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).
In World Order, players control the four great powers in the mid-2010’s as the once-unrivaled influence of the United States is beginning to wane. China, Russia, and the EU all step up to posture themselves and the next great super power.
What a nice clean board
Before we really get underway, I just have to admit something. I’m kind of a dummy. Like, I read the news sometimes, I read books, but I’m never terribly invested in international politics until it actually starts to affect my daily life. Scrutinizing economic dependencies while balancing domestic projects and expanding military spending is not something I really want to dedicate very much of my brain space to. So right off the bat I have to admit that the theme of World Order doesn’t exactly light my world on fire.
To play World Order, each player takes control of one of the four factions, and draws 6 cards from their unique deck. Each turn they’ll play one card, which will allow them to do the actions on that card. The base deck generally just lets you do the actions straight, while upgraded cards will let you do multiple actions on your turn, or modify how you might preform that action.
This player aid is double sided
The actions largely break down into 4 categories. The diplomatic actions let you improve relations with other countries, letting you spend a resource to take the associated card into your play area, allowing you to invest or build a military base in that region. You can engage with a region, again, spending diplomacy to place an influence cube and an engage token into that region, both of which will be important later.
The military actions let you move tanks from your board into any regions within your zone of interest, with each of the four players having their own zones of interest, overlapping with one another like a Venn Diagram of violence. Building a base has you placing a single token onto one of your allied countries, and if the region that country is located in is not within your zone of influnce, then you now have the option of moving your tanks into that region. It’s worth mentioning here that at the end of each of the 6 rounds, each player checks each of their zones of interest, and for every player who has a larger military presence in that region, they lose 2 victory points.
The economic actions let you import and export your resources, getting cash for your exports and netting resources you can’t easily produce yourself. Each of your allied countries will have a list of resources they wish to import, and some will have resources they can export, expanding your ability to move goods around your player board. Investing in an allied country on the other hand, has you dropping wads of cash, to place a token on that country that will earn you a paltry sum back each round. Most countries seemed to have an ROI of 4 or 5 rounds, making this action less attractive the further the game went on. But investing does allow you to place an influence in a region, which can earn a lot of points throughout the game.
Each player has different starting productions and limits on each of their tracks.
Last are the domestic actions. Getting a growth card is like researching a new technology in every 4X game you’ve ever played. Pay the resources to get the card, now you have a persistent ability for the rest of the game. The other domestic action is to produce. If you produce one of the three primary resources, you just gain as many of those resource as your production allows. While the secondary resource types require that you pay some resources to get a resource, and your production limit being how many times you’re allowed to make that exchange.
Each round lets each player take 4 turns. At the end of the round, the cards remaining in your hand would give you some resources and some research points, which lets you take upgraded action cards from the card market and place them on top of your draw deck. I loved this little wrinkle, letting you prepare for the upcoming round by buying a clutch card, unlike a lot of deck builder games where the exciting new card you buy is thrown right into the trash and then shuffled in, perhaps taking whole rounds before the card shows its ugly mug again.
After research, everyone’s investments pay out, then you have a chance to spend your cell phone resource to increase your nations prosperity, and then you resolve threat, which I explained in the military actions section. At the end of the 3rd and 6th round, you also score the regions.
Each region has a number of spots for players to play influence cubes, and those spots are separated by a line. All the spots above the line are permanent influence spots, once a cube goes on that spot, it’ll never move. The spots below are temporary spots. If all the temporary spots are full, then one gets added in on the end of the line and the oldest cube gets bumped off the track. The reason why you want influence in all of these regions is because each region will bestow a hefty number of points to the majority influence holders.
At the end of the 6th round, and second scoring, the player with the most points is the winner!
All of the systems and actions in World Order feed into each other really nicely. Taking allied countries gives you avenues to spread influence for points, or it might let you roll tanks into regions where you’d otherwise be barred from moving. Nothing feels overpowered or obvious, but everything feels considered. In fact, “considered” is probably the word that kept coming to mind throughout the entire experience. Everything about World Order feels like the designers put an enormous amount of time, effort, and care into making it. It feels extremely well playtested. Everything is finely balanced.
