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On The Table: Mini Boardgaming Weekend

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This weekend a few of my friends and I got together for a two day blowout where we did pretty much nothing but eat, drink and play board games.

As is always the case when this particular group gets together, we had a blast. There was too much food, probably too much alcohol and absolutely too many board games crammed into too little time.

In other words, a pretty damn good weekend.

Of course, we are here to talk about the games.

The cool thing about this particular weekend was that we played almost exclusively new stuff. Games that, for one reason or another, had been sitting on our collective radar but had never actually made it to the table.

So this list is effectively a collection of first impressions. Some good, some bad and, as you will soon discover, some that landed squarely in the great kingdom of “it was fine.”

Here we go!

Star Wars Outer Rim

We kicked things off with Star Wars Outer Rim, a 2019 Fantasy Flight Games release that has picked up some notable accolades over the years, including a Golden Geek nomination for Best Thematic Board Game.

This one has been on my must try list for quite a while, so when it finally hit the table I was genuinely excited to give it a go.

In Outer Rim, each player takes on the role of one of the many rogues, scoundrels and bounty hunters floating around the Star Wars universe. You have characters like Boba Fett, Han Solo and, naturally, one of my all time favorite smugglers, Lando Calrissian, who I immediately snatched up.

Nobody else was getting Lando.

The game itself is a competitive adventure game in which you travel around the Outer Rim delivering cargo, hunting down bounties, taking jobs and trying to avoid, or occasionally confront, patrols belonging to the various major factions. All of this earns you fame, which is effectively the game’s victory point system. Get enough fame before everyone else and you win.

Pretty straightforward stuff.

The production, as you might expect from Fantasy Flight Games, is completely over the top. There are cards everywhere, piles of tokens, character sheets, ships, markers and enough gorgeous Star Wars artwork to wallpaper a small apartment.

Fantasy Flight Games never disappoints when it comes to production values, all of their games look amazing on the table and Outer Rim is no exception.

Visually, the game absolutely delivers.

The gameplay itself is a little harder to pin down.

I would describe it as unique and interesting, but not particularly groundbreaking or deep. In fact, underneath all of the cards, tokens, characters, abilities, and various moving parts is actually a fairly simple game.

It is simple in that wonderfully overcooked Fantasy Flight Games sort of way.

There is a lot going on, but that does not necessarily mean there is a lot going on.

Outer Rim is clearly designed primarily as an entertainment experience rather than some deep strategic puzzle, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of decisions to make and certainly opportunities to play well, but at least in our game, luck played a pretty significant role in determining how things ultimately shook out.

I won, for example, and while I would love to sit here and explain how my brilliant tactical mind and mastery of intergalactic smuggling carried me to victory, the reality is that Lando caught some very fortunate breaks.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

The game was also a bit too long for what it was. Again, this is something I have come to expect from Fantasy Flight Games. Outer Rim has enough going on to keep you entertained, but not quite enough going on to justify how long it takes to reach the finish line.

That said, I had fun.

I would certainly play it again and I think there are still plenty of characters, ships, jobs and strategies I would be curious to explore. I do suspect, however, that Outer Rim has a relatively short shelf life. This does not strike me as the sort of game you are going to pull out twenty or thirty times and continue discovering new layers.

It’s a fun Star Wars adventure game with great production values, plenty of theme and enough randomness to produce some memorable moments.

It was entertaining. It looked fantastic. I won.

It was… fine.

World Order

Definitely the highlight of the weekend and, judging by the reaction around the table, I suspect not just for me.

World Order comes from the same team that gave us the absolutely fantastic Hegemony, so expectations were pretty damn high going into this one. It did not disappoint.

In fact, I would argue that it exceeded my expectations in just about every way.

In World Order, each player takes control of one of the major powers of our modern world, China, Russia, the United States or the European Union, and then proceeds to do what major powers do best. Compete for influence, manipulate everyone around them and generally make the world a worse place in the name of national interest.

You know, geopolitics.

Mechanically, World Order is effectively a card driven deck builder, but describing it that way really undersells what is going on here. Deck building is the engine that makes the machine run, but wrapped around it is resource management, area control, economic competition, political maneuvering and a mountain of player interaction.

Like Hegemony, World Order blew the doors off almost immediately. Just from the rules explaination, I already knew I was going to love this game. It was everything I hoped it would be and more!

This game is a well of asymmetrical strengths and weaknesses, clever plays and wonderfully vicious gotcha moments.

Like Hegemony, however, the real magic is how perfectly the mechanics capture the theme.

You genuinely feel like you are engaged in this constant geopolitical tug of war where everything you do affects someone else. Every action feels meaningful, every play creates an opportunity for someone to respond and every mistake feels like an opening your opponents can exploit.

It doesn’t take long before this turns into a competitive grudge match.

Exactly as it should.

There are also so many clever little ways World Order tweaks familiar deck-building concepts to fit the game. One of my favorites is incredibly simple. When you purchase a new card, rather than putting it into your discard pile as you would in the overwhelming majority of deck builders, you put it directly on top of your deck.

That sounds like a tiny change. It isn’t.

It means that every card you purchase is effectively a card you are buying for your next turn, essentially planning your next move. You are not just improving your deck at some vague point in the future. You are making a strategic decision about what you are going to be able to do next.

This becomes even more important because World Order is an incredibly tight game. You play six rounds and, in each round, you play just four cards. Do the math.

You effectively get 24 actions in the entire game.

That is not a lot of time to establish global economic and political dominance.

Worse yet, there are only two scoring rounds, which means timing is absolutely everything. You can’t simply build some magnificent engine and assume that eventually it will pay off. Eventually may be too late. You need the right cards, in the right place, at the right moment and you need to understand exactly what everyone else is trying to accomplish while you are doing it.

That creates an enormous amount of tension from surprisingly few actions.

The production also deserves some praise, not because it is extravagant, but because it is incredibly clean. Almost everything you need to understand the current state of the game is right there on the board. Who controls what, where influence is building, where the money is flowing and where the next fight is likely to break out is all immediately visible.

The only truly hidden information is the cards in your opponents’ hands and even that mystery only goes so far.

World Order is a highly deterministic game. Luck exists, naturally, but this is very clearly a game that rewards good planning, good timing and, perhaps most importantly, understanding what the other players at the table are trying to do.

I absolutely loved it. There are games you play once and think, “Yeah, that was pretty good.”

Then there are games where you finish and immediately start thinking about what you would do differently next time.

World Order was very much the latter.

Without question, one of the best games I have played all year.

Meeples and Monsters

Released in 2022, Meeples and Monsters seems to have fallen between the cracks of the board gaming world, which is a little surprising given the caliber of its designer, Ole Steiness.

This is the same guy who gave us sleeper hits like Champions of Midgard, Altay: Dawn of Civilization, another really clever game that seems to have largely fallen through the cracks, and the visually stunning Deep Rock Galactic.

That said, after playing Meeples and Monsters, I kind of get it.

There is quite a bit of Lords of Waterdeep DNA here, but Meeples and Monsters is a considerably simpler worker placement game, lighter and executed with far less flair.

In Meeples and Monsters, you collect and upgrade heroes, whose various strengths and abilities you use to fight monsters and score points. As the game progresses, increasingly powerful monsters appear, eventually leading to final showdowns with end-game bosses. Manage your little army of wooden heroes better than everyone else and, presumably, you walk away with the most points and win the game.

The theme is actually quite fun, built around the gag that your heroes are literally wooden meeples. It is colorful, bright, very easy to learn and there is something inherently satisfying about upgrading your little wooden adventurers and sending them off to murder monsters.

The problem is that there really isn’t a tremendous amount to think about.

Unlike Lords of Waterdeep, where you are constantly weighing different options and trying to figure out how to squeeze the most out of each turn with a fair amount of player interaction, Meeples and Monsters has a tendency to present you with several options where one is very obviously better than the others.

Here are the things I can do. That one is clearly the best. So I do that.

Next.

Upgrading and finding interesting combo’s for your heroes is probably where the game was most interesting; there were certainly many ways to go, but really the game was kind of one-dimensional. If you played it once, you have seen everything your going to see.

The fact that it’s a worker placement game where after you place your workers down you remove them, means that blocking actions isn’t a thing, so there is considerably less interactions if any at all between players.

That is really the issue with the game. It is not that there are no decisions to make, it is that too often the game effectively makes the decision for you and it really doesn’t have much impact on the other players.

The main gimmick is that the heroes you have available for this worker placement game are drawn randomly from your bag. Part of the strategy is building the contents of that bag so that the heroes you draw work together and support whatever strategy you are pursuing.

In theory, that should create an interesting puzzle.

In practice, I think there is just a little too much luck involved in what actually comes out of the bag.

