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.
Sometimes I wonder how much designers end up living in the shadow of their own biggest hits. Does Agricola loom large in the mind of Uwe Rosenberg, affecting everything he touches? Is every new Stefan Feld release inevitably compared to The Castles of Burgundy? And more importantly, do those comparisons subtly shape how designers approach their next projects?
That was my thought that kept creeping in while I was playing Recall, the follow-up from most of the designers of Revive, a game I’ve held in very high regard since it came out. Honestly, it might be my favourite release of the past five years. Recall shares the same artist and overall production aesthetic, which makes the comparison between games almost unavoidable. It looks like Revive’s cousin, and that alone sets certain expectations before you’ve even taken a single turn.
Recall is, at its heart, an action selection game played over just 13 rounds. Each round is a single turn, either sliding one of your action keys into your board and taking the corresponding actions, or taking a recall turn to pull them all back. That recall turn does give you a bit of income based on how many keys you retrieve, but it also costs you something precious: time. Thirteen turns for the game is not a lot, and you feel that constraint almost immediately.
Before even getting into the mechanics, I have to say there’s a really satisfying physicality to the whole production. Slotting a cardboard key into a slot on your board is completely unnecessary from a functional standpoint, but it looks and feels great. It’s satisfying watching the little orange “eye” peek through the keyhole, and it’s a tactile way to represent the actions you’ve already taken. The production doesn’t need to be this elaborate, but I’m very glad that it is.
At the start, your two keys are basic. Actually, they’re totally blank. But pretty quickly you’ll acquire better ones with abilities printed directly on them. So when you take an action, you’re not just doing the action on your board, you also trigger what’s on the key, in whatever order you want. That flexibility is where Recall starts to open up. Suddenly a simple action becomes a small engine, and later, a full-on cascade of actions and benefits.
The actions themselves are fairly straightforward at a glance. You can spawn more meeples on the main board wherever you already have a presence, move groups across the hex map, ferry across connected bodies of water, reveal new tiles, and excavate. Excavation is the big one, the action that feels like five actions rolled into one. It’s also the most mentally taxing at first, because each building you can build requires its own specific terrain. In addition to building, you can excavate, which has you taking stones off the board and paying a variable cost based on the number of stones on that hex, and getting a variable reward based on the number of stones and the colour of the one you’re taking off the board. Thankfully, the player aid is printed right on your board for easy reference.
Interestingly, there’s no real blocking in Recall. You can move freely without interference, which gives the map a more open feel than you might expect, especially if you’re coming in from Revive. That being said, if you do choose to build where someone else already has, you’ll pay an extra meeple for the privilege, and your opponent will get to spawn a meeple there. It sounds punishing, but in practice, at least in my three-player games, it didn’t come up often enough to feel oppressive.
Where Recall really shines is in how it builds toward these sprawling, satisfying turns. Many actions are bundled together, move twice and excavate, or reveal a tile and move and excavate. Then once you start layering in key abilities, clan powers, gadgets, and bonuses from building next to camps on the board, turns can stretch in that delightful, “wait, I can also do this… and then this… and then that lets me do that…” kind of way. It’s not quite a full-blown engine builder, but the combotastic nature of your turns ends up feeling very satisfying, very quickly.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. The map is tight, and movement is more restrictive than I previously alluded to. Water is a hard barrier unless you use the specific ferry action. Then there are the volcanoes, which are a hard barrier, unless you’re playing the one clan that can actually use them. Adding to that are the cubes scattered across the board. You must pick them up when you encounter them, which can disrupt your plans in frustrating ways, as they cost an increasing number of meeples. Hopefully you brought enough along on your movement to continue onto your actual destination and still have enough remaining to complete your building. The compensation for the cubes is often progress on knowledge tracks, which is valuable, but if a cube is in your way, and you’re short on meeples, it feels like a tall wall you can’t get around.