I quite like the asymmetry in World Order. Each faction has different strengths, but every player is still fundamentally playing the same game. It’s one of my biggest frustrations with wildly asymmetric games like Root, where it often feels like all four players are playing completely different games and interacting with one another via happenstance. It makes it difficult to understand what anyone is capable of doing until you become extremely familiar with the system. Here, everyone can do the same things. Sure, Russia might produce more resources, China might generate more technology and consumer goods, and Europe starts with more allied countries, but at the end of the day we’re all still pursuing the same goals using the same action framework. That makes it much easier to parse a board state and understand what’s happening around the table.
If I have something to complain about, World Order did take us a very long time to play. We started around 7:30 and wrapped up close to 12:30. A five-hour game is not something I’m really keen to bring out very often, especially when our game night falls on a Wednesday. This isn’t the kind of game I want to sink my teeth into and then immediately try to function at work the next morning.
I also felt that after the third round, when we completed the first scoring phase, the second half of the game largely felt similar to the first. There was a point where I wondered whether we could have simply stopped there and still had a satisfying experience. But I also understand why the game is as long as it is. In our game, the United States was almost twenty points ahead of everyone else after the first scoring phase. in the second half of the game, however, the rest of us had begun chipping away at America’s economic and military strongholds. Round by round, we slowly eroded that lead until the once-dominant superpower was left a shell of its former glory. If World Order only lasted three rounds, then the United States would have cruised to victory. The six-round structure, combined with every other player effectively working together to contain the leader, creates a much more tense and dynamic experience.
Aside from the criticism that it’s probably too long, I find it surprisingly difficult to criticize much else about World Order. It feels very well designed. All of the edge cases feel like they’ve been considered. Every faction’s powers feel appropriately balanced and tuned. Everything seems to exist for a reason. I could criticize my own skills and strategies! I let myself get blinded by emotion, sinking way more resources that what was reasonable, just to deny another player two points, or to hold onto a region that would give me two points. I can sense there’s a really high skill ceiling at World Order, but at this stage, playing well still feels opaque to me.
That feeling of a really well designed and considered game reminds me of when I played Arcs. Every single level exists for a reason, and I could see why things worked the way they did. But unlike Arcs, World Order felt more sensical to me. Arcs often felt like wrangling an arcane system of trick-taking while wearing handcuffs. World Order felt more like reacting to shifting world politics and adapting to changing circumstances.
So if you have any love for the theme, if world politics excites you, and if the idea of spending four or five hours with your friends jostling for global supremacy sounds appealing, then World Order is an achievement. I’d recommend it without reservation.
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?
In Kingsburg, players are Lords sent from the King to administer frontier territories. Each round, players will roll their dice and use assign those dice to various advisors, representing their influence. The board ranges from 1 to 18. The lower end advisors have measly powers, like getting a single resource each, while the higher numbered advisors generally have much more powerful abilities.
Each round features 3 dice placement phases. After each dice placement phase, you have the opportunity to spend some of the resources you’ve amassed and build a building to grant yourself a persistent benefit for the rest of the game. Come winter, you’ll need to defend against the horde, which is simply a matter of flipping up a card, and then comparing each players strength, and then gaining the benefits if your strength is higher, or suffering the penalties if your strength is lower.
The dice placement round is where you’ll spend most of your time with Kingsburg. Starting from the first player, you have the opportunity to place one or more of your dice on the advisor that matches their strength, summing up the pips on the die if you choose to use more than one at a time. Once you place one or more of your dice, the next player takes a turn, and you go around and around until all players have placed all of their dice. The sticking point in Kingsburg is that each advisor can only have one set up dice on them, so if you roll three 4’s, and the first player places one of their dice on the level 4 advisor, and the second player places their two 6’s on the level 12 advisor, you’re pretty much locked into taking that level 8 advisor.
Now, any dice placement game lives and dies on it’s modifiers, and Kingsburg has some available to the player. Each round you’re allowed to use a single +2 chip to increase the value of one group of dice. You do have to earn those +2 chips, but having one available to you each round can prove invaluable, as the opportunity for hate drafting is incredibly high in Kingsburg. In addition to the +2 chips, some of the higher level buildings will introduce perks such as placing your dice on one advisor higher or lower than your sum of dice would typically allow.
