Perhaps this is a byproduct of playing entirely too many games on Board Game Arena, or maybe I’ve just become more sensitive to it since having kids and watching my sleep health deteriorate entirely, but I hate hidden trackable information in board games.
First, a definition.
Hidden Trackable Information (HTI) refers to information that everyone at the table could be tracking and therefore knows with 100% certainty, but which is deliberately hidden. I’m not talking about drawing cards into your hand in Ticket to Ride, even if you use the public market every turn, because you could still be drawing blindly from the deck, and that information is hidden.
What I mean is something more like Puerto Rico, where scores are completely trackable, but for some reason the scores are told to be hidden. Or For Sale, where you can, and probably should, be tracking how much money each player is paying at each auction, and therefore how much money they have left for future bids, but the rules insist on keeping your bank accounts private.
Here’s my real problem with hidden trackable information: I’m dumb. And I play games with really smart people.
I don’t mind losing because I made tactical errors, or because randomness bit me in the ass. I can handle that just fine. But when I lose because I wasn’t able to keep every piece of data in my head while my opponents were successfully counting cards or tracking points, it feels incredibly discouraging.
A good example is El Grande. Players drop cubes into the castle, and when it’s time to score, the cubes are revealed and whoever has the majority scores the points. I find it deeply frustrating to sit there trying to remember who put cubes in and how many. Should I commit three cubes because I think that puts me into the majority? Should I commit four just to be safe? If I had been writing this down as players added cubes, I’d be able to make an informed decision instead of guessing based on vibes and vibes alone.
As most parents do, I’m going to blame my children.
Over the past five years, my sleep has been constantly interrupted by rugrats. Unfortunately for me, no one else in my game group has kids. They usually show up to game night well rested and emotionally stable, ready for a long game of cold calculations. Meanwhile, I’m crawling in on four hours of sleep because my five-year-old was awake for three hours from 1am to 4am, terrified she was going to swallow her first loose tooth (true story).
Some people have very strong opinions about hidden trackable information. I’m always surprised by the ferocity with which people will defend games that use HTI, and rail against the mere idea of someone using a memory aid or taking notes.
“It makes games so much less enjoyable!” “memory is a skill! That’s part of playing the game!”
In furtherance of me being dumb, playing a lot of board games online has absolutely made my brain lazy. The Yucata version of El Grande shows you exactly what’s in the castle at all times, because, ostensibly, you could be tracking that information yourself. BGA has a notes feature built right into the interface, allowing you to jot things down at any time. Somewhat ironically, I almost never use it, but I’m glad it’s there, especially for those async games that stretch over weeks.
The most common defences of HTI seem to be that it reduces analysis paralysis and prevents king making. If everyone knows exactly who’s winning, the table will pile on the leader. If all information is open, players might spend far more time puzzling out the optimal move instead of trusting their gut and just playing the game. To me, this sounds like the defence of well rested players relying on their more simple compatriots making mistakes to cement their victory.
So where is the line? When is hidden trackable information okay?
Would you allow someone to look through a discard pile to check whether a card had already been played, and they just missed it? Would you allow a player to look into their bag in Orléans or Automobiles to confirm what cubes they even have available to them?
If you let someone shift through their discard pile, would you let them look through the previously played tricks to see if that jack of hearts had already been played? Some games like Cat in the Box are very friendly to players like me, because they include a whole board for everyone to track what cards have already been played.
Now, I will concede that playing El Grande with perfect information makes the reveal much less exciting. Sometimes imperfect information really does create a different, and occasionally better, experience. I’ll also concede that taking this argument to its logical extreme is annoying. I absolutely don’t want to play with someone who’s maintaining a full spreadsheet of which cards have appeared and which ones I’ve drafted while playing Star Realms. As with most things, nuance matters.
