I’ve talked about a bunch of polyomino tile-laying games on this blog, from Project L to the more recent Frosted Blooms, and in those posts I’ve often said that I really enjoy poluomino tile laying games. I still suspect a lot of this joy comes from my background in Tetris. My mom was very good at Tetris, and she would mercilessly crush me when we played multiplayer, until I got my first job and with my first-ever paycheck as a teenager, I bought myself a GameCube and a copy of Tetris and practiced and practiced in my room until I could finally bury her in junk lines.
Take that, Mom.
But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to talk about Bärenpark.
In Bärenpark, players are trying to build the best bear park. Every player starts with one 4×4 entrance tile and one of the green enclosure tiles, the size of which depends on your player order. These green enclosure tiles are small attractions, like a food stand or a porta-potty. They can be one, two, or three squares large and come either in a straight line or in a small L shape. On the central board in front of all players, there’s also a bunch of small bear enclosure tiles arranged in stacks. Each of these enclosures are 4 squares large and each of the 4 types are in the classic Tetris tetromino-style shapes, and the highest point value tile is on the top of each stack. Lastly, covering nearly half of the entire supply board are the coveted large enclosure tiles, which are five or six squares large and worth a healthy chunk of points.
Your 4×4 entrance tile is littered with icons. There are green wheelbarrows, white cement trucks, and construction crews. Covering those icons earns you pieces of the corrosponding type. Cover a wheelbarrow and you gain a small attraction tile. Cover a cement truck and you gain a medium bear enclosure tile. Cover a construction crew and you get to take another 4×4 park tile to expand your zoo.
Each turn, players simply place one tile from their supply onto their park, making sure it’s adjacent to an existing tile. Then, if they covered any icons in their zoo, the collect the corrosponding rewards and the next player takes their turn. The game ends when someone manages to completely fill all four of their 4×4 park sections, including the one they started with.
In addition to the points you earn directly from the various bear enclosures you’re placing into your park, there are a couple of other scoring opportunities. First, whenever you completely fill one of your 4×4 park sections, you get to erect a bear statue. The first player to do this scores the most points, and the statues steadily decrease in value as the stack gets depleted. There are also three randomly selected objectives available every game. Sometimes these are straightforward, like being the first player to collect three Panda bear enclosures, or just have three orange tiles touching each other. Other times they’re much trickier, requiring specific spatial arrangements, such as placing three L-shaped green tiles end-to-end. These objectives make the spatial planning aspect of Bärenpark significantly more challenging than it first appears.
Because you’re earning points from so many different places, from the bear statues, from the various enclosures, and from the objectives, and the fact that each of those point sources are slowly diminishing, you’re constantly being pulled in different directions. Do you place the piece that will finish a 4×4 section and secure a valuable statue? Or is it more important to stretch off into a new area and cover two icons with a single placement? Maybe you don’t have a need for that 2×2 yellow tile, it doesn’t fit perfectly anywhere in your park right now, but it’s the highest point value piece available, and you can see that your opponent does have a perfect spot for it. Is it worth taking now? Also, if you place a tile and don’t cover an icon, do you have an extra piece in your reserve to play next turn? If you don’t, you need to burn an entire turn taking a single green tile, which is a huge disadvantage.
It’s managing all those little decisions that makes Bärenpark really fun to play for me.
I find Bärenpark infinitely replayable. Every time I sit down with this puzzle, I’m delighted. Even if the core game always feels fundamentally the same, there’s just something about this system that just keeps me coming back and brings a smile to my face every time I play. When the odd shapes just fall in your favor and you manage to always be one step ahead of your opponents, netting an extra point here and a small bonus there, it’s great. And then when you eventually stumble across the finish line and count everything up to find that you won by a mere 5 points, it feels incredibly gratifying.
Of course, the inverse is also true. Sometimes you get to the end of the game and discover your park is dotted with tiny single-square holes. Holes that you now need to spend round after round filling those holes with porta-potties, because apparently you thought it was more important to lay your 3 large enclosures in a weird shape just so they touched, all so you could earn that one objective, and your two opponents managed to achieve it before you did! That part of the game is much less fun.
But hey. Skill issue, right? I don’t know how, but I rarely come in 2nd in Bärenpark. I’m either absolutely crushing my opponents, or being crushed. There is no middle ground.
What I appreciate most about Bärenpark is how focused it is. If you like polyomino tile-laying games, Bärenpark is about as good as it gets. There’s nothing here to distract from the spatial puzzle. There aren’t any markets to manipulate, side mechanisms to explore, or layers of complexity piled on top of the core experience. This game is simply about taking tiles, placing tiles, and trying to make them all fit together as efficiently as possible.
If spatial puzzles are your jam and you haven’t played Bärenpark yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.
The two-player-only category of games is a crowded genre. It’s crowded with a lot of extremely good games, and I’m not even talking about games that play more players but also happen to play really well at two, like Race for the Galaxy or Innovation. I’m talking about games that are specifically designed for two players and two players only. 7 Wonders Duel, Targi, Star Realms, Splendor Duel, Patchwork, you know the ones. Among all those two-player games, one of the first 2 player games I ever played, and to this day remains one of the best 2 player game in my mind, is Jaipur, designed by Sébastien Pauchon in 2009.
