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 catch your attention because of a clever mechanism. Others do it because the table looks completely unlike anything else around it. Cubyria is very much in the second camp, although there is a surprisingly clever spatial puzzle hiding underneath all that three-dimensional plastic. And some amazing multiplier scoring options that will blow your minds! This is a preview based on a prototype copy, so the final components, materials, presentation and production quality are still subject to change. That matters particularly here because Cubyria has been designed around its physical structure from the beginning, and the team is still working towards a manufacturable version that retains the distinctive look of the original 3D-printed pieces. I am therefore focusing primarily on the gameplay, building system and overall experience rather than judging the prototype as finished retail production. Although, for a 3-D printed prototype, this is exceptional. Build Me a Palace Cubyria casts two to five players as rival architects hired by a rather demanding Vizier. Everyone contributes to the same palace on the same board, but you are competing individually for points, with the idea being that the architect who best satisfies the Vizier’s tastes earns the most favour. The designers describe it as something close to competitive 3D Tetris, and that is probably the quickest way to understand the basic appeal. Players are dealt three cards. Cards correspond directly to physical building components, and on your turn, you use as many cards as you wish to add rooms, roofs, stairs, balconies, and structural pieces to the growing palace. Each card shows the building's scoring potential based on what floor it is built on. Some want to be higher, others like the Crypt, like to be low. There are multipliers based on matching buildings of the same category next to each other, as shown on the symbols on the left of the card. And most conveniently, there is a grid reference showing where you can find the attached building in the building container's storage unit, which works so well. I love it. Every room has a base value, and that value is multiplied by the floor on which you build it. A room worth four points on the first floor is therefore worth considerably more if you can somehow position it safely several levels higher. But this will not always be possible. And your fellow players will be looking for those high placements too. The Avery is located in G2, so run your finger along seven spaces horizontally, then two down and there it is. The Vizier Has Opinions Of course, your employer is not content to let architects build wherever they like. Certain rooms have preferred locations, while others can comfortably sit anywhere. A Dungeon, for example, belongs down low, and the Vizier's own chambers score negative if it sits on floor three or below. He wants to be up high! If you ignore those preferences you can still place the room, but you will suffer a penalty equal to its value. That creates a nice little tension. Sometimes the correct thematic placement is also the obvious scoring choice, but there can be reasons to accept a penalty if a badly placed room creates the foundation for something much more valuable above it. The scoring therefore encourages efficiency without completely dictating your decisions. The larger and more complicated rooms tend to be worth more, but they are also more difficult to support as the structure rises. Most rooms need to be completely supported underneath, so the palace naturally becomes a puzzle of foundations, useful surfaces and increasingly awkward gaps. Doors, Windows and Actual Architecture But that is not even half of it. Cubyria does not let you build a nonsensical pile of boxes either. Every room must ultimately be connected to the rest of the palace through a continuous path, most commonly by matching doors. You only need one valid connection, which keeps the rule manageable, but it still forces you to think about how your new room actually joins the existing structure. And each room only has a few doors, sometimes just one. Sometimes even none! Secret doors make that easier because they can connect to normal doors, other secret doors or even blank walls. Gallery windows work the opposite way and cannot be blocked, which creates another spatial consideration as the palace becomes more crowded. Once placed, a building with a window can never be blocked, and this will affect every turn for the rest of the game, so think carefully about where you will be place these tricky rooms. What I like about that system is that the complexity remains mostly visible. You do not need to remember some buried internal network once the palace becomes enormous. You are primarily looking at the exposed edges, open doors, available support, and useful building locations, which is exactly where a game like this needs the information to live. As you can see, as the game progresses, you will have a lot of rooms built. It's nice to not have to worry about what's under or in between previously built rooms! Going Up Vertical construction is where Cubyria starts to get especially interesting. Internal stairs acquired via cards just like the rooms, create a connection between one room and the room directly beneath it, opening access to a new floor and allowing further construction around it. Once that vertical route exists, other rooms on the same level can connect normally without needing their own staircase. And mostly, the higher you go, the more points! Roofs score slightly differently, using their base value plus the floor they cover rather than multiplying by height. Support columns are effectively structural wild cards that can go almost anywhere and help hold up rooms or roofs, although they do not create a valid route through the palace themselves. Then there are external staircases, and these are where the scoring can really explode. Rooms attached to them can be doubled, and linked staircases can stack those multipliers again and again. A clever player is therefore constantly looking for ways to combine height, room value and multipliers rather than simply placing the next convenient piece. Balconies and Bridges Balconies loosen the normal support rules. Balcony spaces can overhang empty areas as long as more than half of the entire piece remains properly supported, allowing the palace to stretch outward rather than becoming a neat vertical tower. Some specific components even reward that overhang directly. The Juliet Balcony and Bridge Tower can score bonus points based on the empty space beneath them, encouraging you to create those dramatic suspended structures rather than simply filling every gap underneath. It is exactly the sort of rule that gives Cubyria personality. The game wants the final palace to look strange, ambitious and slightly