Blog Archives
Moregenta
On the whole, I appreciate CMYK’s Magenta series, which takes classic card games and shrouds them in oversized pink boxes. Don’t believe me? Uh, that’s an odd thing to not believe. Here are the receipts: Fives, Duos, Figment, and Fruit Fight. Now you can get back to the serious business of not believing the propaganda in your social media feed.
Anyway, two new titles have now been added to Magenta. They’re both excellent. I’d even say that these are the best games in the series to date.
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.
Space-Cast! #47. Bun Bangers
Hot Streak! Off-brand mascots and gambling degeneracy have never been more in fashion. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Jon Perry to discuss his mascot-racing board game, its connections to the digital collection UFO 50, and the particulars of adaptation and artistic medium. Now that’s a mouthful!
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Ready Set Brat
How has it come to this? You’ve lost your house. Your family. The bank has issued a repo order on your car. Credit cards? Forget about it. You’re the first person in your state to hold a credit score below 300. Thank goodness you still have a few bucks in your pocket. The bounce is coming, you can feel it. Sure, every casino ejects you on sight, but there’s one last hope for salvation:
Off-brand mascot racing.
This is Hot Streak, a game with a premise so weird and wild that I’d be drawn into its orbit even if it hadn’t been designed by Jon Perry. But like Time Barons, Scape Goat, Air, Land, & Sea, Spots, and a good number of titles in the faux-retro collection UFO 50, it was indeed designed by Jon Perry — and I can safely say it’s the only game in existence where a man in a hot dog suit might trample a foam angler fish to death by running backwards on a racetrack.
Magenta Four: Fruit Fight
Of course, there’s a Knizia. Fruit Fight is the final entry in CMYK’s Magenta, a series of four brightly-colored card games that each introduce a new concept. It’s also perhaps the most storied of the bunch, with multiple reissues over the years, masquerading as Hit!, No Mercy, and Cheeky Monkey. This time around, you’re apparently chucking fruit at each other, complete with blurred images of foodstuffs sailing through the air. As with the rest of this set, the aesthetic is downright charming.
The game itself? Eh. It’s fine.
Magenta Three: Figment
Another week, another Magenta! After Fives and Duos, I thought I had a handle on CMYK’s approach. These are fresh spins on familiar card games, simple enough to appeal to the masses, but dimpled enough that you, a time-tested veteran, won’t grumble when it hits the table.
Until Figment. Figment is the weird one of the bunch.
Magenta Two: Duos
Last week, I called Fives, the first entry in CMYK’s Magenta, the least intriguing of these four releases. Duos, on the other hand, is probably the best in terms of raw gameplay. Designed by Johannes Schmidauer-König, this is a remake of his 2015 title Team Play. And let me tell you, for a thirty-minute partner game, it’s as tight as they come.
Magenta One: Fives
After the unbroken killstreak of Spots, Lacuna, Daybreak, and Wilmot’s Warehouse, I was as surprised as anyone by CMYK’s announcement that their next big release would be Magenta, a series of four garish reissues of older card games. Although in the case of the first entry, “older” only hearkens back to 2022.
That first title, Fives, is a remake of trick-taking wunderkind Taiki Shinzawa’s The Green Fivura. We’ve looked at a number of Shinzawa’s trick-takers in the past, including (deep breath) American Bookshop, 9 Lives and Ghosts of Christmas, and Inflation! and Charms. Also in the non-card category, Tower Chess.
Compared to some of those offerings, Fives plays things relatively straight. You know. Relatively.
Space-Cast! #41. Wilmot’s Island
Dr. David King’s Wilmot’s Warehouse has been described as a magic trick, a miracle, and one heck of a fun time. On today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by King to discuss the ins and outs of his creation, along with how he began teaching game design, his breakout browser game Tiny Islands, and the role of failure and memory in making a board game worthwhile.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Ars Wilmot
Meet Wilmot’s Warehouse. Based on the video game by Richard Hogg and Ricky Haggett, and designed by David King — creator of browser-based roll-and-write Tiny Islands — Wilmot’s Warehouse is a memory game. Let me finish! Wilmot’s Warehouse is a memory game but good. But great. But excellent. But a minor miracle, a religious experience, a paean to human creativity in an era where tech grifters believe the species ought to be replaced by expensive imitation engines.
SPACE-BIFF! 