. The artwork will improve. Components will evolve. Certain cards and balance decisions will almost certainly be revisited. What excites me is that the foundation already feels strong. The deck-building is familiar enough to be approachable, but introduces several genuinely interesting twists. The stabilisation race creates tension throughout. The unique card-back system adds subtle but meaningful planning opportunities. Most importantly, the game constantly rewards curiosity. Even after multiple plays, I was still discovering cards, spotting new combinations, and wondering what might appear next. For an early prototype, that's an excellent sign. The best compliment I can pay Corebind is that I stopped thinking about what the game might become and started enjoying what it already is.

An Age Contrived WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Anachrony, Tzolk'in, Le Harve Published by: Bellows Intent Designed by: Chris Matthew This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. This review is for the Core version. An Age Contrived comes from new designer Chris Mathew, who seems to have struck Kickstarter gold, after over 4,800 backers pledged close to half a million dollars for this game back in the beginning of 2023. Now the game is hitting people's tables, and there have been some mixed reviews. I will say for the record, right now, I like this game and will explain why in more detail below. But I will also cover the criticism people have for the game, so you can hear a balanced argument. But first, let's explain how this game works and get it to the table. This will be a detailed teach of the set-up and how to play. If you would rather just know what we think, skip to the Is It Good? section below. How To Set Up An Age Contrived First place the main board down on the table. It's a beauty, so take a moment to take it all in! Now shuffle the five Monument Randomiser Tokens and draw a number matching the player count. These Monuments will be used alongside the Beacon Monument during your game. The total number of Monuments played will always be equal to the number of players plus one. Next, locate the metal frame a for each Monument in use this game and place them into their positions from under the game board. Start with the middle Monument, lay the board flat, then do the sides one by one. The Dice Tower suggest this process is hard. Do it in the right order and it will not be hard at all. Locate the various panels for each Monument you are using and place them in their assigned space on the board. they go in numerical order with one on the top and the square icons facing up. Place the Monument Patron Tokens into each Monuments bound energy area. This is the circular area behind each Monument. Now, get the Monument Benefit Tokens and remove all Tokens that show a player count greater than your number of players. This is shown in a notch icon on the top right of the token. Randomly deal one Monument Benefit Token face-up into the assigned space next to each stack of Monument sections in use this game. Next, randomly deal one of the six Achievement Tokens face-up into each of the the blank Achievement Token spaces on the board. Return the rest to the box. Then remove all upgraded Transmuter Tiles that show a player count greater than your number of players, then shuffle the remaining Tiles by tier a single face-down deck on the bottom of the board, with tier three on the bottom and tier one on top. Reveal four tiles face-up to fill the Tile Pool. Next, place the Upgraded Actions tokens faceup near the board in a 4x2 layout suitable for your player count or utilise the provided tray. Then, position the Conduit Tokens in three stacks near the board or in the tray. Remember to place the Conduit Token with two icons at the top of each stack to reward the first player to claim it with a superior token. Now, distribute one quick-start card to each player randomly for character assignment. Alternatively, players can choose their card if they prefer, although random selection is recommended due to the asymmetry in player powers. Gather your character’s corresponding Transmutation Device, Character Board, character components, and a player aid. Players can select the side of their Transmutation Device, Character Board, and Transmuter Tiles to use, which does not impact gameplay. Each player now needs to place their Character Miniature on the starting space of the closest region to their seat at the table that has a Monument in use this game. Now, take all the energy tokens of your colour. Note there are four types of icons. Place two Energy Tokens of each type into the energy reserve on the right hand side of the game board. You will be bale to get these using various powers during the game to increase your pool. Then, place your remaining Energy Tokens into the Exhausted Pool of your Character Board Everyone now places their three Bridge Tokens onto their matching numbered spaces on their Character Board along with their Channel Marker, face up with two players and face down with every other player count. Each player must now place their five Action Tokens into their matching numbered spaces of their Transmutation Device You can use either side, just position them into the right slot. The two Transmuter Tiles numbered zero are placed to the left of your Transmutation Device. Now, each player must place Energy Tokens from their Exhausted Pool, matching the types and positions shown in their quick-start card. Place one Energy Token into the Tile Pool on the main board and this should leave four on your exhausted pool. Next, randomly deal the neutral Bridge Tokens based on your player count face-up onto the broken path spaces connecting each player’s starting region to the central region on the main board. Finally, randomly choose who will be the start player, and give them the start player marker. You are now