improbable, and it rewards players for embracing that. Introductory and Core Games There is an introductory mode designed to teach the basic building rules. Players have cards in hand alongside a shared open display, and on a turn can use up to five cards from the combined selection before everything is replenished. Play continues until the deck is exhausted. The full game then adds Affinities, which are symbols representing the style or function of various rooms and components. Matching affinities between adjacent pieces creates bonus points, with rooms gaining extra value for matches and roofs potentially doubling their total value. This is where the scoring becomes much more tactical. Building high is already valuable, staircases can multiply scores, and then affinities can increase them again. The result is a system where an apparently ordinary room placement can become extremely lucrative if several scoring opportunities intersect at once. The Whimsy of Cubyria The full game also introduces Whimsy cards, which are secret personal objectives representing whatever strange architectural demand the Vizier has whispered into your ear. Each player has one hidden goal, and the first person to complete theirs doubles the score from their entire turn. This allows for insane scores. The highest we achieved on one turn using a Whimsy was 180! And most early game scores are more like two or five! The particularly nasty twist is that when somebody completes a Whimsy, everyone loses their current card. They are shuffled back together and new goals are dealt out, so you can spend several turns quietly preparing for something only to watch another architect complete theirs first and wipe your plan away. That injects a welcome bit of urgency into what could otherwise become a purely contemplative spatial puzzle. It also helps explain some of the enormous scoring swings the designers have seen, with height, affinities, stairs and a completed Whimsy all potentially combining into one ridiculous turn. Shared Building, Shared Problems Because everyone is working on the same palace, Cubyria is naturally quite reactive. The perfect position you were eyeing up may be gone by the time your next turn arrives, and another player can unintentionally create exactly the support, doorway or affinity connection you needed. That also means long-term planning has limits. Some early players have noted that card draw and the rapidly changing shared structure make it difficult to plan several turns ahead, but the other side of that is that you are constantly solving a new spatial problem rather than executing a script you decided upon ten minutes earlier. For me, that feels appropriate for the design. Cubyria looks like a puzzle, but it is really an opportunistic puzzle, where the challenge is not simply identifying the perfect move but spotting what the palace currently allows and exploiting it better than everybody else. Everything is so easy to find and pack away thanks to this handy duel-layered tray The Physical Game Cubyria’s biggest strength is impossible to separate from its physical form. This game began life as an attempt to represent vertical movement properly on a tabletop, before the designers realised that constructing the environment was more interesting than the chase game they had originally intended. That history makes sense when you see the system. The castle is not a decorative representation of something happening elsewhere. Building the object is the game. The doors, windows, stairs, balconies, support and height are all meaningful parts of the rules rather than plastic scenery added afterwards. The challenge has been manufacturing that vision at a sensible price. The current plan is for foldable semi-flexible plastic components that arrive flat and permanently snap together, recreating the look of the original 3D-printed rooms without requiring prohibitively expensive multi-part moulds. Because this is still a prototype, the final success of that production solution is something I would want to see before giving the game a full review. Final Thoughts Cubyria is immediately distinctive. Plenty of games involve laying tiles, building cities or constructing shared landscapes, but physically assembling a competitive three-dimensional palace gives this one a very different presence and creates spatial decisions that simply would not work on a conventional flat board. There is also more game underneath the spectacle than I initially expected. Height multipliers, preferred floors, architectural connections, stairs, balconies, affinities and secret Whimsy objectives all interact to create some potentially huge turns, while the shared structure means you are constantly reacting to what everyone else has built. There are question marks that only the finished edition can answer, particularly around final component quality, durability and how successfully the production version preserves the prototype’s table presence. But as a prototype preview, Cubyria already has the most important thing going for it: it feels like its own game, rather than another familiar system wearing a new coat of paint.

Yield WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 2-5 You’ll like this if you like: Texas Hold-em and The Gang Published by: BFF Games Designed by: Satoshi Matsuura, Luigi Sampieri Rodriguez This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Some games impress on first play and then slowly disappear from your thoughts. Yield has done the opposite for me. I enjoyed it when I first previewed the prototype, and after more plays over a much longer period, and now with this final print copy, I still enjoy it just as much. That matters, because this is exactly the sort of game where the real test is not whether the first few battles feel exciting, but whether the system still has enough life in it once you understand the tricks. Set 43 years before the events of Hidden Leaders, Yield puts players in charge of rival Houses fighting for control of Oshra during a civil war. You move Armies around the map, strengthen and conquer Fortresses, manage hidden Army strength, and fight over the most valuable parts of the board. After three Years, each Fortress is worth the number of tokens in its stack, and whoever controls the top token scores the whole value. Setup and How to Play Each player begins with three Armies and secretly divides 12 Units between them, with at least one Unit in each. That hidden information immediately gives the game some tension, because the Army sitting next to you might be barely hanging on or could be far stronger than it looks. Players also start with six identical Strategy cards and a hand of Battle cards, while the map changes depending on player count. The game lasts three Years, and each Year is divided into a Strategy phase, Battle phase, Conquer phase, and Recovery and Recruitment phase, although