I have a complicated relationship with Alexander Pfister games. And by complicated relationship, I mean I actively dislike most of his designs. Great Western Trail, Blackout Hong Kong, and Maracaibo all illicit feelings of frustration and hatred from my heart when I sit down to play. That’s not to say I hate everything he touches, Broom Service and Isle of Skye are some of my favourite games of all time. But that dichotomy, the love it or hate it reaction I have to his games always makes me pause whenever I approach a new Pfister game. I won’t bury the lede here, Pirates of Maracaibo is pretty good.
The turn structure is very simple. On your turn, you just move your ship from the left side of the card display 1 to 3 cards to the up, down, and right, then doing the thing on the card you land on. That “thing” might be buying the card and bringing it into your tableau, offering you a persistent benefit or triggering one of the various actions of the game (exploring, raiding, or upgrading your ship usually, but I’ll expand on those later), or building a building. None of these actions are complicated on their own, and they all largely feel detached from one another, meaning that in your game you’ll need to choose which path you’ll want to focus on, being the jack of all trades and the master of none doesn’t often translate to very many end game points.
Regardless, your turn is simply move your boat, do the card thing, and that’s your turn. Once a player reaches the harbour on the far right side of the board, they trigger the end of the round for all players. The harbour has a (usually) stronger version of the actions that you can get from the cards for the player who landed there to take, then all other players take their last turn for the round. When it’s the player who reached the harbour’s turn, they move into Maracaibo, where they get 6 points and get to upgrade their ship. Then all ships are moved to the far left side of the card tableau, everyone gets their income, and the next round starts. After the 3rd round, the game ends and the player with the most points is the winner.
None of the little activities I just mentioned above are particularly thematic. The exploration action, for example, is just moving your meeple along a track and taking the benefit of whatever space you land on. Sure, you’ll cross rivers for end game points, and the rewards generally get better the further you move, but there’s no hidden depth in the exploration track. Similarly for raiding, you just roll 3 dice, then choose one to be your raid. The colour of the die you pick will affect which treasure you can claim (pearls, emeralds, or gold), but you just take the pip value of the die, add any bonus strength you may have, and then take various rewards based on your total raid value. Upgrading your ship is simply placing a single cube on the hull of your ship, covering up either a persistent benefit or a one time bonus. As you place more cubes on your ship, you’ll unlock better upgrade spots, but you’re always just placing a cube on a menu of benefits.
What I really like about Pirates of Maracaibo is how easy it is to play. Every action and benefit is uncomplicated. Even if the decisions you’re making have some weight, you can always see the consequences of your choices. Moving your ship might force you to make some trade-offs. If there’s a specific card you want, or you placed your black market tile somewhere a little inconvenient, you might need to decide exactly where to park your ship for a round so you can reach your preferred destination next round. But very rarely will you ever do something and say “Oh, I didn’t realize that was going to happen.”
The cards that make up the main space of the game offer a fair amount of benefits too. In addition to the action or persist benefit they offer, each card also is worth some end game points, and many will give you money or points income between each round, making every movement the result of several micro-decisions.
Adding to your decision space are the quest cards. Each player starts the game with one, but you can earn several more as the game progresses. The quest card will nudge you towards specializing in a specific way, and hopefully you can acquire a couple that synergize well together to really rake in those end game points. The quest cards are semi-random, perhaps the specific one you were hoping for doesn’t show up, but at least there is a quest card market, letting you pick from two face up quests, or drawing one from the top of the deck. You even have the option of wiping the card market before choosing to take one or drawing from the top of the deck. I appreciate the options instead of being subjected to total randomness.
What I really love about Pirates of Maracaibo are when you can hit a good combo on a turn. You move your ship, spend some money, get an effect that lets you move your explorer, which gives you more money funding your next turn. The cascading, barely in your control efficiency is really satisfying when it manages to come together. Starting a round with only 4 coins and being able to make it all the way to Maracaibo without needing to spend a whole turn taking income makes me feel really clever and smart. Unlike a lot of Alexander Pfister games that make me feel handcuffed, where I often feel like I’m staring at a bunch of things I *could* do, if only I had the exact three prerequisites lined up perfectly, Pirates of Maracaibo is much more forgiving. If I do run out of money I can just spend a turn putting my ship into a better position, and take 5 coins. It’s refreshing.
