A copy of Cretaceous Rails was provided by Spielcraft Games for the purposes of review
As someone who has never actually sat down to watch a Jurassic Park movie, I don’t necessarily understand how the dinosaur theme and the theme park aesthetic have become so intrinsically linked. From Dinosaur Island, to DinoGenics, to Draftosaurus, and now Cretaceous Rails, it feels odd that we have so many games about building the best theme park featuring dinosaurs. I assume Jurassic Park is to blame for this, but I’ve always found it dubious that if we invented time travel or resurrected dinosaurs, our first inclination would be theme parks.
Cretaceous Rails, designed by Ann Journey and published by Spielcraft Games in 2025 after a successful crowdfunding campaign, tasks players with building the best dinosaur theme park, although the theme park element is mostly absent from the gameplay.
Before I get into the aforementioned gameplay, the production of this game is a little gregarious, as is somewhat expected from a game that came from crowdfunding. The box is quite large, giving plenty of space for the brightly coloured dinosaur miniatures. The custom insert looks very well-made, but I’ll be really honest, I couldn’t quite figure out how everything was supposed to go back into the box after playing it. Thankfully, those wells for dinosaur miniatures are voluminous enough to hold nearly all the components for the whole game, leaving the top tray mostly barren.
I’m not always against big boxes, but I feel like in this case, the product size could have been shrunk a little to be a bit easier to fit on my shelves. I know the Kickstarter came with an expansion, Cretaceous Skies, perhaps the insert and box were designed to fit the expansion in as well, but for my experience, the box is larger than I feel is necessary. That being said, I cannot deny that the table presence is impressive. Seeing Cretaceous Rails set up on the table looks great, and makes you want to sit down and start playing.
What hooked me into Cretaceous Rails at first was the worker placement/action selection mechanism. A 4 x 4 grid of action tiles is shuffled every round, and then players take turns placing their worker onto the space between two action tiles, then taking the two actions their worker is adjacent to, in any order. The actions themselves are quite simple, lay some trains to expand your network, cut down some trees to provide better dinosaur viewing angles, take tourists on tours to increase the value of the dinosaurs, and capturing those dinosaurs to exhibit in your theme park. This system intrigued me, especially given that the grid gets shuffled every round to create some variety in what combination of actions are even available each round.
At first, I thought that Cretaceous Rails was going to be a pretty straight-forward game. It only took about 10 minutes to teach my friends, and we were off to the races. But then we immediately crashed up against the grit of Cretaceous Rails, in that each of the systems want to pull you in different directions. First, there are cards that offer some pretty fantastic player powers, it takes one action to bring two cards into your hand, and another action to build cards in your park. To build cards, you have to pay their costs using the appropriate dinosaurs, tourists, and jungle tokens. To get jungle tokens, you need to build your train into the jungle, and take the chainsaw action, pulling the jungle token from a tile onto your train. You can capture dinosaurs in the same way, but you can only capture a dinosaur if the jungle token on that tile has already been removed. Tourists, on the other hand, go on tours. You load one onto your train, and they increase the point value for every dinosaur of the same colour adjacent to your entire train network, but only if the jungle token has been removed (after all, you can’t see dinosaurs through trees). This push and pull of tourists needing to see dinos to increase their value, and capturing the dinosaurs so you can score them, creates some tense decisions between players who can both access the same dinos.
Once you’ve pulled things onto your train, you can forfeit an action to empty the whole train onto your player board, which allows you to spend those resources to build the cards. The challenge shows up when you remove a jungle token with one action, and then another player captures that dinosaur before you have the opportunity to take someone on a tour. Or, do you take a sub-optimal tour now, so you can use the tourist to build a card, or do you spend an action or two making that tour even better? All the while hoping against hope that the other players don’t step on your toes. And even worse feeling, when there’s something you desperately want to do, either because it’ll earn you a tonne of points, or deny someone else, but then your train is full, so you need to spend an action unloading, creates some fascinating trade-offs.
The card powers are pretty great, and many of them will make you jealous when your opponents use them. Things like your tourists are no longer impeded by trees, or placing up to 3 extra rails when you take the rails action. The downside of the cards, is that most of the card powers will be improved depending on how high up in your structure you build them. Again, do you hold onto the best card until you can build it on the 3rd level and use it to it’s maximum potential, or do you build it early, and use it more often, but to less effect?
