White Castle showed up on my Top 10 Favorite Games to Play on BGA list last week, and this little worker placement game has become something of an obsession lately. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper into what makes it such a special and truly unique worker placement game.
At its core, White Castle is a dice-driven worker placement game with a heavy focus on tight resource management and a healthy dose of engine building. In other words, it’s a pretty standard Euro game on paper. Nothing about that description should have veteran board gamers falling out of their chairs.
What’s interesting is that White Castle isn’t really the sort of game that normally lands in my wheelhouse. In fact, if you’ve spent any time reading this blog, or glanced at my Top 20 Games of All Time list, you’ll know that Euro games rarely make the cut. When one does, like Dune Imperium or Terraforming Mars, it’s usually because it has earned its keep at my table as one of the very best in the genre.
Terraforming Mars remains a gold standard for Euro games in my book. Through and through, it’s outstanding in every measurable way, the only complaint I have is I don’t play it as often as I would like to. Rich, deep, meaningful gameplay, it’s a masterpiece.
I realize that makes me sound like a bit of a board gaming snob. I promise that’s not the case. I’m perfectly capable of recognizing and appreciating a great game, Euro or otherwise, regardless of genre. It’s just that Euro games often leave me feeling a little cold. They’re usually clever, well-designed, and about as exciting as a tax spreadsheet.
When a Euro game grabs my attention, that says something. When it completely takes over my BGA play history, that says even more. White Castle has done exactly that. I genuinely believe it’s operating in the same league as the genre’s heavy hitters and deserves to be mentioned alongside some of the greats.
I’m still anxiously awaiting my physical copy, but it’s clear as day that this is a very pretty game, albeit a very busy game. I would definitely put it in the “gamers” game category.
There are two things in particular that stand out.
The first is its brilliant use of dice as communal workers that every player draws from. The second is the game’s razor-sharp efficiency. White Castle wastes absolutely nothing. Every action matters, every resource feels precious, and every turn leaves you wishing you had just one more action to pull off your master plan.
It’s a master class in game design.
The Dice Workers
Most worker placement games follow a pretty familiar formula. You have your own pool of workers, your opponents have theirs, and everyone competes for action spaces on the board. That’s the core of the mechanic and, in many games, that’s about where the story ends.
The more interesting examples tend to add something extra. Age of Empires gives players different worker types that create unique opportunities and decisions. Dune Imperium layers deck building and combat on top of its worker placement system, giving players multiple ways to approach the game and interact with one another.
That’s generally where I land on worker placement games. When the mechanic exists in isolation, I often find it a little dry. It’s not that games like Russian Railroads are bad. Far from it. They’re well-designed games with plenty of strategic depth. The problem, at least for me, is that the interaction between players often begins and ends with, “Well, you took the spot I wanted.”
I know that this is a worker placement fan favorite, but it did not fare well for me. It’s a game about railroads, yet they are barely featured in the game, and it’s just a plain, run-of-the-mill worker placement game with absolutetly nothing particularly interesting happening beyond that. It was, in a word, kind of boring.
As a result, many worker placement games start to feel a little one-dimensional over time. The better ones usually find a way to add some extra flavor, some additional layer that transforms the mechanic into something more engaging.
That’s where White Castle surprised me.
At its heart, it’s still a worker placement game. It hasn’t abandoned the formula. Instead, it takes the worker placement mechanic itself and twists it into something far more interesting through its use of communal dice.
The first thing that stands out is that the dice are shared by everyone. Just like the action spaces, the workers themselves are a limited resource. Suddenly, you’re not only competing for the spaces you want to use, but you’re also competing for the workers you want to use on them.
There are a lot of dynamics in White Castle, from the cards that make up the worker placement spots to the value of the dice, no two games are going to be the same, and there is no “base strategy” that is going to work. You really have to assess what is feasible and work with what’s on the table. It’s a new puzzle every time you play.
That alone would be clever, but White Castle goes several steps further.
Each die has three different characteristics that matter.