ready to play! How To Play An Age Contrived On your turn, players can either ADVANCE their channel (to develop and prepare for later turns) or take one or more ACTIONS. Play continues in turns like this until all of the Monuments have been made, at which point the game continues until all players have had equal turns, then the game ends immediately. Advancing is done very simply by selecting one of your two inactive Transmuter Tiles and sliding it into the first position of your Device. This will push the others along, knocking the last one. The one that is knocked off is brought back to your inactive side. Any energy in the final tile that comes out is immediately exhausted. You will then fill up all spaces in the new tile that you just added with energy taken from your exhausted pool. You can pick any energy, so think about which action you may want to do. If your Channel Marker is charged, you can do this all twice. When you move the tiles along, check to see if any of the symbols on them match any symbols above in any gained Conduit Tokens. You start with none, so this won't happen for a while. But when it does, you can then carry out these actions, moving your character or energy one space along the tracks for each matched symbol. More on this later. The main thing you will do in the game though, is use the energy in your device to take actions. There are five actions in the game as shown on the bottom icons on each of the five rows. You can upgrade these through building monuments and buying new upgrades. When you use your turn to take actions, select and exhaust one energy from the bottom row from the area you chose to take an action. Add this to your exhausted area. Then take the Action. You can repeat this for as many energy tokens as you wish to exhaust from the bottom row. Any energy located in the bottom row at position five can be exhausted to perform any one action. The other four work as such: The second action space lets you buy and upgrade the Transmuter Tiles from the main board. The first one costs one energy, the second and third cost two, and the final costs three energy. You can only spend energy previously placed into the energy tile pool on the main board. Later upgrades will let you reduce these costs. The tile you buy immediately replaces one of your existing tiles. You can never have more than seven. The replaced tile is out of the game. All other tiles then slide down and a new one is added to the row. Upgraded tiles have more spaces for more energy, and additional icons to improve your Advance action. The fourth space lets you move your figure on the board two spaces or move on the Monument or Pillar tracks. These final two are on your player board, and the first time you do this, take any energy token from your exhausted area and add it sideways into the first position on the track. When you get to the top of either track, you can carry out the benefit. This is to either bind (add) an energy token to a Monument's bind area on the main board or onto one of the Pillar spaces on the main board. In a two or three-player game, there is only one space for each monument, so act fast. Moving your character on the board is mainly to get into new areas and cross bridges. Doing so gains you the benefit of the bridge. More on that later. Finally, the first and third action space work in the same way. You can exhaust energy here to then move energy from the corresponding upper rows and place them onto the board. Space one lets you move energy from space four and five. And action space three lets you move tokens from energy space two and three. Pictured above is an upgraded action tile in space three for you to see how you can advance this. Hopefully, it is clear what this means. You can add any one upper energy to the board. You will also notice a symbol in the first space that lets you refresh your Chanel Marker, meaning you can Advance twice again on your next Advance turn. Moving energy to the board is the main thing you will do in the game. There are three places to move energy too. First, you can add tiles to the Tile pool to help you buy upgraded Transmuter tiles in later turns. Second, you can add them to the left-hand Achievements row to any achievements you may have completed by then for end game points. These change each game but are mainly about getting energy onto the board, upgrading your Transmuter tiles, and developing your powers. You can either gain five points or two points for each type of Energy token you have on the board in the Monument spaces that match the energy use here on the Achievement row. The above two show how you can gain points if you have bound energy to at least three Monuments, and below; if you have acquired at least three Conduit tokens. Finally, you can add them to the monuments, and this is the main action in the game. When you add energy to the monuments, you must match one of the face-up spaces in one of the face-up monuments, based on the type of energy required there. When you fill the final space on a Monument, place the final piece on its side to remind you that you were the player to add the final energy. Then, when your turn is over, you will build that completed piece of the monument. Each Monument has four or five parts. When the final part of the final Monument is built, the game is over that round. When you build the Monument, remove all energy from it, one at a time. Each player who contributed energy can take one of two actions. Either gain one or two (for the first piece of each Monument) energy from the Energy reserves on the right side of the board, or take that Monument's Benefit Token. These are different each game, but are essentially how you will upgrade your actions, gain the Conduit tokens to improve your Advance turn, and build bridges. There are also other benefits that repeat other actions already covered. Each player can gain just