All of these systems play into each other in different ways. I never found any obvious optimal paths to take, the puzzle was always very open with seemingly multiple viable options available to me at all times. I will say I enjoyed the plays with more player counts, as at two players it was really easy for the two players to just go off in different directions and largely do their own things. Also, the action grid doesn’t change with the number of players, making the 2 player experience even more open, which I felt robbed the game from some of its tension.
Despite its oversized box and a theme that doesn’t really quite jive with its mechanics, Cretaceous Rails surprised me with how engaging and cleverly interconnected its systems are. The game strikes a compelling balance between accessibility and strategic depth, offering a satisfying puzzle of timing, positioning, and resource management. Its modular action grid, open-ended decision space, and tight competition over shared resources make each play feel fresh and dynamic, particularly at higher player counts where tensions naturally escalate.
Cretaceous Rails manages to shine amongst the dinosaur theme park games through smart design and solid gameplay. It’s an impressive debut for designer Ann Journey, and a title that fans of mid-weight strategy games will find themselves returning to more than once. Whether you show up to play with the great dinosaur miniatures, or are settling down to just wrestle with the puzzle, there is plenty of fun to be had in Cretaceous Rails.
Tokyo Vice is a memoir by Jake Adelstein. As a young adult, he moved to Japan and managed to land a job at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun, the first gaijin (foreigner) to do so. The book covers over a decade of his experience reporting on the police beat, and eventually covering the Vice squad, bringing him face to face with Japan’s human trafficking and prostitution rings.
One of the main reasons I choose to read memoirs, is to get a glimpse of lives and experiences that are wholly different from my own, and Tokyo Vice fills that requirement wonderfully. Adelstein tells wild stories that I (thankfully) have never come across in my own life. I can’t help but respect Adelstein for having the courage to move to Japan and live in a culture so different from the one he was born and raised in.
The stories he shares often highlight his own incompetence, either real, or acted out. Adelstein uses his foreigner-ness to get away with plenty of acts that other people would be punished for, such as crossing police tape after a massive shooting.
As Mark mentioned in his podcast, there are some criticisms, accusing Adelstein of embellishing his stories, but I don’t think that matters to me very much. I didn’t read Tokyo Vice expecting an objective reporting of facts, this is his story to tell, and he can tell it how he wants. I appreciate that throughout the book, Adelstein rarely made himself out to be a big damn hero, smarter and stronger than everyone else. Instead, a lot of his stories focus on how lucky he was, or how often he made blunders.
I’m reminded that Frank McCourt’s book, Angela’s Ashes, also was the subject to a fair amount of criticisms from the residents of Limerick, saying his book was not an accurate portrayal of life in the city. On some level, I assume those slinging criticisms are stung when someone speaks badly about something they adore. In the case of Tokyo Vice, and the events Adelstein depicts, I am wholly ignorant. Sure, I’ve watched a lot of anime, and I knew of some of the words and places Adelstein references, like Yakuza and Ikebukuro, but I have no real understanding about the places or the culture surrounding it. I do know a lot of people have very fond memories and ideas about Japan and its culture, and Adelstein’s stories about the sex trade and how women are exploited, run afoul of their love for the country as a whole, especially when he calls Japan the king of the sex traffic trade. I may be completely off base in my assumption, but hey, I’m just an ignorant dude with a keyboard.
I found it utterly infuriating when Adelstein tries talking to the police about the women who were being trafficked in Japan. The cops can’t or won’t take action, because if any of the women come forward, they have to be arrested, as they are often in Japan on a tourist visa, or otherwise in the country illegally, so, they must be deported. By imprisoning and deporting the victims, they are unable to build a reliable case against those harming others. A vicious circle that requires laws to change, and while the cops aren’t the ones writing the laws, it is frustrating when the letter of the law runs afoul against the spirit of the justice system and prevents victims from receiving any kind of help. Now, Tokyo Vice was originally published in 2009, so it’s entirely possible that things have changed in the past 15 years, perhaps my next reading assignment will be to see how things have changed, I see Adelstein published Tokyo Noir in 2004, perhaps that book will answer my questions.