The first is its value. Depending on where you’re placing it, a high-value die might earn you resources (coins) while a low-value die could cost you precious coins. Sometimes the die you desperately want is also the die you can least afford.
The second is its color. Different locations on the board require different colored dice to activate, which means you’re not simply evaluating numbers. You’re evaluating colors, values, timing, resources, combos, and opportunity all at once.
Then there’s the position of the die on the bridge.
Dice on the right side generally have higher values, making them immediately attractive. Dice on the left, however, grant a secondary action that becomes increasingly valuable as the game progresses. The catch is that taking a die shifts the remaining dice along the bridge. Grab the wrong die, and you might accidentally serve up an incredible opportunity to the next player.
And that’s where White Castle starts to become fascinating.
Every decision feels loaded with consequences, for a worker placement, the interaction goes far beyond “you took my spot”.
Most mechanics are communal in White Castle, but each player does have their own player board where some of your engine-building elements are managed, including some elite spot you might, on occasion, be able to leverage.
Do you take the lower value die on the left to gain the bonus action? Can you afford the resource cost? Are you opening the door for another player to grab exactly what they need? Is there a chain of actions on the board that turns an average move into a great one?
These aren’t decisions you make once or twice during a game. They’re decisions you make every single turn.
What’s remarkable is how much depth emerges from such a simple idea. On paper, you’re just selecting a die and placing it on the board. In practice, every choice feels like a small puzzle packed with tradeoffs, risks, and opportunities.
It’s one of the most elegant worker placement systems I’ve seen in years.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this approach ends up influencing future designs. The idea of communal workers with multiple competing characteristics feels like a genuine step forward for the genre. White Castle takes one of board gaming’s oldest and most familiar mechanisms and somehow makes it feel fresh again.
I was trying to think of a game that White Castle might be compared to, and while it’s a bit of a stretch, it does remind me a little bit of The Red Cathedral.
It’s simply one of the most elegant and exciting worker placement mechanics I have seen come along in a board game in a long time, and I definitely think it’s going to become a thing. You are going to see this in a lot of worker placement games in the future. This is the next evolution of worker placement games.
Now, I should say that I don’t know that this mechanic originated in White Castle; there are tens of thousands of board games out there, so I don’t want to accidentally steal credit from someone by suggesting this is the first invention of its kind, odds are it probably isn’t. Suffice it to say, it’s the first time I have seen it in a game, and I think it’s fantastic.
The Efficiency
The other thing that makes White Castle stand out is just how unbelievably efficient the design is.
This game is tight. Not “Euro game tight.” Not “carefully balanced tight.” I’m talking about the kind of tight where every game feels like you’re attempting a speed run and constantly realizing you’re three moves away from greatness.
Most of the time, you’ll come up short somewhere. You’ll miss a resource, mistime an action, or discover that one seemingly harmless decision three turns ago has come back to haunt you. Then every once in a while, it all clicks together, and the result feels magical.
Without the expansion, you’ll take just nine actions during the entire game. Nine. That’s your whole game.
Nine opportunities to create the most efficient sequence of actions possible and somehow turn a handful of resources, workers, and bonuses into a winning score.
Despite having only 9 actions in a game, your first few play-throughs are going to feel very slow. There are a lot of interactive decisions; the depth here is pretty heavy. Once you get accustomed to the rhythm, though, this game can actually be quite fast. Analysis Paralysis however, is real in this game; people are going to get stuck.
At first, that sounds restrictive. In fact, during your first few games, it feels almost cruel. Some might bounce off the game for that reason, but stick with it because this game is so much more than what you discover on the surface. Surely nine actions can’t possibly be enough. And somehow they are.
What makes White Castle special is how many possibilities exist inside those nine actions. Every move has the potential to trigger another action, generate resources, set up future turns, or create scoring opportunities. The game constantly asks you to squeeze one more drop of value out of every decision.
It’s difficult to fully explain until you’ve experienced it yourself. White Castle is one of those rare games where you finish a session and immediately start replaying your turns in your head. Not because the game was frustrating, but because you can see the path so clearly in the aftermath. You can see where two or three tiny improvements would have transformed a good score into a great one.