Those knowledge tracks, though, are where Recall gets really interesting. At the start of the game, you draft a clan with a unique ability, often powered by the stones you excavate. You also get a unique gadget, which is essentially a bonus action. As you advance on the knowledge tracks, you’ll unlock additional clans and gadgets, layering more powers into your toolkit. By the end of the game, if you’ve invested heavily, you could be juggling four clans and four gadgets, all with their own abilities. It’s a lot, but in a good way. It creates this sense of growing versatility that I found genuinely exciting. Further to that as you earn points, you automatically upgrade your actions, with each upgrade seeming small, but almost always 50% more powerful.
And all of this is happening under the pressure of those 13 turns. You simply cannot do everything you want to do. The game becomes about stretching each action as far as it will possibly go, like trying to scrape the final bits of peanut butter from an empty jar for that last slice of toast. That tension is excellent, and it makes recalling your keys feel painful. You know you need to do it, but giving up a full turn to reset your board stings a little. The tight 13 turn structure really encourages you to upgrade your actions early to squeeze as much juice out of your remaining actions as possible.
Layered on top of that are the scoring decisions. Three times during the game, you’ll choose between two scoring conditions to amplify for endgame. Everyone scores all base conditions, but the ones you boost can be worth significantly more. The twist is that each choice also gives you immediate income, and inevitably, the worse scoring option for you just so happens to have the income you desperately need right now. Those moments are great. Do you play for the long term, or take the short-term boost to fuel your next few turns? There’s a similar tension with your personal scoring cards. You start with two and eventually have to discard as you approach the end of the game. But the one choose to discard offers you some income as well. Surely the income you need would be on the scoring condition you’d rather give up, right? Again, it’s that same push and pull: what helps me now versus what pays off later?
All of this adds up to a game that feels full of smart, deliberate design choices. It’s tight, but not suffocating. You always have something you can do, but never enough time to do everything you want. It’s a familiar kind of tension, but executed with a lot of finesse. The modularity of the clans and scoring objectives keeps subsequent games fresh and interesting.
If I have a lingering thought, it’s that I’d love to see more clans. There’s 14 in the game, but the system that has you mixing and matching clans practically begs for more. There are also some small oddities, like scoring icons printed on the board that correspond to some of the scoring cards, but not all, which makes me wonder if there’s already room being left for an expansion. But those are just some minor niggles that don’t get in the way of a great game.
The comparisons to Revive are inevitable, and maybe even a little unfair. Recall clearly shares some DNA, but it never felt like it was trying to be Revive at the table. If anything, it feels sharper, more complex and confident than its predecessor. It delivers a satisfying experience of juggling your meagre resources as you stretch yourself for just one more round before succumbing to your recall action. It may look similar, but Recall doesn’t feel overshadowed by Revive. Recall feels distinct, and more importantly, like a game I’d happily come back to on its own terms again and again.
Disclaimer: a copy of Vantage was provided by Stonemaier Games for review
It’s kind of hard to know how to approach Vantage. The box is big, black, and heavy. Physically heavy, sure, but also weighed down by expectation. This is a project that Jamey Stegmaier spent nearly eight years bringing to life, a self-described labour of love built on over 800 unique location cards and 900 other cards besides. That kind of effort is something that makes you pause a little before diving in. You don’t just crack it open and give it a whirl, you need brace yourself for it.
In Vantage, every game begins with one to six players crash-landing on an alien planet after receiving a mysterious signal from a being known as The Traveller. Right from the start, Vantage does something interesting: It’s a cooperative game, but everyone has been separated. All those years of drilling “Don’t split the party” into role playing gamers heads, Vantage does it immediately from the outset. You’re all on the same planet, chasing the same broad mission, but your individual journeys begin in completely separate locations. It’s a cooperative game, so you can talk, share information, and offer advice, but for the most part you’re each having your own little adventure that might occasionally overlap with everyone else’s.
Each turn begins with your character standing on a single “vantage” card, which represents your current location. Every one of those cards (usually) offers six possible actions. These actions are tied to general traits like Move or Overpower, but the specific wording changes from card to card. One location might let you “climb,” while another might tell you to “leap,” another might ask you to “push” or “steal.” On your turn, you pick one of those options, and another player flips through the corresponding book to find your entry and read out what happens.