one of these two benefits, no matter how much energy they have there. Now, each energy token becomes active. The Rose energy is exhausted but lets you move your character one space on the Monument or Pillar track. The Magnet energy lets you load it back into any empty space on your Transmuter tile board. The Compass energy lets you place it on the board into one of the three available spaces (Tile Pool, Achievement row, or Monument section). Any wild energy can be placed anywhere on the Monument, but now it just simply becomes exhausted. But when you build your first bridge, a Wild energy power will become unlocked. Watch out for other play throughs that got this rule wrong! The final token, placed on the side, does not activate like this, rather it moves onto the board next to the built Monument, into the Monument's bound energy area, ready for big end game points. Everyone gains a benefit from contributing towards a Monument being built, but the completing player gets the biggest reward. At the end of the game, players will be rewarded with points for any of the four types of energy they have fully gained from the energy stores on the board, for each energy bound to a Monument on the board or bound to the Pillar spaces, and for any Tier three bridge that has been built, and all achievements you have bound energy to. Finally, any energy left in the Tile pool will gain one additional point as well. Is It Fun? An Age Contrived Board Game Review Building up your engine through combo turns is a real delight. In your first game, you may not be able to do this quite so much. It does take a game or two to learn the strategy and really learn how to play this game well. This learning curve is not too steep though, but you do need to give it a few games. But it is also genuinely satisfying as you see your turns develop into combo-tastic beauties, and your scores improve rapidly. Game one will still be fun, you just may not build up your combos quite so well and get a great score This was a big criticism that The Dice Tower review focused on. Which did not sit well with me. They suggested the Action turns took too long (due to these combo-tastic turns) and that the Advance turns were dull. The Advance turns certainly are not as fun, but are just a necessary part of the panning process, and are quick and the game runs on when you do it. The Action turns can combo into longer more powerful turns, but this does not happen each time, it takes a few turns to power them up as when you have a bigger turn you use your energy up, so you then need to build back up. The Dice Tower are right to say it can lead to longer wait times between turns, but these longer turns are not frequent, and when they happen, they involve other players as well. So, you need to be paying attention. For example, when someone completes a Monument, this will involve all players who contributed to it, each player being able to then activate their energy there. When someone buys a new tile, you can add more Energy to the Tile pool if you had any there. And you will want to be paying attention when people add tiles to the Achievement track or bind energy anywhere else on the board, as it will affect what you can do on your later turns. There are only so many spaces for this. The game offers a plethora of options each turn and in your overall strategy. There are multiple viable paths to victory. The variety ensures that every choice you make feels significant and impactful, but also unique and truly a choice. There is never an obvious and clear path. It's up to you what you aim for. I don't see a way you can ever do it all. In part, this is down to you, obviously. But you do need to pay attention to what other players are aiming for and counter that. You cannot let other players dominate specific scoring areas. Watching other players strategies is important, and forming your own strategies to counter is key. I enjoy this sort of interaction in games. It forces me to adapt my strategy during each game rather than following a set process. Visually, the game is a treat. Constructing monuments is both fun and rewarding, with each structure adding to the game's aesthetic appeal. And let's face it. It's just cool to do. They clip on magnetically to the board and it just works so perfectly. When built, they look great and add an impressive dimension. The game's pace is intriguing. If multiple players focus solely on monument building, or at least as a major part of their strategy, this can lead to a very quick game with lower scores. If one player opts for this strategy, others may feel pressured to follow suit to avoid missing out on completed monument bonuses, and the end game scoring this brings. However, balancing your focus across all areas of the game will likely yield better results. There leads to a fascinating balance between game pace, strategy, and overall performance. Mastering the art of multitasking in this game is challenging yet crucial. For instance, the pillars of civilisation initially offer a modest four points for the first one built, which might seem insignificant. But if you manage to complete all six, a whopping 39 points can be yours. As with monuments, it's important to prevent any one player from monopolising this scoring area. For context, in a two-player game, the maximum points from monuments are 36, but linking the energy bound this way to your achievements is essential. Achievements can significantly boost your score, especially if you’re the first to reach them and can capitalise on the bonus points for bound energy types on the board. You can score two points for each bound energy on the board of any one type this way. Another criticism from The Dice Tower was how the game felt a little devoid of theme, and how what you did did not link with the overall feel and story of the game. And how the board was detached from the game and moving your