the final Year skips that last step. During the Strategy phase, players simultaneously choose one Strategy card, reveal them, and resolve them in turn order. This happens four times per Year, meaning you only play four of your six available Strategy cards before moving into battle. Those Strategy cards are refreshingly direct. They let you move, conquer unguarded or neutral Fortresses, ambush, upgrade Fortresses you already have, or use the Ritual card to sacrifice some Fortress value in exchange for copying another action and potentially changing the starting player. The decisions come less from having dozens of options and more from choosing exactly when to use the few tools you have. Fighting for Oshra Combat is where Yield really earns its name. When opposing Armies are adjacent, players reveal the strength of the participating forces and mark the totals on the Battle tracker. The weaker player gains initiative and must decide whether to play Battle cards to climb above their opponent, accept a draw where possible, or simply Yield and take the loss. Battle cards are tied to the colour of the region your army occupies, so positioning matters before the fight even starts. Matching cards can be played face up for their full value, while any card can be played face down for just one point. This creates some lovely tension because you are constantly asking whether your opponent genuinely has the cards to keep going or is simply trying to make you blink first. You can play as many cards as you wish until you have a higher score. Then the other player takes the initiative and can do the same in return if they wish and have the cards to do so. This continues until one player yields. Get the name now? Although you can tie and draw too. Losing does not necessarily mean destruction. You lose Units equal to the difference between the two sides scores after adding all battle cards played, then retreat, while the winner may Chase into the vacated position. Armies can also be destroyed if they hit zero or have nowhere legal to retreat, and doing so grants the victor free Fortress upgrades. This makes battles meaningful without turning every defeat into a complete disaster. The Fortresses Are the Real Prize The most interesting part of the scoring system is that Fortresses become more valuable as players interact with them. Every time one is conquered, another token is added to the stack, increasing its value for whoever eventually controls it. They score one point per token there at the end of the game. And tokens never go away; they don't get removed. They just get added to as the game progresses. That means a location can become increasingly tempting as the game goes on, and a Fortress everyone has been fighting over can suddenly be worth far more than something you quietly protected in a corner. This creates some excellent late-game pressure. I have had games come down to one final battle over one heavily upgraded Fortress, with everything resting on positioning, hidden Army strength and whether the right Battle cards are still in hand. That is exactly the sort of finish I want from a fast area-control game. It also means Yield is less about building an empire you defend forever and more about timing. Control can be fluid, and that will not suit everyone, but I like the way it keeps players moving and interacting. Sitting safely in one corner is rarely the most rewarding route. Where the Game Really Comes Alive The asymmetric Leaders remain my favourite part of the design. Each offers two different powers, and some of them dramatically change how you approach the board. Keralon can field a fourth Army or strengthen Battle cards through a Champion, Lemron can move or even create Fortresses, Vymar can improve face-down Battle cards, and Pavyr can gain power from Fortresses or steal cards. Then there is Basil. One side lets losing Armies gain Units rather than lose them, while the other can win the entire game immediately by destroying a single enemy Army. That sounds completely ridiculous on paper, but powers like this are exactly what give Yield its character and make different match-ups feel meaningfully different. I adore it! Importantly, that variety has held up for me. This is not something I only enjoyed during the excitement of the prototype. More games have simply reinforced how much I like exploring different powers, different maps and different ways of approaching the same compact system. What Might Not Work for Everyone There are a few areas where I can see players bouncing off the game. The battle system is intentionally incremental, with players leapfrogging each other by playing cards until one side finally gives in. And you can have your arsenal of battle cards drained with one battle, when your plans were to use them for something else. I enjoy that tension, but if you prefer combat to resolve quickly and decisively and with a little more control, the back-and-forth can feel repetitive. Worse n a multi-player game of more than two, when you are not involved in a long back-and-forth battle. The game can also feel quite fluid for an area-control title. With only three Armies, holding everything you capture is difficult, and Fortresses can change hands repeatedly. If you like building secure borders and carefully defending territory, this may feel less satisfying than a more traditional conquest game. This is a fluid game. Pros Fast, punchy area control with meaningful interaction. Excellent asymmetry that keeps different match-ups fresh. Clever hidden Army strength and Battle card tension. Strong replayability despite a relatively focused ruleset. Cons Battles may feel repetitive if you dislike incremental escalation. Territory can be hard to hold, especially at higher player counts. Multiplayer battles are slightly more cumbersome than the rest of the game. The core loop is focused rather than mechanically broad. Final Thoughts When I first previewed Yield, I thought it had the potential to be a very good fast area-control game. Now, after considerably more time with it, I am more confident in that judgement. The initial excitement has not worn off, and the game still gives me the same satisfying mix of bluffing, positioning, tactical aggression and dramatic late battles. What impresses me most is how much game it gets into a relatively short playtime. You are constantly making meaningful decisions about where to move, which Strategy card to commit, when to risk a battle, when to Yield and which Fortresses are worth fighting for. The asymmetric powers then push those decisions in different directions without turning the game into a sprawling rules exercise. Most importantly, Yield is still a keeper. I have had enough time with it now for the novelty to disappear, and I still want it on my shelf and still want to play it. For me, that is about as useful a recommendation as any review can give.