Some games only work with HTI. Trio, for instance, should be a simple game of memory, but for some reason it makes me feel like my brain is melting out of my ears. But the game only really shines when players are making mistakes and struggling to remember if they already know what someone’s lowest card is. The ever shifting information of players hands helps facilitate that feeling as well. Similarly, Wandering Towers would be really boring if those towers were clear.
As with all things, context matters. I’m generally pretty against HTI in economic euro games, because the purpose or goal of those games are to be the most efficient, and obscuring some information goes against the spirit of the game. In other, less mathematical games, where the purpose of the game is to evoke specific feelings, then HTI makes sense.
But in my opinion, someone who insists on preserving HTI and then wins because of my poor memory is no better than someone winning a game because their opponent forgot a rule and had a critical turn derailed. I’d much rather win or lose with everyone playing at their best, rather than because someone couldn’t remember how many cubes were dropped into a tower.
All of this said, I’m speaking from a place of privilege. No one at my table suffers from serious analysis paralysis. No one quarterbacks co-op games. No one is deliberately exploiting information asymmetry to bully less confident players. I’m not arguing that HTI is always bad, or that it should be purged from game design entirely.
But I am saying this: if the deciding factor in a strategy game is who remembered better, or who was able to silently run a second game in their head while also playing the first one, then that’s not a test of strategy I find especially compelling anymore.
I want to win or lose because I made better decisions with the information in front of me. I want my mistakes to be tactical, not neurological. When a game rewards someone for tracking numbers in their head while pretending they aren’t there, it doesn’t feel clever to me, it feels exclusionary.
Maybe that’s the sleep deprivation talking. Maybe it’s too many games on BGA. Or maybe it’s just that, at this stage of my life, I’m less interested in proving I can remember how many cubes went into a tower three rounds ago, and more interested in making interesting choices right now. If that means occasionally letting players look into their bag and confirm the information that was available to them all along? I’m fine with that. I’d rather play a game where everyone can see the whole picture, than one where the real contest is who forgot the least.
Disclaimer: This review is based on plays of 7 Wonders Dice on Board Game Arena.
Ah, the roll and write. First comes a successful board game. Then comes the card game version. Then comes the roll and write cash in. 7 Wonders is no different, albeit it’s taken quite a bit longer to get here than some of the other examples I’m referencing, *cough CastlesofBurgundycough*.
In 7 Wonders Dice, you’re competing with your neighbours to earn the most points by managing your resources and utilizing the whims of the dice most effectively. If you’ve played a roll and write before, you’ll recognize the scorepad fairly well. Half a dozen coloured sections for you to scratch off, half a dozen different ways to score, and dozens of tiny symbols that promise synergy and cascading combos, which is my favourite part of a roll and write, if I’m being honest.
The player boards, much like in the full game of 7 Wonders, are slightly asymmetric. Each one is themed around a different wonder, and will offer players different rewards when they progress their wonder. Some of the symbols on the main mat are slightly different too, making different coloured dice more valuable to some players than others.
The dice part of 7 Wonders Dice is the more interesting system. At the top of each round, 7 dice are put into a box, and the box gets shaken, Boggle style. The box is slammed down, the lid lifted, and inside will be the dice sitting in one of the four quadrants. Each player gets to select one die, pay the cost based on which quadrant it’s sitting in, and do the action depicted on the die, paying any resource costs listed on the space they want to action on. Following similar themes from its big brother, the blue are straight points, the yellow focuses on economy, the reds have you competing against your opponents, and the greens give you special abilities.
7 Wonders Dice comes to an end when someone has completed 3 sections of their board, and that may happen sooner than you think. The wonder itself only has 3 stages and can be taken at any time by any dice. The yellow and white sections only have 6 spaces, and that white dice can let you take 2 actions in a specific colour, potentially ending the game faster than you’d think was possible (although you do need to unlock the white, black, and purple dice before you can do any of their actions).