One thing that caught me off-guard was just how much of the game’s scoring lives at the end. During play, your points can feel modest. I think in my best game I managed to hit 60 points before the final scoring. Then the final scoring happens, and suddenly I’m sitting at 200 after everything tallies up. So if you’re mid-game and feeling behind because someone has 40 points, and you’re stuck at 20, it’s honestly not worth worrying about. Once you internalize how big that final scoring swing is, the whole experience relaxes. I don’t get that creeping sense of doom when I’m behind; I just keep playing and see how it all shakes out. And more often than not, it shakes out better than I expected.
Interaction is… there, but only just. You can land your ship on a card that has another players ship, and you’ll need to pay them a dollar for the privilege. On the exploration track, you can’t share spaces, but hopping over someone is free, so it’s actually more of a speed boost than a blockade. You can technically drain islands of their treasure, but that would just leave you holding less valuable loot yourself, so it’s not exactly a cutthroat strategy. There’s a small bonus for being the first to build certain buildings, but beyond that, everyone’s mostly doing their own thing. I think the most interactive element here is when someone rushes to Maracaibo and brings the round to an end while everyone else is playing around the middle islands.
And honestly, that’s fine. This isn’t the kind of game I come to for tense player interaction. Instead, it excels at being a good euro game, one where I feel clever in my efficiencies. If I win, it’s because I built the best point scoring engine, not because I managed to beat my opponents down more than others.
So where does that leave Pirates of Maracaibo for me? I’m happy to report that it totally subverted my expectations. It’s one of the few Alexander Pfister euro games I actively want to keep playing. Unlike Maracaibo, Great Western Trail, or Blackout: Hong Kong, Pirates of Maracaibo never makes me feel trapped beneath its own complexity. Instead, it feels loose, approachable, and surprisingly forgiving.
I think that’s why Pirates of Maracaibo works for me when so many of Pfister’s heavier games don’t. It doesn’t constantly punish me for not planning six turns ahead, nor does it make me feel like I’ve accidentally ruined my game because I missed one prerequisite thirty minutes ago. It just lets me play. Move the ship, take a card, build a little engine, chase a few quests, and hopefully stumble into a satisfying combo or two along the way. And when those combos hit, when all the tiny efficiencies start cascading into one another, the game feels fantastic.
Is it the most thematic pirate game? Not even close. Is it particularly interactive? Also, no. But as a breezy midweight euro where I can quietly optimize my little East India Trading company while feeling clever the entire time, it absolutely succeeds. More importantly, it succeeds at making me enjoy an Alexander Pfister design, which for me, was the biggest surprise of all.
Sometimes, I come into a game with no expectations at all, and then am pleasantly surprised when the game turns out to be amazing. Take Time, Scout, and No Thanks are all examples of games that I knew almost nothing about before playing utterly falling in love. The flip side of that scenario is when you keep seeing pictures of a game all over social media, you stalk the game’s BGG page, you voraciously consume every review and commentary about the game because it looks like so much fun, but then when you actually get to play it, it just falls flat. And unfortunately, Kabuto Sumo falls into the latter family for me.
Kabuto Sumo, designed by Tony Miller, with art by Kwanchai Moriya and published by AllPlay in 2021, is a coin-pushing dexterity game about sumo wrestling bugs trying to jostle each other off a tree stump. These beetles, all themed after famous WWE characters, evoke a ton of charm. Much of that charm is conveyed by the brilliant and evocative artwork of Kwanchai Moria, whose work coveys a sense of drama and excitement. The small helmet beetle facing down Mighty Jaw Mike, the terrifying Giant Stag Beetle makes for great piece of artwork.
The production of Kabuto Sumo is no slouch either. All the discs are large and smooth and feel nice to hold. Each of the unique characters have unique shaped pieces that will give them an edge in combat. But what is combat, in the context of Kabuto Sumo? Heavily inspired by coin pusher machines, each player will take turns moving the on-ramp to the tree trunk, and then in one steady motion, push their disc onto the tree trunk, displacing the existing discs on the board, and hopefully, pushing the opposing beetle off as well. If you can’t knock your opponent off the platform, an alternate victory condition is wrestling them into submission, by exhausting their supply of pieces.