As a result, much of the game felt less like I was deciding what to do and more like I was drawing meeples from a bag to discover what the obvious best move was going to be that turn.

Draw your meeples. Look at the board. Spot the obvious move. Execute it.

Occasionally you might have two choices that are equally appealing and you actually have to stop and think about what you want to do, but those moments were the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time the game felt strangely scripted, despite the fact that the script itself was being randomly generated by whatever came out of your bag.

That is not necessarily terrible. There is something pleasant about the whole experience. You are upgrading heroes, killing monsters, getting stronger and watching increasingly ridiculous creatures appear on the board. The game moves along nicely and there is enough going on to keep everyone engaged.

It just never really challenged me.

Meeples and Monsters was fine, but I can understand why it disappeared under the radar despite having a recognizable designer behind it. This is certainly not Ole Steiness at his best.

I do think there is an audience for it, however.

If you have younger kids who are ready to move beyond basic family games and into proper hobby board games, I could actually see Meeples and Monsters being a pretty great step up. The colorful presentation, fun theme, straightforward decisions and constant sense of progression would probably go a long way with that audience.

For my group? It was fine.

Cascadia: Landmarks

Cascadia was the only game in our lineup that I had actually played before, but this time we added the Landmarks expansion and bumped the game up to five players.

Cascadia is, by just about any reasonable measure, one of the premier board games of 2021. It’s sitting pretty in the 61st spot on the 100 games of all time on BoardGameGeek list as of this writing and has collected awards from just about every place you can collect an award from.

At this point, I think it is fair to call Cascadia a modern classic.

I’m a pretty late bloomer here. I only played it for the first time this year and, apparently, I am considerably less impressed with it than the rest of the board gaming world.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Cascadia is a very clever puzzle game. There are plenty of interesting decisions, it moves at a brisk pace and there is something genuinely satisfying about watching this little ecosystem slowly come together in front of you.

When you pull off exactly what you were trying to do, it feels great.

For me, though, the whole experience is just a bit too benign.

We are all sitting around the same table, supposedly playing a board game together, but really everyone is off in their own little corner playing their own private game of Cascadia. The entire scope of player interaction basically boils down to someone taking the tile or animal you wanted.

You bastard. Then you move on with your life.

It reminds me quite a bit of Wingspan, which falls into a similar category for me. Everyone is technically playing the same game together, but most of the time we could probably erect little privacy screens around our play areas and it wouldn’t dramatically change the experience.

I’m just not a huge fan of games like that.

That said, I completely understand why so many people are.

In Cascadia, the basic premise is that you are placing habitat tiles and populating them with wildlife, trying to arrange everything into particular patterns that score points. Each turn you select a habitat tile and an animal token and add them to the growing puzzle in front of you.

At the end of the game, whoever has done the best job putting all of this together scores the most points and wins.

What keeps the puzzle fresh is that the wildlife scoring conditions change from game to game. You randomly select scoring cards that determine what arrangements of bears, salmon, elk, hawks and foxes you are actually trying to create.

It is simple, elegant and very easy to understand.

The Landmarks expansion adds another layer to that puzzle by rewarding you for building sufficiently large connected habitats. Put together enough of a particular terrain type and you can place a landmark, which gives you access to additional scoring opportunities unique to you.

It is certainly interesting and gives you one more thing to consider while constructing your little wilderness.

I’m just not convinced Cascadia needed it.

The additional ways to score points in the Landmarks expansion is a kind of benign way to approach extra scoring. You sort of did whatever you were going to do anyway for your main scoring and then grabbed things when the opportunity presented itself. I’m sure more advanced players will find better ways to use this expansion, but for me that approach worked fine.

For me, one of the game’s greatest strengths is how clean the original puzzle is. Landmarks adds another decision point and another scoring consideration, but I’m not sure it actually makes the game better. It makes it more complicated, certainly, but those are not the same thing.

I suspect this expansion makes considerably more sense for people who play Cascadia all the time. If you have played the base game twenty or thirty times and know its puzzle inside and out, adding another layer probably gives you exactly the sort of additional complexity and variety you are looking for.

For someone like me, who is going to pull Cascadia out once in a long while, I think I would rather just play the base game.

Ultimately, I walked away with pretty much the same impression I had the first time.

Cascadia is clever, polished, easy to teach and beautifully paced. I completely understand why people love it and I certainly wouldn’t object to playing it again.

It’s simply not the kind of board game that gets me excited. I liked it. It was…

You guessed it.

Fine.

Hamlet: The Village Building Game

The last game on my list is Hamlet: The Village Building Game, which is a clever little puzzly game about, as it says right there on the tin, building a village.

Who says board game names need to be complicated?

This very colorful and incredibly busy game has players collectively constructing a village out of awkwardly shaped tiles, connecting buildings with roads and creating a network through which resources can be transported.

The ultimate goal is to use those resources to construct the central building of the Hamlet, the church. Once completed, your humble little Hamlet officially becomes a Village and the game ends.

Apparently all that separates a Hamlet from a Village is a church. Who knew?

Along the way, everyone scores points for their participation in this increasingly chaotic group construction project, with each player trying to make sure that their contribution to civic development is considerably more valuable than everyone else’s.

Of all the games we played this weekend, I think Hamlet was the only one besides World Order that really got my attention.

There was something going on here.

The village is technically a shared construction project, but everyone is naturally trying to shape that village to benefit themselves. You want roads going where you need them to go, resources available where you can reach them and buildings entering play that support whatever little economic empire you are trying to construct.

The village tiles are oddly shaped; there was no real symmetry to how the village comes together, which creates a lot of weirdness when trying to put different buildings into play. At first I saw this as a drawback, but the result was actually kind of interesting because you really couldn’t make a definitive plan on where you are going to put stuff. You sort of shoved it in where you could.

That creates some surprisingly interesting interaction because when you add something to the village, you are not simply improving your own position. You are changing the board for everyone.

Sometimes that means helping yourself. Sometimes it means accidentally helping someone else.

Sometimes it means putting something somewhere specifically because you know it is going to be a pain in the ass for one of your opponents.

Now we’re playing a board game. There were also clearly layers here that a single play did not fully reveal.

Certain buildings, for example, do not produce resources at all but can score you a considerable number of points. Building them, however, means making sure you can actually get the required resources to the right place. That requires planning your routes, understanding what resources are available and making sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin trying to accomplish everything at once.

There is a surprisingly delicate balance to all of this.

You need to pay close attention to which buildings are available, where resources are being produced and how the growing network of roads connects everything together. It is very easy to get ambitious, overextend yourself and suddenly discover that what looked like a brilliant plan two turns ago now requires you to spend several turns recovering while everyone else happily gets on with scoring points.

I did that. More than once.

That is probably what I liked most about Hamlet. When I made a mistake, it generally felt like my mistake. I could look back at what I had done and see where I had overextended, failed to plan properly or misunderstood how the village was developing.

That immediately makes me want to play again.

I also suspect there is considerably more strategy hiding underneath the colorful presentation than we uncovered during our first game. I came away thinking about different approaches I could take, different ways I could manipulate the village layout and, most importantly, things I would do differently the next time it hits the table.

That is usually a pretty good sign. I liked Hamlet.

It was clever, interactive, pretty to look at and had enough going on beneath the surface that I genuinely want another crack at it.

So after an entire weekend filled with games that were mostly some variation of fine, Hamlet managed to climb a few notches above that.

Not World Order good. But definitely better than fine.

Conclusion

This was a really fun-filled weekend; the truth is that even when games aren’t blowing your mind, it’s hard not to have a good time surrounded by friends.

I will say, however, World Order was the unquestionable king of the hill this weekend. It was a robust, clever, and deeply interactive game that really triggered an unquenchable urge to get it back to the table as soon as possible!

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Hidden Gems, On The Table

Review: Got Five! (2026)

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Some of the best games ever made aren’t built around some revolutionary new mechanic nobody has ever seen before. More often than not, new games are the result of taking a couple of familiar ideas, smashing them together, and discovering something that feels new. The fact is, most games aren’t trying to reinvent board game design; they just want to be something fun to play.

Maybe it’s Gin Rummy mixed with railroad building. Maybe it’s worker placement with dice. Or, as is the case with Got Five!, maybe it’s abstract logic combined with good old-fashioned deduction.

If you’ve ever played classics like Mastermind or even a game like Clue, you’ll immediately recognize the basic concept here. You’re given a set of information, in this case, hidden number tiles that everyone else can see, but you can’t. Your job is to figure out exactly what those numbers are using nothing but logic, deduction, and the information sitting right there in front of you.

I’m sure I’m showing my age here, but if you’re a Gen-X’er, you probably played Mastermind, it’s one of the granddaddies of deduction games right along with Clue!