The buildings are the real exciting part of Kingsburg. At the start of the game each player gets a large sheet detailing all the buildings and upgrades available to them throughout the game, and most of your actions throughout the game will be simply amassing resources so you can afford another building at the end of the round. You need to build your buildings from left to right, meaning if you really covet the abilities those far right side buildings offer, you’ll need to plan a few rounds in advance to get them built.
Every winter you’ll need to defend your keep. Each year will have a face down enemy card, just waiting for it’s time to shine. Throughout the year, a couple advisors will allow you to look at the card, so you know what you’ll be dealing with. Each card also shows the range of strength values that it can have, giving the players who don’t get to look at the card a rough idea of what they need to prepare for. Each winter, that card flips up, and players compare their strength to the value on that card. You can earn strength throughout the round, and some of your buildings will give (or take away) strength (some buildings only provide bonuses against specific types of enemies). if you exceed the threshold, you’ll earn a benefit. If you merely meet the threshold, nothing happens. But if you come in under the strength threshold, you’re in for a punishment.
In a game that’s all about amassing resources to build buildings, the punishment of losing a few resources might not seem like that big of a deal. But the reality of Kingsburg is that when you lose resources, you’re wasting time, and your opponents will slowly start pulling ahead. By not building a building in a round, you’re forfeiting the points that building would afford you, and whatever the special ability of that building is. The sooner you build sooner buildings, the more time you can make their special effect work for you, and squeeze more juice from the tight economy.
I don’t know if this is a Kingsburg specific thing, or a byproduct of playing 20 year old games, but Kingsburg makes a great first impression. It’s exciting and interesting, interactive in just the right ways, and when you’re done, you’ll walk away thinking about what you could have or should have done to clinch the victory. But as I play it more and more, the charm of Kingsburg fades a bit. Even with the expansion that adds a few more rows of buildings to vary every play, I can’t get away from the fact that the whole game is just about amassing 3 different resources to maybe build a building each round. I don’t often find many reasons to diversify my strategies these days, the best buildings at this point are fairly obvious, making every other building on that sheet an unnecessary distraction. Maybe if there were a way to build the 3rd and 4th column buildings without their prerequisites, but the fact that you only get one build action per round will really limit your horizons.
One more small gripe. In the past 20 years, Kingsburg has had a second and third edition come out, and I have to say from purely an artistic point of view, I vastly prefer the original. The court members are all full of colour and character in the first edition, while the second and third edition just look like generic character portraits ripped from a B-tier fantasy video game. The unchanged gameplay is still solid, so I’d recommend playing it if its the only copy available to you. But you’ll have to pry the original edition from my cold, dead hands before I pick up these new versions.
I do enjoy playing Kingsburg. The dice-placement mechanism works wonderfully, injecting risk and uncertainty into an otherwise straightforward system. Misjudge the order of your placements and your opponents can punish you immediately. Neglect your military strength and a brutal winter can undo an entire year’s worth of planning. Those moments of tension create stories that linger long after the game ends. Twenty years later, however, some of Kingsburg’s limitations are easier to spot. The core loop is ultimately about gathering three resources and converting them into buildings. With experience, certain building paths begin to reveal themselves as stronger than others, and the decision space can feel narrower than it first appears. Even the expansion’s additional building options don’t entirely solve that problem.
Yet judging Kingsburg solely by modern standards feels a little unfair. One of the joys of revisiting older games is seeing where many of today’s ideas came from. While newer designs have refined and expanded on dice worker placement, Kingsburg still delivers an engaging, interactive experience that remains easy to teach and satisfying to play to this day. I’m reminded that board games used to be mean, and every once in a while, I revel in that feeling. Not every game becomes timeless, but Kingsburg earns its place as a reminder that good design can remain compelling long after newer and shinier games have taken the spotlight.