That’s the mark of exceptional design.
Great game design isn’t just about knowing what to include. It’s also about knowing what to leave out. White Castle feels like a game that has been refined over and over again until every unnecessary piece was stripped away.
What’s left is a remarkably focused experience where every mechanism serves a purpose and every action matters.
It’s a design that’s elegant, balanced, and incredibly satisfying to explore.
Quite frankly, it’s a chef’s kiss.
Conclusion
I’ll be reviewing White Castle in the near future, but even before putting together a full review, I can already say this much with confidence.
This game is special.
In nearly twelve years of writing for Gamers Dungeon, very few games have seriously threatened a perfect 5 out of 5 score. In fact, only one game has ever achieved it: Blood Rage.
White Castle might just be the second. That’s not a statement I make lightly.
White Castle offers an expansion that is available on BGA called White Castle Matcha, and honestly, once you know the game and try this expansion, it will be hard to imagine playing without it. It’s one of those rare cases where it feels like this expansion probably should have been included in the base game. I didn’t think so at first, probably because I tried it too early, but it’s made me a believer!
If you’re a fan of Euro games, this should already be on your radar. If you’re a fan of worker placement games, it absolutely needs to be. White Castle takes a familiar genre and manages to make it feel fresh, challenging, and exciting again.
That’s a rare achievement.
This is one of the best worker placement games I’ve played in years.
Finspan is the third entry in the growing and rather oddly named “Span” series, following award-winning Wingspan and the more fantasy-leaning and complex Wyrmspan. This time, instead of birds or dragons, the focus shifts underwater to diving and collecting fish.
Before getting into it, a bit of transparency. I came into this review without any real attachment to the series. I had not played Wingspan or Wyrmspan beforehand, so I am not coming at this as a long-time fan or someone already invested in what these games are trying to do. For me it’s a new game and a first go at the series, open mind, no preconceived notions.
That said, I did spend some time with Wingspan while preparing this review. I felt it was important to have that point of comparison, a bit of context for this review, as clearly, fans of Wingspans are going to be eyeing this one. If I were to summarize that experience, I think the best review I could give it is that it left me…. wanting. I will talk a little bit about why that is later in this review, as we make some comparisons between Wingspan and Finspan.
Wingspan was a runaway hit in 2019, winning a laundry list of awards and rising to the status of “classic” in a short span of 5 years. (no pun intended). It is a bona fide success story in the world of board games and continues to be one of the most talked-about and often played games in the hobby.
Finspan, however, is where things get interesting, albeit only slightly. While Wingspan and Finspan share a lot of the same core ideas and structure, they do not necessarily deliver the same experience. For better or worse, Finspan is a much simpler game, focused on being a kind of more accessible version of Wingspan with its own unique theme, and this is quite obvious from the onset. In fact, it could arguably earn the label of a gateway game were it not for a couple of quirky elements.
There are, however, other more subtle differences beyond the simplified gameplay and approachability of the game; the most notable thing that stood out to me is why Finspan is not just simply a 2-player version of Wingspan with a different theme. I can’t stress how different the experience is between a 2-player game and a 3+ player game.
I think the strangest thing about my experience with Finspan is how vastly worse the game got with more players. My initial experiences with the game were a two-player affair, and I have to admit, while the game was simple and a little outside of my genre preference, I still enjoyed it. It was a pretty quick, fun little engine builder and victory point salad with a charming theme and colorful components. It was… simply put, kind of fun.
Then I tried Finspan with 4 players, and it was like being run over by an ice cream truck. I like ice cream, just not from this angle. It was a dismal slog that overstayed its welcome by nearly an hour, and there was quite literally no payoff to it, not just because there is virtually no interaction between players, but there was a ton of downtime, and it swallowed up a stupid amount of table space. It was just outright boring and slow.
One thing I can say is that when playing Finspan, due largely to the lack of interaction between players, one way you can expedite a game with more players like this would be to just have everyone do their turns simultaneously. Rarely will anything anyone does on their turn affect you, so there is no logical reason why you couldn’t do this.
