Quilt for Kitten
Nutgoo.Lee’s Blancat made my seven-year-old cry. I know. That’s a movable bar. She was tired from a long day of playing in the sun, but she wanted to try the “kittie quilting game” anyway. It ended in tears. That’s on me, not Blancat, and certainly it isn’t on Nutgoo.Lee.
But here’s the thing: she practices at Blancat. She sits on her own at the table and studies the little templates and does her best to craft the quilts. She’s played plenty of other board games. She even has her favorites. Right now, that means Barbecubes and A Gentle Rain. Tactile stuff, not all that far removed from Blancat, but simpler, with lighter stakes. This is the first game I’ve seen that’s made her studious. The first game that’s meant to be challenging. Her intensity makes me wonder if there’s something here that I didn’t see right away. They say children let you see the world through new eyes. It seems the same goes for board games.
Clammy Scythe-on-Expeditions Action
I won’t pretend to know what’s happening in Duel of Meloch. When we first got a glimpse of this world via Scythe, it was an alt-history Great War mechs-n’-boiled-barley affair. Then Expeditions rolled around and the whole thing took on a determinedly Strugatsky Brothers flair, all strange zones and alien meteors and zombified hussars. Now there’s a foreign entity named Meloch who’s thrown the previous games’ heroes into a time warp, resulting in one last excursion that just so happens to be a grudge match between two of Jamey Stegmaier’s most iconic gameplay systems.
Do these disparate threads make a lick of sense? Not to this philistine. But even as the gameplay mostly gets me shrugging, I can’t help but find the result compelling. It’s a pickle.
Space-Cast! #58. Postmarks
For over five years (but fewer than seven), Postmark Games has published high-quality, low-cost print-and-play games. Oh, you need examples? How about roll-and-move titles like Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints? Or ditties like Battle Card, Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club? Or even 52 Realms: Adventures? Now the company is working on their first coin-flip title, Master of Coin. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Rory Muldoon, half of the Postmark team, to discuss the beginnings, current status, and future of the company. How does one build a business on games that players print for themselves? Maybe we’ll find out!
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Tagging In
Not that long ago, my twelve-year-old daughter listed Tag Team as her favorite title of 2025. When I asked her whether that was still the case, she replied, “I like other games more, but I still like Tag Team.” There we have it, I guess.
Except now there’s a second set, Arthur’s Legacy, that can be played standalone with its own six fighters or merge with the original ten to create infinite possibilities. Or 120, which might as well be infinite. How does it stack up? Honestly, I think it might be the stronger of the pair.
Revealing the Medium’s Secret
Houdini’s Last Act feels like a magic trick. And not only because designers Chris Zinsli and Suzanne Zinsli (no relation) (okay, maybe there’s some relation, but it’s rude to assume) provide an actual card-shuffling trick as an intermission.
Set during the final years of the escapist’s life, the game’s apprentices — of which there must always be precisely four — are here to assist Houdini in exposing various spirit mediums as frauds and hucksters. It’s a noble objective, protecting the bereaved from those who would take advantage of them. But it’s also a testy proposition, one liable to end in disaster. Thus the game’s core tension: Will you work toward the show’s success? Or look after your own self-interest?
Doing Our Best
There’s a tagline on the box of The Witches of Willowspur, the latest game by Jenna Felli, that I appreciate deeply. “Doing their best,” it reads. It’s a reference to the titular witches, the daughters of wicked witches who, as a clique of misbehaving teens, have decided to get up to some good by releasing Prince Murray — the very same Murray the A**hole Frog who troubled the waters of his own title — from his shapeshifted form as… well, as a frog. Presumably not as an a**hole. There’s no counterspell for that malady.
“Doing their best.” It’s such a warm and reassuring phrase. This is a cooperative game about teenage rebellion and about teenagerhood more broadly, about finding one’s own goodness despite a world that would rather hammer you into a very different shape. Presumably Felli also did her best in crafting the game. I so very much wish it had resulted in something more playable.
Playing with Cellulose Fiber
Paper! Despite the meddling of the internet, it’s still everywhere. There’s a good chance you have some in your very own home. In fact, it’s probably within arm’s reach right now. Coming for you. Fluttering closer. Ready to give you a stingy cut on the fingertip.
But for all its sins, paper is good for a few things. Making board games happens to be one of them. And today, I’m going to talk about three paper games I’ve been playing this week.
Yawpz
This might sound funny, but the game that kept springing to mind while playing Gruntz, the tiny-as-it-gets wargame by Carter Scott, was none other than Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ. Like that ancient (but now resuscitated) title, Gruntz is about a pair of World War-era armies bashing it out on the field. They’re both highly attritional, encouraging a tit-for-tat gameplay that’s either enthralling or exhausting depending on your tolerance for swapping one piece for another.
More than that, they’re both games about both movement and reinforcement. It isn’t enough to position your troops smartly. You also need to know when — and what — to call up from the rear. In the case of Gruntz, that sometimes means snapping a range of equipment onto a chassis to create a custom-built war machine.
This is never not cool. Because magnets, baby. I’m always in a mood for magnets.
Afterlife for Auction
I find Realm of Reckoning, the latest title by Max Anderson, Zac Dixon, and Austin Harrison, to be fascinating. There’s the cosmological angle: an afterlife fallen into disrepair, now pieced back into working order through the clashing imperatives of feuding factions. Personally, I’d be a fanatical member of the Eat As Much Cake As You Like Without Getting Tummy Sick sect.
But more even than that, it carves out a new space in the whole “dudes on a map” genre. (Are we still saying that?) There are fingerprints of the greats all over the design. A splash of Blood Rage, some Inis, even a little bit of Arcs. It’s something of a mashup, and not every part works as smoothly as the others, but the result is a gripping struggle over an ashen landscape.
Joker’s on You
Say one thing for Carl Chudyk, he’s always swinging for the fences. His latest, Chess Joker, is full of wonderful ideas. At its most basic: what if we took the game-altering jokers from Balatro, say half a thousand of them, and transformed Chess, that ancient game of strategy and discipline, into a cast-iron bathtub filled with jelly beans and marmalade and one or two razor blades just for fun.
At its best, Chess Joker lives up to that promise. The problem is that it isn’t often at its best.
SPACE-BIFF! 