I will say that I’m becoming increasingly less keen on Authors reading their own books. Adelstein did a good job narrating his story, and having his voice deliver his tale is a unique and intimate experience, but there were a few moments where I felt like his cadence was off, or a joke didn’t land quite right. I had a similar experience when I listened to Deryck Whibley from Sum 41 read his book,Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell. Juxtapose Whibley and Adelstein’s books against Bill Gates’ recent book, Source Code, read by Wil Wheaton. Gates’ book was much less interesting, and dare I say, pretty boring, but Wil’s voice acting and reading was much more enjoyable.
Tokyo Vice was a compelling book. While I don’t usually seek out cop or crime stories (unless it’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine), I thoroughly enjoyed Adelstein’s story, and it made me appreciate those who do the work to bring these stories to the light. For every Lucie Blackman, whose disappearance makes the news, there are hundreds more that just simply don’t. Without people to shake the cages of the establishment, who knows what kind of filth would be swept under the carpet, even more than what is already overlooked. While Tokyo Vice doesn’t offer a neat resolution or profound philosophical takeaway, that absence feels honest to the world Adelstein describes, messy, unresolved, and often frustrating. Tokyo Vice is a series of glimpses into the shadows, each story shedding light on people and systems we’d often rather pretend don’t actually exist. I walked away with a deeper respect for those who keep shining that light, even when the job offers little glory and even less closure.
I’ll also include a link to Jake’s website, Japan Subculture if you’re interested in the stories he continues to tell https://www.japansubculture.com/
I’ve been on quite the Vladimir Suchy kick lately. He’s a prolific board game designer that has had some hits and misses with me, but more often than not, I find joy in his games. As I said in my Suchy Round Up, a Suchy game is generally a tight economic euro game with an interesting action selection mechanisim. Praga Caput Regni, Woodcraft, and Underwater Cities are the best examples of this.
Shipyard, was one of Suchy’s first published designs, way back in 2009. In 2023, it was treated to a second edition, which, beyond a complete graphical overhaul, most of the gameplay mechanics remain intact, perhaps speaking to the strength of the design. But let’s hold off on our judgment until the end, shall we?
In Shipyard, players each manage a shipyard during the turn of the dawn of the industrial age. The demand for ships, both commercial and military, are only growing, so it’s up to you to build the best ships to accrue the most points to win the game.
I’m starting the review with this picture of the obscene amount of cardboard sprues that comes in the box. I don’t know who the cardboard engineer is over at Delicious Games, but they certainly make punching out a board game interesting. Not only are there 175 crew and equipment tiles, but there are also 100 ship tiles, a cardboard bit holder that you need to assemble, a cardboard crane to hold those ship tiles while you play the game, but Shipyard makes you embark on a DIY craft mission to achieve dual layer player boards, and to make the action tile queue and game timer gear work properly. And by that I mean there are thin cardboard frames that you need to use adhesive stickers to achieve dual layered goodness.
Personally, I usually quite enjoy punching out games and assembling things. It feels like cardboard Lego. But I certainly wasn’t expecting it, which is a bit of a damper when I show up to game night and the host is only just pulling the shrink wrap off the game. A bit of a barrier to get started if you’re hoping to squeeze your first play of Shipyard into a somewhat tight time slot.
As I said before, the action selection mechanism is novel at the very least. Each of the actions in the game sit in a queue, and on your turn, you place your cube onto one of the actions. For every cube that’s further left on the track compared to yours, you earn a single coin. Then at the start of your next turn, you pick up the tile that your cube is on, and slide it in from the right, turning the gear that tracks how long the game takes.
It’s a pretty elegant system, dynamically adjusting the value of the actions as players take actions and slide them down a track, instead of something more pedestrian like dropping a coin onto all the unused actions each round. The game timer wheel spins around, and the cube will fall into a little slot, telling you it’s time to take a cube out of the row. Around halfway through, you’re instructed to toss some of your endgame victory points. I quite like that you don’t have to commit to and endgame victory point condition until about halfway through the game. Really lets you pivot from one plan to another, depending on how the game is shaking out.
As I said before, in Shipyard, you are trying to build ships, and almost all the actions available to you are in service of that goal. One of the central boards has a large wheel with 4 rings, each one supplying players with a different resource or ability. 4 of the 8 actions correspond to those rings. Beyond that, you can take commodity tiles, which allow you to trade for the resources at ever so slightly more efficient rate than the ring actions, another just gives you two coins, which in my opinion is largely worthless. The last two actions are claiming a canal tile, and taking 1 to 3 ship tiles.