That contrast is difficult to review because I want to tell you that I really like Finspan, my daughter and I have played it several times, we had a lot of fun, and it continues to hit the table long after my obligation to write this review ended. That said, there is absolutetly no way I will ever play this game with more than 2 players again, because that was a truly painful experience. So does that make Finspan a good game or a bad one? It’s tricky.
I think to tackle this review, we have to answer some questions here to put things into context. Does Finspan stand on its own within this series? Is it different enough to justify a place alongside the other games? And perhaps more importantly, who is it really for?
Spoiler alert! While Finspan does look a bit complicated in a screenshot like this, the reality is, it’s mechanically a fairly simple game, something you can teach to just about anyone.
Today, we sort all that out. Let’s get into it!
Overview
Final Score: (3.05) Good Game!
The first thing that struck me about Finspan was how bold and vibrant it looks on the table. The colors really pop, and once everything is laid out, the game becomes a genuine visual feast. It immediately made a stronger impression on me than Wingspan ever did in that regard.
Bright, colorful, beautiful! The importance and impact of eye candy as a part of a game’s appeal should not be underestimated. Finspan sticks the landing here without question.
Now, to be fair, I do enjoy fishing as a hobby, so I was naturally more drawn to the theme here than Wingspan’s birds. Drawing a fish card you have caught and eaten before adds a kind of charm to the experience. There is also the fact that my experience with Wingspan was digital, played on Board Game Arena, which I personally think is not a great way to get the right first impression of a tabletop board game, while Finspan was played physically at the table. That difference alone likely plays a role in how each game landed for me. Fortunately, I’m not here to review Wingspan; we are here to talk about Finspan, and while I think a comparison is a valid addition to a review in a game in a series, I don’t think it matters how much I did or didn’t like Wingspan.
In Finspan, each round you take one of two actions. Either you play a fish card from your hand into your player board or you go diving down one of three columns representing, I guess, different types of dives (reef, coast, and open ocean?).
When you play a fish card, you typically get a one-time “when played effect,” or you get an ability you will activate each time you make a dive in the zone that the fish is in.
Additionally, each fish is worth a certain amount of points and has a wide range of potential attributes that are sort of collected for certain types of scoring opportunities that are available each round of play.
When you dive, you activate all the fish in the column that you activated, gaining various rewards like drawing cards, laying fish eggs, and stuff like that. All the little point scoring levers.
There are, of course, a few other little auxiliary things to the game, but that is more or less the gist of it. A lot of this probably sounds very familiar to Wingspan players because it’s mostly the same routine.
Beyond the much-improved presentation, Finspan felt noticeably smoother to play than Wingspan. The game is more streamlined and easier to grasp, both when learning it yourself and when teaching it to others. It takes several of the core ideas from Wingspan, trims away some of what I feel were rough edges, and presents them in a cleaner, more efficient way. The result is a game that flows better and gets out of its own way. Perhaps more accurately, the game is a lot more newbie-friendly, being the lightest variant in the series.
That said, like Wingspan, Finspan is a very solitary experience. While there are occasional moments where another player’s action might give you a small incidental benefit, there is little reason to pay close attention to what others are doing. For the most part, you are focused entirely on your own board, your own cards, and your own engine.
For me, this is probably the game’s biggest weakness, especially when playing with more than one other player. Player interaction is extremely limited, but the downtime and the length of the game increase dramatically with each added player.
At three to five players, it often feels like you are playing a solo game where you simply wait for others to take their turns, even though what they do has no impact on your own decisions.
That may not be a flaw for everyone, though. In fact, I suspect this is exactly what fans of Wingspan enjoy. Finspan delivers that same kind of energy, a quiet race to build the most efficient engine and score the most points. As a 2-player game, a race to victory points like this, where you have quick back-and-forth uninteractive turns, makes sense, but in a 3 or 4 player game, it’s just painful waiting for your turn.