As the great MC Hammer once said, "Yield, Gaming time!" This is a prototype version of the game and may not represent the final quality or look of the game. From the makers of Hidden Leaders and Almost Innocent there now comes new area control game, set in the same world as the previous games, with the same artistic style from Satoshi Matsuura but a whole new game style. You can find more about Yield here. Yield operates in a straightforward manner. A group of 2-5 players will select a faction from five options and one of the two sides of their chosen faction player boards. Each player will gather their three (or four for a specific faction) army tokens, power dials, six action cards, fortress tokens, and ten battle cards (from which they must discard three from). The remaining battle cards should be positioned next to the main board (on the right side according to the player count) near the score tracker. Neutral fortresses are then placed on the spaces marked with roman numerals. Players will distribute twelve power between their three armies (or four for the yellow player if they chose side A), rotating the dials to any numbers above one, to a total of twelve between them. Players will keep each individual army's assigned number secret. Players will then add one of their fortress tokens to one of the neutral fortress spaces, placing their token on the top. Players will then take turns adding their army tokens to the board either on the space with their starting fortress or one space next to it. Finally, assign one player to be the starting faction. You are now ready to play. Play now follows three rounds, each of which consists of four steps. The first step is where players will all play one of their six action cards from their hand. All players have the same six cards and will play four each round. The cards are all played face down, and when all players have played one card, the cards are revealed to show the intentions of each player. The starting player will then carry out their action first, followed by the next player, until all players have done this. This continues until all players have played and carried out four actions. If you ever do not want to take an action, or need more battle cards, you can choose not to reveal the action card, and instead draw five new battle cards, add them to your hand, then discard two. The main actions available are to move your armies, conquer neutral or other players' fortresses if they are left unguarded, and build new fortresses. You can also initiate a battle with an added battle score of six, which we will explain later; or conduct a ritual when you can copy any other card either in your hand or already played, gain the first player marker, but you must remove the bottom fortress token from one fortress that you control. At the end of the game, the player with the most points from fortresses wins. Each fortress is worth the number of tokens there, including neutral and other players' tokens. Whoever has the top token scores all the points. So you want to be adding tokens, not removing them. After the action card phase concludes, players will proceed to start battles. Battles will occur across the map whenever two or more opposing armies are currently adjacent to each other. A scenario of two (or more) armies facing one can arise if two armies surround a single one, but only the armies neighbouring an opposing army will engage in combat. In a situation where one army is adjacent to an enemy's army and has another army next to itself, but not adjacent to the opposing army, the two armies cannot team up against the single army. Battles work by players revealing the current battle strength of the armies engaged in battle, and then using a fortress token to mark this on the score tracker. The player with the lowest battle score then takes the initiative and decides if they want to fight or yield. If they yield, they will lose the difference in their current battle score and the enemy's by removing that from their battle dial. If this brings them to zero, they are destroyed. If they still have health left, they are defeated but not destroyed. If the player with the initiative does not want to yield, they can play a battle card to raise their battle score. The battle card must match the colour of the area in which they are fighting. If a player has more than one army involved, and these armies cover more than one terrain, that player can then play cards from more than one colour in this battle. This is a significant advantage. Players keep playing cards, rotating the initiative as they overtake each other's battle score by playing cards, until one player yields. The only other way a battle can end is if a tie occurs, and the player who has received the initiative decides to call a draw. This is rare. The battle cards can also be played on their reverse side as a wild card. A defeated army can be pushed back one space by the winning army. They can then advance one space with one army if they choose, potentially moving onto a now unprotected fortress. If you cannot push an opposing army as they are backed into a corner, then this is another way an army can be destroyed. Defeated armies stay on the map, but destroyed armies are removed. Play then moves to the next phase, the conquer phase, where players can add fortress tokens of their colour onto any fortress space they don't currently own, so long as they are on this space with one of their armies. This generally is the result of winning a battle. For each fortress conquered this way, the player who does this can draw two new battle cards. Play then moves to the final phase where any destroyed army can now come back onto the map, onto any fortress owned by that player. They will reappear with half of their previous health, rounded down. One player will then draw one card from the battle deck, reveal it to all players, and all players will then add that amount to their overall battle score, distributed amongst all their battle dials. In round two, two cards are drawn like this. After round three, the game ends. So far, so normal. But where is the twist? Alright, calm down, I was getting to it. This game has five different factions, and each one has its own unique asymmetric power. In fact, each one has two of its own. You can choose side A or B. Let's take a closer look at these now, and this is where the game comes alive! These powers can give you an extra army, allow you to move your fortresses as well as your armies, or even gain units for your armies instead of losing them when you lose a battle! A pretty hard power to combat when you are up against it, I found! Pavyr lets you gain extra battle cards for being in bigger fights, and Vyma has a great power that lets you play face down battle cards as neutral threes, rather than neutral ones. A bit advantage. But this is side A, check out some of the side B's! Pavyr now gains units from his total Fortresses, a huge swing in most fights! And Vyma now gains additional movement when carrying out the Ritual action. Movement is very powerful in this game. And check these out! Keralon now adds plus two for all face-up battle cards when their champion is in the fight! Lemron can now place power tokens on any space where they have armies present, rather than just existing fortress spaces. This is huge. But most bonkers of all, Basil now wins the entire game, no matter what round it is, no matter what player count it is, simply by destroying one army! Will you dare fight Basil? These variable powers bring not only incredible variety to the game, but also bucket loads of fun! I have loved exploring the variations of fighting with and against each of these, in multiple player counts and combinations. It makes every game feel different, and adds huge character to the game. Often a game will come down to one final battle for one powerful fortress. You need to plan ahead and make sure you have the right armies in the right place, with the right battle cards in hand. There can be some luck to this, but also a lot of planning, and when it pays off, it feels great. Games are surprisingly fast. Two-player games can be done in under 30 minutes. And I have had a four-player game last under forty too. Obviously, this depends on the players at the table, but ultimately, you play four cards each round, the actions are often pretty fast, and you won't have battles every round. Making the battle conquer and recovery round sometimes instant. I predict this game will be a huge success at both Kickstarter and retail levels, and would encourage anyone who enjoys a competitive, fast, fun-filled area-control game to check this one out.