And this is where one of Vantage’s more interesting ideas shows up: you never really fail. The game leans heavily into a fail-forward system. You always succeed at what you attempt, it’s just a question of what that success costs you. Maybe you make the jump across the cliff, but you take two hits to your health while doing so. Maybe you manage to steal the item, but it took 3 time and 1 moral to make it happen.
Those costs are always resolved through challenge dice. When attempting an action, there will usually be a number cost, with the more valuable actions costing more. You pick up the number of challenge dice the action asks for, but before you roll them, you do have the chance to reduce the die pool by spending corresponding action tokens. And other players can even contribute their own tokens to help you out, which is a neat bit of cooperation. Thematically it’s like someone talking you through a tricky situation over a comms channel. Then, once you have your dice pool set, it’s time to roll them bones.
The dice themselves can hit your health, time, or morale. After rolling your dice you can slot them into any open slots in your personal tableau. Almost all the characters, gear, and items you encounter in Vantage will live in your tableau and offer slots for you to hold your dice, often giving you a reward cube for doing so. Many of them with certain restrictions. Some slots will only be available to certain die faces, while others will be restricted to being available when you’re using a certain type of action (i.e. you can’t slot a die into a spot with the Move tag when you’re doing an Overpower action). Some will be a bit nebulous and require that you are somewhere, like on water. There’s a good amount of flexibility in the system. Many of the book entries don’t explicitly say that you’re ‘on water’, so we made context appropriate calls as to when someone was on water or not.
And Vantage supports this, the rulebook specifically calls out for players to follow the golden rule of fun. If an interaction isn’t clear based on the context of verbiage on the card, just follow your gut and choose what makes the most sense, or what your group would find the most fun.
Back to those challenge dice. After you’ve slotted all the dice onto your cards and equipment as possible, any remaining die must be paid. That means losing stats, ticking your character one step closer to failure. Except even in failure, Vantage plays fast and lose. When any player stat drops to 0, you can choose to accept defeat, or, you can just keep going. There are options for both. If you’re not done with your adventure yet, Vantage is ready to support your whims, rules and consequences be damned. After all, it’s just a game. Who cares if you fudge the losing condition a little bit?
The challenge dice on your cards are generally locked to their slots until there aren’t enough dice for a player to take an action. Then a refresh happens where all the die come off and go back into the challenge pool. It’s a good system, but one that makes me frustrated when I’m playing solo. The number of dice in the challenge pool scales with player count. Eight by default, then plus two per player, which might sound reasonable at first. But in practice it means that larger groups will have a much easier time managing the challenges. In a solo game, you’re dealing with ten dice all on your own. In a three-player game, you’re dealing with fourteen dice total, but they’re spread across three people with three tableaus that naturally have more slots and more flexibility. The result is that solo play can feel punishingly tight, while multiplayer feels much more forgiving simply because the burden is shared.
And that flexibility matters. In one game, a character ended up stacked with boat-related abilities and could basically dominate anything involving water, and was able to take on dice from the other players rolls with ease. In another game, I couldn’t find anything useful and just quickly bled out after just a handful of turns, because I had no way to manage the dice being thrown at me. There’s a huge swing in how your game can unfold depending on what you happen to find.
But that variability is also part of the appeal. There’s a genuine sense of discovery here that’s incredibly charming. Every vantage card is a new location with 6 little stories to explore. Each time you move you get a whole new set of possibilities. In one game, I repaired a bridge and was rewarded with a bedroll that protected me from the cold. In another, we were trying to fish up a kraken, but I found myself wandering aimlessly across cliffs and plains, desperately searching for any body of water so I could start progressing our mission. The feeling of being lost is palpable, especially in your first few games. Even as you start to piece together a mental map of the world, everything still feels vast and unknowable. Like groping around an unfamiliar place in the dark.
