Disclaimer: A copy of Doomlings was provided by the publisher for the review purposes
Evolution is a fascinating concept. The idea that over generations, the traits that help a species survive are what get passed down, and offspring that lack those traits, don’t reproduce and therefore, those traits are lost to time. Of course, no amount of heat spreading frills will let you compete against the end of the world, but this is where we find ourselves in card game Doomlings, designed by Justus Meyer and Andrew Meyer, with art by Justus Meyer, and published by Doomlings LLC in 2022.
In Doomlings, players play trait cards from their hand to try and amass the most points before the 3rd catastrophe card is revealed, and the world comes to an end. Each trait card offers points and/or actions, and many cards will play off each other, like giving you bonus points for other traits of the same name, or letting you swap cards with one of your opponents. Each player has a gene pool card that can grow and shrink over time, dictating how many cards they’re allowed to hold at the end of their turn.
Each round, an age card is revealed, and may affect what and how players are allowed to play during their turn. For instance, the Northern Winds age lets you draw one and discard one card from your hand before you take your turn, while Tectonic Shifts prevent you from playing any green traits. Once the third catastrophe card is revealed, the game comes to an end. End game effects trigger, scores are tallied up, and the player with the highest score is the winner. Although one has to ask themselves, does winning really matter if all species are equally wiped out at the end of the world?
The base box of Doomlings comes with hundreds of traits and dozens of ages, creating a unique mix of events every time you play. If you’re into this kind of game, there are also expansion packs to dive into, which the base game box has left plenty of room for expansions to sit right next to the base game.
As I alluded to at the beginning, I like this theme quite a lot. The traits you play can range from functional, like Mindfulness, to silly, like Flatchulance. The names of the traits don’t always seem to correspond to their effects (if they even have one) very well. The age cards also do quite a bit to inject a bit of theme into the round by displaying things like a super volcano spewing ash into the sky, or a mega tsunami bearing down on the land. You know, light-hearted game night fun stuff. (side note, literally as I was writing this, a small earthquake shook my house. More fun stuff)
The art is cartoony and simple, but enjoyable. It’s very reminiscent of Matthew Inman’s work on The Oatmeal, as well as the art he’s contributed towards 30 of the games published by Exploding Kittens. From reading history of Doomlings, Justus Meyer taught himself how to create digital art so he could create this game, which is an achievement in itself. Perhaps the best compliment for the artwork came from my wife. I had left the game on the kitchen table, and the box caught her eye, she picked it up, and said “Looks fun, I’d play this”. There’s nothing better than a game that makes people want to play it just by the look of it.
Like the artwork, the gameplay is cartoony and simple, but enjoyable. It’s a game to play with your family, or non-gamer friends, as there’s plenty of luck and chaos, but also the potential for combos tickles the gamer brain in just the right way. If you’re looking to play this with kids, you will need to make sure the kids know how to read, as there is plenty of text that is quite important to understand.
The base game suggests creating 3 piles of 3 age cards, and putting one catastrophe in each pile, making the game last a maximum of 12 rounds. You also shuffle each pile individually, then stack them on top of each other a la Pandemic, so the game end trigger isn’t easily known. You can make the game longer or shorter just by adding or removing age cards, and I really appreciate the flexibility, especially when playing with groups that can have low attention spans.
Because there are so many cards with so many effects, it’s difficult to remember everything that your opponents can do, or what effects their cards may have, and trying to read small text upside down and across the table is a fools errand. There’s a lot of randomness in this chaos too, in that some cards do want to have other cards of the same name, but if you don’t draw cards that let you discard or draw more cards, your ability to seek those cards out is quite limited. They’re more of a bonus to luck into, rather than a viable strategy on their own. Some games you’ll draw the perfect cards that compliment each other in your tableau. Other times you’ll be wishing for the heat death of the universe.
Okay, that was a bit dramatic. But it is worth pointing out that the randomness in Doomlings will turn some people off, as will the take-that element of the game. It’s disappointing when you pull a card that would work for your tableau very well, but then the opponent to your right forces you to discard two cards at random. And considering you only draw at the end of your turn, it is possible to have your turn come around, and you simply don’t have any cards left to play, which is a disappointing feeling.