Scales Of Fate WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 2 You’ll like this if you like: Veiled Fate and two player deduction games Published by: IV Studio Designed by: Max Anderson, Zac Dixon, Austin Harrison This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Some two-player games feel like smaller versions of something built for more people. Scales of Fate does not. It feels completely designed around the tension of sitting opposite one person, watching every move they make, trying to work out what they are really doing while giving away as little as possible yourself. It is short too. A full game can come in at around 25 minutes, setup is easy, the rules are surprisingly straightforward, and there is almost no downtime. More importantly, you never really switch off when it is not your turn, because every move your opponent makes might be helping them, hurting you, disguising something, or doing all three at once. How to Play At the start of the game, all nine demigods begin on seven Renown, and each player secretly receives two demigod cards from their own identical deck. That last point is important because both players can potentially care about the same demigod, which immediately makes the deduction less obvious than simply working out which pieces your opponent keeps helping. The aim of the game is to get your two demigods to be either as far away from each other as possible on the scoring track, as you score the difference between the two, or on the same spot, where you score the spot they are on. The game lasts three Ages. On your turn you normally place a demigod onto an action tile, but you could also place a previously gained Servant or use one of the three God Powers, or pass when you no longer have normal actions available. The action tiles let you Smite a demigod into the Abyss, influence what happens to those in the Abyss at the end of the Age, or gain Servants that can later manipulate Renown. Servants are the main way you actually move demigods up and down the Renown track. Different servants interact with different quest types and can sometimes hit several demigods at once, which creates some very satisfying tactical swings. Placing them will move the affected demigods up or down the score track, based on what tiles they are next to, and where you place your servants. So when you place demigods onto the board, and where you place servants will all give clues to your opponent about your intentions. There is enough going on to make each move matter, but never so much that the game becomes difficult to follow. The Real Game Is Reading the Other Player This is where Scales of Fate really works for me. You are not just trying to improve your own position. You are also constantly interpreting your opponent’s actions while trying to make sure they cannot interpret yours. Did they move that demigod because it belongs to them? Did they move it because they think it belongs to you? Are they helping one of their own while pretending not to care, or are they simply setting up a bigger tactical move somewhere else? Because both players can potentially have the same hidden demigod, even an apparently obvious clue can be misleading. That creates a lovely little game of bluff and counter-bluff. Sometimes the smartest move is not the one that scores the most immediately, but the one that muddies the water enough to keep your intentions hidden. And sometimes you realise your opponent has spent the whole game feeding you exactly the wrong story. In joyous! Two Very Different Ways to Score The scoring system is one of the smartest parts of the design. If your two demigods finish on different Renown spaces, you score the difference between them. If they finish on the same space, you score the value of that space instead. That gives you two very different paths. The safer route is often to push one demigod high and one low, creating as much distance as possible. The more daring route is to try to get both onto the same high-value space, which can score very well but is far more vulnerable to interference. I have managed that second strategy a few times, and it is wonderfully satisfying when it comes off. It definitely helps if you have the final move of the third Age, though, and it becomes much harder if your opponent has already identified both of your demigods. If they know what you are trying to do, they can destroy that perfect alignment with one well-timed move. Deduction That Actually Matters At the end of each Age, both players answer a yes-or-no question based on the current Age card. Those questions give partial clues about your hidden demigods without necessarily giving away exact identities, which keeps the deduction developing gradually rather than turning into a single obvious reveal. Then, at the end of the game, both players make their final guesses. Correctly identifying both of your opponent’s demigods is worth three points, identifying one scores nothing, and missing both costs you one. That sounds small, but in a tight game those points can absolutely matter. More importantly, the reveal is just fun. Guess correctly and there is a proper little moment of satisfaction as all those tiny clues click into place. Guess wrong and, rather than feeling cheated, you often end up appreciating just how well your opponent disguised what they were doing. Powerful Tools, Real Costs The God Powers add another nice layer. Smite can throw any demigod into the Abyss, Switch lets you swap any two demigods anywhere, and Steal takes an unused Servant from your opponent. They are powerful, but they are not free. Each costs you a whole turn and one victory point at the end of the game, and once used, that power is gone for good. That makes using one feel significant rather than automatic, which fits the rest of the design perfectly. Everything in Scales of Fate feels like that. There is no obvious filler, no action that exists simply because the designer wanted one more mechanism in the box. The systems are compact, interconnected and nearly always force you to think about both the visible board state and the hidden intentions behind it. Production The production is excellent. The chunky, weighty pieces feel great in the hand and give the game far more physical presence than you might expect from something this short. It also looks superb on the table, with the board’s interlocking shapes and layered spaces giving the whole thing a distinctive identity. The theme itself is much less important. Mechanically, this is really an abstract tactical duel with a demigod skin, and I never felt particularly invested in the world or characters. That does not bother me much because the underlying game is strong enough, but anyone coming in because they want a rich mythological experience may find the setting thinner than the presentation suggests. The iconography can also take a little getting used to. Several of the demigods and visual identifiers are close enough that you may need to pay more attention than feels ideal in a game built around information management. It is not a deal-breaker, but it is probably the weakest part of an otherwise very polished package. Pros Excellent two-player-only design with almost no downtime. Clever mix of deduction, bluffing and tactical board manipulation. Brilliant scoring tension between separation and matching Renown. Superb chunky components and strong table presence. Cons Theme is much lighter than the presentation suggests. Some iconography and demigod identification could be clearer. Deduction may feel a little fuzzy if you prefer hard logical certainty. Very much a dedicated two-player experience, so naturally niche. Final Thoughts Scales of Fate is exactly what I want from a dedicated two-player game. It is short, easy to teach, fast to set up and packed with meaningful decisions from the first turn to the last. There is no long wait between actions, no period where you feel out of the game, and no real downtime because your opponent’s moves are just as interesting to watch as your own. The thing I like most is how well the different layers interact. You are manipulating Renown, protecting your own scoring plan, trying to read your opponent, disguising your priorities and working out whether to chase a safer spread or a riskier matched score. None of those things sit separately, and that is why such a short game can still feel so full. Then you get the final guesses, which give the whole experience a satisfying little flourish. Sometimes you feel like a genius. Sometimes your opponent reveals just how completely they fooled you. Either way, for around 25 minutes of play, Scales of Fate delivers a wonderfully tight and engaging duel.