character felt devoid of purpose. I suppose feeling for you will depend upon your own desire to immerse yourself in the lore, which is rich and deep; and how much you want to play a resource management efficiency euro game versus a more thematic character-driven Ameritrash. The game can be both. What you do with you energy effects what you can do on the board. The two are interlinked. And where your character moves affects what bridge powers you can activate, and which monument track you can bind energy too. Where you are and what you do affects your abilities. The most surprising criticism from The Dice Tower for me was when they said the game makes you get "bogged down in minute details" that they "don't care about," such as where they place their specific energy on their Transmuter board. Where you place energy affects what actions you can do on later turns, and which energy you place affects which energy you will place on the board, potentially activate later, and score with the achievements. This is fairly basic future planning seen in a lot of games. I like the process of thinking through future turns in this game. "I want to score this energy in this achievement, and I want to take this action from activating this energy on that monument, so I will place this energy here, these here, and then these ones here." I like this sort of thinking. This is a very odd criticism that I wonder if it comes more from the unscripted "riff" style of review they do, that can create off-the-cuff points like this that are perhaps not actually thought out, or even genuinely believed? It would be fair to say that planning ahead turns like this is not something that some individuals would enjoy, but to say they are minute details they don't care about simply makes no sense in this reviewer's considered and humble opinion. And then they had an issue with the "un-fun" and "boring" rule about keeping your character facing and moving in the same direction. My understanding of this was so that your character cannot simply walk on, off and back onto a bridge, over and over. Like any track in any game, you move up and towards the next benefit. Not up and down, off and on the tracks you like. Hence, keep moving forward in the direction of your character. There are other issues they mentioned such as the Monument building (which is the entire point of the game!) stopping the game flow; that I could also debate here, but I think I will leave it at that. Maybe they were having a bad day. Overall, the interplay between strategy, game pace, and multitasking makes for an engaging and intellectually stimulating experience. I love getting better at this game. I love trying new strategies in this game. And right now, I cannot stop thinking about previous games of this, future potential games, and ways I may try and play next. I think I may be falling hard for this game. Watch the Dice Tower review for contrasting views and make up your own mind. But for me, this is up there as one of my top ten games of 2024.

Fruit Island WBG Score: 6 Player Count: 2-4 You’ll like this if you like: Simple kids games Published by: Analog Game Studios, Designed by: Reiner Knizia This is a review copy. See our review policy here Every now and then I play a game that reminds me my children and I are in very different stages of our board gaming journey. Fruit Island is one of those games. Designed by Reiner Knizia, Fruit Island is a lightweight family game about collecting fruit, avoiding a rampaging gorilla, and deciding whether to push your luck for a few extra points or head back to safety. After seven plays at both two and three players, I found myself in an interesting position. The children enjoyed it. I enjoyed watching them enjoy it. But I rarely found myself excited by the game itself. That might sound harsh, but I think it says more about the audience than the design. Setting up the island Setup is refreshingly simple. Place the island board in the middle of the table, fill a bag with fruit and gorilla tokens, place the monkeys at the market, and you're ready to go in a couple of minutes. It's exactly the kind of setup parents appreciate. No sorting hundreds of components, no lengthy rule explanations, and no complicated iconography to decipher. How to play On your turn, you'll draw a token from the bag. If it's a Gorilla token, you will move or rotate the Gorilla the shown number of spaces. Then draw again. Keep drawing and acting on the token until you get a fruit token. If it's a fruit token, you place it onto a matching tree somewhere (you will have two choices) on the island before moving your monkey one to three spaces. When a tree becomes full, a monkey can land at its base and collect all the fruit from it. Collected fruit isn't safe, though. The island's resident gorilla is constantly roaming around the board and if it lands on your space, all of your unbanked fruit disappears. To protect your haul, you need to return to the central market and bank your fruit before disaster strikes. That creates the game's central dilemma. Do you grab another tree and risk losing everything, or do you play it safe and cash in what you've already earned? It's a simple question, but one younger players immediately understand. Monkey business The first few plays of Fruit Island are genuinely enjoyable. The gorilla creates tension, children quickly become invested in protecting their fruit, and there's plenty of excitement whenever someone gets caught carrying a large haul. The problem is that the game reveals most of its tricks very quickly. After several plays, turns start to feel remarkably similar. Draw a token. Add fruit. Move. Decide whether to bank or not. Repeat. There are tactical decisions lurking beneath the surface. You can influence where fruit appears, position yourself relative to the gorilla, and occasionally force opponents into awkward situations. But