I’ve been running this blog since January 2021, and in that time I’ve published over 200 reviews, which is kind of mind-boggling to me. One thing I’m not very good at, however, is keeping an index of all the games I’ve already reviewed. Sometimes I’ll sit down to write a review for a game I just played, only to realize I’ve already written one two years ago. Today was the opposite problem. My wife and I played a game of Hardback last night because our kids went to bed with no fuss for once, and we actually had the mental capacity to play a game together. So we pulled out one of our favorite games, Hardback. Afterwards, I went digging through my blog archives to see if my thoughts on the game had changed over the years, only to discover that I haven’t actually reviewed Hardback before. So let’s give it a go, shall we?
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.
Right off the bat, I’ll say that if you own Paperback, I don’t think Hardback replaces it. They’re different enough word games that both can happily exist in the same collection.
Hardback begins with everyone having the same deck of eight cards plus two unique cards specific to their player. On your turn, you draw five cards and use them to make a word. If you need a wild letter, you can turn any card face down and use it as a wildcard, but of course you don’t get any of the benefits that card would bestow upon you if it’s face down. After you’ve assembled a word, you count up all the points and money it provides, track your score accordingly along the bookshelf track, and then purchase card(s) from the market. The card market is simply a display of seven cards drawn from a massive deck. The cards in the market come from one of four genres, and each genre pushes your strategy in a different direction or provides effects unique to that genre.
Any cards you buy go into your discard pile. All the letters you used for your word, along with any unused cards from your hand, also go to the discard pile. Then you draw a new hand of five cards. If you run out of cards, you reshuffle your discard pile and keep going until someone reaches 60 points. Once all players have had the same number of turns, the player with the most points wins. Pretty simple right?
One mechanic I haven’t touched on yet is the ink system. During the card buying phase of your turn, you can spend one cent to purchase an ink token. Then, during a future turn, while you’re trying to build a word, you can choose to ink a card. To do this, you draw a card from the top of your deck and place an ink token on it. Now that inked letter must be used in your word. You can’t turn it face down as a wildcard; you have to use the letter exactly as it appears. This push-your-luck element is wonderful, as truly bold players can ink four or five letters and attempt some ridiculous nine-letter monstrosity for a massive payoff. Longer words are generally more beneficial anyway because you’re more likely to trigger genre bonuses.
On the subject of the genres I mentioned earlier. There are four of them, and each has effects unique to that genre. Many genre cards also have layered benefits. All cards have an effect that activates when you play them, but many genre cards have a secondary ability that only activates if you have another card of the same genre in the same word. Anyone who’s played Star Realms will immediately recognize this system. It encourages you to focus on one or two genres because triggering those genre bonuses are the way to unlock to full potential of each of your cards.
The genres themselves are all quite distinct. Horror primarily focuses on gaining remover tokens, which let you remove ink from cards you’ve previously inked, giving you more flexibility in how aggressively you use that system. Romance revolves around removing cards from your hand and deck for small benefits, but the real hidden strength of Romance is how absurdly thin you can make your deck. I’ve had games where my Romance deck was only five or six cards, meaning I was playing the same hyper-efficent word every round.
The Mystery genre has two primary benefits. First, it allows you to jail cards from the market row, reserving them for later purchase or denying them to opponents. Since you can only jail one card at a time, it’s not especially useful for hate-drafting. The real power of Mystery is that it can reveal the face-down wild cards in your word, so you can reap the reward from the card without really using that letter in your word. This allows you to use those difficult letters much more frequently, provided you can place them adjacent to the Mystery card. Finally, Adventure is straightforward. Adventure mostly focuses on generating points and money.
There’s a lot to love about Hardback. The ink system lets you push your luck while mitigating some truly awful draws. No one likes drawing a hand that’s mostly basic cards when you know your deck is full of good letters and powerful effects. Likewise, if you’ve built a deck around a particular genre and only draw one of those genre cards taking a chance on an ink draw can be incredibly satisfying, especially when the card you’re digging for comes up. Drawing that second genre card and suddenly unlocking the full power of your cards feels wonderful.
I also love the flexibility of being able to turn cards upside down and use them as wildcards. Having that option makes me far more willing to buy awkward letters like C, X, or Q because I don’t need the perfect follow-up draw to make them useful. Sometimes those difficult letters give you better benefits than than three basic cards combined, so it’s still a win if you only use that letter with 3 face down cards. Using all your weak starter cards as face-down wilds while still benefiting from the powerful card you’ve added to your deck is a pretty great way to keep those starter cards at least somewhat useful as you approach the endgame.