Doomlings at the end of the day is inoffensive. The tableau building aspect gives faint hints of satisfaction that engine building games so wonderfully evoke, but Doomlings doesn’t hit the same highs as other tableau building games, such as Wingspan or Race for the Galaxy. Nor does it really lean into the evolution theme, like Evolution does so well.
So who is Doomlings for? If you like games like Exploding Kittens or Munchkin, I’d certainly play Doomlings before either of those two games. It has the randomness of Fluxxwithout the need for appreciating or understanding a theme, which may be a boon if you’re playing with kids who haven’t consumed the entirety of the Doctor Who cannon. A copy of Doomlings would gladly live its life at a cabin, or at grandmas house. It’s easy to play, light-hearted fun. While it wouldn’t be my first choice for a game night, if Doomlings was the game being played, I’d certainly engage with it instead of sitting on the couch trying to learn how to knit a scarf before the impending ice age.
If you’ve made it this far, and thought to yourself that Doomlings sounds like your cup of tea, you can pick up a copy for yourself from their website
What if I told you that Go-Fish could be fun? What if I added a memory element? Wait! Come Back! Hear me out. In Trio, designed by Kaya Miyano and published by Happy Camper (in Canada) takes the core conceit of Go-Fish, but manages to create some actually engaging and fun moments.
The set-up is simple. Deal everyone an equal number of cards, plus 8 or so, out to the centre of the table, face down. On your turn, you can ask any player to show their highest or lowest card, or, flip over a card from the centre. Then, you do it again. If the two revealed cards match, you get a third action. If no match, the cards go back to their owner’s hand. If all three revealed cards are a match, you claim them and keep them face up in front of you as a trio.
In the simple game, a trio of trios wins the game, or, claiming the trio of 7’s always spells victory. In the spicy variant, each trio has a spiritual partner, such as the 2’s and the 5’s. Claiming both of those trios is how you claim victory. Or, again, the trio of 7’s on its own wins the game.
That’s very much it. Trio plays from 3 to 6 players, and takes less than 5 minutes per round. The memory aspect scared me at first, as I am a dummy. But the memory aspect almost turned out to almost be a moot point. The information is sort of ever-changing and flowing. Because you can only ask someone’s highest or lowest card, as soon as that trio gets claimed, you can reset that information in your brain. You don’t need to remember where all 36 cards are, you only really need to remember 4 or 6 or 8, depending on the number of players.
I’m awful at counting cards, it’s the reason we lose so many games of The Crew. Once a hand or trick has been played, I void the information from my brain immediately. Trio was gentle with my head, which I very much appreciated. The 8 cards on the table are easy enough to track, and the excitement when someone else reveals the key information you need is exhilarating. Similarly, that moment of doubt when you reach for the centre cards, and suddenly doubt yourself which card was the right one. And when someone fails that test, you’re free to swoop in and claim the trio for yourself.
The golden 7 cards are wildly appealing. Getting dealt one or when someone is forced to reveal one, it’s enough to give your heart butterflies. And when you get the enough information to collect that trio, every second that passes until your next turn is tense. And the elation that comes when it’s finally your turn again, and you reveal all three 7’s, it’s utterly magical.
On one hand, I find super light or simple games difficult to review, because there’s not usually much to pull apart and discuss. On the other hand, these are the kinds of games that leave a positive impression because they’re just fast, fun, and accessible, so I want to highlight them here on my blog. Trio is the kind of game that you’ll bring to a family gathering, and by the end of the night, half the table will be looking to buy their own copy. Similar to SCOUT, there’s a ‘theme’, or rather, a motif, but it doesn’t really matter, not does it influence or inform any of the rules. It’s just window dressing on a really fun game.
If you had told me that one of the first games I recommend in 2025 would be a mixture of Go-Fish and Memory, I would have called you crazy. I can’t think of a single other game that has a memory component that I would even be willing to play again. Yet here stands Trio with a wholehearted recommendation from me because it really is just that much fun to play.
Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization by Vlaada Chvátil is the 2015 refresh of 2006’s Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. This is a semi-abstracted take on the Civilization building genre of games, and I feel it does a phenomenal job imparting the feeling of progress to players and simulating a civilization building game.