these decisions never develop into anything particularly deep. More often than not, success feels heavily influenced by being in the right place when a tree fills or avoiding an unfortunate gorilla movement. That's perfectly acceptable in a game aimed at younger players, but adults looking for the clever decision-making often associated with Knizia's best work may come away disappointed. Best with more players Of the player counts we tried, three players was noticeably more enjoyable than two. And I would guess four even better, but I have not tried that yet. The extra player creates more chaos, more competition for fruit, and more uncertainty around the gorilla's movement. Ironically, adding more randomness made the game more entertaining because there was simply more happening around the board. At two players, the experience felt thinner and more predictable. Even at three players, however, nobody was asking for an immediate rematch. The games were pleasant enough, but they lacked those memorable moments that make you eager to reset the board and go again. Who is this for? This is where Fruit Island succeeds. If you have younger children and want something a step above traditional children's games, there's a lot to like here. It teaches risk versus reward, introduces basic tactical thinking, and wraps everything in a colourful, approachable package. In many ways it reminded me of a HABA-style game that has been given a little extra hobby-game polish. If your children are already moving into more advanced family games, however, I suspect they'll outgrow Fruit Island fairly quickly. Likewise, I can't imagine many adult gaming groups choosing to play this unless children were involved. Pros Very easy to teach and learn Quick setup and playtime Creates genuine push-your-luck tension Younger players will enjoy the gorilla mechanic Works well as an introduction to hobby gaming Cons Becomes repetitive after a few plays Heavily influenced by luck and timing Limited strategic depth for experienced gamers Two-player game feels noticeably weaker Few truly memorable moments Final thoughts Fruit Island is a perfectly competent children's game that understands exactly what it's trying to be. The rules are simple, the tension is easy to grasp, and younger players will have fun collecting fruit while desperately trying to avoid the gorilla. The issue is that there simply isn't enough beneath the surface to keep older gamers engaged for long. After a few plays, I'd seen most of what the game had to offer, and while the children were happy to play, I was never particularly excited to get it back to the table. For families with younger children, Fruit Island is a pleasant way to spend twenty minutes. For adults hoping another Knizia classic is hiding amongst the bananas and mangoes, you may want to keep your expectations in check. Find out more info here.

Finspan: Sharks & Reefs WBG Score: 9 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Wingspan, Everdell, Finspan Published by: Stonemaier Games Designed by: Michael O'Connell (II) This is a review copy. See our review policy here Finspan, but with teeth I really liked Finspan. In fact, I liked it more than a lot of people seemed to initially. While some felt it stripped too much away from Wingspan, I actually thought that was the point. It took the satisfying engine-building core of Wingspan and streamlined it into something faster, cleaner, and easier to table. Less fiddly. Less intimidating. More elegant. But even I admitted in my original review that it perhaps lacked just a little of the strategic texture and variety that made Wingspan and especially Wyrmspan so endlessly replayable. Enter Sharks & Reefs. And honestly? This expansion fixes almost every tiny criticism I had of the base game without ruining what made Finspan work in the first place. That is harder to do than it sounds. This is not one of those expansions that completely transforms the game. It does not reinvent Finspan. It does not suddenly make it a heavyweight strategy title. What it does instead is quietly deepen the experience in a way that feels so natural you almost forget it was not there originally. After a few games, the coral reef system feels less like an expansion and more like how Finspan was always supposed to play. Which is probably the highest compliment I can give it. Oh, and do you like me new board game table? Finspan: Sharks & Reefs - How to set up Setup is almost identical to the base game, which is one of the expansion’s biggest strengths. Shuffle the new fish cards into the main deck, mix the new starter fish into the starter pile, and replace the scorepad and achievement board with the new versions included in the expansion. If using the variable achievement side, shuffle in the new achievement tiles and randomly assign them to the correct weeks. Each player then takes a coral reef overlay and places it over the twilight zone section of their ocean board. This adds a reef track to each of the three dive sites. Place the coral tokens into the general supply and hand each player one of the new reference cards. That is basically it. The new board overlay. The expansion integrates into the base game incredibly smoothly. There is very little additional overhead, and I genuinely think you could teach this version to brand new players without them even realising parts of it are expansion content. Finspan: Sharks & Reefs - How to play The core game remains exactly the same. On your turn, you either play a fish card into your ocean or dive down one of the three columns on your board, activating benefits as you descend. The big addition here is coral reefs. Each time you dive, your diver will pass through the new reef overlay section in that column. When this happens, you may discard the required resource to grow your reef by placing one coral token there. The cost depends on the column. One