No (Okay, Some) Ragrets
As a natural melancholic, the idea of being drawn to the sea — to drown one’s regrets, whether figuratively or bodily — makes me glad there isn’t a significant body of water within six hundred miles. It isn’t that suicide holds appeal for its own sake. Rather, it’s a fire door in the back, rigged with an alarm but duly located in case of an emergency. Sometimes, when an elderly person goes missing in the mountains, I wonder if they disappeared because of forgetfulness, as the silver alerts would have us believe, or because they could no longer stop remembering.
Deep Regrets, like Judson Cowan’s forthcoming Personal Demons, wears its metaphor on its sleeve only to collar it in gameplay. Perhaps we went to the sea to forget, to scrape our hull free of the barnacles that have accreted there, only to find ourselves fouled with a fresh catch. To mount an escape is to be caught.
Okay, now I’m being melancholic. At least it’s a good fit for Cowan’s intended topic.
Liberation Ludology, Part Three: Nicaragua
The first thing one notices about the third scenario in Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation is that the script has been flipped. Unlike both the Uruguay and Peru scenarios, which presented the COIN Series’s customary red insurgents facing off against government blues, here the entire color scheme has been inverted. Now the insurgent cylinders are the blue ones, while the government’s troops and police are red and pink. The effect is jarring. More than once, I found myself staring at the wrong side of the faction aid, trying in vain to make sense of the information before me. What do you mean the red side needs to deploy sweep-and-clear operations? Wait, the pinkos have air superiority? When has that ever been the case?
This is Nicaragua, baby. One short year after the socialist Sandinistas ended the Somoza family’s four-decade reign, inheriting an indebted and war-wracked country, the U.S.-backed Contras are pouring over the border from Honduras and Costa Rica. What follows is the most harrowing of the multipack’s scenarios thus far.
Quilt for Kitten
Nutgoo.Lee’s Blancat made my seven-year-old cry. I know. That’s a movable bar. She was tired from a long day of playing in the sun, but she wanted to try the “kittie quilting game” anyway. It ended in tears. That’s on me, not Blancat, and certainly it isn’t on Nutgoo.Lee.
But here’s the thing: she practices at Blancat. She sits on her own at the table and studies the little templates and does her best to craft the quilts. She’s played plenty of other board games. She even has her favorites. Right now, that means Barbecubes and A Gentle Rain. Tactile stuff, not all that far removed from Blancat, but simpler, with lighter stakes. This is the first game I’ve seen that’s made her studious. The first game that’s meant to be challenging. Her intensity makes me wonder if there’s something here that I didn’t see right away. They say children let you see the world through new eyes. It seems the same goes for board games.
Clammy Scythe-on-Expeditions Action
I won’t pretend to know what’s happening in Duel of Meloch. When we first got a glimpse of this world via Scythe, it was an alt-history Great War mechs-n’-boiled-barley affair. Then Expeditions rolled around and the whole thing took on a determinedly Strugatsky Brothers flair, all strange zones and alien meteors and zombified hussars. Now there’s a foreign entity named Meloch who’s thrown the previous games’ heroes into a time warp, resulting in one last excursion that just so happens to be a grudge match between two of Jamey Stegmaier’s most iconic gameplay systems.
Do these disparate threads make a lick of sense? Not to this philistine. But even as the gameplay mostly gets me shrugging, I can’t help but find the result compelling. It’s a pickle.
Space-Cast! #58. Postmarks
For over five years (but fewer than seven), Postmark Games has published high-quality, low-cost print-and-play games. Oh, you need examples? How about roll-and-move titles like Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints? Or ditties like Battle Card, Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club? Or even 52 Realms: Adventures? Now the company is working on their first coin-flip title, Master of Coin. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Rory Muldoon, half of the Postmark team, to discuss the beginnings, current status, and future of the company. How does one build a business on games that players print for themselves? Maybe we’ll find out!
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Tagging In
Not that long ago, my twelve-year-old daughter listed Tag Team as her favorite title of 2025. When I asked her whether that was still the case, she replied, “I like other games more, but I still like Tag Team.” There we have it, I guess.
Except now there’s a second set, Arthur’s Legacy, that can be played standalone with its own six fighters or merge with the original ten to create infinite possibilities. Or 120, which might as well be infinite. How does it stack up? Honestly, I think it might be the stronger of the pair.
Revealing the Medium’s Secret
Houdini’s Last Act feels like a magic trick. And not only because designers Chris Zinsli and Suzanne Zinsli (no relation) (okay, maybe there’s some relation, but it’s rude to assume) provide an actual card-shuffling trick as an intermission.
Set during the final years of the escapist’s life, the game’s apprentices — of which there must always be precisely four — are here to assist Houdini in exposing various spirit mediums as frauds and hucksters. It’s a noble objective, protecting the bereaved from those who would take advantage of them. But it’s also a testy proposition, one liable to end in disaster. Thus the game’s core tension: Will you work toward the show’s success? Or look after your own self-interest?
Doing Our Best
There’s a tagline on the box of The Witches of Willowspur, the latest game by Jenna Felli, that I appreciate deeply. “Doing their best,” it reads. It’s a reference to the titular witches, the daughters of wicked witches who, as a clique of misbehaving teens, have decided to get up to some good by releasing Prince Murray — the very same Murray the A**hole Frog who troubled the waters of his own title — from his shapeshifted form as… well, as a frog. Presumably not as an a**hole. There’s no counterspell for that malady.
“Doing their best.” It’s such a warm and reassuring phrase. This is a cooperative game about teenage rebellion and about teenagerhood more broadly, about finding one’s own goodness despite a world that would rather hammer you into a very different shape. Presumably Felli also did her best in crafting the game. I so very much wish it had resulted in something more playable.
Playing with Cellulose Fiber
Paper! Despite the meddling of the internet, it’s still everywhere. There’s a good chance you have some in your very own home. In fact, it’s probably within arm’s reach right now. Coming for you. Fluttering closer. Ready to give you a stingy cut on the fingertip.
But for all its sins, paper is good for a few things. Making board games happens to be one of them. And today, I’m going to talk about three paper games I’ve been playing this week.
Yawpz
This might sound funny, but the game that kept springing to mind while playing Gruntz, the tiny-as-it-gets wargame by Carter Scott, was none other than Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ. Like that ancient (but now resuscitated) title, Gruntz is about a pair of World War-era armies bashing it out on the field. They’re both highly attritional, encouraging a tit-for-tat gameplay that’s either enthralling or exhausting depending on your tolerance for swapping one piece for another.
More than that, they’re both games about both movement and reinforcement. It isn’t enough to position your troops smartly. You also need to know when — and what — to call up from the rear. In the case of Gruntz, that sometimes means snapping a range of equipment onto a chassis to create a custom-built war machine.
This is never not cool. Because magnets, baby. I’m always in a mood for magnets.
SPACE-BIFF! 