In Through the Ages, players are trying to build the best civilization through resource management, developing new technologies, appointing appropriate leaders, building wonders, maintaining a strong military, and developing a culture. A failure in any of these areas can and will be exploited by your opponents.
Through the Ages takes players right from the age of antiquity all the way up to the modern era. The primary mechanic of Through the Ages is card drafting. Everything in Through the Ages is represented by a card that you have to take. Cards flow through a river, refilling and cycling at the end of each player’s turn. The newest cards to be available cost 3 actions to take, while the cards that have been on the table for a few turns may only cost a single action to take.
Beginning with Despotism as your system of government, philosophy for science, bronze as your best resource, and the barest thoughts of religion and agriculture, you’ll slowly grow and expand your civilization in different ways. There are lots of thematic touches in Through the Ages, such as having a peaceful change of government, or the violent revolution. Corruption siphoning resources out of your stockpiles, and famine causing workers to fall idle, everything in the game just makes sense when put in the context of a civilization game. That said, the theme falls away pretty quickly as you spend your turns min/maxing the options available to you, and how you can maximize your numbers.
All of the systems of Through the Ages are linked together. If you want to build a new building, you’ll need a citizen and some resources to build it. If you need more citizens, you’ll need to spend food to bring them into your civilization (and pay an upkeep, depending on how many workers you have). If you want to discover new technologies, you’ll need to earn science, if you have a large population, you need to keep them happy through religion and entertainment. As I said before, it’s vital to keep everything at a good balance, as any bottleneck will cripple your progress.
Another major aspect to consider is military. While having a strong military presence won’t outright win you any games, having a weak military will almost certainly cause you to lose. I’ve often found the rule of Mutual Assured Destruction can apply here. If no one has a military, no problem. But as soon as one player starts to arm themselves, everyone else must invest in their own military to keep pace. Should you choose to neglect your military, you may find yourself having your resources and/or food stolen, your science points stolen, your leaders killed, your wonders destroyed, or your culture siphoned away. I think it’s important to highlight here that conflict isn’t resolved by rolling dice, or moving units on a map. It’s literally just comparing your strength numbers, which the defender can augment by spending cards. Most of what Through the Ages is at the end of the day, is pushing numbers up and down.
There’s a lot of depth in Through the Ages, which makes each play more and more satisfying. I don’t consider myself particularly enthusiastic about Civilization, mostly because I tend to not enjoy direct conflict in my games. I really like how Through the Ages approaches player interaction. How everyone needs to keep each other in check, and if someone leaves their front gate open, you’re obliged to sack their court.
After dozens of plays on Board Game Arena and the app, I can confidently say that the digital version of Through the Ages is the way to go. Managing tokens, sliding cards, and keeping track of resources and scores in the physical game is clunky. In the digital form, these issues vanish, letting you focus on the puzzle-like strategy that makes Through the Ages such a cerebral delight.
And what a cerebral puzzle Through the Ages is. needing to manage so many aspects of your empire, and the consequences for mismanagement spreading throughout every other aspect, creates a tense and exciting game. The ravages of time will reduce your surplus population and leaders will die, forcing players to pivot and adapt instead of running a single strategy right from the start of the game. You’ll need to decide between building more mines or farms, but if you don’t have resources you can’t build farms, but if you don’t have food, you can’t staff your mines. Everything is pulling for your attention, and how you manage each of these pulls will determine who comes out as the victor.
As I said above, I don’t consider myself a civilization connoisseur. I’m a euro gamer at heart, and Through the Ages is firmly in the euro game category for me. It does feel unintuitive to streamline the whole of history into a card river and the technological advancements from bronze to iron as just numbers on a card. But even with thematics as a weak point, Through the Ages is a great game. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who likes to burn their brain a little bit, and I’ve been the direct instigator for a few people to buy the app on their phone (and their productivity at work taking an immediate plunge). I don’t think I would recommend to anyone to pick up and play the physical game. It’s certainly not impossible, but there are pain points that get smoothed away when Through the Ages becomes a video game. If you like big board games and haven’t tried Through the Ages yet, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.