reef requires discarding an egg, another a young fish, and another a card from your hand. At the end of the game, each coral is worth one point. Fully complete a reef and you also gain a chunky bonus depending on the column. Simple enough. But the cleverness comes from how the new fish interact with coral. Some new reef fish require a certain amount of coral already present before they can even be played. Others gain enhanced abilities if enough coral exists in that dive site when activated. Suddenly, the reef system is not just another point source. It becomes part of your wider engine-building strategy. Then there are the sharks. And yes, they are cool. Some sharks introduce powerful new abilities, including breaking schools apart into four separate young fish, consuming fish directly from your hand, or allowing fish to be played entirely for free. A few cards even create chain reactions around coral generation and consumption that can make certain columns explode in efficiency later in the game. One particularly clever addition is the new two-stage activated abilities. Some fish now provide a standard benefit, but then give an extra reward if you have enough coral in that specific reef. It creates lovely moments where you suddenly realise your previously average dive has become massively more effective because of how you built your ecosystem several turns earlier. And that is what this expansion really adds: layering. Finspan: Sharks & Reefs - Is it fun? Yes. Very. But perhaps more importantly, it makes Finspan itself more fun. That is the key thing here. The base game was already smooth and approachable, but there were moments where strategies could feel a little too straightforward. Sharks & Reefs gives you more to think about without dragging the game down into complexity overload. The reef system adds tension to your decisions constantly. Do you spend your eggs growing coral now, or save them for fish costs later? Do you break apart a school for short-term flexibility? Do you prioritise filling an entire reef for the bonus points, or simply use coral to unlock stronger fish abilities? Do you commit heavily into one dive site, or spread your coral growth across all three? These are not earth-shattering strategic dilemmas. This is still Finspan. But they are exactly the sort of small extra decisions the game needed. The expansion also improves the rhythm of diving. In the base game, I often found myself repeatedly favouring one or two columns depending on my engine. Now, because each reef has different costs and scoring potential, I naturally found myself diversifying more often. I want to complete my collections of all the coral. The bonus is too enticing! This expansion subtly nudges you toward broader play without forcing it. I also love how optional much of the reef strategy feels. You can absolutely lean hard into coral synergy if the cards appear, building a powerful reef-focused engine. But if the cards do not come, or another strategy opens up first, you can largely ignore coral and still compete. That flexibility matters. The new fish deck is fantastic too. The added variety massively helps replayability, especially at higher player counts where the original deck could occasionally cycle faster than ideal. And the shark cards genuinely feel thematic. There is something wonderfully satisfying about smashing apart a school into four scattered young fish and immediately turning them into new opportunities elsewhere in your ocean. These are the upgraded egg tokens available from Stonmaier Games webstore Finspan: Sharks & Reefs - The theme and presentation Stonemaier continues to absolutely nail the presentation side of these games. The artwork is stunning once again. The coral reefs themselves make your ocean board look far more vibrant and alive, and the sharks add a little extra menace visually that Finspan perhaps lacked previously. More importantly though, this expansion carries a stronger ecological message than the base game did. Designer Michael O’Connell has spoken openly about wanting Sharks & Reefs to highlight the fragility of marine ecosystems and the devastating decline of coral reefs globally. That passion genuinely comes through. Building and protecting your reefs does not just feel mechanically rewarding, it feels meaningful within the context of the theme. No, a board game is not going to save the oceans. But games absolutely can make people care about subjects they otherwise might not engage with. And I suspect more than a few players will finish a game of Sharks & Reefs and suddenly find themselves Googling coral bleaching afterwards. That matters. Pros • Adds meaningful strategic depth without complicating the core game • Coral reefs integrate beautifully into the existing systems • The new fish abilities and increased card variety massively improve replayability Cons • Will not convert people who fundamentally disliked base Finspan • Coral requirements can briefly confuse newer players early on Final thoughts Sharks & Reefs is exactly what a good expansion should be. It does not bloat the game. It does not “fix” Finspan by changing its identity. Instead, it understands what Finspan already was and carefully builds upon it in ways that feel natural, elegant, and surprisingly impactful. For me, this moves Finspan from “really good streamlined Wingspan variant” into something that genuinely stands alongside the other Span games confidently on its own terms. Wyrmspan probably still offers the deepest strategy of the trilogy. Wingspan still has the broadest appeal and legacy. But Finspan with Sharks & Reefs may honestly now be the one I most want to actually play. And perhaps the best compliment of all? I do not really want to play Finspan without this expansion anymore. Turns out the ocean was just missing a few sharks. And let's be honest, most ecosystems improve slightly when you add sharks.