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. There is something inherently satisfying about building a rocket. Slotting together the right parts, hiring the right people, watching the numbers improve and then deciding whether you are brave enough to light the fuse is a strong foundation for a game. Payload takes that idea and turns it into a compact card game about running your own space company, competing for contracts and trying to get enough successful launches under your belt before everyone else catches up. At its heart, this is an engine-builder with a strong race element running through it. Technically, it is the player with the most victory points who wins, but the game ends when everyone has launched their second Payload or somebody launches a third, so you are always conscious of the pace being set around the table. That creates useful pressure because you cannot simply sit there perfecting your engine forever. Building towards launch Each turn begins with a selection of optional actions before you take two main actions. Those main actions let you buy Rocket Parts, hire Engineers, use Operations or attempt a launch, while optional actions include moving Parts around, selling a Spare Part, repositioning a Junior Engineer or starting a bid for a Payload contract. It gives turns a decent sense of freedom without making them overly long or complicated. The market system is one of the nicer parts of the design. Parts and Engineers sit in variable-price rows, so where a card happens to be positioned determines how much it costs, and buying something causes the rest of the row to shift. It is not revolutionary, but it creates a steady stream of small decisions around value, timing and whether to grab something now or gamble on it becoming cheaper later. There are some neat wrinkles around construction too. A complete rocket needs a Nose Cone, Propellant Tanks, Engine and Nozzle, while Engineers improve the key attributes of Payload Safety, Thrust and Stability. Colour matching matters as well, because Engineers can provide stronger bonuses when matched to the right Part, while matching Parts to Payloads can reduce launch risk. That means you are not simply collecting four cards and moving on, but trying to build something efficient. Contracts, upgrades and risk Payload contracts are acquired through a secret bidding system that is more interesting than it first appears. Players call out labels rather than numbers, with each Bid card assigning different values to those labels, so there is a light deduction element sitting underneath the auction. The lowest bid wins the contract and receives income based on the bid, which makes the whole process feel nicely thematic for a game about commercial space launches. Operations add another layer of flexibility. They let you upgrade Parts, gain Shields, manipulate markets or stretch your turn with effects such as Overdrive, and there is enough variety here to create some genuinely interesting tactical choices. None of these ideas individually feel especially new, but they have clearly been tested against one another and they fit together cleanly. Then comes the fun bit: launching. Once your rocket meets one of the requirement tiers on a Payload, you calculate its Launch Target from the risk on your Parts, reduce that through colour matching, and then roll against it using two dice plus the Weather Die. Shields let you manipulate results, and you can even abort after the second roll, so the dice create tension without making the outcome feel completely arbitrary. First impressions My main feeling after playing Payload is that this is a very solid game. It does not arrive with one huge mechanism that makes you immediately sit up and think you have never seen anything like this before, and in a very crowded card game market that may make it harder to stand out. But what it does, it does well. The theme works, the systems feel balanced, and there is a sense that a lot of playtesting and refinement has gone into making the different parts fit together. There are meaningful choices around money, contracts, upgrades, timing and risk, and the game manages to deliver a surprisingly rich experience from little more than a deck of cards and three dice. That is probably its biggest achievement. It is also relatively quick. You can get a proper sense of development, build something meaningful and enjoy a satisfying arc from first contract to final launch without committing an entire evening to it. For a game built around engine construction and optimisation, that efficiency deserves plenty of credit. Final thoughts Payload is not necessarily the sort of game that immediately speaks to my own tastes, and I do think its biggest challenge may simply be getting noticed. There is nothing especially shiny or immediately spectacular about the design, and the hobby is full of games fighting for attention with bigger hooks, louder production and stranger ideas. But underneath that, this is a carefully constructed and enjoyable game. It offers a good mix of planning, tactical adaptation, market timing and push-your-luck tension, all wrapped around a theme that makes sense of the mechanisms rather than simply sitting on top of them. There is real satisfaction in getting your rocket ready, deciding when to take the risk and then seeing whether all that preparation pays off. If the final production keeps the current clarity and the campaign gives it enough visibility, I can see Payload finding an audience with players who enjoy compact engine-builders and games where efficiency matters. It may not reinvent the genre, but it does not really need to. Sometimes a well-made game that knows exactly what it wants to be is enough.