What makes this most interesting is that the discs on the trunk aren’t square, nor are they a single size. Instead, they’re all perfectly rounded and come in 3 different sizes. Sometimes you’ll line up a push, only for a big disc 3 away from your push to slip in the wrong direction, shifting the entire play area into a state you didn’t quite expect. Now, I’m no physics major, but it is a lot more enjoyable having to deal with the chaos of round discs pushing against each other rather than boring, predictable squares.
Another layer to this combat is each character having their own unique power and pieces. One wields a large horn that can catch a whole big disc in it’s gaping maw. Another has 5 V shaped antenna that you stack together and push onto the play area in one fell swoop. These powers do cost you some of your inventory, however, so you often really want to hold it back until a truly optimal moment, lest you be left up the creek without a paddle.
I want to celebrate Kabuto Sumo. It’s unique, it looks great, I love the production, and I was obsessed with it before I got my hands on it. Now, I only have a passing familiarity with WWE characters, and I’ve never really spent time with a real coin pusher machine, but I love how unique this game is. Unfortunately for me, the gameplay failed to hook or engage not only myself, but everyone I played it with. Most of my plays happened at the 2 player count, and most of our duels devolved into a tit-for-tat defensive pushing affair. I’d move their beetle closer to the edge, they’d move it right back. More often than not it became a battle of attrition, with each player just trying to avoid a victory by submission than anything else.
Kabuto Sumo is the kind of game that charms on first contact, and a lot of that charm comes from the production. But repeat plays failed to engage or excite. Once we experienced the novelty of pushing discs off the tree trunk, doing it a second or third time felt stale, even when using different characters with different powers. Maybe my problem was always playing with adults. Lacking the whimsy and excitement of adolescence makes Kabuto Sumo hit softer than it otherwise might within the right context. It also doesn’t help that I was the most familiar with the references that all the bugs were making, and I am barely wrestling literate at that.
In the end, Kabuto Sumo leaves me with a strange feeling. Caught somewhere between admiration and indifference. I can clearly see the version of this game that absolutely sings: a table full of laughter, kids leaning in too far, someone celebrating a perfectly timed push like they’ve just won a championship belt. The design is clever, the table presence is undeniable, and the tactile joy of it all should be enough. But for me, right now, it isn’t.
What I’m left with is a game I want to love more than I actually do. A beautiful object that promises chaotic tactile delight that never actually materialized in my plays. The moments of excitement are there, when you manage to pull off a 4 disc chain and push a large piece off the other end of the tree trunk. But those moments are often separated by long stretches that feel oddly static for a dexterity game.
And yet, I’m not ready to write Kabuto Sumo off completely. Instead, I feel like I’m waiting for the right audience. I suspect the context in which Kabuto Sumo shines isn’t with a bunch of stuffy boring adults who are working out optimal defences and playing the game safely. It thrives with someone too inexperienced with life to know to play it safe. Someone who puts themselves in danger, because even though they might lose, they might do something cool in the meantime. And that moment is more valuable than victory.
I’m a pretty antisocial kind of guy, which is not exactly conducive to building a community. I’m the perpetual lurker: always reading, always watching, rarely commenting. I show up to public events and hover near the wall, sticking close to the people I already know, not really engaging in the way I’d perhaps like to. But when I saw that a local board game café was hosting a launch party for a local designer’s newly published game, I decided it was my civic duty to show up and support a local success story. After all, if I ever designed and published a board game, I’d hope my local community would come out to support it. The launch party even just so happened to fall on my regularly scheduled board game night, so I convinced my friends to make the trip out to the café, and we sat down with Tatsumi, designed by Jeremy Rozenhart and published by Adam’s Apple Games in 2026.
In Tatsumi, each player is a Tatsu, a guardian dragon, trying to collect elemental rings from a 5 by 5 grid of ocean wells, and offer them to shrines in order to cover their island and score the most points. The turn structure is wonderfully simple. Every turn you’ll do two things, and one of those things must be movement. To move, you simply fly in one direction as far as you want. Dragons block each other, so you can’t simply hop over someone or push them out of the way to land on their space, but otherwise movement feels very open and free. Whenever you leave a space, you collect the ring from the well you were standing on and add it to your holding area. Your second action is either gathering or offering. Gathering lets you collect additional rings from the spaces near your dragon, and in the asymmetric version of the game every dragon gathers differently. Offering on the other hand lets you cash in the rings you’ve collected at altars around the edges of the board, which will see you placing rings onto your personal island and scoring points based on the number of elemental rifts you’ve managed to cover.