My tableau is really good at handling green actions, and almost nothing else
That sense of discovery is easily Vantage’s biggest strength. I love exploring in games, and this one feeds that desire constantly. Every turn is a new choice, new threads to pull on, a new story beat to uncover. But that also comes with some trade-offs. You only get to take one action per location before you’re usually forced to move on, and sometimes that feels really disappointing. There were plenty of moments where I wanted to dig deeper, to try a second option on a card, to see what else was there, but the game ushers you forward instead. It creates this lingering feeling of “maybe next time,” which is exciting, but occasionally frustrating.
Initially, I assumed Vantage would be best as a solo experience. After all, you’re mostly off doing your own thing. But I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it with others. Taking turns reading for each other, reacting to each other’s discoveries, nudging someone toward a risky or ridiculous choice, it creates a shared storytelling experience that’s more engaging than I expected. Even if the mechanical interaction is light, the social interaction fills in those gaps.
That said, the variety doesn’t always hold up under scrutiny. There are moments where the game feels like it’s offering you meaningful choices. Like, do you duel this companion, or flirt with them? But the outcomes can feel a little samey, with only minor variations. It actually reminded me a bit of Charterstone, where the differences between resources or factions didn’t always translate into fundamentally different experiences. Sure there are 6 resources, but they all feel the same. Sometimes in Vantage I got the vibe that there was an illusion of choice happening under the hood. Where the journey felt dynamic, but no matter what choices I picked I would have been shepherded along the path the game wanted me to go.
And then there’s the question of what you’re actually working toward. At the start of the game, you’re given a mission, and you might uncover additional “destinies” along the way that can serve as alternate or additional win conditions. But the endgame is as loose as anything. You can complete your mission, chase a destiny, do both, or just stop when you feel like you’ve had enough. The game doesn’t push you toward a climactic finish so much as it invites you to decide when your story is done. And Vantage is not a legacy or campaign game, every time you sit down at the table, you should be crash landing back on the planet, starting from square one. The rules don’t encourage you to ‘save’ your game and pick up your threads when you come back. Instead you take nothing but knowledge into your next game.
For some players, that’s going to be a feature. I was the player who landed and immedately started chasing squirrels off into the sunset, my mission long forgotten. But then when I wanted to go back to it, I wasn’t really sure how I was going to get back on track. Vantage isn’t about winning or losing, but it’s about the stories you discover along the way. It’s challenging to wrap my euro-game brain around this idea, that the win and lose conditions aren’t really important, but when I do let go of my old preconceptions of what a game is, I find myself delighting in the shiny objects scattered around the world for me to pick up.
Sorting the cards back into the box at the end of a session is pretty tedious
And if you’re wondering, yes, it took me around 100 hours to finish the storyline in Breath of the Wild. I was that player that set a pin for an objective in the distance, and then spent 3 hours doing a dozen tasks completly unrelated to my pin, often sending me sprawling in an entirely different direction.
It would be a mistake to say Vantage isn’t a good game. It absolutely is. What it accomplishes from a design perspective, this sprawling, interconnected web of over a thousand cards is impressive. It may not have the mechanical heft of something like Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, but it doesn’t need to. It’s a fundamentally different experience.
And for me, more often than not, it works. There’s a sense of wonder here that’s hard to shake. Even when the systems creak a little, even when the choices feel thinner than they first appear, I keep coming back to that feeling of stepping into the unknown and seeing what’s over the next hill. And after just a few plays, I can say pretty confidently that I’d rather be wandering around Vantage than grinding my way through something heavier.
Disclaimer: This review is based on plays of the game on Board Game Arena.
I don’t usually like to review games solely based on a Board Game Arena play. I recognize that the platform has some sincere benefits, from the wide variety of games, the plentiful amount of people to play with, and the ability to play games asynchronously, letting me get my board game fix all week long. But even with all those benefits, it’s just not the same as playing a game face to face with your friends, handling and admiring the physical production, and heckling each other over each of our moves. But sometimes I get a sense of everything a game offers just from the BGA plays, and so here we are.