COSMO WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 2-5 You’ll like this if you like: Texas Hold-em and The Gang Published by: Helvetiq Designed by: 宮野 華也 (Kaya Miyano) This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Some games need twenty minutes of rules before anyone can start having fun. Cosmo needs barely any time at all. If everyone at the table already understands poker hands, you can have this tiny box open and be making meaningful decisions within seconds, and that immediacy is a huge part of why I enjoyed it so much. Designed by Kaya Miyano, Cosmo is a two-to-five-player card game that takes around 15 minutes and asks everyone to assemble the strongest five-card poker-style hand. The catch is that you never have complete information about anybody else's hand, and before the final cards are drawn you must bet on who you think is going to win. It is simple, quick and wonderfully suited to that space before, after or between something considerably heavier. Setup and How to Play The game consists of six small decks, labelled A to F. Each deck has a known composition, and that information is displayed on the backs of the cards, meaning you always have some idea of what might come out of each pile. That tiny detail turns what could have been random card drawing into a neat little probability puzzle. On your turn, you choose any of the six decks and take its top card. Your first and fifth cards are kept face down, while the second, third and fourth are played face up for everyone to see. By the time everyone has four cards, you therefore know three of each opponent's five cards, while also having clues about what their hidden cards could be based on which decks they came from. Before anyone draws that fifth card, everyone bets on the player they think will finish with the strongest hand, and you are perfectly entitled to back yourself. The last cards are then drawn, everything is revealed and the best combination wins a Space Dollar, while a correct bet earns another and an incorrect one can cost you one. The first player to reach five Space Dollars triggers the end, with the most Dollars taking the win. Poker, But Not Quite Poker The hands themselves will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has played poker. You are looking for pairs, two pairs, three of a kind, full houses, four of a kind, a straight from one to five, or the mighty five of a kind. Cosmo dresses these combinations up with names such as Chaos Crew, Giant Grippers and Cosmic Crew, but underneath the colourful space animals is a wonderfully recognisable structure. That familiarity is important because it means almost all your attention can go into reading the table rather than remembering rules. You might see somebody sitting on three matching cards and assume they are miles ahead, but perhaps you know enough about the deck they drew their hidden card from to think otherwise. Equally, your own visible cards may look mediocre while you quietly know that your first hidden card has already put you in a much stronger position than anyone realises. It reminded me a little of The Gang, another excellent game that takes poker and asks you to think about the relative strength of everyone's hands. The crucial difference is where the information comes from. In The Gang, you are largely judging other players through how confident they appear to be in their own cards, whereas Cosmo gives you genuine information to work with and asks you to deduce what the missing pieces might be. Small Game, Lovely Decisions That is where Cosmo becomes much more interesting than simply drawing cards and hoping for the best. There is luck, of course, and sometimes your final card will turn a promising hand into nothing particularly exciting. But because you choose the deck you draw from and can track what other players have selected, there is nearly always a reason behind your decision. The betting phase is what really completes it. Even if your own hand is clearly going nowhere, you are still involved because you can score by correctly identifying who is most likely to win. It means you spend the whole round watching everyone else rather than staring exclusively at the cards in front of you. This version is also a reworking of Miyano's earlier Mole Poker, with the betting phase and race-to-five scoring giving Cosmo a more satisfying overall structure. Those additions make each round matter beyond simply determining who assembled the best hand. There is a nice little rhythm to building, judging, betting and revealing before everything resets and you go again. More Is Definitely Merrier I would strongly favour Cosmo at the higher player counts. It works with two, but the betting phase inevitably loses much of its charm when your decision is simply whether you think you or the other player has the better hand. The deduction is still there, but the table-reading becomes rather flat. With three it improves considerably, but four or five is where I think Cosmo really shines. Suddenly there are several plausible winners, far more visible cards to process and much more uncertainty around where to place your bet. If you mainly play games with two people, I would probably look elsewhere, but for groups regularly playing with four or five this is a cracking little filler. And filler really is the right word, in the best possible sense. Cosmo is not trying to dominate your evening or provide hours of strategic development. It is an amuse-bouche of a game, something lovely to bring out while people are arriving, to finish the night, or to clear the palate between two bigger experiences. Pros Incredibly quick to teach, particularly if players already understand poker. Excellent use of partial information and probability. The betting phase keeps everyone invested in every hand. Tiny box, short playtime and ideal for four or five players. Cons Noticeably flatter at two players. Luck can still swing a round despite the information available. The space theme is charming rather than particularly meaningful. Players wanting deep strategy may find it too light. Final Thoughts Cosmo is exactly the sort of small-box card game I love discovering. It takes something everybody understands, twists it just enough to feel fresh, and gets out of its own way. There is very little rules overhead, but plenty of opportunities to make a smart read, take a calculated chance or confidently back entirely the wrong astronaut. It also understands its place. This is not a game pretending to offer enormous depth from 36 cards, nor does it need to. What it gives you instead is 15 minutes of genuinely enjoyable deduction, probability and poker-inspired tension, packaged into something you can carry almost anywhere. Just make sure you have the right group for it. With four or five players, Cosmo is a superb filler that I can see hitting the table again and again. Simple, clever and enormously fun.