In Jaipur, both players are trying to become the best merchant around. Each player is dealt five cards to start, and those cards can be one of six different types of goods. There are the basic goods: leather, spices, and cloth, and the luxury goods: silver, gold, and rubies. The cards can also be camels. Camels never live in your hand, but they sit in front of you on the table. This is important because the hand limit is a huge thing to contend with in Jaipur.
Between the two players is a market of five cards. On your turn, you’ll do one action, and there are a couple of different actions available to you. Probably the easiest one is selling goods. Beside the card market is an arrangement of cardboard pogs, discs arranged in ascending value, with the highest-value token sitting on the top of each stack. Each type of good has its own value structure, and they decrease in value at different rates. The first leather sold is worth five points, but the last five are only worth a point each. Meanwhile, all five silver tokens are worth five points each. The coveted rubies are even better, with the first two sold worth seven points each and the remaining three worth five.
Whenever you sell a set of goods, you take that many tokens from the supply and add them to your area. Those become your points at the end of the round. You can also attract a bonus token if you sell three, four, or five of a good at once. Selling three goods gets you a bonus worth anywhere from one to three points. Selling four gets you four to six points, and selling five gets you a juicy eight to ten points. Because of that, it’s often worth holding out for those extra cards before cashing in.
Another action you can take is trading goods. You can take any number of cards from the market row, but you must place an equal number of cards back into it. This is helpful if, for example, you have two silver, a leather, and a cloth in hand and there are two more silvers sitting in the market. You can grab those silvers and replace them with the leather and cloth. This is where the camels come in. You can always use camels when trading, placing them into the market in exchange for other goods. But here’s where that hand limit matters. You can only hold seven cards in your hand at any time. If you’re already at that limit, you can’t take any more.
The last action is taking camels. If there are camels in the market row, you can simply take all of them and add them to your herd. The market then refills from the deck, potentially offering lucrative goods to your opponent.
Players take turns going back and forth, trading, selling, and accruing camels until three stacks of goods tokens have been depleted. At the end of the round, whoever has the most camels earns a five-point bonus, and then whoever has the most points wins the round. The winner of the game is the first player to win two rounds.
Jaipur is the kind of game that you teach someone who is kind of into games, in order to get them really into games. It’s a card game that feels unique and interesting, and when you walk away from it you can’t help but think about how you could have played better. It’s the kind of genius design that just sticks in your brain.
The push and pull of wanting to hoard goods until you have five of a kind for that really juicy bonus token is constantly juxtaposed against the diminishing returns of waiting too long. It’s not uncommon for one player to notice the other is hoarding all the spices, only to sell two spices from their own hand instead. They don’t get a set bonus, but they do snag the two highest-value spice tokens and leave only the low-value scraps behind. Suddenly that big stockpile your opponent has been carefully building doesn’t look nearly as impressive.
There aren’t enough good things to say about Jaipur. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s fun, it’s replayable, it’s competitive. It’s everything I want from a two-player game. If you have someone in your life who likes playing games with you, this is the perfect game to keep in your bag at all times.
Now, it is a little bit more than just a deck of cards, which makes it slightly awkward if you want to sit down at a coffee shop or in an airport and instantly start playing. But man, is it worth it.
There have been so many times where I’ve been absolutely convinced that I’ve won. I’ll be sitting there thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this. Look at all these goods I’ve collected.” Then final scoring happens and I realize I’m somehow almost twenty points behind. Part of that comes from the fact that the value of the scoring tokens are hidden from the other player. You know the value of the goods tokens that have been taken, but once they’re face down you can’t easily recount everything and determine exactly where your opponent stands. Then you add in the set bonus tokens, which are drawn face down, and now you have no idea whether they just scored one point or three points for that sale of three goods last turn.
That little bit of mystery keeps both players on edge. It keeps both players making difficult decisions. Do you take the lucrative points now, or do you chase the bigger payday later? Because that later may never come…
Jaipur is one of those games I could talk about all day. If I were to create a Meeple and the Moose Hall of Fame list, a collection of games that I think are brilliant, nearly perfect, and that everyone should play, Jaipur would be high on that list. In case you’re wondering, a Hall of Fame is different from a Top 100 list. I love Jaipur. It is in my Top 100, though perhaps not as high as you might expect given all the praise I’ve lavished on it here. That mostly comes down to personal proclivities and preferences. I can recognize that Jaipur is a triumph regardless if there are other games I’d usually rather play.
Jaipur has been around for as long as I’ve been involved in board gaming. It was a game that my wife and I played a ton when we first started in the hobby, and even today, when someone tells me, “Oh yeah, I like Catan,” or “I’ve played Ticket to Ride,” Jaipur is one of the first games I reach for. It’s a game that shows people what else games can be.
dnup (Pronounced Down-Up (Holy cow does it ever feel wrong to not capitalize the name of the game)) is the latest game from Kei Kajino, the designer of the wonderfully brilliant and unique game Scout. dnup also uses the two-cards-in-one concept where a card has one number on one half, and if you flip it upside down, there’s a different number on the other side. But this time there’s no theme. I suspect that after every single review lamented how the circus theme in Scout just didn’t make any sense, he said, “f*** it,” and just made a great new card game.
