It’s in my nature to appreciate wallets. I own a couple dozen of the things. One for carrying money and eleven-year-old gift cards to defunct smoothie chains, the rest for microgames from Button Shy.

This latest batch includes something experimental, something from a designer whose previous work I’ve loved, and something that’s really just a bigger board game compressed to fit into a wallet. That’s gotta be a home run, right?

Right?

Downtown Las Palmas is the domain of “banana mitts.”

Downtown Las Palmas

I appreciate a surfaceless game now and then, especially on long flights or while sitting in hotel rooms with tables that barely fit their obligatory lamp. In theory, Erica Pinto’s Downtown Las Palmas is one such game. You’re building a city in the palm of your hand, stretching those finger-webs to maximize real estate. The more cards you stuff into your mitts, the better, earning points not only for volume of cards, but also for every highlighted feature. Along the way, there’s some variability thanks to objectives printed on the back of every card. Stuff like “Traffic Jam: +2 points per vehicle” and “Urban Sprawl: +10 points if there are 7 or more cards with visible ground.”

Sadly, it doesn’t work.

I have wide hands. Not as wide as my friend Chris’s — everybody in our high school group called him “gorilla hands,” they were that massive — but big enough to comfortably reach an octave plus three on the piano. And I can barely hold these things. Maybe it’s the linen finish. Maybe it’s the game’s directives, which require ground-level streets to align and the sky to not intrude like some dimensional rift in front of another structure. These are necessary rules; to function as a society board game, you’ve gotta have rules. Or maybe it’s just my slippery fingers. But whatever it is, the entire thing slides to pieces the instant I’m holding more than four or five of the things.

The table version is functional, at least.

There’s an alternate way to play. Cards can be arranged on the table, spaced between your session’s chosen objectives. This allows some glimpse of how Downtown Las Palmas is meant to function. The buildings that sprout from the concrete jungle, punctuated by slants of blue sky. The signs over the signs, the awnings and cats perched in impossible places. It’s a lovely thing to see come together.

Playing this way, though, I can’t escape the notion that this isn’t how Downtown Las Palmas should work. Probably because it isn’t. Sure, this is an official variant. But there are other small games about overlapping cards, many of them also published by Button Shy.

In the end, the game remains a lovely concept. Maybe I’ll get to try something else from Pinto before too long.

Stronger? Weaker? Who can say?

Phantasmic

Phantasmic is the smallest of Marceline Leiman’s games, which is saying something when the others are High Tide and Heavenly Bodies. It’s the smallest in terms of rules footprint as well. The game is dead simple.

Picture a magical duel. That can’t be hard; heaven knows we’ve witnessed a bazillion of the things. One player is the Leader, a face-up spell before them on the table. The other is the Rival; their card goes face-down. At this point, the Rival announces whether their concealed spell is stronger or weaker than the Leader’s. A spell’s strength is a changeable quality, dependent on its rank and its spellbook’s position in relation to two others. The Leader declares whether they believe the Rival is lying or telling the truth. The hidden card is flipped. Everyone oohs and aahs.

Like I said, Phantasmic is simple. Perhaps too simple. At first brush, it feels almost like a coin flip. I say something, you determine whether I’m lying.

I want a ring box mimic.

But if Phantasmic is a coin flip, it’s a heavily loaded one. The placement of those spellbooks, the various rankings, even any previously played cards, all add to the game’s texture. A coin flip comes down to 50/50 odds; here, the likelihood that my spell is stronger than yours might be rather slender indeed. It helps that certain cards alter the outcome by swapping those spellbooks before the duel is decided.

So it’s a game of probabilities and bluffing in equal proportion. Given the game’s 18-card format, it helps that the card pool is knowable. Button Shy always offers little expansions, in this case a fourth set of spells; it isn’t enough to throw the calculations into disarray, but it does loosen up the probability a little bit.

Okay, so it isn’t quite as vacuous as a coin flip. But is it any good? Perhaps the best way to describe Phantasmic would be to say that I don’t mind it. I might almost use it as a five-minute tiebreaker, rather than a game’s default “whomever has the most leftover resources” or whatnot. But it’s so slight that I struggle to foresee any reason to nab it off the shelf rather than any number of other titles. Wallet games included.

Pretend the tortilla coaster is a whirlwind.

Dustbiters: Pocket Edition

I remember being curious about Dustbiters a few years back, that collaborative design by Robbie Fraser, Jan Willem Nijman, and Terri Vellman, in no small part thanks to Vellman’s lovely pink-hued trashheap illustrations. It’s basically the sandstorm scene from Fury Road, all those cars gunning their engines and puffing propane-jelly, while being ripped apart by a duster wider than Texas.

To my delight, Button Shy’s Pocket Edition is Dustbiters, albeit in a smaller package and minus only a few cards that are immediately replaced by the expansion. When the original game hit the scene, I had no idea it was functionally a microgame itself, tallying a slender twenty-one cards. I might have even been irritated at seeing its contents floating inside a too-large box.

Right away, Dustbiters excels on multiple fronts. The artwork is perfect, of course, those little road-freaks guffawing as they tear across the wasteland. The gameplay is also no slouch. Six cards begin on the table, three oriented toward me and the rest facing you. Every turn offers three actions, whether spent moving vehicles up or down the line, triggering abilities, or deploying reinforcements to the melee.

From there, it’s a bloodbath. The goal is to be the last player with any cards on the table. Every turn will result in multiple casualties, and that’s if you’re shirking your homicidal duty. Thanks to the storm bearing down on your position, at least one car will be demolished at the conclusion of each turn. The only path to survival is sheer forward propulsion.

A day out with the crew.

What a great little game. There’s some wonderful overlap between the vehicles’ appearance and their function, breeding a certain irradiated logic. There’s a Jammer with an old satellite dish wedged atop its minivan frame; it cancels the abilities of both adjacent cars. A repurposed steamroller can crush its neighbor, but only if its victim is sandwiched by another of your vehicles. A Ramp Truck lets you fling your car haphazardly to the front of the line. The blood-bag Max tethered to the front of the Martyr car may absorb any other hit.

Here’s something that tickles my fancy: quite often, designers stretch the microgame’s 18-card limit by pressing their cards into multiple duty. Each card has two sides and many orientations, after all. Dustbiters doesn’t need the help. All it takes is a conga line of murderous gas-guzzlers, some nasty time pressure, and a few simple rules. Five minutes is all it takes to play, but there’s more drama compressed into those five minutes than… well, than in certain nu-euros about flinging tourists into outer space.

Of the trio, Dustbiters is the clear frontrunner, which means it is the sole title to not be shredded by the wasteland storm of my judgement. Dustbiters, I verily witness thee.

Complimentary copies of Downtown Las Palmas, Phantasmic, and Dustbiters: Pocket Edition were provided by the designer.

(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. Right now, supporters can read about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)