Simple enough, but there is one small wrinkle in Got Five!. Everyone else is doing exactly the same thing, they have their own set of hidden tiles to figure out. The game is a race to see who gets it done first.

With a 15-minute playtime for up to 4 players, Got Five! nails that filler sweet spot, and because the rules are simple to learn and the game is colorful and bright, it’s perfect for family board game night, a no-brainer really.

The question I think I want to answer in this review is wether or not Got Five! has the chops to be a little more, a good filler for the board game geeks out there like me who are looking for an excuse to buy another shelf to put more games on.

Let’s find out!

Overview

Final Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star(4.50 out of 5) Awesome Game!

I think the most interesting thing about Got Five!, once you’ve got a few back-to-back games under your belt, is the realization that deduction and logic aren’t actually the only things going on here.

Something happens around your third or fourth game.

You realize that if you’re going to sit there and wait until you’re 100% certain about every number hidden in front of you, you’ve probably already lost.

Because the winner of Got Five! isn’t necessarily going to be the player who solves their puzzle with absolute mathematical certainty. It’s going to be the player who recognizes when they know enough, looks at the odds and pace of the game, takes a calculated risk, and goes for it.

You don’t have the luxury of sitting there like some pipe-smoking professor of mathematics, spending ten minutes constructing a flawless proof that the blue tile in front of you must be a seven. While you’re doing that, Susan across the table has made two educated guesses, solved her hand and is already looking at you like you’re an idiot.

You have to think on your feet.

When playing Got Five! for the first time, you’re going to have this feeling that you have to be 100% certain about your tiles before you guess. What you quickly realize is that you will never win a game by doing that. Some guesswork becomes mandatory.

You’re eliminating possibilities, making assumptions, watching what everyone else is doing and constantly deciding whether you have enough information to make your move. There’s logic here, certainly, but there’s also intuition, probability and just enough gambling to keep the whole thing from feeling like homework.

Abstract deduction games are difficult to describe because explaining their mechanics inevitably makes them sound far more academic than they actually feel at the table. Got Five! has some of that academic feel to it but in practice, Got Five! has the energy of a party game.

Turns move quickly. Everyone is paying attention. You’re racing against each other, second-guessing yourself and occasionally taking a shot before you’re entirely certain you’ve got the answer. Then somebody suddenly announces that they’ve figured out their tiles and everyone else groans because they were one bloody turn away.

That’s Got Five!.

It’s clever without being exhausting, competitive without being particularly mean and thinky without demanding that everyone at the table be a hardened strategy gamer.

And that’s perhaps its greatest strength.

I can see this working with almost anyone, from relatively casual players looking for a quick 15-minute game to heavy gaming nerds like myself who normally consider a rulebook under 30 pages suspiciously lightweight.

Got Five! is just a lot of fun to play, and so far, everywhere I have tried, it would take 3-4 rounds before anyone was willing to move on to the next game. A very strong sign that this one is a keeper.

Components

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: Bright, colorful, and sturdy; feels wonderful to handle, everything is perfectly tuned.

Cons: It has the look of a kids game, some might pass on it for that reason.

Components

Got Five! is a fantastic little production, especially considering that we’re talking about a 15-minute filler game here.

The tiles are chunky, colorful and feel great in the hand. The artwork is bright and clean, the numbers are immediately readable, and everything has been designed with the rather important idea that you should be able to glance across the table and instantly understand what you’re looking at.

I love it when a game has exactly what you need to play it, not a single token too much or not enough, a perfect, streamlined design that wastes nothing. I love it!

The game also comes with erasable whiteboard pens and boards for tracking your deductions, which might sound like a small thing, but it’s a fantastic addition. They feel good to use, keep everything organized and, perhaps most importantly, help keep the game moving at the brisk pace it was clearly designed for.

Even the rulebook gets it right. It’s clear, concise and doesn’t waste your time trying to turn a simple game into a 30-page technical manual. You can crack open the box for the first time, learn the rules, teach everyone else, and have your first game finished in under half an hour without anyone sitting there wondering what the hell they’re supposed to be doing.

There isn’t anything particularly extravagant here, nor does there need to be. Got Five! simply understands exactly what kind of game it is and gives you everything you need to play it in the best possible form.

It’s pitch-perfect execution.

Theme

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_star

Pros: A party-game-like atmosphere that creates a great table presence.

Cons: The game really doesn’t have a theme unless putting funny faces on tiles is a theme.

Got Five! doesn’t really have a theme. It’s very simply an abstract deduction game, but it does have this wonderfully friendly and colorful presentation that is going to get the attention of kids scanning your game shelf. Which is great, because while I think Got Five! works with pretty much any sort of gaming group, I think it’s particularly strong with kids.

More importantly, it has that perfect balance of rules, strategy, and fun where everything feels like it has been thoroughly tested, adjusted, and stripped down until the designers arrived at the ideal version of the game.

The game doesn’t really have a theme, but it has personality.

You can almost reverse-engineer the design process just by playing it.

If Got Five! used six numbers instead of five, it would essentially be the same game, except slightly longer, and I think it would start overstaying its welcome. With four numbers, it would probably be over too quickly. If you had to identify the colors as well as the numbers, suddenly you’ve added a layer of complexity the game doesn’t need. If you only had one type of action instead of the two, sorting and category questions, the deduction would become too straightforward, and the whole thing would lose much of what makes it interesting.

Everything feels like it’s sitting exactly where it should be.

I obviously wasn’t there during development, but Got Five! feels like a game that went through a hell of a lot of testing. I can easily imagine versions with more numbers, fewer numbers, additional rules and different ways of asking questions, with each unnecessary piece slowly shaved away until only the good stuff remained.

The result is a game that might technically be themeless, but still has a very clear identity. It’s bright, friendly, fast and immediately approachable, with that easygoing party-game energy that makes you want to pull it off the shelf and say, “Alright, one more.”

And because a game takes about fifteen minutes, one more usually turns into three.

Gameplay

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: A perfectly tuned game that knows its design goal and achieves it with perfection.

Cons: If you don’t like deduction games, you will only like this game instead of loving it.

In Got Five! you have a single objective: be the first player to figure out what the five tiles sitting in front of you are.

The problem, of course, is that you can’t see them.

The only information you have to work with is the tiles revealed during the game and the information you can squeeze out of the other players.

Each round, a player does two things. First, they reveal a tile. Then they get to ask one of two types of questions.

You can compare the dots on a revealed tile to one of your hidden tiles. Every tile has either one, two, or three dots on it, and the other players simply tell you whether or not they match. Alternatively, you can ask the other players to place a revealed tile into the correct numerical position among the five hidden tiles sitting in front of you.

That’s basically the game.

From those tiny scraps of information, you have to figure out exactly what five tiles you have through deduction and process of elimination. At any point, even during someone else’s turn, you can shout “Got Five!” and attempt to solve your puzzle. Get all five right and you win. Get even one wrong and you’re out of the game.

To help you along, each player has a board hidden from everyone else and an erasable marker for taking notes. The board shows all the possible tiles in the game, including their colors, dots, and values. As information comes in, you start crossing off possibilities until eventually the answer begins to emerge.

The clever bit is that you’re rarely eliminating possibilities one at a time.

For example, a sorting question might suddenly tell you that the blue, red and orange tiles in front of you are all higher than 40. Bang. Every possible tile below 40 is eliminated from those positions.

Then you notice there are only four unrevealed red tiles left. You know three of them have two dots and one has a single dot. Another player reveals a blue tile, asks whether its two dots match one of their hidden red tiles, and gets a positive answer. That little piece of information might suddenly allow you to eliminate with a fair amount of certainty several more possibilities and identify your own red tile.

That moment, when you solve it, and you realize you’re the only one, is very satisfying; you feel very superior and rightfully so!

Now you know your red tile is 21.

But that doesn’t just tell you the red tile.

If the orange tile was previously sorted to the right of it, you now know the orange tile must be higher than 21. Suddenly another chunk of possibilities disappears from your board.

One answer leads to another deduction, which leads to another, and occasionally a seemingly insignificant piece of information causes half your board to collapse.

I know that sounds slightly confusing when I’m trying to describe it in a blog post. It’s considerably easier to understand when you’re actually sitting at the table. The important point is that information in Got Five! compounds. A single reveal or answer can eliminate a surprising number of possibilities if you’re paying attention and applying a bit of logic.

In our games, we saw players solve their entire puzzle in as few as five or six turns.

And this is where Got Five! becomes wonderfully tense.

I love a good deduction game, even the classics like Clue, but with Got Five! you get that satisfaction in a much shorter game and considerably less rules explanation.

There isn’t a timer. Nobody is counting down. Yet the entire game develops this pressure-cooker atmosphere because every time a tile is revealed or a question gets answered, you know that might be the piece of information somebody else needs.

