Blog Archives
Combat Results Postcard
Battle Card is as apt as descriptions get. Designed by David Thompson and Nils Johansson, this is the fourth project in the Postmark Games lineup. Like its earlier peers — Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints — this is a print-and-play title that can be produced with functionally zero budget. Unlike those projects, however, Battle Card is billed as a wargame on a single postcard-sized sheet.
That’s true enough. With a few dice and a smidgen of experience to help interpret the rules, Battle Card covers six engagements from the Second World War. And their format is indeed very small, highlighting some real resourcefulness on their designers’ part in compressing battles and even campaigns into ten-minute experiences.
But unlike those other titles, Battle Card is a mixed bag. I’ll give an example.
Touch Grass (Metaphorical)
Voyages, the first of Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon’s single-sheet print-and-play roll-and-write games, used three dice. Aquamarine used two. Waypoints continues the trend by using a single die.
That’s cool in its own right. But that isn’t what makes Waypoints special. What makes Waypoints special is the way it handles the movements generated by its rolls. Where those other titles — and let’s face it, most board games — featured straight movements, point to point, A to B, nearly every move in Waypoints is the sort of move you might actually make while traversing an open space.
Here, I’ll show you.
Better Citizens than Netizens
Citizens of the Spark feels like it was custom-made with me in mind. It’s a tableau-builder (yes) designed by Philip duBarry and illustrated by Diego Sá (yes) seeded with a small selection from a huge pool of cards (yeeesss) that happens to be populated with anthropomorphic animals (eh, fine). Those animals, it turns out, are not your usual medieval-ish fare, but scientists, scholars, performers, and everything else, jumbled together to form a polis of intersecting interests and vocations.
Which is to say, it brought me around in the end.
Dive Tables
Here’s something you probably didn’t know about old Dan Thurot: I’m a scuba diver rated for search and recovery. There aren’t many of us here in the desert, which is probably why I receive unexpected calls to dredge the ponds of local golf courses whenever there’s a Silver Alert. Thus far, I have declined these requests. Those waters are, like, four feet deep. That’s a job for snorklers. Or a tall guy with hip waders.
Instead, I mostly use this as qualification to comment on scuba stuff. That cave rescue in Thailand? Legitimate. The roll-and-write shenanigans of Aquamarine? Um. Okay, look, Aquamarine isn’t the most robust scuba simulation. But as another print-and-play title from Postmark Games, it’s a worthy followup to Voyages.
It’s Always the Ides of March Somewhere
I would describe my feelings toward Regicide as “appreciation,” despite it finding dedicated fans all around me. For years it was in regular rotation on my wife’s phone; my sister-in-law bought the fancy custom deck rather than just using a generic deck of playing cards. My own interest had more to do with the game as an act of repurposement: the clever casting of face cards as mad royals who needed to be put down, the suits transformed into character classes for blocking attacks or repairing injuries.
Regicide Legacy, designed by the same trio as the original — Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale — is very nearly the exact opposite of the original game, at least in terms of form factor. Where the previous Regicide could be played with any old deck scrounged from a vacation bag, this edition is something of a throwback. It’s a genuine legacy title, for one thing: torn cards, stickers, micro-expansions, all of it. Its cooperative/solitaire campaign is generous. Moreover, it’s hard, significantly harder than is the norm in our current obliging hobby. It isn’t uncommon for a chapter to take two, three, half a dozen tries before your band of mercenaries is permitted to move on to their next target.
Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I can squarely say that the ordeal was thrilling, brilliant, and exhausting.
High O’er the Billows We Are Wafted Along
Let it not be said that I don’t take requests. A number of readers have pointed out that it’s been a long time since I’ve covered any print-and-play games. Too true. But there’s a reason for that. Voyages, the six-map design by Rory Muldoon and Matthew Dunstan and the launchpad title from Postmark Games, is both an illustration of my reticence and a roundhouse kick to that same reticence’s noggin.
Fry n’ Write
Food trucks, like roll-and-write games, went from unknowns circa 2013 to oversaturated by 2021 to fresh all over again in this the year 2026. At least that’s the hope behind Chicken Fried Dice, a chuck-and-scrawler and food truck simulator from Ashwin Kamath and Rob Newton.
How does it perform? We’ll wait in line together.
Yer All Sheeps
For my money — or, all right, for my attention — Blaž Gracar is one of the finest puzzle-makers of this generation. Between All Is Bomb and LOK, I’ve spent countless hours fiddling my way through some conundrum or another, thinking the madman must have left a typo on the page, only to let out an exasperated sigh as, of course, the solution was there all along. Even his lesser efforts, Abdec and Workworkwork, have proved worthwhile.
Herd is his latest project, and its adorable stacking domes bridge the gap between puzzle book and board game. In some ways it’s his most “straightforward” offering. Of course, that still means it’s twisted and full of secrets.
DoS That LLM Till It’s 404
There’s history to Deckers. Pedigree. Richard Wilkins — better known by the epithet Ricky Royal, the name under which he’s created a bunch of incredible solitaire modes for games that wouldn’t otherwise suit solo play in the slightest — designed a ditty called Renegade back in 2018. Before the plague years. Before the world’s billionaires started cramming robo-slop down our throats and calling it nourishment.
Before, in other words, cyberpunk felt quite so urgent. Back when the genre was a throwback to ’80s techno acceleration and not ’20s techno throttling.
Deckers is Renegade. That’s the short version. The slightly longer version is that Deckers is Renegade, but decoupled from the vulture who acquired it along with the rest of the Victory Point Games catalog, and with the expansion packs folded in, some additional clarity and development, and a new coat of paint. It won’t persuade anybody who didn’t get along with the original, but it’s just as fresh as ever. And as infuriating.
Scratch & Sniffle
Now here’s something I haven’t seen before: a collection of six scratch-off board games designed by puzzle master Zach Barth. That’s a sentence that keeps getting more intriguing as it goes, especially after The Lucky Seven proved one of the most reliable single-deck solitaire games on my shelf.
What I didn’t expect was the smell. I don’t know how scratch-offs are made, especially scratch-offs as nice as the ones in this pack. These are hardly the state fair scratch-offs from my childhood. They still produce a royal mess — I’ve had to play with a little rubbish can next to the table — but that metallic scent has proven strangely addictive. Is this why people gamble away their life savings? Maybe I’d be tempted to do so as well, were the minigames in the state lottery this compelling. Let’s run through all six.
SPACE-BIFF! 