It’s got to be hard to create a sequel to a beloved game. On one hand, you have fans of the old game, that want everything to just remain the same. On the other hand, this is your opportunity to capture a new audience, create some new fans. Perhaps address some of the criticisms that the first game garnered. It’s a unique opportunity, to be sure.
Glen More II: Chronicles is the follow-up to Glen More, both designed by Matthias Cramer, but this time the art being supplied by Jason Coates and Hendrik Noack. Many games get a fresh coat of paint after years on the market, and will sometimes come back as a “Revised Edition”. Glen More II is much more of a successor, it retains the core of the game, which is a clever time track, but includes a lot of new content as well. Let’s dig into it.
In Glen More II: Chronicles, players each control their own Scottish Clan, and are vying for prestige amongst their peers. In the centre of the table sits the turn order track, totally littered with tiles that can be placed into your village. On your turn, whoever is furthest back on the track takes their meeple, and moves it to any tile on that track, taking it and placing it into their village. Once placed, it, and every tile adjacent to it (including diagonals) gets to activate its effect. Then, the tile track is refilled, and the player with the meeple furthest back on the track gets to take the next turn.
At 4 intervals, a scoring happens. Players compare their goods with whomever has the least in each of the scoring areas. Scotsmen in their home castle, landmark cards, whisky casks, and famous person tiles, and earn points based on the difference (obviously the player with the least number of each of those things earns no points). It’s important to note that players don’t need to turn anything in during a scoring, they simply need to have them, and get to keep them for the next scoring phase. After the final scoring has been triggered, each player compares the number of tiles they have in their territory to the player who has the least number of tiles, and lose 3 points per tile they have more than them. Most points remaining at the end of the game is the winner.
Glen More II introduces a whole other board to interact with, called the Clan board. Whenever you take a famous person tile, instead of slotting it into your territory, you instead get to take a bonus from the clan board. Sometimes you’ll need to pay money based on how far away the reward you want is from the next closest clan marker, but otherwise it’s as simple as picking your benefit from a menu of options and taking them into your supply. Once a benefit has been claimed, no one else can claim that benefit as well.
The components of Glen More II are quite luxurious. The tiles are thick and glossy, the art is rich, each clan has custom shaped meeples, the resources are all cut to shapes, and the game includes several sticker sheets to further accentuate each of the wooden pieces. Also included in the box are 8 chronicles, which can be mixed and matched to your heart’s content. Each chronicle includes a mini expansion that further tweaks how you can interact with the game. One chronicle introduces a dragon boat race, which you can sail around the board, visiting opponents, getting bonuses, and earning points if you make it back to your castle first. Another introduces a hill that requires everyone to drop off a resource when they pass it, or, a player can land on the hill to collect all the resources left lying around. Haggis, penny mobs, and so much more are just waiting for you to discover.
The turn order track is one of the biggest stars in Glen More. It’s a fascinating push/pull between leaping ahead to grab the strongest or perfect tile for your territory, but doing so could give your opponents several turns to really build and crank their engine. You’ll be doubly punished for doing this when it comes time to score, and you’re lacking in any of the scoring objectives. At the same time, if someone is leaping ahead, you’re incentivized to keep up, as having a glut of tiles is harmful at the end of the game. But hey, as long as each tile earns you more than 3 points, you’ll come out ahead.
The tiles themselves have a couple characteristics that give more depth to the decisions you want to make. First, you can only place a tile next to one of your Scotsmen, which means you want Scotsmen on every corner of your map, but you also want as many Scotsmen in your castle to score points. Some tiles have rivers on them, which can only be places to the left and right of your castle, while others allow you to overbuild on specific tiles, which would trigger every other tile surrounding it. There’s a ton of great decisions that you need to make on every turn, giving the game a great feeling of depth.
In the centre of the turn order track lies a market. During your turn you’re free to buy and sell goods to that market, allowing you to use money to shore up any deficiencies in your resource engine, or profit from your surplus. There are limits on this market, as you sell things into the market, you get diminishing returns as the market is flooded. On the other hand, if you keep buying a specific resource, eventually the market is tapped out, until someone else swoops in to sell their surplus at a high price. Another great push and pull moment.