You might be sitting there thinking, I’m almost certain I’ve got this.

Then someone else shouts “Got Five!”

Dammit!

That’s the trap. You don’t really have the luxury of waiting until you’re 100% certain. Eventually you have to decide whether the information you have is good enough and take the shot, because somebody else is probably reaching exactly the same conclusion about their own puzzle.

The rules are incredibly simple, but what emerges from them is fast, competitive, and surprisingly exciting. Got Five! creates that wonderful little dopamine hit when a pile of apparently disconnected information suddenly clicks into place, and you realize you know the answer.

And then you want to do it again.

I can pretty much guarantee that Got Five! isn’t going to be played once and put back in the box. You’re going to play it again and again.

Because once you’ve solved your five faster than everyone else, it feels amazing and if someone beats you to it, that unsatisfying, can’t let it go sensation will drive you nuts.

Replayability and Longevity

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: Addictive; you’re going to want to play this over and over again.

Cons: I’m sure there is a limit somewhere; I would imagine eventually you will tire of it.

I’m going to make this one short and sweet.

From the first time I put Got Five! on the table, everyone I introduced it to was immediately hooked. There was simply no such thing as playing one game, and since then it has been played over and over again in my house.

It has very quickly become one of those standard “Let’s do a quick one” games, which I think is about the highest compliment you can give a filler.

There aren’t piles of different modes, variable setups, or mountains of content here. It doesn’t need any of that. The replayability comes from the fact that the puzzle is different every time, solving it feels great and, win or lose, fifteen minutes later you’re ready to have another crack at it.

That’s really all there is to say.

Got Five! has the chops. The 15-minute playtime makes it incredibly easy to get to the table, and the game itself makes it difficult to play just once.

It really sticks the landing.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Got Five! is a fast, clever, and ridiculously fun little filler that asks almost nothing from you. Set it up, spend a few minutes explaining the rules, and everyone at the table will be dialed in and, before long, demanding another game.

It pretty much sells itself.

This is an incredibly easy recommendation for me because I’m genuinely struggling to come up with a group that wouldn’t enjoy Got Five! It’s simple enough for kids, clever enough to keep experienced gamers engaged, and short enough that even the most reluctant board gamer isn’t being asked to make some sort of blood oath committing their entire evening to it.

Hell, this is a game even my wife will play, and we’re talking about a person regularly quoted in our house as saying:

“I hate board games.”

She likes Got Five!

Frankly, if Got Five! were on trial for whether or not it belongs in everyone’s collection, that’s the only piece of evidence I’d present.

The prosecution rests.

Hidden Gems, In Theory, Role-Player Game Reviews, RPG Preview

In Theory: Finding The Right D&D For My Group

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I don’t know what it’s like for everyone else out there, but in my local gaming group, we don’t really play D&D anymore and its a bit of a bummer. I’m going to vent and contemplate out loud today about the core issues of trying to get D&D to the table, perhaps some can relate.

First, its important to note that It’s not because my group doesn’t like fantasy RPGs. Quite the opposite. It’s because my gaming crew occupies a rather awkward little patch of RPG no-man’s-land: they don’t particularly like modern D&D, but they aren’t especially interested in Old School D&D either.

They’re too young to have nostalgia for the old stuff, but too experienced to be satisfied by modern D&D’s strange, dissociative dissonance.

In short, neither of the two schools of D&D available today to us scratches that itch.

On one side, you have Wizards of the Coast’s latest rendition of the game, 2024 5e, with all of its modern assumptions about balance, character building, and what a D&D adventure is supposed to look like. Essentially a game of levers to pull on, something very system-driven and, if I can use a strange word here, very programmatic. There is a reason why modern D&D translates so well to video games.

The success of Baldur’s Gate 3 can be attributed to a lot of things, but if I were to paraphrase it, it’s because of its quintessential D&Dness. There is no denying how well the 5e mechanics translated into a video game, it was practically made for it.

On the other, you have the OSR, which, despite producing some genuinely fantastic material, often seems determined to solve the problem by digging up rulesets from 80’s and 90’s, changing the saving throws, commissioning some wonderfully grotesque artwork and releasing it again. Most of the OSR really is a rehash of the awkward rules of a mostly fractioned base system. The systems produced by the OSR are getting better and better, but they still rely on nostalgia to pave the way and old rules are still considered sacred cows; it’s rarely based on modern game design.

Deathbringer, the latest and greatest out of the OSR, is no doubt a great rendition and take on old-school D&D using modern mechanics. I have full faith in Professor DM, and I definitely think the OSR is starting to branch further and further away from its archaic legacy systems. It’s really only in the last couple of years though, that this started happening. Most games in the OSR have sort of re-affirmed the legacy stuff, and I don’t think my players have any interest in that sort of thing.

My gaming crew wants neither.

Thankfully, they’re also an adventurous bunch. They’ll try just about any RPG you put in front of them. We don’t suffer from that peculiar condition I’ve encountered in so many gaming groups where everyone agrees that D&D isn’t quite giving them what they want, but nevertheless insists that the solution must obviously be to play more D&D, be it old school or modern.

So we wander. And, for the most part, I’m perfectly happy wandering with them. Except…

I really want to play D&D.

The strange thing is that whenever I say that out loud, I find myself wondering what the hell I actually mean. Because unlike the rest of my crew, I do suffer from nostalgia, yet I do get their point.

I’ve played pretty much every edition of D&D as it was released, going all the way back to 1st Edition AD&D. Not 0 Edition, mind you. I’m old, but I’m not carbon-dated old.

And because of that, I’ve developed a general affection for the whole ridiculous thing.

I love the settings. I love the lore. I love the mechanics, even the weird ones that require a flowchart, three tables and a brief consultation with Gary Gygax’s ghost. And I have a particular soft spot for that older style of play: dungeon crawls, hex crawls, wilderness survival, resource management, and that wonderful zero-to-hero journey where a character begins their adventuring career armed with a rusty sword, six hit points, and wildly misplaced confidence.

It’s a love affair that has lasted nearly forty years. I’m not ready to give it up.

And it’s not that I have a problem with other systems. My group is currently playing Forbidden Lands, and we’re having a blast. In many ways, that game is a love letter to old-school D&D. It captures the danger, exploration, survival, and unpredictability I love.

Forbidden Lands is one of the unique early cases of the OSR producing something modern and unique without relying on legacy D&D rules, yet firmly hardwired as an old-school-style game. It’s kind of a horror survival game in a fantasy world with a bit of a post-apocalypse feel. It actually reminds me a lot of Dark Sun.

But…It’s not D&D.

And that’s where things get complicated. Because systems do matter.

There’s something buried inside the perpetual motion machine that is Dungeons & Dragons, something that has somehow survived editions, designers, companies, rules revisions, forgotten settings, THAC0, feats, healing surges, advantage, subclasses, and approximately seven billion arguments about alignment.

It still is, something unmistakably unique, something very D&D.

Other games have captured pieces of it. Some have improved upon individual parts of it. There are RPGs with better combat systems, better exploration rules, better character development, better settings, and unquestionably better-organized rulebooks.

And yet none of them quite manage to reproduce the magic of the whole thing.

I suspect that’s part of the unspoken reason D&D remains, in the eyes of so much of the RPG community, the roleplaying game.

There’s some strange alchemy hidden between those pages. A little bit of true sorcery that designers have been trying to bottle for fifty years.

And perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe what I’m looking for isn’t old D&D. Maybe it isn’t modern D&D either.

Maybe what I actually want is the version of D&D that exists somewhere in between the editions, in the accumulated memories, ideas, mechanics, and traditions of forty years spent rolling dice around a table. I really believe that the OSR will be or perhaps already is the answer to my quest, pun intended!

I have my favorites in principle, but not in practice

I recently did a Top 10 list of the best versions of Dungeons & Dragons, and sitting comfortably at number one was 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I still consider it the best version of D&D ever produced, and not by a small margin.

That said, if you put me on the spot and said, “You can run any version of D&D you want. Pick one,” I don’t think I’d actually choose 2nd Edition AD&D.

I love 2nd edition AD&D mainly because I think it captures that D&D Sword and Sorcery feel. It does have quite a few chinks in the armor, especially when compared to modern RPG’s. It’s flawed perfection if there is such a thing.

Contradictory? Maybe. But there is a difference between the version of D&D I admire most and the version I actually want to put in front of my current group.

I love the core concepts of 2nd Edition. I love its style, its atmosphere, its assumptions about what an RPG should be, and the general approach it takes to running a fantasy adventure. But it also does a lot of awkward things mechanically, things I know would draw the ire of my players and, admittedly, irritate me as well.