I really appreciate is how clean and flexible the whole game feels. Each turn you must move, then do one of the other two actions, but you can do them in any order. You can choose to gather and then move, setting yourself up for an offer next round, or offer and then move or move and offer, you get the picture. Tatsumi gives you just enough freedom that every turn feels like you’re trying to untangle a logistical knot in the most efficient way possible. The altars themselves are also a neat little pressure point. On one side they ask for three rings of the same colour and reward you by letting you place one of your scales onto the associated blessing tile that might give you a persistent ability, a burst of points, or some other perk. Then the altar flips over and suddenly wants a totally different set of coloured rings, with no blessing perk for that offering. It creates this nice tempo where you’re constantly weighing whether now is the right time to cash in or if you can afford to wait one more turn before the other players change the altars requirements out from under you.
The scoring system also pulls you in different directions simultaneously. Your first ring needs to be placed along the edge of the board, and every subsequent ring must be placed adjacent to an existing ring. Every ring you place scores you points equal to the number of elemental rifts that you’ve managed to cover. But those rifts are scattered along the edges of your board, making you really reach to cover all of them to start raking in 4 points per ring of that colour placed. This mechanism gives Tatsumi a really great sense of progression, with the points you’re netting at the end of the game absolutely dwarfing the points you were earning at the start.
Adding to the spatial puzzle of Tatsumi, the coloured rings have their own endgame scorings. Your largest contiguous section of blue rings will net you two points per ring in that group. The yellows are kind of the opposite, where each group of yellow rings nets you 2 points, no matter their size. The blacks want to be adjacent to all the colours, as each black ring scores one point for every different colour next to them, and the red rings just want to be together, scoring 5 points for each group of 3 rings or more. These requirements will have you weighing your short term benefits of covering things on your island for potentially more points down the road, with ruining some of your carefully laid end game scoring plans. The way Tatsumi pulls your brain in two is simply delightful.
I’ve always adored tactical puzzle games. If you’ve been around my blog for a while, I’ve already covered games like Azul, Sagrada, Harmonies, Cascadia, Calico, or Akropolis. And Tatsumi stands alongside this incredible line up. It’s easy to teach, easy to understand, but capable of producing that really satisfying brain burn of “okay but if I move here first, or maybe I should do this instead…” that makes tactical puzzle games so gratifying to play. It’s the kind of game where you don’t have to take it seriously, and you’ll have a pleasant time, but if you’re trying to optimize every point, it really starts to be taxing on the brain in a really great way.
I also really need to talk about the production because it’s genuinely novel. The dragons sit on these ocean wells: a plastic tray holding stacks of rings in a five-by-five grid. As you move around the board you’re hoovering up rings from the wells, and once a well runs dry, you drop in a little sand dollar token to mark it empty. You can still land there, you just won’t collect anything when you leave. The tray itself is kind of genius. I can only imagine how fiddly this game would have been if you had to constantly refill spaces from a bag or manually build stacks during setup. Instead, at the end of the game you basically set the plastic tray in the bottom of the box and just chuck all the rings into the tray, and they just naturally settle into place. It’s one of those production decisions that solves a problem you didn’t even realize would have annoyed you.
The rings themselves are also delightfully tactile. Gathering them feels good in a very simple, toy-like way. You just dip the tip of your fingers into the wells and pull it out effortlessly. This is like the opposite of when you’re trying to pick up a card, but you can’t get your fingernail between the card and the table. There’s also something deeply reminiscent about moving rings from the board into your holding area and then onto your island adjacent to already placed rings. That aspect actually reminds me of The Castles of Burgundy, actually.
I do have some gripes, of course. Sometimes it was difficult to see what the altar on the opposite side of the table required because the ocean board itself obscured the view a little. Black rings sitting alone in wells could also awkward to spot depending on the lighting and your angle at the table, making you think a well was empty while planning your turn. I didn’t feel like the rulebook was especially laid out well, either, which made it harder than it should have been to find some edge-case clarifications during play. Thankfully for us, the designer was right there for us to ask him questions. One specific example of the rulebook failing involved the blessing cards. The phrase in the book said to shuffle them all together, but the intent was that one blessing of each of the 4 types would be used in each game. None of these complaints were game-breaking problems by any means, but they were the sort of little friction points that stood out, because the rest of the experience was so smooth.