Image Credit: W. Eric Martin @W Eric Martin via BGG
At the core of your decision process is going to be money. Every space costs resources, but you can always buy a resource for 1 dollar. You can spend a turn to earn a resource, giving you a permanent discount of 1 for the rest of the game, but how many turns do you want to burn taking resources? Inevitably, you’ll find yourself a coin short at the most inopportune times. I’m not a big fan of this system, as all 6 of the resources are completely arbitrary. Every resource offers a discount of 1 to every other space, and because this is so powerful, pretty much everyone’s first 3 rounds are going to be just taking resources, which is less than interesting.
Speaking of inopportune timing, you’ll probably also curse the dice a lot. Once you exhaust all the options of a particular dice face, that die face is now useless to you. The yellow die offers 3 spaces for both camels and treasure boxes. If you take that camel 3 times in a row and exhaust that half of the pavilion, any future camels that get rolled are functionally a dead die for you. Conversely, you might be waiting round after round for a specific symbol, only for it to finally show up, but in the 3 coin quadrant and your purse only has 2 coins remaining. Bad luck.
7 Wonders Dice lacks the universal appeal and strategic depth that launched the original to its stardom. It also doesn’t have the endless replayability that makes 7 Wonders Duel a top 10 game for me. I would never say there’s anything wrong with 7 Wonders Dice, it’s a perfectly serviceable roll and write game, but it’s not very interesting on repeat plays. The first time, you’ll be tickled in seeing the familiar icons and systems with a fresh coat of paint and some novel reworkings. But after a couple plays, I never felt like any game was particularly different from the others. I don’t think there is a particularly high skill ceiling, as in most games, you’ll be able to achieve most of each section in each game. It lacks the trade-offs and branching paths of bigger roll and writes, such as Hadrian’s Wall.
I will say that I enjoy 7 Wonders Dice a lot more as an “easier 7 Wonders” than the completely arbitrary 7 Wonders Architects, but that was a very low bar to clear. The simultaneous action selection does make this game flow quickly, letting you knock out a 4 player game in under 20 minutes. Sometimes you’ll earn a bonus that lets you do a bit more on your turn, but those are a far cry from the bombastic cascading turns of something like That’s So Clever or Draft & Write Records.
7 Wonders Dice is an enjoyable, but pretty unremarkable roll and write game at the end of the day. You aren’t building a civilization, drafting cards and watching your empire slowly grow. You’re ticking off boxes, watching your decision space shrink over time. I wouldn’t ever say no to playing it, but I’d be hard-pressed to choose it over either of the first two 7 Wonders games, let alone any other roll and write that I already have sitting in my closet. If you’re new to roll and writes or want a lightweight 7 Wonders appetizer, this game might land for you. But If you already own a few entries in the genre, there’s very little here you haven’t seen before.
In the fall of 2019, my wife and I started climbing at our local gym. We fell in love immediately. It was a cathartic challenge—physical, yes, but also deeply mental. There’s something uniquely satisfying about staring at a wall of coloured holds, mapping out a route, failing, adjusting, and finally sticking that move that felt impossible ten minutes earlier. And because I am obsessed with maximizing my value of something, we both bought our own harnesses and shoes, paid into the monthly membership plan and started going three times a week. For months!
Then, spring of 2020 happened. The gym shut down. We moved, had a baby. The membership lapsed. We’ve never made it back, even though it’s one of those activities we both agree we genuinely loved. Fast-forward to January 2026. My five-year-old daughter has just started bouldering. We sign her up for a climbing class, and suddenly I’m spending three days a week back in that chalk-dusted environment, watching people try a problem over and over again. And just like that, the itch is back. I miss that carnal feeling of accomplishment, that feeling of strength of pushing my body past previous limits.
So imagine my surprise when I boot up my Steam Deck and saw that someone in my Steam Family has purchased Cairn. I’d heard nothing about it, but I saw it had strong reviews (I’m pretty good at dodging video game media).
A climbing game? Sure. Why not. What have I got to lose?