There are plenty of little problems you can fix. THAC0, for example, can be turned into ascending AC with some very simple math. But the deeper you dig, the more strange little subsystems you find, and not all of them mesh particularly well with the atmosphere I’m trying to create at the table.

That’s the catch with 2nd Edition AD&D.

For me, it may be the best version of D&D, but it’s the best version when everyone sitting at the table already wants to play 2nd Edition AD&D.

Get a group of enthusiastic players who understand its quirks, accept its rough edges, and are excited about what the game is trying to do, and I think you’ve hit the perfect storm. In the hands of that kind of group, AD&D 2nd Edition is almost impossible to beat.

But I don’t have that group.

And trying to push 2nd Edition onto the group I do have wouldn’t magically recreate the D&D experience I’m nostalgic for. More likely, I’d spend half my time explaining, defending, ignoring, or house-ruling the very things they don’t like as I field complaints.

At that point, what exactly am I preserving, the game, or just the name on the cover?

D&D sucks?

Strategically, I know that playing the wrong D&D with my group is probably a bad idea. It’s just not going to go anywhere good and will ultimately reinforce the idea that “D&D sucks”, a common phrase uttered in my gaming circles. Worse yet, a failed attempt might spoil the potential of the many D&D-like games out there that reinvent its architecture in more modern and interesting ways, some of which I might actually have a chance of getting to the table.

In fact, I have dedicated a considerable amount of time over the last few years trying to find, even create, that perfect D&D variant that might actually work for my gaming crew. Past attempts have had mixed, mostly bad results, but seeing everyone genuinely enjoying Forbidden Lands, a very distant cousin to D&D, but a cousin nonetheless, has given me some new hope.

I think the trick to succeeding is first understanding what my players actually mean when they say “D&D sucks.” Perhaps not just my players but all players out there, as this reflex accusation levied at D&D is quite common no matter where you look.

After all, D&D isn’t one game. It’s not even one system. Hell, I’m not convinced it’s even one style or theme. That is both the problem and, potentially, the thing that gives me some hope.

In a strange way, I think my players actually do like D&D. They just like D&D as a concept more than they like any of the specific versions of it they have actually played.

I know, for example, that they don’t like Bonus Actions, Healing Surges, THAC0 or percentile dice rolling. They don’t want tactical combat or slow gameplay progression. They are very story-focused and generally prefer quick, sensible resolutions and abstractions over gamified lever pulling. None of this is theoretical either. These are conclusions I have drawn from games we have actually played together.

There is something else worth considering here, however, and that is execution.

One thing I have noticed about my gaming group is that even a weak system can work if the story is good and the atmosphere at the table is right. A game can mechanically be completely not our bag of chips, and we can still have a great time with it, there can still be a considerable buy-in from everyone.

Our experience with Pathfinder 2nd Edition is probably the best example.

My group played Pathfinder 2nd Edition for a pretty extended period; we bought all the books, we did a full mental buy-in, and it was fun. In hindsight, though, I don’t think the system had anything to do at all with what we enjoyed about the campaign. In fact, I would argue it was despite the system, not because of it, that the campaign was successful. We liked our characters, the story, the world. The system itself was a constant nuisance.

For all its praise as a competitor to D&D, I think Pathfinder 2nd Edition is a wildly overcooked system. It takes the “rules of the game” concept so literally that at times it feels like it has attempted to codify the entire concept of roleplaying.

We appreciated it as a rules system in the sense that we could admire the complexity and intricacy of the design, but as a practical system at the table it constantly interfered with the thing we were actually there to do.

Roleplay.

I mean, the only thing in Pathfinder 2nd Edition you don’t roll for is talking, and that’s only true some of the time.

Yet we had a great story, great characters and some amazing GMing, which produced a genuinely fun campaign despite the system being rather exhausting.

I remember leveling up in particular being one of the biggest chores. Pathfinder 2nd Edition may be the first and only RPG I have ever played where gaining a level felt more like a punishment than a reward.

Part of the problem was that the game scales so aggressively alongside the characters. Your bonuses go up, but so do the DCs, monsters and obstacles you are expected to face. The numbers get bigger, your character sheet gets more complicated and you gain more mechanical levers to pull, but in actual play it often felt like I was running just to stay in the same place.

At 1st level I might need a 15 on the die to accomplish the sort of difficult task appropriate for a 1st level character. Many levels later, after adding an impressive pile of numbers to my character sheet, I might still need roughly that same 15 to accomplish the sort of difficult task the game now considers appropriate for me.

Obviously there is considerably more mechanical nuance to Pathfinder 2nd Edition than that, but from the player’s side of the screen that was often what progression felt like.

More numbers. More abilities. More rules. More things to remember.

Not necessarily more capable, and nothing that was added improved the experience in any meaningful way, quite to the contrary, all the rules kind of spoiled the fun.

The point of this little Pathfinder detour is that I already know one important thing about whatever version of D&D I eventually put in front of this group.

It needs to get out of the way, it needs to be consumable and approachable; in a sense, it needs to be simple.

It needs quick resolutions, sensible abstractions and enough empty space for us to roleplay without constantly consulting the machinery of the game.

Because that is where my group lives. You could say we are closer to the theatre kids version of D&D than we are to the kick down the doors and murder everything that moves sort of players.

Picking The Right D&D Variant

Now I know what defenders of X or Y edition are going to say.

Don’t use mechanics to replace roleplaying. Just wing it. Change this rule. Ignore that rule. Adapt the game to your playstyle. The rules are just guidelines. Etc… etc…

The internet is full of this kind of advice, but at the end of the day the reality at the table is that whatever a system does mechanically is generally how people are going to use it mechanically.

If there is an Insight skill, people are going to use the Insight skill.

It’s just how it is.

You see the issue between role-playing, story, and player-DM desires for outcome and what a system produces when watching Critical Role. It’s so crystal clear to me that D&D 5e is the absolutetly wrong mechanic for this group, the game itself is constantly getting under their feet. It also shows, however, that a good gaming group can make any system work. I honestly believe that if this gaming group wasn’t famous running a show on YouTube and they were just playing together for fun at home, they would have abandoned D&D 5e a long time ago.

Of course, as the GM I can change rules, ignore mechanics, make rulings on the fly and generally beat the system into whatever shape I want. I’ve been running RPGs long enough to know how to do that.

But that isn’t what I want.

I want to be able to hand my players a rule system and let them use it. I want them to engage with the mechanics without those mechanics derailing either their vision or mine for the campaign, the story and, most importantly, the space they need to roleplay.

When I wrote my Top 10 Versions of Dungeons & Dragons article, one of the goals beyond simply coming up with the list was to dissect the different variants in the hope of finding one I might actually be able to put in front of my players.

Going back through that list with everything I know about my group, the process of elimination produces a surprisingly clear result.

We are currently playing Forbidden Lands, number 10 on my list, and despite its low ranking, it was a serious contender. The fact that one of my buddies independently picked it up and is currently running a campaign with it, which everyone is enjoying, suggests that I must be onto something.

Forbidden Lands gets a lot right for this group. Unfortunately, as I already pointed out, it isn’t D&D. It’s not even particularly close mechanically. It’s more like a distant cousin that occasionally shows up at the family reunion wearing a suit of armor. I love playing it, but it’s not the one I want to run.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition, number 9, has already been tried and executed for crimes against free time. It’s simply too heavy and too mechanically involved for what my group wants out of an RPG.

Castles & Crusades, number 8, has considerably more potential. In fact, this might be my second attempt if the first one doesn’t work out. It’s core sword and sorcery, relatively clean and, to me, feels a bit like an alternate history version of 3rd Edition D&D. The version we might have gotten if Gygax had remained at the helm, made his peace with some modernization, and didn’t insist on maintaining backwards compatibility with 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D.

Modern 5e, number 7, is certainly more direct than Pathfinder 2nd Edition, but for my purposes it suffers from much the same problem. Too much rules weight. Too many mechanics. Too many levers. The same basic criticism applies to 3rd Edition and Pathfinder 1st Edition at number 6.

Dungeon Crawl Classics, number 5, is an interesting one because we actually tried it.

Unfortunately, we played it online during the pandemic.

It went fine. We had fun with it. Nobody hated it, but nobody exactly fell in love with it either. Its reception was mostly just… meh.

In fairness to Dungeon Crawl Classics, I suspect that had as much to do with our general dislike of playing RPGs online as it did with the system itself. I actually think DCC is a really fun game and, on paper at least, it fits much of what I’m looking for here.

Unfortunately, those memories muddy the waters a bit. If I’m trying to sell my group on D&D again, starting with “remember that game we played online that none of us were particularly excited about” isn’t exactly putting my best foot forward.

So DCC is out.