I recently discovered White Castle, an amazing worker placement game that utilizes dice, and this is exactly the sort of interaction-based victory point salad I’m talking about. This game has tension, moves, and counter moves; it’s a race, and it’s super tight. This is one of those games where something someone else did on the board can ruin your day or open an opportunity that might end up winning you the game. I love that kind of tense exchange.
Despite the simplicity of the actions you can take on your turn, the game offers a fair amount of depth as a puzzle. There is a huge variety of fish (cards), each with unique powers that create lots of interesting engine puzzles to solve. Figuring out how to make the most of what you are given is where the game finds its replay value; it’s a very addictive and repeatable experience.
One area where Finspan clearly improves on Wingspan is resource management. Wingspan uses a dice tower as a shared pool of food, which introduces a level of randomness that can feel out of place in an otherwise controlled system. Finspan shifts the focus to cards as your primary resource (discarding cards to play other cards), which reduces both luck and downtime. It becomes more about planning and decision making, and less about hoping for the right roll.
In Wingspan, I thought the dice tower, while cool aesthetically, was the weakest part of the game. The impact of randomized resources really shifts Wingspan from a deterministic strategy game to a bit of a gamble. I wasn’t a fan of it at all.
I prefer games with more interaction, a bit of tension, and at least some level of confrontation. When I sit down for a board game night, I want a reason to react to what the people around the table are doing. Finspan, for all its strengths, leans more toward a personal puzzle than a shared experience. That lack of impact of other players being at the table with you weakens the experience a great deal for me, especially in larger player counts.
Bottom line is that it’s an engine-building victory point salad game, with minimal interaction and zero confrontation. Because it’s easy to learn and teach, being a much lighter game than Wingspan, it’s kind of a perfect introduction to the series and a great introduction to board games in general.
Components
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Bright, colorful, and altogether a visual feast. Great rulebooks!
Cons: With larger player counts, this game takes up a lot of relestate
Finspan is a very pretty game. It looks fantastic on the table, and the components, especially the iconography, are exceptionally well executed. As a whole, it is a pleasure to lay out and play with.
I am a bit of a stickler when it comes to iconography. When done well, it is far superior to heavy text, making games faster to learn and easier to read at a glance. That said, there is definitely a tipping point where too much iconography becomes overwhelming. A perfect example is Race for the Galaxy, which remains one of my least favorite games to teach for exactly that reason.
Fortunately, Finspan finds the right balance. The iconography does a lot of the heavy lifting, but never feels cluttered or confusing. It makes learning and teaching the game remarkably smooth, supported by a rulebook that is clear, concise, and refreshingly easy to follow. I can comfortably teach this game in about five minutes and have everyone up and running without any friction.
Iconography can be a curse or a blessing. I really love playing Race For The Galaxy, but teaching it is a nightmare, and overkill on iconography is the root cause. Once you get it, it’s fantastic, but if you want to play it with me, watch a YouTube video!
My biggest gripe with this game’s components is their size; again, this applies only to games with more than 2-players, but the amount of table space it takes up is kind of insane. I shit you not to play this 5-player game; you will need about as much room as you would need for a 6-player Twilight Imperium game. I assure you, most people do not have a big enough table to play this game with a full player count. I’m not sure how this didn’t come up during play testing.
I’m not sure “taking up too much space,” however, is a rating-reducing offense. For the most part, this game is beautiful, as a gamer, that counts for a lot in my book.
Theme
Score: Tilt:
Pros: While marine enthusiasts and divers might not agree, I think Finspan nails a fun, gratifying fishy theme
Cons: The enthusiasm for the theme gets dragged down by larger player counts.
I was not expecting Finspan to be particularly thematic when I opened the box, and I am still not entirely convinced that it is in the traditional sense. That said, there is a certain charm to it that just works.
Every card represents a unique fish, and that alone gives the game a subtle collectible feel. Playing them onto your board and then activating them as you dive adds a layer of satisfaction that is hard to fully explain, but easy to appreciate once you are in it.