In dnup, players are trying to lose all the cards from their hand. the twist is kind of the complete inverse of Scout. When you get your hand, you’re allowed to sort your cards, but you may not flip any of them over. On your turn, you perform one action, and then play continues around and around the table until someone has shed all the cards from their hand.
There are four possible actions to choose from. The first is playing a set of cards from your hand to the table. When you do, you must play a number of cards that is unique. That is to say, if someone else already has two cards on the table, you cannot also play a set of two cards unless the value of your pair is higher than theirs. If your value is higher, the player who played the inferior set must pick up their cards. And the golden rule of dnup is that whenever cards are taken off the table and added to a hand, they are always flipped over.
Another action is adding one card from your hand to an existing set on the table. If adding that card would cause the set to match the size of another set already in play, then the set you’re adding to must have a higher value than the existing set. If it does, the player with the lower-valued set must pick up their cards.
The third thing you can do is simply pick up someone else’s set. Just reach across the table, scoop up all the cards, flip them over, and add them to your hand. The last action is flipping over all the cards in your hand.
The last quirk is that if the set of cards you played on your last turn managed to stay on the table the entire time, that is to say that nobody forced you to pick up your set, and no one chose to put it up from you, then before you do your action, you simply discard that set from the game, slowly whittling down the pool of available cards in the round.
Players continue taking a single action each, going around and around the table until someone manages to shed all of their cards. That player earns two points. Play continues until someone else also sheds all their cards, earning one point. The game continues until someone has achieved four points, and then they are the winner of dnup.
I’ve often complained about games that have this handcuffing feeling. Games where you have things you want to do, but you just can’t do them because of various arbitrary restrictions. And I do get that horrible handcuff-y feeling in dnup quite a bit. Like, all I need to do is put my two fives down on the table and I’m out, but someone else played two sixes before me, so now I’m left without any good options.
This is a much bigger issue in much bigger games. I find this feeling in most prevalent in games designed by Alexander Pfister, this feeling just frustrates me to the point where I don’t enjoy the game. Maracaibo and Blackout: Hong Kong come to mind, although it’s been a long time since I played either game, so maybe my memory is getting a bit fuzzy on exactly why I didn’t like those games so much. But now I’m getting a little off topic.
I don’t mind the handcuffing feeling so much here. It is frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but the rounds are also just so short. If you’re a little stuck, you can make a slight pivot by picking up someone else’s cards or flipping your cards over, and then a couple minutes later that round is over anyway. You shuffle up the whole deck, deal out a new hand, and there are really no lasting consequences. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Being handcuffed, not able to act and losing out on winning a hand isn’t the end of the world because there’s more game to play right away. Those handcuffs aren’t holding you back for two and a half hours. It only lasts a couple of minutes.
I initially played the two-player variant of dnup, and I quite enjoyed it. In the two-player game, each player takes two turns in a row, giving you ample opportunity to change and adjust your plans. It lets you work around those handcuffs and gives you a bit more control over your strategy.
In a five-player game, the tempo was a lot more chaotic. A lot more hoping that someone else would beat your set so you could pick up the cards and have them flip around into exactly the right cards you needed. Or hoping nobody else plays a set of three because your three ones are exactly what you need to go out. The game became much more opportunistic and much less predictable the more players you added.
That said, dnup is easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to play. The cards are big and colorful, albeit with no theme attached. That’s not a downside in my book, but overall it doesn’t quite have the same charm as Scout. I’m not sure if I’m not as hooked on dnu[ because Scout was the first game where I encountered cards with two different values on opposite sides, so it felt so fresh and innovative, or if I’m simply missing the novelty of not being able to sort your cards at the start of the round, forcing you to play tactically to collapse runs and sets into useful combinations in your hand. I cannot tell you how much I love that mechanic. I do like the coldness of dnup, the feeling of denying your opponents by sending cards running back to their hands. That direct interaction is absolutely lovely.
In the end, I like dnup, but not as much as Scout. They do feel like quite different games, but I kind of struggle to think of a situation where I would choose to bring out dnup over Scout, other than playing with people who have already played Scout and have heard of dnup, and want to give it a shot. I prefer dnup over Scout as a 2 player game, but I already have a ton of 2 player games that I love to play, and I’m not sure if dnup is going to be able to squeeze its way into that crowded genre.
I don’t think it’s a harsh criticism to say that I don’t like dnup as much as Scout. Scout is one of my favorite card games of the last several years, and dnup is still a clever, fast-playing card game. I enjoyed my plays of it, and I’ll happily play it again. For a mere $18 CAD, it was an easy buy. But I just don’t see it replacing Scout on my shelf or in my heart.
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.