Still, Tatsumi made an immediate positive impression on me. The asymmetry from the dragons, islands, and blessings adds enough variety to make repeat plays interesting without overcomplicating the core puzzle, and the game is just genuinely satisfying to interact with from moment to moment. We were hooked almost immediately.
Honestly though, I think the best endorsement of Tatsumi happened after the games were over. As tables started finishing up at the café, people immediately began crowding around the designer asking if they could buy one of his copies right there on the spot. Not preorder it. Not wishlist it. Buy it to take it home right then and there.
And really, I think that speaks more praise than any review can.
I don’t know what’s changed about me lately, but I often found myself preferring the shorter card games instead of the big, heavy, rules-dense board games that used to dominate my life. Maybe it’s just the phase of life I’m in, the fatigue that comes with raising young children, or maybe I’ve finally accepted that not every game needs to be prefaced by an hour of studying the rulebook to feel like time well spend. So when Hungry Monkey, designed by Erik Andersson Sundén and published by HeidelBÄR Games in 2022, came out during a pub night with friends, I was intrigued. Another small-box card game? Can’t wait to find out more!
The core of Hungry Monkey is simple enough. To start the game, each player gets a hand of 3 cards, and a row of 4 cards face down in front of them. On your turn you play any number of identical cards from your hand or play the top card from the draw pile onto the animal pile. The card you play must be valid, that is to say, the value of the card played must be equal or higher than the top card on the animal pile. If the card played is invalid for any reason, you then must pick up the whole animal pile and add it to your hand. If after playing a valid card, there are 4 or more identical cards on top of the animal pile, then the whole animal pile is removed from the game. In addition, several of the animals you can play have some special effects. The ant, for instance, is always valid, but playing it makes you pick up the whole animal deck under the ant. The snake lets you look at a face down card of any player, while the buffalo forces the next player to play a card lower than the buffalo. The King Tiger discards the entire animal pile. At the end of your turn you need to draw your hand back up to 3, unless the draw pile is empty.
Once the draw pile is empty, and you manage to play all the cards from your hand, you can start playing the cards from your face down row. Once both your hand and your face down row have been exhausted, you win the game!
What I like about Hungry Monkey is the presentation. The art by Sushrita Bhattacharjee is genuinely charming. Each animal has a distinct personality, and the style has a charming, playful quality that helps it to stand out.
But the gameplay of Hungry Monkey itself feels very random. Your options on your turn are limited. With only three cards in hand, you’re often stuck between a rock and a hard place if you have the wrong numbers in your hand. That restriction doesn’t translate into meaningful decisions so much as it creates a sense that you’re just along for the ride. Playing an invalid card will make you pick up the whole pile and make your hand swell. Sure, that will give you more options in the future, but because at the end of every turn, you need to draw back up to 3 until the deck runs out anyway, it makes the majority of the game feel somewhat irrelevant. You’re spending your time just kind of posturing your card row until that draw deck runs out and then hoping for some advantageous situations in the final few turns.
There are moments of excitement, to be fair. Little bursts of chaos when someone flips the perfect card off the deck, or frustration when another player jumps half the numbers and plays a card exactly one higher than the highest card in your hand. It creates that light, social friction that works really well in a pub setting. There are some laughs, some mock betrayal, the occasional groan. In that environment, Hungry Monkey makes sense. It’s easy, it’s quick, and it doesn’t demand much from any of the players.
There is also a bean-scoring system that carries points across multiple games, encouraging you to play several games in a row to see who the ultimate winner is. In theory, that adds some longevity to this simple and quick card game. But in reality, I don’t really want to play multiple Hungry Monkey multiple times in a row. The interactions and strategies just aren’t interesting enough to sustain that kind of repetition, and the randomness makes it hard for me to feel invested in any one game, let alone a series of them.
I keep coming back to the same thought when thinking about Hungry Monkey. What’s the point of most of the game? If the early and mid-game decisions don’t meaningfully shape the outcome, and everything hinges on a handful of late-game turns, why not just skip ahead? Why not just top-deck until your choices start to matter? And that’s really not a great question to be asking about a game.