Cairn casts you as expert mountaineer Aava attempting to summit Mount Kami, the most dangerous mountain in the world. If you take the time to explore the posters in the tutorial area, you’ll learn that around 30 people attempt the climb each year. Few ever return. None have ever reached the summit.
Past the tutorial area, the game begins simply. You’re on the mountain, starting your ascent. Better get climbing.
The climbing system initially defaults to an automatic limb-selection mechanic. You move hands and feet individually with the left thumb stick. Up, sideways, diagonally, everywhere you’d think your limbs can go. While the game automatically suggests which limb should move next, it’s tactile, deliberate, and slow. You don’t just “hold forward to climb.” You’re supposed to think through every placement. Just planting your foot against a smooth rock and counting on your smear to hold is going to result in a bad time.
Also, Aava is absurdly flexible. At one point I had her hooking a foot somewhere near her own ear to gain leverage. As I often tell my daughter, video games are not real.
But this system is also where my first major frustration surfaced. Sometimes the “obvious” move like adjusting the bottom-left foot as I’m moving to the left, wasn’t the move the game wanted. Instead, it would shift the bottom-right foot, which then I couldn’t even see behind Aava’s back. Suddenly her leg is dragging across her body, toes reaching where her hands should be, and she’s clinging to the wall by fingertips, and I’m scrambling to fix a problem I didn’t mean to create.
More than one fall happened that way.
On most difficulty levels, you can place pitons into the rock to act as checkpoints. If you fall, you’re hauled back up to your last placed piton. They’re limited, though. If you misuse them or fall too often, you’ll need to collect scraps to forge new ones. and Falling in Cairn stings. Not just because you failed, but because of the time and resources that arelost.
Cairn is a slow game. A tricky problem can take 5–10 minutes to work through. Sometimes 20. One time, 25. And inevitably, you’ll be right at the end of a brutal stretch, one final foothold between you and a cave or hidden discovery… and then Aava’s foot slips. You scramble. You panic. You fall.
Aava’s voice actress has a couple of great screams and curses that I feel in my soul when this happens. If you haven’t placed a piton recently, then you’re falling the way down until your rag-doll body stops rolling. If you’re lucky, you’ll just die and restart from the last save. Otherwise, you now need to climb out of whatever crevice Aava’s body just fell into. And when you get back to solid ground and look up at that climb that you just failed at, you have to ask yourself if you really want to try it again. Spend another 20 minutes scampering up that wall and face the risk of falling again. And when you’re low on food, low on water, freezing, and exhausted, that lost time also means lost resources.
I don’t think Cairn intentionally wastes your time, not like other games that make you backtrack unnecessarily or have runs ruined by randomness. Cairn demands time through the slow, methodical, and purposeful gameplay. It’s the kind of game that every step is slow, but you’re always progressing. You focus on only the next hand or foot hold, and after a few minutes, you’ll pan your camera around and be a little breathless at how far you’ve gone.
That being said, when you finally conquer that tricky section? When you stick the move that previously sent you plummeting? It’s absolutely euphoric. The dopamine rush is so real. It mirrors real-world climbing in a way I did not expect from a video game.
Cairn isn’t just a game about limb placement. It’s also about survival. You’ll need to manage your hunger, thirst, warmth, and stamina. You’ll need to shake your pack to cram as many supplies as possible in, as you scavenge abandoned backpacks, derelict cable cars, and broken vending machines. The real treat is when you come cross a delicious egg in a nest during a climb. The survival mechanics and lack of a firm restocking point creates a tension that triggers my hoarding psychology.
I have “Final Fantasy Elixir Syndrome.” I never use the rare, powerful items because what if I need them later? So I end most games with a stack of elixirs and a pile of regret. Cairn pokes that exact nerve. You don’t want to use your good food. What if there’s something worse ahead? What if there’s no food beyond this point? But if you don’t use your best foods and benefit from the stat boosts they give you, you might fail the next section
And that brings me back to the fall. If you fall and have to climb again, all that food and water you consumed is just… gone. You’re no further up the mountain than when you started, but you have less resources to get you to the next checkpoint.