I think Dungeon Crawl Classics is a great system overall, but it does use these rather wierd and oddly shaped dice, an aspect of the game that really serves no logical purpose. It’s just wierd for wierdness sake, it doesn’t do anything at all to make the game better.

AD&D 1st Edition at number 4 and AD&D 2nd Edition at number 1 both run into the same problem.

Legacy.

My group is simply the wrong generation for nostalgia to smooth over the rough edges. When I look at some strange subsystem in AD&D, I see history, charm and a particular philosophy about how D&D should work.

They just see a strange subsystem.

Their nostalgia lives elsewhere. 3rd Edition D&D and the Swedish classic Drakar och Demoner, known today in English-speaking markets as Dragonbane, are much closer to the games of their youth. Even those games, however, hold little interest for them as something to revisit today. They are not nostalgia gamers, to put it plainly.

Which brings me to B/X and BECMI at number 3.

I think these games come considerably closer. They are simpler than AD&D, cleaner in many places, and represent what I consider to be some of the best versions of classic D&D ever produced. There is a reason so much of the OSR traces its DNA back to Basic and Expert D&D.

But I think they would ultimately suffer the same fate.

Descending Armor Class, race as class, and all the other little artifacts of early D&D design would immediately identify the game as old to my players. I could convert things, house-rule things, and modernize things, but once again I’m back to trying to convince my players to look past the system rather than simply giving them a system they actually want to use.

And that defeats the entire purpose of this exercise.

So after eliminating the games that are too complicated, too modern, too old, too nostalgic, not nostalgic enough, already tried, mechanically unsuitable or simply not actually D&D, I am left with one game from my list.

Number 2. Dolmenwood.

Choosing Dolmenwood from the list I agonized over for the Top 10 Versions of Dungeons and Dragons was not the first thing I did to come to that conclusion. I have actually spent about 3-4 years painstakingly creating my own version of D&D for this very purpose. It was the release of Old School Essentials and games like Dolmenwood that really caused me to abandon those projects. I came to the realization that there are much better designers and writers out there, it was a much easier process to choose one of those systems.

And the more I look at it, the more I think Dolmenwood might be the version of D&D my group doesn’t know they want.

Dolmenwood – The Great Hope

There are actually five unique things about Dolmenwood that I think will register with my group and, perhaps, might do the same for a lot of modern gamers.

A Setting-Driven Game

While Dolmenwood is a D&D variant, a sort of modernized version of what 1st Edition D&D might look like if you designed it today, one of the key elements of that design is that it’s made for a specific setting.

I believe, for my group and probably a lot of groups for that matter, that a system designed specifically for its setting creates a much stronger connection between mechanics, lore, and story. The rules aren’t simply dropped on top of the world; they are part of the world.

This works much better than “generic” systems adapted to settings. In fact, I consider this to be one of D&D’s most prolific flaws as a system, despite it being responsible for the creation of some of my favorite fantasy settings.

I love the approach to story Dolmenwood takes, not just in how the books for this campaign are written, but how the writer understands that the point of a campaign setting is to be a starting point for the creativity of a GM. It hands you a seed that you can plant and grow yourself. Dolmenwood doesn’t give you a whole story, it gives you just enough for you to create your own and as such, its not a complete work, it requires a GM to write the script.

It always happens that the system just doesn’t quite match the story.

In Dolmenwood, everything from race and class selection to spells, abilities, skills, and even the aesthetic of the equipment has a story behind it. More importantly, these aren’t just bits of flavor text. They have connections to the game world that players can discover as they explore it.

Dolmenwood is also sword-and-sorcery medieval fantasy in tone, yet it departs heavily from the traditional Tolkien aesthetic and themes. This gives the game a darker, meaner, and sometimes much stranger edge, while still keeping you firmly in recognizable fantasy territory.

More importantly, it stays quite distant from the superhero fantasy of modern D&D. You are mortal creatures. You are vulnerable. You are very often outmatched by the fantastical things inhabiting this world, and that vulnerability gives those things weight.

One potential complaint I expect to field from my group is the setting’s heavy inspiration from folklore and fairy tales, which includes anthropomorphic creatures like the Grimalkin, shapeshifting cat-like people.

Yeah… I can already hear the grumbling.

I don’t think it’s going to be game-breaking, however. There are plenty of other cool choices, including naturally humans and elves, and given Dolmenwood’s old-school D&D DNA, expanding the options with compatible material isn’t exactly difficult.

Suffice it to say, I think the setting, and in particular the story behind the setting and its deep, inspired writing, is a fantastic foundation for a lot of very cool adventures.

Which brings me to the big picture.

A Grand Story With Freedom of Choice

One big thing I always look for in a role-playing game is a well-defined, structured, and organized story built into the world I’m going to run.

This is probably why games like Vampire: The Masquerade and Alternity’s Star*Drive campaign setting remain among my favorites. I’m a sucker for a great backdrop: a deep, expansive story built into the setting that occupies the imaginations of the players regardless of what goals they ultimately decide to pursue.

Dolmenwood has that in spades.

Grand history. Ancient enemies. Cultural dilemmas. Wars. Geopolitical maneuvering. Old grudges. Weird mysteries. All of that good stuff that gives players something to attach themselves to a cause, an identity, a belief and, most importantly, a sense of direction and purpose.

Many parts of Dolmenwood are really fleshed out, in particular some of the historical bad guys like The Cold Prince. To me, this is a critical part of a good setting, I want to know who the big bad guys are, what are they up to, what motivates them. Dolmenwood understands this and really gives you the tools to bring these bad guys to life.

Dolmenwood is a story filled with secrets and forgotten, dangerous places, but these aren’t simply “adventuring locations” waiting around for the players to clear them out. Everything is a set piece in a larger story.

More importantly, the history of Dolmenwood isn’t just a bunch of stuff that happened centuries ago and now sits in the campaign book as background reading for the GM. Its history is alive. The grudges, conflicts, mysteries and consequences of the past are specifically designed to matter right now.

That is the magic trick.

As soon as the players start exploring the world, they start discovering these things and inevitably become involved in the grand story hidden between the many pages of the campaign setting.

Because the mechanics themselves are also tied to that story, the players have an immediate sense of relevance in the game world. They aren’t tourists visiting Dolmenwood. They belong there.

Inevitably, they are going to become an important part of its history.

For me, that’s the perfect setup for a great D&D campaign: give the players a world already in motion, then let them choose sides and write their own script for how the story unfolds.

Mechanically Familiar & Simple

When I say I want to run D&D, I mean something fairly specific, and Dolmenwood is unmistakably D&D.

Anyone who has played D&D before is going to understand what is going on almost immediately, yet there are aspects of Dolmenwood that I think lean into the best parts of classic D&D while quietly cutting away some of the worst.

Dolmenwood is based on Old School Essentials, but where OSE was a generic system for sword and sorcery fantasy, effectively a re-edit of Basic/Expert rules, Dolmenwood is reworked with the specific setting and style that setting is trying to bring to the table. It’s so much more vivid and in focus and it’s precisely this focus that I think makes it stand out so far and beyond the game on which its based.

Gone are archaic concepts like THAC0, descending Armor Class and some of the stranger old-school subsystems. In their place are quick, standardized and easy-to-remember mechanics, with some mathematical footwork done behind the scenes to simplify elements like skill checks and combat sequencing.

In fact, many of the “new” things in Dolmenwood are really just improved versions of old things, which helps cement the idea that this is still D&D, simply designed with an eye toward modernization.

One of my favorite aspects of the game is the attention paid to areas of adventuring that traditionally become routine bookkeeping.

Dolmenwood absolutely caters to the survival aspect of old-school D&D, but it simplifies much of the resource management in a way that reminds me of Forbidden Lands. Food, water, arrows, torches and other supplies still matter because they are critical to maintaining that survival experience, but you aren’t constantly buried in microscopic bookkeeping just to preserve it.

The combat routine in particular is something I like a lot.

D&D combat has a tendency to get bogged down. It’s often slow, highly mechanical, and intensely tactical, which I have always found strangely contradictory to the fast-moving pulp fantasy heroics the game is supposedly trying to portray.

Dolmenwood goes in the other direction.

Combat is gritty, fast, furious and dangerous. Rounds are still sufficiently structured to ensure combat is tactically more interesting than a simple roll-off, but the sequence is logical and intuitive enough that the storytelling remains at the forefront.

You’re not just pulling mechanical levers off a character sheet. You’re describing actions in a role-playing rhythm, while the tactical layer quietly supports what is happening in the fiction.

Players still have roles to fill. Jobs to perform. Things they excel at. Vulnerabilities that matter.

It feels like a fight rather than a board game interrupting the role-playing session.

A Foundational Campaign

One thing about my players, and I suspect this may register with a lot of groups out there, is that they don’t really want one-shots, short adventures or to walk into a game knowing their stay is limited to X number of sessions before the story is over.

