Fetch-Building
To quote the Holy Bible, John D. Clair keeps trying to make fetch happen. That isn’t an insult. If anything, I admire the guy’s persistence. Unstoppable is his latest attempt to master the “deck-building but also you’re building the cards by sticking other cards into increasingly overstuffed sleeves” system that he kinda-sorted invented (provided we ignore Keith Baker’s Gloom), following up on Mystic Vale, Edge of Darkness, and Dead Reckoning. This one is a solitaire outing, and it’s the most expansive expression of Clair’s approach to card-layering yet.
Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have some pretty big hangups, unfortunately.
All Workworkwork and No Play
By the time my brain was being compressed like fine pasta out through my ears, my self-confidence had taken more than one impact and, although this may reveal too much about the ailing functions of my inner ear, I had suffered a few vertiginous moments that bordered on nausea.
This is Workworkwork, the latest effort from Blaž Gracar, the madman who gave us LOK and Abdec and All Is Bomb. Like the first pair of those titles, Workworkwork is a puzzle book, comb-bound and packaged with a transparent plastic sheet for doodling on with a dry-erase marker. Unlike your average sudoku or crossword, this is a necessity. There is no solving these puzzles on your first go. Instead, it takes practice, experimentation, and failure. So much failure.
Chariots of Frickin’ Fire
It is wild to me, utterly wild, that in 2025 CMYK has released not one but two racing games. Even wilder that the second, slipstreaming in the wake of Jon Perry’s Hot Streak, should be a remake of Takashi Ishida’s Magical Athlete, tuned up by Richard Garfield of all folks, and that it’s as close to perfection as any board game has ever managed.
Sporks
Critter Kitchen is what you get when you take Matty Matheson from The Bear, Jon Favreau from Chef, and Daniel Brühl from Burnt, and then change almost nothing, because those are the actors who most closely resemble anthropomorphic animals in the first place. Designed by Alex Cutler and Peter C. Hayward, this is a feel-good board game about earning as many not-quite Michelin Stars for your restaurant as possible, marred only by a bit of clutter and the sneaking suspicion that the meat tokens must have been sourced from factory-farmed humans.
The Little Crunch
Ah, the “small civgame,” the brass ring of tabletop design. If Age of Galaxy sounds familiar, that’s because this is the second edition of the tinier-than-you’d expect title from a couple years back. Now, in a somewhat ironic turn, it’s been blown outward.
Some dead space in the box notwithstanding, it’s a suitable alteration. The cards are full-sized! The map and action board feel less like gimmicks! The discs can actually stack on top of each other! This is the very same Age of Galaxy I reviewed positively two years ago, transformed so that it’s much easier to read across the table, with all the upsides and downsides vacuum-sealed for a fresh audience.
How to Train Your Fledgling
I don’t know why dragons are so popular all of a sudden, but as a parent I’m genetically predisposed to be invested in the same things as my eleven-year-old… so bring on the dragons. Dragon Academy is the first expansion to Connie Vogelmann’s Wyrmspan, the heftier and more draconic alternative to Wingspan and Finspan, and it understands the fad even more intimately than the base game.
When the Bell Breaks
It wouldn’t be fair to call the Munich Crisis “small.” Certainly it wasn’t small to the almost fifteen million inhabitants of Czechoslovakia. But time and history, especially the history of World War II, have a way of making the betrayal of an entire nation seem tiny. In 1938, Czechoslovakia was twenty years young, guaranteed safety and autonomy by France, and remained the sole functioning democracy in Central Europe. Within a few short months, it became the latest target of Germany’s rolling territorial acquisitions and, after the Sudetenland was traded away to appease Hitler, was carved up between neighbors. The peace purchased with the First Czechoslovak Republic’s dissolution held less than a year.
This is the topic of Petr Mojžíš’s The Bell of Treason, an improbable but evocative title, not to mention a despondent one in an era of renewed imperial aggression against states that have been promised security by feckless global powers. Riffing on Mark Herman’s system from Fort Sumter and Frédéric Serval’s developments from Red Flag Over Paris, it’s also comparatively diminutive for a wargame, with short rules, a compact profile, and a sharp eye for the crisis’s framing. All the better to make its players feel like minnows among sharks.
Tick Tick Toe
If there’s anything that tickles the pleasure center of my brain, it’s seeing a designer put their own spin on a classic. Even better when that classic is soggier than bread that’s been tossed into a duck pond. Robert Hovakimyan isn’t the first person to tackle Tic Tac Toe this year. But compared to Brett J. Gilbert and Trevor Benjamin’s Tic Tac Trek, Bombastic is the straighter adaptation, right down to the nine-square grid and make-three gameplay. The big distinction is that everything has already been played to the board. Face-down.
Oh. And there’s a bomb.
Not a Blackthorne in Sight
Hard to believe it’s been two years since General Orders: World War II. The brainchild of Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson — and distinct from Undaunted, their other shared WWII series — the inaugural General Orders was an ultralight wargame blended with worker placement. I liked that opening salvo well enough, and despite some hangups there wasn’t any reason to not take a gander at the system’s second outing.
I’m glad I did. General Orders: Sengoku Jidai turns back the calendar to the warring states of 15th century Japan, swapping airplanes and artillery for ashigaru and… well, still artillery, but it’s somewhat less efficacious. More importantly, every detail of Sengoku Jidai, from the game’s more coherent visual direction to its fluctuating battle lines, is punchier and more confident than before. The result is a near-perfect small-box title that packs thunderous drama into a slender half hour.
Simps All the Way Down
Gastby. You know Gatsby, right? Throws fancy parties. In love with a woman who couldn’t care less whether he lives or dies. Always staring at that green light.
When it was announced that Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc were doing a board game version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the response was mostly derisive. I get it. We’re tired of this multiverse crap. And who are these new characters anyway? Everybody knows you can’t go disrupting fans’ headcanon by adding characters to a century-old book.
In this case, though, it works. What’s a better homage to Jay Gatsby than inventing two new characters who were presumably hovering in the wings the entire time, only he never noticed? Unsuccessfully simping for somebody’s attention is as Gatsby as it gets.
Too bad about the rest of the game, though.
SPACE-BIFF! 