It’s brutal. It’s effective. It feels bad. But that bad feeling is clearly intentional design.
The HUD (heads up display) is wonderfully immersive. Your survival meters fade away unless they demand attention. Most of the time, it’s just you and the mountain. As you climb higher, you’ll discover remnants of those who came before you. Abandoned infrastructure, old campsites, backpacks from climbers who never returned, and most interestingly, artifacts and stories from the troglodytes, a group of people who once lived on Mount Kami.
Your only consistent companion is a small robot called a Climbot, a boxy robot on four spider-esque legs that skitter along the rocks, carrying your ropes and retrieving your pitons. Occasionally, Climbot will receive voicemail messages from her manager gently asking how her progress is going, or her partnerchecking in, seeing if she’s okay on her death hike. Aava’s responses to those messages can vary from indifferent to abrasive or dismissive. She resents the distraction. How dare they interrupt her focus while she attempts something this monumental?
Early on, you meet Marco, another mountaineer. He climbs for the love of climbing. He doesn’t believe he’ll reach the summit, but he’s just here for the good times. Aava tears into Marco for that mindset. Calls him defeated. Weak. It’s one of the first times she really speaks, and it’s not flattering. Aava does soften slightly over time, but so much of her characterization left a sour taste in my mouth. I understand she’s undertaking something life-threatening. I understand obsession. But her abrasiveness made it hard for me to enjoy her company.
Near the summit, you encounter another climber who has lived on the mountain for twelve years. He’s too close to the summit to turn back, but he’s unable to reach the top. He shows you dozens upon dozens of backpacks from those who tried and failed. a graveyard. Here, Marco decides he’s done. He’s going back down. Then the game asks you to choose. Do you descend with Marco? Or do you continue your ascent, despite every warning?
On my first play through, I went down. The reward for choosing that is a quiet montage of descent. Marco gives Aava a ride home in his van. The final scene shows her sitting on her bed, staring into space. Disappointed, but alive. Her partner calls out that friends are coming over. Marco is on his way.
This ending felt human. Bittersweet. Real.
On my second play through, I chose to go up. Shortly after that decision, An avalanche crashed on your head, and reduces your survival meters to a third of what they once were. You claw your way through the final ascent, which, surprisingly, isn’t dramatically harder than what came before. On the final wall, Climbot succumbs to the elements. For his mechanical failure, Aava beats it with her climbing picks, berating it for failing her. You can choose to drag it along anyway, or cut it loose. The choice here, doesn’t matter.
Then, Aava reaches her summit. She trudges through the snow cap, to the highest point of mount Kami. There is nowhere else to climb. She screams, a visceral, guttural howl. Then, she sits down in the snow, quiet. Finally, she reaches toward the stars, grabs them, and climbs into the sky.
Some players will find transcendence there. The culmination of obsession. The ultimate accomplishment. But for me, it felt unsatisfying. There is no joy in the accomplishment, no one to share your victory with. Just a tired woman sitting quietly on all she’s conquered. Maybe she dies there, and maybe she heads back down. The ending is poetically ambiguous, to me, it felt like descending with Marco was the good ending, and reaching the summit was the bad one.
Cairn will not win my Game of the Year.
But it was a cathartic, memorable experience, especially given where I am in life right now. It gave me an echo of the real-world climbing rush I’ve been missing since 2020.
The first ascent in Cairn is magical because of the discovery. Peaking your head into a cave to find an indestructible piton, or an angry bear gave me such rushes of excitement. Subsequent climbs lose some of that magic. Now, you know where the food is. You know the shortcuts. You know which caves you should explore, and which you can skip. The mystery fades.
Still, finishing Cairn felt like a real accomplishment.