They want broad, long-term campaigns. They just don’t want to commit to one.

Welcome to adult role-playing.

A weekly campaign spanning several years is absolutely in their wheelhouse conceptually; they simply can’t reliably afford the time. So they’re resistant to short-term games while simultaneously being unable to commit to long-term ones.

It’s a wonderfully stupid problem.

I think the best answer is what I would call a foundational campaign: a setting where you can have adventures and build characters without committing to some enormous predetermined campaign arc.

The story isn’t the commitment. The place is.

The Dolmenwood Campaign Book is a massive tome, overflowing with story seeds, adventures, bad guys, awesome locations, factions, culture and so much more. Everything is written with usability in mind, you don’t have to read this book cover to cover to run a good Dolmenwood campaign. Turn to any page and it’s always a self contained, clearly defined thing you can use at the table. Gavin Norman, the creator of Dolmenwood is a master editor. The book is pitch perfect.

It’s somewhere the group can continually return to, building a shared history together, building familiarity with its denizens, and picking things up wherever they left off even if the real-world time span between sessions is months apart.

Dolmenwood is written almost perfectly for that style of play.

There are countless plots, adventure locations, strange people, mysteries and individual stories. While the whole setting is connected through a handful of larger narratives, you don’t have to embark on some epic multi-year quest to get satisfaction out of it.

There is simply a ton to do.

It’s a little bit like Diablo in that sense. You can do everything from a single-session delve to a multi-part adventure, to a grand epic quest, and none of it feels wasted because everything exists within the same lore, history and milieu.

Every adventure adds another little piece to the group’s history with the place.

Dolmenwood is good for a visit of almost any length.

Extreme Compatibility

The final piece is Dolmenwood’s compatibility with the enormous ecosystem of D&D and OSR material, and this is where the real magic happens for a GM like me.

Because underneath everything, Dolmenwood is delightfully, recognizably D&D, adapting material from across the game’s history is generally pretty painless.

Classic monsters, adventures, magic items, dungeons, and ideas can all be pulled into Dolmenwood without having to rebuild the entire game around them. Old-school and OSR material in particular is practically begging to be raided for parts, while material from newer editions can usually be converted with a little common sense.

And that matters.

After fifty years, D&D has accumulated a ludicrous amount of material. Adventures, settings, monsters, classes, spells, magic items, house rules, weird subsystems, and thousands upon thousands of ideas created by professionals, hobbyists, and lunatics with access to a word processor.

Dolmenwood gives me access to that library without forcing me to inherit all of D&D’s baggage along with it.

That’s the sweet spot.

It feels a little like a vanilla version of D&D, except one that has been remastered with modern sensibilities. It avoids much of the mechanical weirdness of old-school D&D while simultaneously sidestepping the overcooked “lever systems” of modern D&D.

The result is one of the more flexible D&D architectures I’ve encountered. And for a GM, flexibility is freedom.

It means that when I find a great monster, adventure, mechanic, dungeon or idea buried somewhere in fifty years of D&D history, my first thought doesn’t have to be:

“Can I make this work?” It’s usually: “Where can I put it?”

That swings the door wide open for creativity.

And perhaps that’s ultimately the strongest argument I can make for Dolmenwood.

It’s a version of D&D that rarely has to say no.

Conclusion

This turned out to be a much bigger article than I expected, and I’m not even sure how many people out there will relate to my very specific local gaming dilemma. But if this blog is anything, it’s an ongoing dialogue about my gaming experiences, and figuring out what RPGs I actually want to run and play has always been a never-ending challenge for me.

In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve actually run anything, in part because I’m picky about what I run. I don’t want to start a campaign simply for the sake of having a game on the calendar. I want to be excited about it, and I want to believe that what I’m putting in front of my players has a real chance of working for us.

Whether or not Dolmenwood actually makes it to the table remains to be seen.

What I do have, however, is the strange satisfaction of finally having made a decision. After digging through editions, variants, old-school games, modern games and all the different ideas about what D&D is supposed to be, I’ve landed somewhere.

If I’m going to run D&D again, Dolmenwood is the game I’m going to run.

A decision contemplated, dissected, and finally made.

Now I just need to get the bastards to show up.

Gaming Articles, In Theory

In Theory: When Star Wars Lore Becomes a Rules Engine, Not Decoration

–By Søren Kamper

Søren is a guest writer here at Gamersdungeon, and we are thrilled to have him. It’s been a well-established goal that I have wanted to achieve to have more voices speaking through the Gamersdungeon platform, so big thanks, Søren, for your contribution. You’re always welcome!
– Gamersdungeon

The best licensed games do not merely put familiar names on cards and miniatures. They ask a harder question: what should this universe force the player to do?

Star Wars is unusually easy to decorate a game with. Put Darth Vader on the box, scatter a few TIE fighters across the table, add a Wilhelm scream at a suitable moment and the licence is immediately doing visible work. The harder part begins when the box is open. A game can look exactly like Star Wars and still behave like something that could have been about medieval merchants, colonial railways or highly competitive turnip farmers. Theme is cheap when it only changes the nouns. The interesting licensed games are the ones where the verbs change too.

That is one reason Trials of Maya is such a useful recent example of the broader problem. A MOBA-inspired tabletop game cannot simply borrow colourful heroes and lanes as scenery; it has to translate a genre built around unique abilities, pressure, positioning and team roles into decisions that survive contact with cardboard. Star Wars tabletop design faces the same test. The galaxy already arrives with forty-nine years of expectations attached. The rules either turn those expectations into pressure, or they leave them sitting politely in the artwork.

The most interesting Star Wars games usually choose the former. Star Wars: Rebellion makes the Empire and the Rebel Alliance feel different before anybody quotes a film. Outer Rim turns the scoundrel fantasy into an economy of fame, jobs and people who are angry with you. Armada makes commanding a capital ship feel like issuing an order to something too large to change its mind quickly. The Clone Wars takes the relentless spread of a galactic conflict and turns it into cooperative triage. And, now, Zero Company shows that the same philosophy works when the table becomes a screen.

Rebellion: asymmetry does the storytelling

Rebellion works because its two sides are not simply different colours with slightly different unit values. The Empire has ships, troops, production and enough plastic to make the table look as though somebody has emptied a military warehouse onto it. The Rebels have a secret. Their base is hidden, the Empire has to find it, and almost every major decision follows from that imbalance. One side occupies space and gathers information. The other side survives by being difficult to locate, disrupting plans and making every Imperial deployment feel faintly suspicious.

Star Wars Rebellion is often described as “Star Wars In a Box”, a sentiment I fully agree with. It truly captures the sensation of watching A New Hope, with every mechanical and thematic detail perfectly captured. I fully agree with Soren here; it’s almost a magic trick what they manage to pull off with this game mechanically.

-Gamersdungeon

That sounds obvious because it is exactly how the original trilogy works, but that is the achievement. The hidden base is not flavour text explaining why the Rebel player starts with fewer pieces. It is the central engine. Probe cards eliminate possibilities. Imperial fleets spread out because ignorance is expensive. Rebel missions create diversions because a weaker military force cannot afford to play the same game as its opponent. Even the victory conditions are telling different stories: the Empire needs to discover and crush the base, while the Rebels need to outlast the machine long enough for resistance and reputation to grow.

There is a useful comparison with War of the Ring, another licensed design where asymmetry is not a balance problem to be sanded down but the entire point. Sauron should have armies the Free Peoples cannot sensibly match. The Fellowship should have a different route to victory. In both games, the source material gives the designer permission to make the players uncomfortable in different ways. Balance does not require sameness. In fact, sameness would destroy the fiction.

Rebellion is not beyond criticism. Repeated play can expose its structure, and the hunt for the base can occasionally end with the strategic equivalent of opening the correct cupboard by accident. But even those weaknesses reveal how completely the theme and mechanism are fused. If the search loses tension, the game loses Star Wars with it. That is a far more interesting failure than a game whose theme could be replaced by changing the card art.

Outer Rim: Han Solo is a job description

Outer Rim operates at the opposite scale. There is no galactic command chair, no Death Star to position and no reason to care which government controls the Core. The fantasy is smaller and, in its own way, more recognisably Star Wars: get a ship, find work, improve the ship, hire somebody useful, annoy the wrong faction, and become famous enough that people eventually stop asking whether the hyperdrive was legally acquired.

Never had the pleasure, but it’s been on my radar for a long time. I have an affinity for Corey Konieczka’s work, in fact, looking at my gaming shelves, this designer takes up a lot of shelf space. I believe it’s his attention to detail when it comes to linking theme and mechanics together flawlessly that sets him apart as a designer.

