Latest Posts
dnup – Board Game Review
dnup (Pronounced Down-Up (Holy cow does it ever feel wrong to not capitalize the name of the game)) is the latest game from Kei Kajino, the designer of the wonderfully brilliant and unique game Scout. dnup also uses the two-cards-in-one concept where a card has one number on one half, and if you flip it upside down, there’s a different number on the other side. But this time there’s no theme. I suspect that after every single review lamented how the circus theme in Scout just didn’t make any sense, he said, “f*** it,” and just made a great new card game.
World Order – First Impressions
I spend a lot of time looking at crowdfunding campaigns. I can’t really help it, they pop up in my social media feeds, or my friends send me the ones they like so we can ooh and ahh over them together. But I don’t back very many crowdfunding campaigns at the end of the day. I’ve backed about a dozen projects total. They’re always exciting, and I love receiving them when the game is finally released, but I’m just never willing to drop the cash for a new game years in advance when there are so many games deserving of my money on store shelves right now.
So when someone in my board game group pulls the trigger and backs a game, I’m more than ecstatic to fulfill my obligations, and be the person to sit down and play with their new toy with them. Today’s new game is World Order, designed by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou, with art by Angga Satriohadi and Miłosz Wojtasik, and published by Hegemonic Project Games in 2026 (this is one of those moments where I’m very glad I work in a written medium, because my anglophone face would have butchered those names).
Kingsburg – Board Game Review
It’s kind of fascinating going back and playing older games. I get that in the grand scheme of the universe a mere 20 years is a blink of the eye, but in the board game hobby, a lot has changed in 20 years. Aesthetic preferences have evolved, who mechanics have fallen out of favour, and productions have been massively upgraded in the past two decades. But the wonderful thing about games is that when you buy a game it has the opportunity to become timeless. There’s no reason a game released in 2007 would be any better or worse than the new games that are coming out today? Right?
Hardback – Board Game Review
Hardback is a deck-building word game designed by Jeff Beck and Tim Fowers, and was published by Fowers Games in 2018. Perhaps it’s considered to be a spiritual successor to Paperback, Hardback uses the same deck-building word game core, but the mechanical changes to the way you acquire cards and how those cards work together change how the game feels in a pretty dramatic way, despite sharing the same categories on the BGG pages.
Things in Rings – Board Game Review
I’m not going to bury the lede here. It’s a special moment when I play a game with my wife at our local board game café and she immediately grabs a copy off the shelf to bring home. Things in Rings is that game.
Designed by Peter C. Hayward and published by AllPlay in 2024, Things in Rings is basically Venn Diagrams: The Board Game. One player takes on the role of the mastermind, or the “Knower”, while everyone else is trying to figure out the hidden logic by dropping clue cards into the appropriate intersections of coloured yarn circles.
Flip 7 – Board Game Review
There’s no denying that Flip 7 has absolutely captured the attention of the board game media. I can see why, it’s really easy to evangelize. You buy five copies of the game, toss it into every bag you own, and bring to every gathering just in case people want to play something quick. It’s approachable in that magical ‘anyone can sit down and start playing immediately’ kind of way. New and old gamers alike can gather around Flip 7, laugh at bad luck, cheer at risky plays, and then, once the game’s over, you can just hand your copy away as a gift and move on with your life, because it’s cheap enough to replace without much thought. That accessibility is a huge part of its appeal.
Final Fantasy X
“Listen to my story.”
Those are the first voice-acted words spoken in the Final Fantasy franchise. They’re spoken by Tidus as Final Fantasy X begins in medias res. A group of people sit around a campfire looking forlorn and melancholy. There’s no context for who these people are or where they are, or what’s causing them to be so depressed. All we have is this beautiful piano piece playing over the scene as a blonde boy touches a girl’s shoulder and then walks up a hill to look at a ruined city in the distance. He asks us to listen to his story.
Illiterati – Board Game Review
There’s a certain kind of chaos that only real-time games can create. It’s the moment when your brain suddenly forgets every skill you’ve ever worked on the moment the time pressure is on. I delight in this feeling, and this is exactly where Illiterati shines for me. Designed by Gary Alaka, Rob Chew, and Jon Kang, with art by Audrey Jung, and published by Gap Closer Games in 2023, Illiterati is a cooperative real-time word game for 1 to 5 players. Illiterati tasks players with frantically building words from a limited supply of letter tiles, all in an effort to craft the necessary words to defeat the evil secret organization that has taken over the world. Or something like that.