I also appreciate how distinct the genres feel and how mixing and matching them changes the experience from game to game. Some games I’ve leaned heavily into Mystery, using all my powerful letters as wildcards and building around revealing them later. Other games have gone in completely different directions like mixing horror and adventure for some huge letter words with bombastic point totals at the end.
The game we played last night saw me focusing almost entirely on Adventure. It wasn’t flashy, it was simply a high-scoring point engine. I also got fairly lucky with my draws, consistently pulling my Adventure cards together at the right times. My wife, on the other hand, had some back luck and got stuck trying to unlock her engine that never quite got it going before the game ended.
This is noteworthy because after 23 plays, I have never beaten my wife at Hardback. Except for last night.
Let this be a lesson to everyone. No one beats me 24 times in a row at Hardback. NO ONE!
*ahem* I’ve gotten off topic.
I will say that the card market can be annoyingly fiddly. If four cards share the same genre or four cards cost six cents or more, players have the option to wipe the market and have it be refilled. It’s not a huge issue, but I find it annoying to have to sweep all the cards and deal out 7 more every other round. It interrupts the flow of the game just enough to be mildly annoying.
The market can also occasionally stagnate. If the conditions to refresh it aren’t met and nobody really wants the available cards, then the market can just sit there for several turns. That’s mildly frustrating, but thankfully it’s rare. Either the condition to wipe the market will pop up, or if players have stopped buying cards, it’s because the game is approaching its conclusion anyway. Adding new cards to a deck in the last two or three rounds probably won’t matter much, but it still feels bad to have seven cents available and not want a single card that’s on offer.
Earlier I said that Paperback and Hardback can happily coexist in the same collection, and I genuinely mean that. Whenever I compare the two, I inevitably arrive at the question of trying to figure out which is better or which one I prefer more. The problem is that I don’t actually have an answer. They’re different games that do different things, and both are enjoyable.
I think Hardback offers more strategic variety. The genre system encourages specialization, and the ink system gives players far more flexibility. Being able to use any card as a wildcard makes most turn feel viable, even if you draw a C, X, V, and T. Paperback, meanwhile, has a much more defined arc to the game. You’re gradually improving your deck, climbing the card row, and deciding when to stop buying letters and start investing in the permanent wildcards which clog up your deck. Knowing when to make that pivot is a genuine skill.
In Hardback, you don’t worry about that nearly as much. Instead, the challenge becomes recognizing when money has stopped mattering. Early in the game, money generation is important. By the middle of the game, though, you often don’t need more money-producing cards. You need points, and you need ways to consistently score them.
So in the end, I don’t think one game is better than the other. Both succeed at being excellent word games, but they achieve that goal in different ways. Paperback offers a more traditional deck-building progression, while Hardback provides greater flexibility and more room for strategic experimentation. Both have earned a permanent place in my collection, and which one I would rather play on a given night mostly comes down to my mood.
Though if I can recreate whatever happened last night and actually beat my wife at Hardback for a second time, maybe I’ll be reaching for Hardback a little more often.
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.
Perhaps that description on its own doesn’t sound all that interesting, but believe me when I say that Things in Rings is simply a delight.
Each of the rings corresponds to a different aspect of the words. The yellow circle has to do with the makeup of the word itself, things like which letters are present in the word. The blue circle has to do with attributes of the thing, usually something physical about it. The red circle focuses more on context, like where you might find the item represented on the card.
Gameplay has non-knowing players laying one of the item cards from their hand into the Venn diagram where they think it belongs. As more items get laid into the diagram, theoretically, the more clues you’ll have to help determine where your future cards should go.Then the Knower either confirms that the player was correct, in which case, they get to play again, or, the Knower shakes their head disapprovingly and moves the card to the correct intersection. The player draws a new card, and the next player takes their turn. The goal of the game being to shed all the cards from your hand.
I realize this concept is a little hard to visualize in the abstract, so imagine looking at a completed puzzle and considering everything in the blue circle. What does a guitar, a moose, a flamingo, and a belt all have in common?