Fugu WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Clever, fast, card games Published by: Helvetiq Designed by: Flavio Foches, Riccardo Foches This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Some small card games are exactly what they look like. Fugu is not. At first glance, this is a bright little sea-themed game about placing numbered cards into ascending order, but there is far more going on here than that simple description suggests. It looks and sounds simple, and in truth, is it. But you could instantly love it! Setup and How to Play Every player begins with 18 face-down cards in a fixed row, while three face-up cards sit in the centre of the table. On your turn, you take one of those three, replace one of your hidden cards with it, and then reveal the card you displaced back into the middle. The basic placement rule is beautifully simple. Number cards must sit in ascending order from left to right, so once you begin revealing your row, every new card needs to fit somewhere logically between the numbers already in place. If you cannot, or simply do not want to, you can rotate the card and use it as an Anchor instead, ignoring the numerical restrictions but accepting negative points later. That sounds easy enough, and sometimes it is. If there is a one and you will want it on the very far left. But draw a three and suddenly things become much less obvious. Do you put it in the first space, knowing a one or two could still appear later, but maybe other players with take them first. Or the second or third and gamble that the lower cards will eventually turn up? The clever part is that the card you place is only half of the decision. You have 18 potential positions to replace, and whichever hidden card you choose is immediately revealed into the shared market. So every placement is also a decision about what space you are committing to and what unknown card you may be handing to somebody else. More Than Just Numbers Then comes the scoring puzzle, which is where Fugu becomes properly interesting. Bannerfish want to sit together, rewarding larger uninterrupted groups, while Pufferfish prefer to be isolated from other fish. That means getting your numbers into perfect ascending order is not enough on its own. Octopuses want to sit beside Coral, scoring best when tucked between two Coral cards, while Coral itself scores in sets of three different colours. So a card can be numerically perfect but strategically poor. Putting an Octopus exactly where the sequence demands may keep your row clean, but if it ends up miles away from any Coral, you have effectively solved one problem while creating another. That constant conflict is what surprised me most. You are not simply filling gaps, and you are not simply collecting sets. You are trying to construct a numerical framework and a scoring ecosystem at the same time, and those two goals frequently pull you in different directions. The Real Decision The biggest misconception you could have about Fugu is that the choice of three centre cards is the main decision. It really is not. The more important question is often which of your 18 hidden cards are you prepared to sacrifice to make that choice work? A seemingly perfect card can create a headache several turns later because you have boxed yourself into a narrow numerical range. Equally, deliberately leaving a larger gap can give you flexibility, but only if the cards you eventually need actually appear. You are constantly making small probability judgements about what might come next, what opponents might take, and how much space you can afford to leave open. This is also where the game gains more depth than I expected. There are only three cards available each turn, yet the number of possible placements and scoring consequences means the decision rarely feels trivial. For such a small game, it asks some genuinely satisfying questions. When Luck Bites There is luck, though, and sometimes it can be annoying. You have no control over the hidden card you reveal when you replace something in your row, so you can make a brilliant move and then immediately flip over the exact card your opponent desperately needs. They take it, thank you very much, and your clever little plan has accidentally improved their reef instead. It can be even more painful when you deliberately leave a gap for a specific number or creature type, only to reveal that exact card yourself and watch another player snap it up before your next turn. There is nothing you can really do about that, and if you dislike moments where good planning gets undermined by random information, this may occasionally grate. Thankfully, Fugu is quick. Those frustrations are usually fleeting, because another decision is only moments away and another full game is not much further behind. In a longer strategic game, that level of randomness might bother me more, but here it feels like a tolerable price for the tension it creates. Knowing When to Stop There is another clever wrinkle in the endgame. At the start of your turn, you can choose to pass permanently, even if you still have face-down cards remaining. Those hidden cards score nothing, but they remain in place as separators, which can sometimes protect the scoring structure you have already built. That means you eventually reach a point where continuing is not automatically correct. Do you keep digging for a better score and risk damaging what you already have, or accept that your reef is good enough and step away? I like that decision because it introduces a small push-your-luck element without adding any rules overhead. Some players may find it anticlimactic that the optimal move can simply be to stop, but I think it fits the puzzle nicely. Knowing when further improvement is more likely to hurt than help is part of the game. Pros Far more depth than the simple rules suggest. Excellent tension between numerical placement and creature scoring. Fast turns and a short overall playtime. Clever use of hidden cards and the shared centre display. Cons Luck can hand opponents exactly what they need. A strong plan can be disrupted by an unfortunate reveal. Interaction is mostly indirect rather than confrontational. Players wanting complete control may find the randomness frustrating. Final Thoughts Fugu really surprised me. What initially looks like a straightforward ascending-number puzzle quickly reveals itself to be a much more interesting game about positioning, probability and competing scoring demands. The best move is rarely just “take the lowest useful card and put it in the obvious place”, and that is exactly why it works. I especially like that the depth comes from such simple ingredients. Eighteen spaces, three available cards and a handful of scoring rules are enough to create a constant stream of interesting decisions. The game never feels heavy, but it regularly gives you that satisfying moment where you sit staring at your row wondering which tiny compromise is going to hurt least. There is luck, and occasionally it will absolutely sting. But Fugu is so quick, colourful and easy to replay that those moments rarely linger. This is a smart little card game with considerably more going on beneath the surface than I expected, and one I can see coming back to the table often.

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

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

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

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

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