When it comes to theme, Finspan sticks the landing like an Olympic gymnast; I’m not sure how you would improve it, considering the subject matter, but it’s fair to say I’m no expert in diving or fish, so I’m speaking mostly to the aesthetic.
Whether that qualifies as “thematic” is up for debate. I am no expert on diving or marine life, but the combination of the theme and the simple, approachable gameplay creates an experience that feels cohesive and inviting.
This is also the kind of game I could comfortably put in front of non-boardgamers without much hesitation. It is easy to grasp, visually appealing, and does not come with the usual baggage that might scare people off. It feels like a family game, though probably best suited for a smaller group.
That is really where the theme feels strongest. At two players, and to a lesser extent three, the rhythm of drawing cards, diving, and scoring points flows nicely. The game moves at a pace where the experience feels engaging, and before anything becomes repetitive, you are already wrapping up and counting points.
Once you push beyond that player count, the experience starts to lose some of that charm. Drawing a card and being excited about the fish you got kind of loses its luster when you’re doing it once every ten minutes. The pacing slows so much at higher player counts that whatever thematic immersion the game builds begins to fade.
So yes, I would say Finspan does deliver a thematic experience, but much like other aspects of the game, it works best at two players, maybe three. Beyond that, the magic starts to slip away.
Gameplay
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Solid, easy to learn and teach engine builder with a very streamlined and satisfying game loop.
Cons: Lacks meaningful interaction and is an absolute drag at larger player counts.
Finspan does several things that I think are genuinely clever, but three elements in particular stand out as major improvements over the original concept established by Wingspan. Now, I have not played Wyrmspan, so I cannot say how much of that game carries over here, but it is very clear to me that Finspan aims to be a more streamlined and accessible version of the same core design philosophy, and for the most part, I think it succeeds.
After trying Finspan and seeing some potential in the series, despite my less-than-stellar experience with Wingspan, I think Wyrmspan is worth a go. Who doesn’t love dragons?!
The first thing that stands out is the sheer variety of beautifully illustrated fish cards. Every fish feels distinct, and there are countless combinations and strategic uses for them. Building your engine by carefully adding fish to your board is consistently satisfying, and watching those synergies come together is where much of the game’s appeal lives.
I would actually argue that Finspan handles this far better than Wingspan. The strategic role of each card is more intuitive and immediately understandable. You can glance at a fish and quickly grasp what it is trying to accomplish, both the short-term boost and how it fits into a long-term strategy. Wingspan’s cards are not necessarily more complicated, but I often found their place within the broader strategy less obvious and harder to piece together naturally. Admittedly, my experience with Wingspan is limited, but when playing Finspan, it was so obvious and easy to decode that it all just felt more intuitive. I did not have that experience with Wingspan.
The second major improvement is resource management. Finspan feels far more deterministic, which makes it feel like a strategy game first and a gamble second.
I do not mind randomness in games when it creates tension or memorable moments, but my experience with Wingspan was that the randomness often blocked me from executing the strategy I actually wanted to pursue. The dice tower resource system felt clumsy to me because the unpredictability existed in the worst possible place, resource generation itself. It constantly interrupted planning. It reminded me a little too much of Catan, and that is not a compliment coming from me.
I love dice towers, I’m using the word love here! But it has to be executed in a way that doesn’t undermine the game’s core decision-making. In Dirk Henn’s Shogun, the dice tower is used to determine who wins the fight. It’s used at a time when all of your strategy and planning is already in place; now it’s time to see if it works. That’s exciting, it’s fun. Rolling a die to see if you get the resources you need to execute a strategy you want is less strategy and more gambling. I just don’t think it works in Wingspan.
Finspan handles this much better. Your cards and your board effectively become your resources, and there is far less randomness interfering with your plans. You are making deliberate decisions instead of simply hoping things line up correctly. When your strategy works, it feels earned. It feels like good planning rather than good luck.
The third improvement is how the game handles scoring objectives and long-term planning. In Wingspan, I often felt that bonus objectives came down to luck. You could not reliably plan around them because card access and resource access were too inconsistent. Even when you got the cards you wanted, you still had to hope the resource system cooperated enough to let you actually play them in time for it to matter.