I don’t hate Hungry Monkey. If it comes out, I’ll play it. It’s harmless, quick, and occasionally amusing. But I’m also probably not going to request it, and it’s certainly not a game I’d request to play. There are a lot of games that fit into this space, the ones that play well in a pub like No Thanks or 6 Nimmt, or Don’t L.L.A.M.A. Small, portable, easy-to-teach card games, and all of them offer more interesting decisions, with fewer rules. Which can really matter when you’re trying to explain how a game works while speaking over a crowd of people and wrestling their attention away from the Habs game on the pub’s TVs.
For me, Hungry Monkey didn’t quite stick. It seems like the perfect game to play at the pub, but even having a great setting couldn’t make this game shine.
I think one of the byproducts of growing up in a town that was basically 2 km long and half a kilometre wide is that I never really developed a need for a car until I was in my early twenties. And as a result of not having a car for the entire first half of my life, I’m just… not really a car guy. I don’t seem to have that stereotypical urge to fix an engine, and I couldn’t care less about the intricacies of the Daytona 500. Watching a whole bunch of cars turn left all day has never exactly called to me.
But I do love the bicycle racing board game Flamme Rouge, and when the designers of that (Asger Aleksandrov Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen) came out with another racing game, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Although, I found myself predisposed to disliking Heat. Upon its launch it immediately got a bunch of critical acclaim, and I felt weirdly betrayed. How dare the community move on from Flamme Rouge so easily, and for a game about grotesque cars!? How inelegant! My monocle nearly popped off my eye at the mere thought of it.
But, I never let my biases prevent me from giving a game it’s proper due. If I’m going to dislike a game, I feel I should at least play it, so I can have an educated opinion, rather than one rooted in assumptions and hearsay.
Bowl of candy not included
At its core, Heat is a racing game. I want to call it a deck builder, but that’s not quite right. All players will start with the same base deck, you’ll draft some equipment cards to add a bit of asymmetrical flare, and during the game, heat cards will enter and exit your deck. Not really a deck building game, but it has a deck building vibe. Each round starts with all players drawing up to 7 cards, and then playing cards equal to your current gear. You can always play one more or one less than your gear to ‘shift’ for free, or you can jump a gear by moving a heat card from your engine into your discard pile. I’ll get back to what heat means in just a moment. All players pick their cards for the round, then you slide into the movement phase.
The cards you play from your hand, will each generally have a value from 1 to 4. At the start of the movement phase, the player in first position moves the number equal to the value of the cards they played. You can move a heat into your discard to ‘boost’, which has you just drawing the next card off the top of your deck and move that number of spaces. Then the next player goes, but if they happen to end their turn directly behind someone, they can slipstream, moving two bonus spaces, in a great catch up mechanism that does wonders for keeping all players in the race.
On the subject of movement, the course you’re racing on will have corners, and those corners will have limits. You can safely pass the corners by only moving the described number of spaces on your turn. For every square you move beyond that limit, you’ll need to move a heat from your engine to your discard pile. If you ever need to move a heat, but can’t, then you ‘spin out’, making you reset back to the square just before the turn you spun out on.
So let’s talk about the titular heat resource. It’s actually kind of amazing. At the start of the game each player will have 6 heat cards in the centre of their player board. Whenever you need to ‘pay a heat’, you’ll move one of those heat cards from your engine into your discard pile. Those cards will eventually get shuffled and drawn into your hand, where they will clog up your deck until you ‘cool’ them, which simply removes them from your hand and puts them back into your engine.
Clogging up your hand is no joke. Having more cards to choose from when you’re trying to thread the needle between players and nail a specific corner is paramount. But heat isn’t just a dead card, but it represents a moment where you push your car beyond its safe limits to gain an important edge. Taking those limiting corners just a bit faster than everyone else, boosting on a straight away to exceed your gear capacity, it’s all things you need to take into consideration if you’re hoping to win.
Of course, what really makes Heat: Pedal to the Metal great, is the tension that arises from the stress cards. Instead of numbers, these cards have a + symbol, which when resolved, just has you flip over cards from your deck until you pull one of your base speed cards, then move the number on that card. It’s a bit of uncertainty, a touch of risk. The stress cards cannot be discarded, either, they must be played at some point. If you hold them for too long, you’ll clog up your hand, removing those precious options from yourself. But also you need to negotiate with yourself, how much are you willing to risk? If you play a stress card and pull the 4, you’ll go over the corner and spin out. But you probably won’t draw a 4. Right?