-Gamersdungeon

The goal is fame, but the important part is how many roads lead there. Bounties ask you to hunt people. Jobs turn the map into a chain of opportunities and complications. Cargo can be profitable until a patrol takes an interest. Reputation with the Empire, Rebels, Hutts and crime syndicates changes how safely you can move through the same space. The result is that being a scoundrel is not communicated by a portrait of Han Solo grinning from a card. It is communicated by the fact that your best plan is often profitable, questionable and likely to create a second problem before it solves the first.

That is what good thematic design does. It asks what behaviour the fiction should produce. Star Wars smugglers are not interesting because they own fast ships. They are interesting because they live inside networks of debts, favours, employers, rivals and authorities. Outer Rim turns those relationships into a playable economy. A patrol is not just an enemy token. It is a reminder that your previous decisions have a memory.

Armada: a Star Destroyer should not corner like a shopping trolley

Armada may be the purest example of a physical mechanism explaining fictional scale. Star Wars has always told us that capital ships are enormous, but film can cheat. A camera cuts, John Williams does the heavy lifting, and suddenly several kilometres of metal seem perfectly nimble. A tabletop game has to make mass something you can feel.

Soren is absolutetly correct here that Star Wars Armada captures the sensation of what we see on screen mechanically. The added magic trick is that Armada is a deep well of strategic possibilities. This is a war game in the purest sense, with a tremendous amount of Star Wars-based sci-fi realism assumptions that work as strategies. It remains one of my favorite miniature games of all time, a true masterpiece.

-Gamersdungeon

The command stack does exactly that. Larger ships plan commands in advance, with orders buried in a queue before they are executed. A navigation command chosen now may be the thing that saves you later, assuming you guessed correctly about where the battle would be by then. That delay creates command friction without requiring a thirty-page subsystem about naval bureaucracy. The Star Destroyer feels large because your intentions take time to travel through it.

Movement reinforces the same idea. The manoeuvre tool does not merely measure distance; it gives large ships arcs, inertia and commitments. You are steering a capital vessel, not dragging a miniature to a convenient spot because the ruler says it fits. The contrast with the movement-first design of Star Wars: X-Wing is instructive. X-Wing uses hidden manoeuvre dials to create the uncertainty of a dogfight, where reading an opponent matters because fighters can change the geometry of a battle in seconds. Armada slows that thought process down. Both games are about Star Wars ships, but they are not asking the same question.

This is where a licence becomes useful rather than restrictive. The designer does not need one universal movement system for every spacecraft. A TIE fighter and an Imperial-class Star Destroyer should not feel related simply because both have engines. One is a knife fight. The other is urban planning with turbolasers.

The Clone Wars: Pandemic becomes a war

Star Wars: The Clone Wars takes a more visible shortcut because its foundation is the Pandemic System. That could easily have produced a reskin: replace disease cubes with battle droids, rename outbreaks, put a Jedi on the cover and go home early. Instead, the useful question is what the Pandemic structure already understands. Pressure spreads. Problems multiply while you are solving different problems. No player can be everywhere, and ignoring one region because another looks more dramatic is exactly how a manageable board becomes a disaster.

I’m going to have to take Soren’s word on this one; I have neither played Star Wars Clone Wars, nor am I a particularly big fan of the Pandemic series in general. For me, the issue that Soren suggests is not a problem in this variant of Pandemic games is that it suffers from “Alpha Gamer Syndrome,” where a single, experienced player is pretty much going to dictate the decisions for the less experienced players.

-Gamersdungeon

That rhythm fits the Clone Wars remarkably well. Jedi move from planet to planet, droids accumulate, blockades obstruct routes, missions demand attention and villains push the game toward specific kinds of trouble. The system creates the feeling that the Republic is permanently short of time. Winning is not about clearing the map and admiring a clean galaxy. It is about deciding which crisis can be allowed to remain ugly for one more turn.

The best cooperative games understand that cooperation needs adversity rather than politeness. The appeal of designs built around genuine shared pressure is that the table has to negotiate priorities, not merely distribute chores. The Clone Wars inherits that strength from Pandemic and gives it a particularly suitable costume. Ahsoka, Obi-Wan and their allies are powerful, but the war is larger than any one of them. A Jedi can solve the problem in front of them. The rules make sure there is always another planet on fire.

Zero Company: the rules engine leaves the table

The interesting thing is that this design philosophy no longer stops at the edge of the table. Star Wars Zero Company is a single-player turn-based tactics game rather than a board game, but it is wrestling with the same question: how do you make the Clone Wars behave like more than a backdrop for blaster fire? Its answer is to make people, time and preparation into resources.

Everyone is talking about this game right now, it’s being hailed as one of the best Star Wars Games ever made by some reviewers, a claim I have heard many times said about many Star Wars Games. It does look awesome, and it’s definitely on the list!

-Gamersdungeon

On the battlefield, operators spend action points to move, attack, assist, use abilities and hold positions with overwatch. That is the familiar tactical layer. The more interesting translation happens around it. At the Den, the company chooses between missions and non-combat operations, and it cannot do everything in a cycle. Injured operators may be poor choices for dangerous deployments. Relationships between squad members can strengthen or weaken, with bonds unlocking combat synergies. Optional permadeath means a bad decision can become a permanent absence rather than a quick reload-shaped inconvenience.

A complete Zero Company guide quickly becomes less about listing guns and more about explaining those interlocking systems: squad builds, bonds, recovery, resources, the Den and the consequences of deciding who goes where. That is precisely why the game belongs in this conversation. The Clone Wars are not only represented by clone armour, familiar planets and a Jedi in the squad. The fiction is asking the player to behave like the commander of a small organisation operating inside a conflict far larger than itself.

There is a faint tabletop logic to the whole thing. You look at a roster, weigh limited actions, accept that one objective may have to be sacrificed for another and then live with the state you created. The computer handles the arithmetic, animation and line-of-sight calculations, but the dramatic mechanism is familiar: scarcity turns lore into decisions. The player does not merely watch a squad become close. The rules pay out when those relationships become tactically useful, and punish you when people are injured, unavailable or dead.

The real question is what the licence makes you do

Licensed games are often judged first by recognition. Does Vader look right? Are the miniatures detailed? Is the terminology correct? Those things matter, especially with a universe as obsessively catalogued as Star Wars, but they are the easy part. A game can pass every visual inspection and still feel strangely hollow once the first turn begins.

The stronger test is mechanical. The Empire should make you feel powerful and blind at the same time. A smuggler should make money by creating future complications. A Star Destroyer should force you to think several minutes ahead because several kilometres of warship cannot simply perform a tidy little U-turn. A Jedi in the Clone Wars should be extraordinary and still unable to be on six planets at once. A mercenary squad should become more valuable, and more frightening to risk, as its people develop relationships and history.

One example I think could have been part of this list to make the point is Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit. Strangely, the game does such an amazing job of linking theme and mechanics that it’s gained cult status among board game and Star Wars fans alike, and this is despite the fact that it’s actually not a particularly good game. It just nails that connection so well that it becomes “good” despite its flaws. It nails the point home that when theme and mechanics are synced up, even a mediocre game becomes good.

This is also why thematic games can survive long after the pleasure of recognising the artwork has faded. Star Wars: Destiny and Star Wars: Unlimited approach the licence through another design tradition entirely, but the same tension remains: familiar characters can attract us to the table, while the system has to give them something meaningful to do once they arrive. Theme is not the presence of Luke Skywalker. Theme is the set of pressures that makes a player understand why Luke Skywalker matters here.

That is the difference between Star Wars as decoration and Star Wars as a rules engine. A TIE fighter is a miniature; uncertainty and speed make it a dogfighter. A bounty hunter is a portrait; fame, contracts and faction heat make it a career. The Clone Wars is a logo; cascading crises make it a war. When the design gets that translation right, the game stops asking us to admire the galaxy from outside. It makes us obey its logic for a few hours.

And that may be the finest trick a licensed game can pull. The box eventually closes, the miniatures go back into their trays, and somebody spends ten minutes looking for the one token that has somehow migrated under the sofa. But for the length of the game, the rules made the galaxy exist.

–About the author–

Søren Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, an independent site covering the history, design and present-day world of Star Wars video games. He has been writing about Star Wars games since 2009.

Crowdfunder, Gaming Articles, Kick-Starer, News

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The Gamers Dungeon Affiliate Program

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I don’t know…. It just feels wrong somehow.

At the same time, when I find a great game and spend countless hours playing it, and writing about it and ultimately recommending it, that recommendation has value.

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Going forward, when I find a game I really like, I’m going to try to establish an affiliate relationship with the publisher, crowdfunding campaign, or online store selling it.

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You Get Something Too!

Every month, I’m going to hold a raffle for readers who purchased games through Gamers Dungeon affiliate links.

And the prizes?

Games!

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