You might be thinking that they all have holes, but then you have to ask yourself: why isn’t the button in that blue circle too? What do the carpet, button, and guitar have in common that the belt doesn’t? If you’re holding a card showing a teapot, is that more like a guitar, or more similar to a belt?
At first, figuring out where to put your cards is almost an exercise in futility. There are so many things that a thing could be that you’re largely just placing cards based on vibes. But after everyone has had two or three rounds and items start to congregate within each section of the Venn diagram, and you begin to intuit where certain things should go. You might not be able to explain exactly what the criteria are, but you can start making educated guesses. If a cow goes in one particular spot, then a moose is pretty close to a cow in attribute and context, so that feels safe. You stop solving the categories directly and start reasoning by association, which feels surprisingly satisfying.
Now, you can play Things in Rings two different ways. One has all players competing against each other while the Knower simply facilitates where things go. The way I prefer to play, however, is the cooperative variant. In the cooperative game, the Knower has ten cards of their own while every other player has five. The goal is for the group to collectively play all of their cards before the Knower runs out of theirs.
I enjoy this version much more because I really appreciate the communication between players. The discussions, assumptions, and suggestions about what each category might be are more fun than sitting in silence hoping you’re the smarty-pants at the table before your dumb friends figure it out too.
Having a cooperative spin on Things in Rings also makes being the Knower kind of agonizing. Often you’ll have to make judgment calls. Like, if a category is “flammable,” then, is a flamingo flammable? What about a school? Is anything flammable if you try hard enough? It’s these moments that make sorting cards into their correct spots just a little bit painful. You worry about how judgmental your friends will be once the categories are revealed. If you’re playing cooperatively, you also worry about how badly you’re misleading everyone by arbitrarily deciding one way or the other when these weird edge cases come up.
Like all the best party games, the score here doesn’t really matter. Winning and losing isn’t the point of playing Things in Rings. Instead, you get to revel in the unknown. You get to spend twenty minutes trying to figure out what a flamingo, a guitar, and a belt possibly have in common. Then, at the end of the game, the Knower reveals the categories and everyone gets to see just how close they were, or wonder how they somehow missed what now seems like an obvious connection. The moment of the reveal, when everyone goes “OOOOOHHHHH, DUUUH!” is something I absolutely relish. And Things in Rings excels at delivering that moment.
Depending on who you play with, the game can occasionally drag on. Some people become completely paralyzed by indecision. If they can’t definitively place a card correctly, they freeze up and don’t want to place anything at all. That’s tough because Things in Rings really rewards people who are willing to take a shot and see what happens.
I said it at the beginning, but this game feels pretty special. It’s rare that my wife and I can go to a board game café, learn a game, play it once, and then have her pick up a copy on the way out because she loved it that much. Usually games need to marinate for a while before either of us decides they’re worth bringing home. But not this one. We played Things in Rings in public, laughed our way through trying to figure out bizarre connections between random objects, and by the time we were leaving the cafe, my partner had already decided that a copy was coming home with us.
That’s probably the strongest recommendation I can give a game.
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.
My problem with Flip 7 is that I’ve already been playing this game for over a decade.
I’ll recognize that there are SOME differences, but I’ve always been a big fan of Pairs, which operates on almost identical mechanics. I’ll get into those differences in a bit, but first it’s worth talking about what Flip 7 actually does, because clearly it’s doing something right.
Flip 7 is simple. Every round starts with each player receiving a single card, and then the dealer goes around the table asking the same question over and over: “Hit or stay?” If you hit, you get another card. If you stay, you lock in your points. The catch, of course, is that if you ever collect two cards of the same value, you bust and score nothing for the round. If you manage to get 7 cards of different values, the round ends immediately and the player who achieved the feat earns 15 bonus points for their boldness. It’s pure push-your-luck design. The score is based on the total value of your cards, and the first player to reach 200 points triggers the endgame.
The clever wrinkle of Flip 7 is that the numbers in the deck aren’t evenly distributed. There are twelve 12s, eleven 11s, ten 10s, and so on all the way down to a single 1 and a single 0. That means that statistically some cards feel dangerous while others feel remarkably. The size of the deck and the speed of play makes it difficult to count cards and then players often act on instinct and vibes rather than actual probability. There are also a few action cards mixed in added flavour. Some score modifiers that can’t bust you, but don’t add to the 7 unique card bonus, second chances, and the flip three card that forces any player to flip three cards in a row with no opportunity to stop and bank your points between flips.