The new Clan board is the aspect that I’m least enthusiastic about. I find the famous person tiles to be the least interesting part of the game, as you take them and just get a benefit from the clan board. Never again will they trigger, or having your tokens on the clan board will count for anything else. The faces are beneficial for scoring, AND the famous person tiles do not count at the end of the game for comparing territory size. They’re powerful tiles, ignore them at your peril, even if they are a less interesting part of the game.
The Chronicles seem like they were build specifically for me. I love discovery in my games, and adding in a new twist each time I play is simply a joy. Sometimes I feel like it’s addressing a specific problem (such as the dragon boat races being an excuse to use up extra movement points), while other times it’s adding in a whole new module to play with. Somehow I feel like there is an ‘optimal’ set of chronicles to explore, I don’t always feel the need to include any. The base game on its own is so strong and satisfying that the chronicles are just the icing on the cake. If I feel like playing with something new, they’re ready for me. If I just want to have a simple, great time, the base game is perfect.
Fans of the original Glen More may be a bit disappointed that all the new bits in Glen More II can’t be stripped out to play the old game they know and love, especially because the original was out of print for so long. And I’ll be the first to admit that all the things that I love about Glen More II are ripped directly from the original game. The turn order track, the tile placing, the competition between resources, the market that lets you buy and sell the goods that you’re missing, everything I love. I’d love to ignore the new Clan board, as it isn’t my favourite aspect, but I recognize it’s power and the need to engage with it, lest someone accrue every person tile and utterly punish everyone else at the end of the game for their massive territories.
In conclusion, I love Glen More II (as evidenced by it sitting at #9 on my top 100 games list). It’s been a fantastic game to play over and over again. I’ve hosted Robbie Burns nights where I force haggis and scotch eggs on my friends, then we play Glen More II while consuming too much scotch. It’s thematic, and a fantastic puzzle for eurogamers. Glen More II is a must-play game, and I’m so very happy that I own it.
Disclaimer: A copy of Between Two Castles: Essential Edition has been provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes
In a lot of other media types, mash-ups and crossover events are some of the most exciting moments. In comic books, having Spider-Man appear alongside the X-Men had fans frothing, heck, Deadpool & Wolverine was the second highest grossing movie of 2024. In music, mashups were exciting, combining the best and iconic moments from several songs into one banging track. While board games have had some iterative designers, such as Uwe Rosenburg with Agricola and Caverna, or taking an existing game and putting a new spin on it, a la The Crew and The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, there really haven’t been a lot of direct mashups.
Stonemaier Games already has a pedigree of inviting collaborators to use their games to build something bigger and better, like taking the Wingspan game by Elizabeth Hargrave, and spinning off the more complex Wyrmspan by Connie Vogelmann and the less complex Finspan by designers David Gordon and Michael O’Connell, but again, these are iterative designs. New games standing on the shoulders of giants, borrowing core mechanisms, but introducing new ideas.
In 2018, Stonemaier games released a true mashup. Designers Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset took their game, Between Two Cities, and smashed it into Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Ted Alspach. If you’ve never played either of those two games, let’s talk briefly about how Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays.
Sitting between each player, lays a castle. Each round, you’ll pick nine tiles into your hand. You’ll choose two to keep, and place the rest face down next to your neighbour. When everyone has made their pick, everyone reveals the tiles they kept. Then, you place one of the tiles they kept into each of the castles on either side of you. Each of your opponents will do the same. You’re collaborating with your neighbours, trying to build both of your castles to be the best they can be, as the castle of yours that scores the lowest will represent your individual score at the end of the game. Once you’ve placed a tile into both castles, you’ll pick up the seven tiles your opponent left you, pick two again, and on and on the game plays until you’ve completed two whole rounds. Then, you’ll score each of your castles and declare a player the winner.
If you have played Between Two Cities, you might be thinking “That’s exactly how Between Two Cities plays, where’s does Castles of Mad King Ludwig come into the picture?”. Well, how each tile scores is lifted directly from CoMKL. Each tile is a room, from activity rooms, to dining halls, to outdoor gardens. Each type of room has a different scoring objective, such as being adjacent to other rooms of specific types, or earning points for all the tiles of a type in a single row or column. In addition, when you get 3 rooms of a single type into your castle, you earn a bonus based on that room type. If you’ve played Castles of Mad King Ludwig, all that will sound very familiar.