You use the canal tiles to build a personal stream next to your board that kind of functions as building your own personal victory point track. When you take ship tiles, and complete a ship (a ship is complete when it was a bow, 1 to 7 middle pieces, and a stern), at the end of your turn, your newly completed ship will have a shakedown cruise, where you’ll determine it’s speed, and have it sail down your personal canal, earning points for the crew and equipment on the ship when it sails onto specific icons on your canal.
The real weakness of this action selection system is the fact that the goal of the game is to build ships, and there is only one way to get ship tiles. When a player takes the ship tiles action, no one else can take it until after that player’s next turn, when they slide it all the way to the right of the queue. We quickly found that you simply cannot afford to skip that action when it’s your turn to take it. Ships are the only way to earn victory points in Shipyard, and while you may be tempted to delay taking ship tiles for one extra turn just to really optimize the ship you want to complete, but doing so means you’ll be locked out of the ship tile action for another 3 rounds.
All of this complaining about being blocked out of actions or having no good actions available to you, or money being useless, I should mention there is a bonus action you can take, where you spend 6 coins to take a second action on your turn, which can be any action, even the one you took last turn, or one that is currently covered by another players cube. That does alleviate my problems somewhat, but not by much. It feels bad to essentially skip your main action to earn coins, just to spend all the coins you earned on a ‘wild’ action next round, assuming everyone else’s cubes were to the right of the coins action. Perhaps that’s just my loss aversion kicking in.
Near the end of the game, you’ll likely have all the tools and equipment you require for your final ship, and you’re just waiting for your turn to take the ship tiles action. In my play, a few of us expressed that on our turn, there was literally nothing valuable worth doing. All the actions we wanted to take were occupied, and the ones remaining, like coins, felt like a waste, especially on your last turn. If you don’t have the money to take the wild action, your last turn, you can take money? Sure, it’s a consequence of your own poor planning, but at the end of the game, no one is going to be taking the resource voucher action, or the money action, and probably not the player power action, making the rest of the actions so much more valuable if they happen to be open when it’s your turn.
The actions of Shipyard are specific and narrow, which makes it a fairly easy game to teach, but it offers no wiggle room. If the Ship tiles action is covered, there’s no other way to take ship tiles. I’m reminded of Agricola, and how that game has various ways to get all the resources you may need. Sure, the space that produces 3 wood each round is going to be the one taken most often, but sometimes the 2 wood action can accrue over a few rounds to give out 6 wood. It has a natural balancing effect, making all the actions feel useful at some point in the game.
In the end, I don’t think Shipyard is a bad game by any stretch. I really liked the canal aspect where you create your own victory point track, and really maximizing your ship speed to land on the Blue Riband space as your last movement, doubling your speed points, and the end game victory points did seem to be fairly varied. I always like it when you get end game victory point conditions, but don’t need to pick until the game is underway.
But all that being said, I found Shipyard to be kind of boring. The actions are narrow and don’t offer any wiggle room. The action selection design is supposed to create a tension between a totally optimized ship and the availability of the actions, but to often it devolves into turns where any meaningful decision-making is totally absent. There’s ship tiles are slightly varied in the equipment mounting points and life preserving equipment, which can modify the points each ship is worth, but building ships is the only way to earn points, it’s less important to have exactly the right equipment, and much more important to just get a ship onto the water at all costs. There aren’t multiple paths to victory. If you’re not building ships, you aren’t earning victory points. The actions you take to achieve this are repetitive and boring, and on all of your turns, nearly half of the actions will be inaccessible to you. Shipyard is a game about building ships, so it stands to reason that building ships is the path to victory. But if that’s all there is, and everyone has an equal footing, the whole game is just about being slightly more efficient with your actions than your opponents, and lucking into the ship and canal tiles that synergies together well.
Shipyard is probably my least favourite Vladamir Suchy game I’ve played to date, which is a shame. But hey, not every game is for every person, and at least it makes Evacuation more likely to make it back to my table!
Last time I was a grumpy, old, curmudgeon. It was a change of pace that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. Turns out, I don’t actually like complaining all that much. So this week I want to highlight some games that I really love, that I think are woefully underappreciated.