Flip 7 works because it’s incredibly easy to teach. You just flip a card and ask “hit or stay?” over and over until somebody groans in agony because they paired their 6 with another 6. It was a relatively safe move, but that’s the risk you tale. It’s a game your eight-year-old nephew can play with your ninety-year-old grandmother without any issues. And that’s a real achievement.
But let’s also be honest here: Flip 7 is a game of luck, not strategy. Sure, there are moments where you feel brilliant because you chose to stop, and then you see that the next card flip would have busted, that’s just luck. You didn’t know, nobody knows! There are no deduction mechanisms, no real information management, no meaningful strategic framework beyond deciding how lucky you feel in the moment and trying to remember if 3 or 4 of the 8’s have already come out of the deck.
Now, my biggest criticisms of Flip 7 is how it handles the end game, specifically as compared to Pairs. in Flip 7, at the end of every round you need to add up all all the numbers and add those scores to everyone’s running tally. It’s not onerous, but it does require a pen and paper, which is more than I might expect from a game that I just want to throw down and start playing.
And while I’m talking about score, I guess it’s time to talk about Pairs specifically in relation to Flip 7. Pairs was one of the first games I ever reviewed on this blog because I loved it so much. I literally bought six or seven different decks and handed them out like candy. It became my travel game. The thing I could bring anywhere. And this is really where the crux of my Flip 7 versus Pairs comparison comes into view.
In Pairs, the core game play is basically identical. You flip cards, decide whether to hit or stay, and bust if you pair a number. But the scoring is so much cleaner. Instead of totaling up a whole piles of cards every round, the player who busts simply takes the value of the card they busted on as points, and the first player to reach 21 loses the game. That’s it. It’s elegant in a way that makes the entire experience feel lighter. There’s no bookkeeping and it’s easy for everyone at the table to see how well each other is doing instead of asking the player keeping score how close everyone is to ending the game before deciding to take a risk or not.
That simplicity matters even more in the environments where these games thrive best: pubs, bars, coffee shops, someone’s kitchen table at midnight, and so on. Pairs feels perfectly engineered for those spaces. Flip 7 is good too, but not as good.
Also, the push your luck is more interesting in Pairs. In Pairs, when one player busts, they take a card for score, but it resets the round for everyone. Sure you might be sitting on an 8 and a 7, but if you can hold out until someone else busts, you get away scot-free! If the risk is too much for you, or you’re staring down really unfair odds, like if you have a 9 and 10, but the player next to you is holding a 1 and 3, you can choose to just prematurely end the round, and take the lowest card as your score instead, start a new whole new round. I find it more engaging and interesting.
I will concede that Flip 7 is dramatically easier to find right now. It’s available in every game store and Wal-mart across Canada and the US. Pairs feels niche by comparison, which is a shame because one of the things I adore about it is how many different themed decks exist. The cards are filled with artwork from different artists and settings, giving you something pleasant to look at while you play. Finding a Pairs deck that speaks to you feels custom and charming. Flip 7’s plain colorful-number aesthetic by contrast is utilitarian and boring. Sure, the big numbers in Flip 7 are perfectly functional, but Pairs has personality!
So part of me can’t help feeling a little sad watching Flip 7 become this massive commercial and critical success when, in my opinion, the better version of this game has been available on shelves for over ten years already.
And yes, I’ll fully admit some of my bias here is emotional. Pairs has collaborated with artists and created decks based on some of my favorite books, including Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. Meanwhile, the CEO behind Flip 7 publicly defended his decision to vote for Trump. Fair or unfair, that factors into where I’d rather spend my money. I know which company I feel more excited supporting.
So I suppose this review is less my thoughts on Flip 7, even if it is pretty good at being a fast and easy card game. But I can’t help but get onto a tiny soapbox asking people to please, for the love of all things cardboard, look at Pairs instead. Because every time I see people discovering Flip 7 for the first time, I can’t help but feel like I’m watching an old friend get overlooked in the background.