I wouldn’t want every game to use this limb-by-limb climbing system. I cannot imagine playing Breath of the Wild or Assassin’s Creed, and having to individually manage my feet every time I try to scale a hill.
But for a game wholly committed to simulating mountaineering, Cairn does something special. It captured the frustration. It captured the obsession. It captured the fall.
But most importantly, It captured the feeling that climbing gives you. It reminded me why I got obsessed with it in the first place in 2019. And any game that manages to evoke strong feelings, is a special one indeed.
Growing up, I was a console gamer. I didn’t really have a game-worthy PC until after 2010, meaning I skipped over a lot of the old PC favourites, one important one being the Civilization franchise. That is to say, tech trees are not a part of my gaming background. I’m not ignorant to tech trees, but it’s not a mechanic that I’ve spent a significant number of hours with.
For the uninitiated, a tech tree is a hierarchical visual representation of the possible sequences of upgrades a player can unlock. Think, you have to invent Mining before you can invent Masonry. You need to discover both mathematics and construction before you can discover engineering. You need to learn how to walk before you can run type of thing. In Beyond the Sun, designed by Dennis K. Chan and published by Rio Grande Games in 2020, the entire main game board is taken over by this 4 tier tech tree, that players will crawl up, unlocking new actions and special abilities to give them an edge in their quest for dominance over the stars.
One of the first things that grabbed me was how Beyond the Sun uses dice. At the start of the game, your player board is packed full of inert crates. As the game progresses, those crates are unlocked into crew members, and later upgraded again into spaceships with power values ranging from one to four. All six resources in the game are represented by different faces of the same die. Instead of rummaging through a supply looking for the right ship, you simply rotate a die to the face you need. It’s elegant, intuitive, and I absolutely love it. It’s the kind of design choice that once you see it, you’ll wonder why any other game bothers with piles of chits when they could be using dice instead.
As I mentioned above, most of the real estate on the table is taken up by the tech tree board. Starting with the first four techs laid out face up, the rest of the tech slots are covered with blue advancement cards. Along the far left side of the board are the basic actions that everyone has access to, and on each player’s turn, they’ll take their little action pawn and place it into an available action slot, blocking it from other players. Simple worker placement stuff, really. Most of the actions revolve around researching other techs, deploying and moving ships around the planet board, or colonizing planets.
I really appreciate is how production works. At the end of every turn, you choose to produce either crew or ore. Production starts modestly, but can be improved by removing discs from the bottom of your player board. In many games, production is an action in its own right. An action that eats a full turn and often feels obligatory. in Beyond the Sun, it’s folded neatly into the rhythm of play. The result is a game that keeps moving, where turns feel productful and players are rarely left feeling like they’ve ‘wasted’ a turn while other players are zooming on ahead.
Each of the techs belongs to at least one of four categories, commerce, military, science, and economics. Each of those categories will generally feature abilites that cater to something specific, like military techs will generally revolve around ships and movement, while scientific techs will generally assist you in researching more techs. Many techs are a blend of two, perhaps offering the military heavy line of techs a much needed science boost. What’s most interesting is that the person who takes the action to research any new step of the tech tree, gets a choice of 2 cards to lay on the board, a tactical advantage for sure! Everyone who comes after them are just following in their footsteps. This makes the big tech tree dynamic and different in every game.
Running alongside the tech tree is the system map, made up of eight planets, four of which are represented by cards that grant special bonuses and can be colonized for even more bonuses. Gaining majority strength on a planet lets you place a production marker, increasing your income and sometimes triggering an immediate benefit. Of course, that control is fragile. If another player seizes the majority, your marker is kicked back to your board, and the sting of losing income is very real. Interaction here is indirect but sharp, and it’s often where the game feels most openly competitive.