A high-speed puzzle ‘SHUMP’ wrapped in the aesthetics of a futuristic magical girl anime, Bullet♥︎ is one of the slickest, most replayable games I’ve ever played, as evident as its placement as #3 on my top 100 games of all time list
It’s a real-time puzzle game, where you drop bullets onto a grid based on colour and number, trying to match patterns before your board fills up. Every heroine plays differently, and the combinations of Heroines and Bosses provide near-endless variety. It plays fantastically solo or with friends, and the real time rounds keep the game moving at a decent clip.
There’s nothing quite like pulling out the perfect bullet you need to complete a pattern just in the nick of time, clearing space on your board and sending a cascade of bullets flying at your opponent. That moment when the round ends, and they look at the mountain of wood you’ve sent their way, it’s just a pure delight.
2. Le Havre: The Inland Port
BGG Rank: #1,729
Le Havre by Uwe Rosenburg gets plenty of plaudits. It’s revered by many a Uwe fan, even sitting in Tom Vassel’s #1 spot in his yearly Top 100 Games of all time lists in 2020 and 2021. Myself, I think it’s okay. It’s a bit big and unwieldy in my experience, but a great game none-the-less. What I am enthuasastic about, however, is the 2 player only spin off, Le Havre: The Inland Port.
The Inland Port features a resource grid, with 4 trackers on it. Players alternate taking turns building or using buildings, which sit on your own personal dial. As turns go by, the dials spin, powering up each of the buildings. When using a building, you can use your own for free, or throw a franc at your opponent to use their building. The buildings are mostly just different ways of getting more resources so you can build more buildings, but the resource grid has a fun spatial element to it. One building may move your wood marker up and to the left, but it’s useless to you if the marker is already bumped up to the left side.
Now Boarding by Tim Fowers turns the stress and mundanity of air travel into an utterly delightful real-time cooperative experience. As always, featuring charming artwork from Ryan Goldsberry, and featuring a fast-paced, real time, pick-up-and-deliver framework, players are tasked with juggling angry passengers, unpredictable weather, and the literal ticking clock as they shuttle travelers back and forth across the U.S. What starts as a breezy morning shift ramps up quickly, with passengers piling up and the best laid plans unravelling in real time as new passengers and their destinations are revealed mid-round. The game encourages tight communication and flexible thinking, and yes, sometimes ejecting a passenger mid-route because someone more convenient popped up.
No game makes a table look cooler by the end than Tokyo Highway. It’s part dexterity challenge, part spatial puzzle, and part architecture simulator.
You’re stacking and stretching tiny wooden roads on top of pillars, aiming to sneak under or over your opponent’s highways to place your cars. There’s a magical moment in every game where the roads twist into wild, impossible shapes and the table becomes a miniature cityscape of gravity-defying construction.
It’s easy to teach, hard to master, and packed with tension. Plus, it’s the rare abstract game that tells a story—not with words, but with the shape of the board by the end of the game.
This solo word-building roguelike is what happens when a word game, a deck-builder, and a dungeon crawler walk into a bar and actually hit it off.
You’re building words to defeat a series of enemies, collecting power-ups, levelling up your deck, and trying to survive until the final boss. Each playable character offers unique abilities, which means your strategy shifts dramatically from one run to the next.
The progression is satisfying, the mechanics are sharp, and the design is downright clever. It’s not just “a good solo game” — it’s a great game, full stop. And once it hooks you, it really hooks you.
Final Thoughts
Not every great game gets the love it deserves. Some are too niche, too chaotic, too quiet, or just fall between the cracks of hype cycles and hotness meters. But these five games prove that sometimes, everyone else is wrong.
So if you’re the type of person who stops looking at board games if they’re ranked lower than 500 on BGG, give these underrated gems a try. You might just find your next favourite game hiding behind a bad rank.
I have somewhat mixed feelings on games designed by Simone Luciani. I disliked Tzolk’in for quite a while before coming around to the side of appreciating its complexities. I find The Voyages of Marco Polo, and it’s sequel to be quite satisfying, but I fail to see the enjoyment in Grand Austria Hotel and Rats of Wistar. Nucleum was cool, and while I enjoy Lorenzo Il Magnifico, I’m also not going to be the first one to sing its praises (that’s Tim from Board Game Hot Takes‘ job). What ties all these games together is the fact they’re all medium to heavy Euro games with an emphasis on resource management. So when I heard he was involved with a lighter set collection game, I was intrigued. I’m always interested when designers step out of their comfort zone!