Seashells, by designer Bruno Faidutti and published by KTBG in 2026, is a grid movement set collection game for 2 to 5 players. In Seashells, you’ll randomly place all the seashell pieces onto a grid, with a red pail in the middle. On your turn, you can move that pail any number of spaces along the X or Y axis from where it currently sits. Then, you take the piece that’s on the spot you choose to stop the red bucket on and put it into your own supply, and the next player takes their turn. Turns progress until the bucket is put on a spot with no pieces in the X or Y axis, and the game comes to an end.
The score in Seashells is mostly achieved via set collection majorities. There are 7 types of seashells in 7 colours, and whoever has a majority in each of the 14 categories at the end of the game receives 3 points. Sand dollars are 1 point a piece, and each fossil pair you have (1 head and 1 tail) is worth 3 points as well. The player with the most points at the end of the game, wins!
I won’t beat around the bush. Seashells is fine, but it’s not very interesting. All of the scoring comes from getting and maintaining majorities, so you’re encouraged to gerrymander to the best of your ability, that is to say to only collect the items that you’ll be able to win the majority for and eschew everything else. Heaven help you if you get caught in a battle with another player for a colour.
The grid movement is slightly interesting in that the choice you make for your turn is what sets up your opponents options for their turn. But it’s frustrating in that it’s nearly impossible to control, if your opponents are happy to hate draft you, you’ll never have the opportunity to take the pieces you want. But with the nature of scoring only your majorities, choosing a piece you won’t win can almost be equated to a wasted turn.
Which leads me into the endgame for Seashells. As the grid gets picked clean, your options start to diminish. Your last few turns you’ll be forced to pick from one or two options at most, and often they’ll be effectively worthless to you, as they’ll be the first item or colour you’ve collected of that set. Wasted turns feel bad, and the endgame of Seashells is full of them.
The advance scoring variant helps with this problem slightly, in that if you miss majority but have the second most, you’ll earn a single point. Or if you tie for first, all tied players earn 2 points instead of the 3 given for a clear majority. At least then you’re slightly more encouraged to spread yourself out in hopes of scooping up half a dozen second place victories.
I think the nicest thing I can say about Seashells is that looking at pictures on BGG shows a very nice production. The pieces you’re collecting are made of very thick wood and look really attractive.
At the end of the day, Seashells feels like a game that belongs at a beach house. Something to mindlessly play after a long day of soaking up the sun. I appreciate that the gameplay is simple and approachable, that each turn doesn’t ask too much of the players at the table, but the frustration of being forced to take pieces that will never score had me thinking “What’s the point?” more than once during my plays.
Maybe the physical production does some of the heavy lifting that I’m missing when I play Seashells on Board Game Arena. I can imagine those chunky wooden shells, the bright colours, and the tactile act of holding the chunky pieces adding a layer of charm that smooths over some of the mechanical flatness. There’s definitely been games where the aesthetics and table presence elevate what is otherwise a fairly straightforward game.
But even giving Seashells that benefit of the doubt, I don’t think it offers enough interesting decisions to sustain repeated plays. The combination of rigid scoring incentives, limited control over your options, and an endgame that often devolves into low-impact turns leaves it feeling a bit too passive for my tastes. It’s pleasant enough, and certainly not broken, but it never quite gives me a reason to come back.
Last week I wrote about Turing Machine, a deduction puzzle that fascinated me with its cardboard computer but ultimately left me a little cold with the multiplayer experience. This week I’m talking about designers Fabien Gridel and Yoann Levet’s follow-up game, Kronologic: Paris 1920. It turns out the same designers have taken some of those clever ideas and turned them into something that feels much more like a game you’d actually want to sit down and play with other people.
Kronologic is still a logical deduction game, but the premise is wrapped in a small mystery scenario. In the puzzle I played, a detective has been poisoned, and the goal is to figure out exactly when, where, and by whom the crime occurred. The structure of the mystery revolves around an opera house made up of several rooms, a handful of characters constantly moving through those rooms, and a sequence of time steps representing the evening’s events. The key piece of logic driving the puzzle is that the detective was poisoned when he was alone in a room with someone else. Your job is to track where everyone was, when they were there, and eventually determine which character found themselves alone with the detective.