If you manage to have the prerequisite number of ships on a planet, you can take a colonize action, which removes that planet from the board, and the ships you used to pay for it. That planet goes into your personal supply, with an additional income disc, and your ships get slotted back onto your player board. That might sound like a negative, but in reality it’s a boon. You see, when you take your crew income, you take one crew from every column that you’ve revealed along the bottom of your row, and if crew make their way back onto your board, you’ll probably be able to get all those spent ships back as crew with a single action or two. Yay for efficiencies!
By now, it’s probably clear that Beyond the Sun is a game of two halves: the tech tree and the colonization map. Neither is clearly more important than the other, and ignoring either is a fast track to falling behind. That said, the relationship between them isn’t always as seamless as I’d like. Advancing technology doesn’t always meaningfully enhance your spatial presence, and strong planetary play doesn’t necessarily open new research avenues. The systems coexist, but they sometimes feel like parallel paths rather than deeply intertwined gears.
In the end, Beyond the Sun is a game I adore. I love how clean the systems are, how the dice do so much heavy lifting, and how every turn feels purposeful without feeling bloated. At the same time, that split focus between research and planetary expansion can leave the game feeling a little disjointed, like two excellent ideas politely sharing the same table rather than fully embracing each other. Still, every time I play, I find myself thinking about the different paths I could have taken, different technologies I wanted to see come out, different planetary gambits might try next time. And that lingering feeling, that urge to come back and do it all again, perhaps just a bit better, puts Beyond the Sun in a rare position. A game that requested again and again, which is the best achievement a game could aspire to.
Disclaimer: A review copy of Inkborn was provided during early access. All impressions are based on the game’s current January 2026 state.
Listen, it’s going to be real hard to not directly compare Inkborn to Slay the Spire throughout this review. Both are rogue-lite deck building card game. The similarities and influences are obvious from the first moments of the game. Also, I have over 300 hours logged in Slay the Spire, its gameplay is ingrained into my brain, so when something like Inkborn shows up, standing on the shoulders of that giant, it’s going to draw comparisons at every turn.
That said, I’ll do my very best to focus on what makes Inkborn its own thing, and save the direct comparisons to Slay the Spire for when they’re absolutely necessary. This isn’t a question of whether Inkborn is “the next Slay the Spire.” It’s about whether it brings enough new ideas, systems, and personality to justify its existence in a genre that’s already very crowded.
As I’ve said above, Inkborn is a rogue-lite deckbuilding game, designed by Acram Digital. Acram is well known for their visually appealing board game adaptions. From Concordia, to Charterstone, to Istanbul, Acram has proven themselves to be proficient in adapting tabletop games to PC and mobile devices. Unlike their previous output, Inkborn isn’t based on an existing tabletop game, instead it’s an original game, built from the ground up for PCs (and Steam Decks).
In Inkborn, your character moves from encounter to encounter, battling enemies and reaping rewards, until you either succeed in beating the final boss, or die trying. The rewards can be new cards, upgrades to existing cards, potions, and augments to your character, giving you persistent benefits for the rest of your run. The core loop of Inkborn is immediately comfortable to anyone who’s sunk even a little bit of time into any of the (many) other rougelite deck building games.
What really sets Inkborn apart, is its presentation and style. Everything in the world is built of, and revolves around paper. The enemies are ornate origami creatures with scissor blades for claws, the black and white backgrounds feature papercraft trees. As you or the enemies take damage, the character model gets covered in black, splotchy ink. It’s moody, atmospheric and engaging.
Further to the theme, your buffs and debuffs are also thematically named. Specifically, ‘sharpness’, ‘crumpled’, and ‘torn’ (Sharpness grants +1 to attacks, a crumpled character takes 50% more damage, and a torn character receives damage for every point of torn, then loses one point of torn). These thematic terms for status conditions are a little unintuitive, I constantly have to remind myself that crumpled means vulnerable in Slay the Spire-speak, but it’s probably more of a byproduct of my extensive time with the other game, and not something that Inkborn has done wrong.
