Here’s a question for you. What do Oltréé, The Plum Island Horror, The Struggle for Zorn, Earthborne Rangers, Sleeping Gods: Distant Skies, Striking Flint, The Mandalorian: Adventures, Mass Effect: The Board Game: Priority: Hagalaz: Subtitle, and The Lucky Seven all have in common?

That’s right: they’re all solitaire or cooperative games from the past year that I broadly enjoyed that are too easy to win. Time and time again, I sit down at the table spoiling for a fight, thinking I’m about to get thrashed by the approaching tsunami, that it will take all my guts and endurance just to keep my head above water, and instead I roll the storm like a steamroller over a kiddie pool. Sure, in the past I may have groused about Antoine Bauza’s Ghost Stories being too rough on my delicate sensibilities, but this is an over-correction. Sometimes I want to be punished. Give me Slay the Spire. Give me Halls of Hegra.

Or give me the depot. This is a one-card expansion for The Lucky Seven, included in copies of the second printing, that Zach Barth sent over along with a copy of his next game, Chemistry Set. Too bad for Chemistry Set, because this singular addition has gotten me playing The Lucky Seven more obsessively than the first time around.

I’ve never reviewed just one card. Roll out, squad.

It’s a good day to be back in the hurt locker.*

If you don’t remember, The Lucky Seven is a nasty little thing. Conceptually nasty, that is.

Your squad of eight soldiers has been ambushed. One of your men, the unlucky eighth, was vaporized in the opening volley. Now that everybody’s hit the deck, it’s time to scramble around the table, pick up the stragglers, and stem a bum-rush of enemy threats. Mortars and machine guns suppress your boys, tanks and flares lock down lanes and spaces, and infantry stalk up close to eliminate anybody hapless enough to stay pinned down for more than a few seconds. It’s a bona fide firefight.

Except it’s sometimes too easy.

Not all the time. Thanks to the random distribution of your squad, including the identity of your deceased eighth squaddie, and the order those enemy threats appear in, it’s entirely possible that you’ll be confronted with an interlocked wall of infantry and machine guns, or that your entire squad will get rumbled by accurate mortar fire, or that the lane you desperately need to rush to take out that final enemy will be blocked by a tank at exactly the wrong moment.

Too often, though, Barth’s puzzle can be solved. Readily solved. Sometimes, when the pendulum swings the other way, flippantly solved.

That’s where the depot comes in.

Take that, Leader!

The depot is added to the board during setup. Always located in one of the “inner” spaces — no edges allowed, for reasons that will become clear very soon — the depot is presumably your squad’s target. And it’s the toughest thing on the table. At a whopping four strength, it needs to be surrounded on all four sides, individual abilities notwithstanding.

But that incoming tide of enemy men and materiel hasn’t been paused. If anything, one of the best things about the depot, mechanically speaking, is that the rules haven’t been altered at all. Every turn still opens with four new threats being seeded across the battlefield’s four rows. Your goal is still to eliminate everything by the conclusion of the final turn. Every one of your old tricks still applies. Two of your guys, the Hammer and the Anvil, boast upscaled attacks when positioned next to the Pacifist. The Natural can attack diagonally. The Mouse can attack while suppressed. You have every tool you need to destroy your target.

Once destroyed, the depot confers a minor benefit of its own. The turn it goes kablooey, the fireworks are so brilliant that your enemies are momentarily overawed, faces aglow as they gawk at the fireball instead of taking out your guys. It’s a perfect Hollywood moment, all thundering flame and gormless mooks and clockwork timing.

What makes it all the more impressive, though, is that it’s hard as balls to pull off. Even with your squad’s special abilities and the knowledge that you’ll be momentarily invulnerable once the fuse is lit, the addition of this one card tips the scales in your enemy’s favor. There’s too much on the field, and the depot is too tough, to easily beat everything the deck throws at you. Even when I’ve blasted the dang thing, sometimes the effort left my squad too strung out to rally against my remaining enemies.

How do I get around this thing?!

This is probably my favorite update to a card game since… okay, since ever. As I noted earlier, the depot doesn’t actually change the rules. Nor is it mandatory. Players are free to trample over their ambushers, sans depot, until they’re ready for a tougher challenge. That speaks to the purity of the original title’s ruleset. This is no major patch, but a single fine-tuned adjustment that puts The Lucky Seven more in line with Barth’s previous solitaire outings, the digital cribbages and mahjongs released by Zachtronics circa 2016-2022.

So here’s my challenge to all the games I listed above: you get one card. One. Don’t change any major rules. Don’t make me read an extra five pages. Don’t have your card feature a QR code that alters every component. You get just one card to transform your game from lukewarm to scalding. The Lucky Seven has thrown down the gauntlet. Like Tom Hanks whispered from the battlefield of Saving Private Ryan, “Earn this… by making victory suitably difficult and sick as shit to pull off.”

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy of that one card, the Depot, was provided.