Because the game is not entirely deterministic, it creates excellent moments of tension. Moments when you need anything other than a 4, and you’ll end your turn right before the turn, but then you flip the card and then bam. There’s the 4. Alternatively, when you come out of a turn onto a massive straightaway, you spend the heat to jump from 2nd to 4th gear, and play all your stress cards and flip over a series of 1’s and 2’s. I don’t know what the motorsport equivalent of a wet fart is, but I feel that in my soul.
Conversely to those bad examples, I recently played a game where on the final stretch I played 2 stress cards and boosted on my final turn, and all 3 of those random card draws pulled a 4, leaving me 2 spaces ahead and winning the game. It was dramatic and exciting, the kind of moment that makes everyone stand up and shout, not believing that you managed to pull off a crazy come back. The game system is chaotic in a way that creates moments that you’ll remember, long after the box has been put away.
As I said before, I was weirdly determined to dislike Heat when it first came out. It was getting all kinds of praise, and in my head I was like, “But I already have Flamme Rouge, how dare you suggest something might be better?” No one was actually saying that, but enough people were comparing them that I got defensive. Add to that the fact that I don’t really care about car racing as a theme, and yeah, I went in skeptical. But Heat has completely won me over.
There’s a real sense of tension throughout the race, those moments where you play a stress card and hold your breath as you flip, hoping for exactly what you need, and then you miraculously get it. Slipstreaming gives trailing players a chance to catch up, so even if someone manages to break away, it never feels like the race is over. You can still find a clever line, tuck in behind at just the right moment, and surge forward in a way that makes you feel like a savant. It’s the kind of game that gets people standing up, shouting, reacting to every reveal. It captures that feeling of pushing a machine to its limit and threading the needle just right.
I do think there are some balance quirks with the equipment cards you draft at the start. You take six of them, and the draft order snakes so that it should balance out among equally skilled players. But in my early plays, there were definitely moments where someone who understood the game better just crushed me, and it wasn’t entirely clear how much the cards contributed to that. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s something I noticed.
What is worth noting is how expandable this game feels. Different tracks, more varied turns, weather conditions and more, it all fits so naturally into what the game is already doing. There are already 2 big box expansions out there, with more on the way.
That said, the setup can be a bit of a chore. There’s a lot going on with boards, decks, and modules that it makes me not want to commit to doing the full championship mode at the table. I don’t necessarily feel like racing multiple maps back to back creates a more interesting experience. As a one-off race, though? Heat is fantastic.
Heat: Pedal to the Metal surprised me. It took a theme I don’t care about and turned it into something tense, exciting, and just plain fun to experience. It’s one of those rare games that can pull people out of their seats, make them laugh at their own misfortune, and cheer when things go exactly right. And for someone who couldn’t care less about cars, that’s saying something.
I’m Canadian, so any jokes about White Castle as a fast food chain are pretty lost on me. Although, thanks to Harold and Kumar, the references are not completely lost in translation. The White Castle, in my context, is a die drafting game designed by Sheila Santos and Israel Cendrero, and published by Devir in 2023. In The White Castle, players control clans as they vie for victory points by amassing influence in the court, managing their resources wisely, and by having a veritable army of staff amongst the bridges and walls of the Himeji stronghold.
The White Castle, has players trying to advance the standing of their clan with the daimyo of Himeji Castle in feudal Japan. And right out of the gate, I felt intrigued. Dice drafting/worker placement? Yes! Tight resource and a penchant for combos? Yes please! Feudal Japanese theme? Sounds like my kind of game!
I’ve mostly played The White Castle on Board Game Arena, and I’ll admit that my first play didn’t leave me with the best first impression. Thankfully, I joined a casual tournament, which meant I was locked in to play at least 6 games. And once I started diving into the game, the more meat and depth I found to plunder. I didn’t realize it at first, because I was playing asynchronously, but the game only lasts 9 turns.
I feel the need to say that again. The entire game lasts for 9. Turns.
But despite its abbreviated length, The White Castle is full of combos. Every time you play, you have the urge to try again to see just how much more value you can squeeze out of those 9 turns.
9 turns spread over 3 rounds. At the start of each round, you roll the all the dice and arrange them on the bridges in ascending numerical value. On your turn, you simply take one die that’s on either end of the cardboard bridge, and do something with it. The main board has an ever-changing pyramid of actions, and your personal board has some actions that will slowly get more and more valuable as you start to spread your meeples throughout the court.