Instead of potions, your character gets ideas, one time bonuses to be used in battle and expire at the end of each fight, forcing you to use them instead of hoard them. Quotes take the place of relics. Kind of. Instead of having being able to hold an unlimited number of relics to provide passive buffs to your character, you inscribe quotes to your body parts. These do all the things you’d expect a relic to do, such as make you immune to specific status debuffs, but you are limited by the amount of appendages that your body has. You’re often asked to make trade-offs on which quotes you want to carry with you, instead of collecting them like a rabid pack rat, which is my go-to strategy.
Combat starts off familiar, you draw a hand of cards, select which ones you want to use and the targets, and keep doing that until either side runs out of HP. Inkborn introduces a combo system, where if you play your cards in a certain order, like ‘skill, skill, attack’, you’ll get a bonus attack, or playing two status cards and then a skill will earn you a bonus buff. Personally, I loved this system right from the start. Discovering new combos is exciting, and being able to pull off a clutch combo to deal that final 4 damage to an enemy is utterly satisfying. Some combos even utilize those useless curse cards, turning a bane into a boon.
This is really where Inkborn begins to separate itself from Slay the Spire. Rather than pushing players toward specific archetypes or established builds, Inkborn’s systems encourages flexibility, adaptation, and occasional deviation from your intended build. It’s less about executing a perfect plan and more about learning how the systems talk to each other.
The map between encounters is a bit of a mixed bag. You start out in the centre of a map shrouded in shadows, with paths to follow spiralling out. You can take your time to hit extra combats and encounters, or, you can beeline to the Act Boss if you so desire. There is a timer, called the Chronicle Metre at the top of the screen that progresses every time you enter a new map node, that will inflict a curse upon you once it fills up, gently nudging you towards your destination, lest the curses undo all the grinding you’ve just gone through. It’s a neat risk vs reward system that works well.
Something else that makes Inkborn stand out is the town that offers some meta-progression that persists from run to run. It’s unlike Slay the Spire where you start from fresh every single run and have only your knowledge and skill to rely on to get you though. If you don’t get good, you won’t ascend the spire. Inkborn feels a bit more like Hades where the intersection of your skill and the persistent benefits you’ve earned will eventually carry you over the finish line.
Inkborn as an early access game is already really strong. The core gameplay is strong, and the unlockable combos are varied and interesting. The one character that is available feels really solid, and had me coming back again and again to try different builds. Heck, cards can be upgraded in different ways to suit your current deck, meaning taking the same card run after run can still feel fresh. I know that I will really appreciate the variety when the other characters get released, but the one that’s currently in the game offers a really solid gameplay experience.
I don’t know how well Inkborn is balanced, and I’m almost tempted to say that commenting on the balance doesn’t really matter right now, because the game is in early access. You can be sure that there will be lots of changes and tweaks as the game works its way towards its full release, which is currently planned for Q1 2027. Between then and now, two more classes are planned, more cards and skills, more combos and quotes, enemies and bosses are all planned to roll out throughout the year.
I did mostly play Inkborn on my steam deck, and generally found the UI to be passable, but sometimes confusing. The D-pad is used as shortcuts for various things, and I kept trying to use it to select my cards. Every now and then I felt like the timing for the animations were a bit off, but nothing really game breaking. I suspect that as time goes on, the UI will get tightened on various devices. I didn’t have any of these nitpicks while I was playing on my PC with the keyboard and mouse.
Inkborn is a pretty and well-made rougelite deck builder, but it isn’t finished. The theme is well executed, the systems are interesting and engaging, and I’m excited to see more content get added to the game to expand the breadth and depth. In it’s current state, Acram Digital has laid a strong foundation, and their ongoing updates suggest a team committed to refining and expanding the experience. If you’re the kind of person who likes to see a game change over development, or value being part of the early adopter crowd and having your input help shape the direction that Inkborn moves in, then Inkborn gets a solid recommendation from me.