To uncover this information, the game uses another clever punch-board system reminiscent of Turing Machine, though thankfully, this system is much simpler to wrap your head around. When you want to investigate something, you pick a room, and then combine the room with either a character, and a time period, then place the corresponding punch cards together before flipping them over. The overlapping holes reveal information about that combination, giving you clues about where someone was or wasn’t during a specific moment. What’s particularly interesting is that when you ask a question in a multiplayer game, some of the information you uncover is private, while some of it must be shared openly with the table. Everyone gets a small piece of the puzzle, but you might receive a slightly more precise insight that helps you get ahead of the pack.
I really enjoyed playing Kronologic. The rules are straightforward, the setup is small, and the puzzles themselves manage to create that satisfying feeling of deduction throughout the entire experience. Because every character must move to a different room at each time step, the logic starts to unfold in interesting ways. Once you know where someone definitely was at one point, it constrains where they could possibly be later, and slowly the possibilities begin to collapse in on themselves. If you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. There’s a good sense of progression as you start to piece together the timeline of the evening, marking down your deductions and watching the puzzle reveal itself in front of you.
The moment when you think you’ve cracked the case, when you’re ready to declare exactly when and where the poisoning occurred and who was responsible, is genuinely exciting. That feeling mostly comes from the fact that you arrived at your conclusion before everyone else did, and so you can rub it in their faces. Sometimes that happens because you simply asked the right question at the right time. Maybe you just happened to pick the one character who actually mattered and asked about them early, which then gave you just enough information to unravel the rest of the puzzle. Meanwhile, your opponents might have spent their early turns investigating characters who ultimately had nothing to do with the crime. In that sense there is definitely some luck involved, particularly in the opening turns when you’re still feeling around in the dark for a useful thread to follow.
That early randomness can make some of the choices feel somewhat arbitrary at first. You’re often picking a character simply because you don’t like their vibe, because they seem as good a place to start as any. But I suppose that’s also thematically appropriate. A good mystery always has its share of red herrings, and part of the detective’s job is to follow the logic rather than their instincts. Someone might give off suspicious vibes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they committed the crime.
What I appreciate most about Kronologic is how directly it addresses the issues I had with Turing Machine. The setup is dramatically faster; eighteen cards on the table and a sheet of paper to start scribbling your deductions on, then you’re ready to go. Kronologic also avoids that solitary puzzle feeling, because every question you ask leaks a little bit of information to your opponents. Even when someone else is taking their turn, you’re paying attention to what they’re investigating and what that reveals. That small layer of shared information creates just enough interaction to make the experience feel communal rather than parallel.
My biggest concern with Kronologic has to do with its long-term replayability. And maybe it’s a little rich for me to worry about long term replayability as I tend to play most games a mere half a dozen times before moving on to the next new shiny thing, but the difference between Kronologic and Turing Machine is stark. Turing Machine boasts over 7 millions puzzles, meaning you could do 5 puzzles a day for 3,835 tears before running out. Kronologic, on the other hand, comes with three main puzzles, and each puzzle has six variations, or difficulty levels. Once you’ve solved them, that’s kind of it. You know the answers. Unless you’re like me and manage to forget the details after a few months, those particular mysteries aren’t going to surprise you again.
That said, there are already two other Kronologic boxes available using the same system (Cuzco 1450 and Babylon 2500), which I’m glad to see. I also saw some PNP puzzles on Kronologic: Paris 1920‘s BGG page. I genuinely enjoy the physicality of the deduction here, and I’m curious to see how the other scenarios differ from the Paris 1920 setting I played.
In the end, while I still think Turing Machine is the more astonishing production, the cooler toy to hold in your hands, Kronologic is the better game. It captures that classic deductive thrill of piecing together a mystery while adding just enough shared information to keep everyone engaged in the same puzzle. If you have any fondness for old-school mystery games like Clue, Kronologic gives off very similar vibes, but in a way that feels fresher and more satisfying to unravel.