Immediately, there’s some consideration on which side of the bridge to take the dice from. Every action has a cost printed on the board, and the difference between the printed cost and the die you place to take the action will either cost you or earn you money. So obviously you want to take from the right side to earn that cash, right? Well, taking from the left side will earn you your lantern rewards, which will shower a bevy of benefits as you slot more and more cards onto your player board. But you’ll likely need to pay a couple coins for that privilege.
The actions themselves are pretty standard Euro stuff. Earning resources, coins, and influence, but the way the actions can chain together is where the game starts to hum. Each player has a staff to manage, including gardeners, warriors, and courtiers. Each offer benefits for placing them out, and are linked to each other in subtle ways.
The courtier action will have you paying pearls to send your meeples to the castle, and ascend up the social hierarchy. Each spot they land on in the action card pyramid, they take that action card and drop it onto your player board, pushing the card that was on your board down to your lantern bonus slot. This lets you have an action card all to yourself, potentially robbing your opponents of its abilities.
I don’t want to just skip over those Lantern rewards, as they can be incredibly valuable. Each subsequent card you add to that row improves the resources you get every time you trigger the lantern bonus. It’s vaguely engine-building, but again, with only 9 turns, you’ll be limited in how many times you’re able to add cards to that row, and how many times you can goose your engine. But it is truly satisfying when you start the game getting a single coin as a benefit to getting 4 or 5 rewards from taking a lower value die. Even better when the dice on the bridge happen to be all 5’s.
The warriors require iron to be placed, but will give you a random benefit that is established at the start of the game. Sometimes you can turn their benefit into a profit, making it feel like the game is paying you for putting them out, while other games the benefit won’t match the cost. At the end of the game however, the warriors earn victory points based directly on how many courtiers you managed to sneak into the castle.
The gardeners live near the bridges, and getting them out early can feel key, as between each round they’ll trigger some income for you. But only after rounds 3 and 6. After that they’ll give you a meagre amount of points at the end of the game, but they seem to exist as a trap for players who don’t realize just how quickly these turns can fly by.
Some turns are quick and simple. But others will let you combo 2 or 3 actions or benefits together. That cadence of “I do this, which gets me this, which triggers this to earn me that” feels fantastic. You line something up, trigger a main action, which gives you another action, which triggers a Lantern reward, which nudges you into something else… and suddenly you’re able to accomplish so much more in those 9 turns than you ever thought possible.
Of course, that tightness does hamper you, too. The game is restrictive. Dice spots fill up fast (in 3 and 4 player games you can stack die on top of each other, making the action slots a bit less tight, although the coin costs will swing wildly), resources are often scarce, and sometimes you’re staring at your options thinking, “What can I even do with this?” The Well action exists as a bailout, but going there feels a lot like a wasted action, and when you only have nine turns, that’s a significant cost.
That tension is what makes it interesting, though. Every decision matters, and I’ve definitely felt my approach shift over multiple plays. Early on, I was so focused on getting my gardeners out in the first round to maximize their value. Now I know that I have to come out swinging. Every turn is precious, and if I’m not doing something meaningful right away, I’m already behind.
There’s also some hidden interaction at the bridges. I said before that the gardeners will earn you income after rounds 3 and 6, but they only do so if there’s at least one die on that bridge. More than once I saw someone stacking up their gardeners on a specific bridge, so I drained it of dice, leaving their workers out to dry. More often than not you won’t be specifically targeting denying someone’s income, but it’s just one more lever to pull, one more consideration when you’re trying to decide between two die. Something you always need to keep in mind.
I particularly appreciate how variable the set-up is. The action cards are all different for every game, and which colours of die trigger which ability is all random. Every game is a new puzzle to interact with. That said, all the changing information can lead to analysis paralysis. If you or your play partners are prone to that, you’ll feel it. Especially when someone snipes the action card you were counting on, so you need to reconsider your entire strategy over again.
All that said, I’ve had a blast with The White Castle. The combos, the tension, the variability from the dice and card setup, it all comes together in a way that makes each game feel just a little different. The dice rolls alone can completely change how a round plays out, and the shifting card availability in the castle keeps you on your toes.
It feels very short. I don’t know if I mentioned this yet, but it’s only 9 turns long. I’m often left with a feeling that if only I had just one more turn, I could have really achieved everything I set out to do. Except for maxing out that passage of time track, I have no idea how someone could manage to get to the end of that.