Mesos is a card-driven strategy game set during the Mesolithic era, where players take on the roles of early tribal leaders guiding their people through the transition from nomadic hunting to settled life. Mesos focuses on drafting cards from a shared market linked to turn order: taking more cards generally means acting later in the next round, creating a tradeoff between short-term benefits and long-term positioning.
Players build their tribes by acquiring character and building cards, some providing immediate effects (like food collection or discounts on buildings) or long-term benefits (such as a set collection engine that scores points at the end of game, or a discount when it’s time to feed your tribe). Central to the game are recurring event cards that test how well players have prepared their tribes over time, with increasing rewards and penalties.
The cards themselves are all fairly simple. Artists and Cultists are mostly for satisfying event cards, hunters let you gather more food the more you have. Gatherers provide perpetual food to feed your tribe, builders make the powerful building cards cheaper, and the engineers rack up points based on how many you have, and how many different symbols they display.
What really drives the tension in Mesos is the card market. New cards come into the top row, at a rate of the number players +4. At the end of a round, whatever cards are left over, flow to the bottom row. Players take turns moving their totem from the player order tile onto one of the card acquisition tiles. The further down the row they go, they more cards they’ll be able to take, and further still, the more opportunities they’ll have to pick from the new, upper row instead of the stale lower row. Once all players have placed their totem, from left to right players pick the cards they’re allotted, and go back onto the player order tiles.
The obvious comparison for Mesos is 7 Wonders if you replaced the draft with the turn order mechanic from Kingdomino. There is more to it than that, but the feeling of 7 Wonders was on my heart and mind every time I played Mesos. Unlike 7 Wonders, there is much more than a single point of conflict. First, the way the cards flow into the system is wide open, everyone can see everything. If you’re gunning for a specific building, you can be sure that everyone else can see what you’re trying to do as well.
In Mesos, there are 4 events that come out every age. One punishes you for not having enough artists, another rewards the player with the most cultists. One sends your hunters to work to feed your tribe, while another triggers the feed-your-people mechanism. The rewards and punishments for each event increase in severity as the ages progress, encouraging lagging players to remain competitive.
The brilliance of Mesos lies in how these systems interlock. I saw Simone Luciani’s name on the box and immediately thought that it was going to be a much more complex game than it was. But was pleasantly surprised at just how simple and natural the game felt. Mesos rewards both tactical drafting just before events trigger and/or hate drafting and denying your opponents access to a suite of cards, and long-term planning for big end-game set collection points.
But don’t mistake “light” and “simple” for “mindless.” The turn order track decision offers such an intense trade-off, that every time you interact with it, it forces you to weigh your options. It’s incredibly tempting to go last to get 3 cards, but how will you feed them? What if the artist you need for the event is sniped before I choose? Maybe you should prioritize going earlier in the order just to get the single artist, and forgo the shaman altogether? Can you gamble that your opponent won’t grab that artist before you, and you can grab both the cards you wanted?
It’s an intense moment of weighing your options. And it can sound like a lot, but it really isn’t. These are small choices that create the context for the rest of the game. Each card essentially only has a single use, and everything is open and obvious to all players. It’s the market that creates the multiple choices and the tension of knowing what everyone else wants that makes this game so interesting.
I suffer pretty hard from loss aversion. And while points can always be paid in the place of food, I think a large part of the game is knowing when to forgo food collection and chose points in other ways. In one game, a player managed to earn over a hundred points from his engineer cards. He was on the bleeding edge of starving every round, but he handily won the whole game.
Mesos is much more interactive and heads-up than you’d expect a simple card drafter to be, it’s certainly more interesting than the ever popular 7 Wonders. The placement of your worker pawn to pick your drafting order and number of cards has a feeling of weighty consequence to it. All cards drafted are face up to everyone, so you’re always critically aware of where you stand in the race to grab certain cards. It hurts to make these decisions, the good kind of hurt that makes you rub your forehead while straining to think about what the other players are going to do.
Mesos proves that when a designer steps outside their established playbook, the results can be both surprising and exceptional. Stripping away the complexity of Luciani’s heavier games reveals just how sharp his instincts are when it comes to creating interlocking systems that generate tension, drama, and real decision-making. In Mesos, the open information, clever card flow, and agonizing turn-order tradeoffs make it a far more engaging game than it first appears. This isn’t just a lighter Luciani game, it’s a lean, tightly-wound experience that makes my brain hum.