Now we understand how each parent game donated its traits into Between Two Castles, I’ll briefly touch on what separates the 2025 Essential Edition from the 2018 original. And the answer is functionally nothing. The Essential Edition contains the original base game, the Stories and Soirees expansion, plus the two promo tiles that have been released. But if you were just looking at the player aids and the rulebook, you’d never know that the secret rooms or the ballrooms were originally expansion content.
Now, I said above that Between Two Castles feels cooperative or collaborative, and it does. You are working with your two neighbours to build the best castle possible, because your individual final score is equal to the lower score of your two castles. But it’s still a competitive game, there is only be one winner at the end of the night. But the friendly nature of the game ensures that no one has bad feelings during gameplay, except for the pangs of jealousy as you watch your partner to your left confer with the person to their left as they decide which of the two tiles they drafted are going to go into your shared castle.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays up to 8 players seamlessly. Much like how 7 Wonders scales up in player count so easily, each round you’re only really interacting with two other people. Your hands of tiles will flow around the table, and much of the thinking time and decisions happen simultaneously. There aren’t many games I’m willing to play at 7 or 8 players outside of party games, but I’d consider this a contender against 7 Wonders if I know that everyone at the table has some experience in the board game hobby.
All the rooms score differently, and you earn a different bonus when you get 3 or 5 rooms of the same type in your castle, which can spiral out the number of choices you need to make. Teaching Between Two Castles is kind of a pain, as by the time you’ve explained the 9th room type, no one really remembers what the first types of rooms do anymore. Thankfully, the game comes with 8 player aids which do a fantastic job of reminding you of the important information, once you have the context of the rules in your head.
Ever since I first laid hands on Wingspans rulebook, with it’s wonderfully luxurious linen finish, Stonemaier Games production quality has been second to none in my eyes, and that remains true here. The rulebook is big and clear with helpful examples, the tiles are thick and beautifully illustrated, although some of the iconography on the tiles is a bit small. The GameTrayz contains the game beautifully, and makes it a breeze to ‘setup’. You literally plop the trayz onto the table, and tell everyone to grab a stack of tiles. Bang, you’re already into the game. For ease of access, Stonemaier games earns top marks.
I had played Between Two Cities once before, and thought it was pretty fun. I am a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so I was excited to experience this mashup. What I found was a fun, easy to teach game that felt friendly and collaborative. Everyone was working with their partners well, conspiring to maximize the points on both their castles. The tile drafting created some interesting decisions as you can pick tiles, knowing what your partner is going to get next round, and just hope that they (literally) pick up what you put down. Between Two Castles has the satisfaction that comes from building and pulling off a plan with a partner that makes cooperative games so popular, while also giving providing one player the satisfaction of victory over your opponents.
Many of the scoring objectives are going to pull you and your partner in opposite directions. Maybe you’ll be wanting to place a specific tile because it’ll score 4 points for the orange tiles in a column, while your partner will want to pick a specific colour tile to gain the bonus for having 3 rooms of a single type. When you start triggering those bonuses, the game really starts to sing. The downside is that some of the bonuses can make for some much longer turns as players take time mathing out how to maximize their points, between drawing new tiles, or cards and placing everything perfectly. A slight frustration when they spend 10 minutes debating where to put something, and the difference between the two options is a single point.
Onto the question that needs answering. Is Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig greater than the sum of its parts? For my money, no. As a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, I’m left feeling sad that the bidding mechanic and whimsical and wacky castle designs were stripped away. But there is no denying that Between Two Castles is the more accessible option. It’s cooperative drafting, fun scoring style, seamless scalability, and polished production make it a fantastic choice.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition is a wonderful game. If you have larger player counts, it’s an obvious pick, as it scales from 3 to 8 players perfectly. It’s fast, unlike many other games that can support that many players, it’s gorgeous, even if the iconography is a bit small. There are two solo modes and a 2 player variant, the expansion content is folded in so seamlessly that you’d be left wondering what’s different between the essential edition and the base game. The puzzle tickles my brain just right, and while it doesn’t surpass the heights of the original Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Between Two Castles offers a unique and interesting spin on the scoring mechanics from CoMKL. This game is well worth a spot on my shelf.