In Finspan, those same goals feel much more achievable and controllable. The bonus objectives are clearer, more direct, and easier to intentionally build toward. Because the game gives you greater control over your resources and a wider range of useful card options, planning ahead becomes far more rewarding. You are rarely forced into awkward short-term plays simply to chase points. Instead, your decisions feel connected to a broader strategy.
While fish cards score their share of points, one of the primary ways you are going to dramatically increase your score is by completing the weekly objectives (each round). This is a key to the game, and it’s what you are building your engine for primarily.
From beginning to end, Finspan simply feels more like a true strategy game than Wingspan ever did to me.
That was a lot of comparison, though, so let’s talk about Finspan on its own terms.
One of the game’s greatest strengths is its streamlined gameplay loop. On your turn, you are essentially making one of two choices: play a fish card or go diving, a strength it shares with the rest of the series. I love it when games with genuine strategic depth keep their core actions simple and easy to understand. It allows new players to grasp the structure quickly and start thinking about meaningful decisions almost immediately.
Finspan excels here. It is lightweight, approachable, and easy to teach, but those two simple actions create a surprising amount of depth over the course of the game. The pacing feels clean and efficient, and mechanically, I think the game absolutely sticks the landing.
That said, I have already touched on what I see as the game’s biggest issue, the lack of interaction between players. At two players, I find this much easier to tolerate because the game moves quickly enough to maintain momentum. But even then, what other players do on their turns rarely matters to you in any meaningful way.
The bigger issue is not just the lack of interaction, but the inability to affect another player’s progress at all. If someone builds a stronger engine than you, there is essentially nothing you can do about it. You cannot interfere, slow them down, block them, react, or force them to adapt. Everyone is simply building their own machine in parallel.
Because of that, playing with other people often feels functionally identical to playing solo, only slower. That is probably my biggest criticism of the game because it undermines some of the excitement generated by the otherwise excellent engine-building mechanics.
I also found the game strangely lacking in tension. Since scoring is mostly hidden until the end, you rarely have a sense of whether you are winning or losing during play. Combined with the lack of player interaction, the entire experience can feel a little too gentle and detached for my tastes.
Hidden scoring, I think, in general, is a bad idea in all games. Seeing the numbers go up is not only satisfying but also creates a natural tension between the players. In a game with so little interaction, having a score tracker on the board was one place the game could have benefited greatly.
That alone is not enough to keep the game off my table. I still enjoyed Finspan, and I do not mind playing it. But when I compare it to other games in the same general space, games with similar complexity and strategic depth that also include meaningful interaction, Finspan struggles to stand out for me personally.
At the end of the day, I think Finspan is a good game. In many ways, it is a very smartly designed game. It just never fully grabbed me because the experience feels so isolated. The mechanics themselves are solid, often excellent even, but the lack of interaction keeps the game from reaching the next level, resulting in a kind of average Euro.
Replayability and Longevity
Score: Tilt:
Pros: As a 2-player joust, it feels quick and dynamic, with plenty of strategies to explore.
Cons: This is a solo game you can play around the same table; there is so little interaction that there is no reason to play this in turn order.
This was probably the hardest category for me to judge when it comes to Finspan.
On one hand, the game taps into a very satisfying formula. There is that familiar rhythm of drawing cards, getting them into play, and watching your engine slowly come together and generate points. It is a system that is undeniably compelling, no doubt, while Wingspan is so popular. Many of my favorite games follow this variation on this pattern, and I have played some of them so much that I have quite literally worn out the components.
The difference between those games and Finspan is that those games usually include some level of interaction. Whether it is indirect pressure through shared spaces, like in worker placement, or more direct forms of disruption, other players create tension. They force you to adapt, rethink, and respond; they threaten your engine and your plan. Without that, a lot of the long-term appeal starts to fade.
With more solitary engine builders like Finspan, I tend to feel that the game gets “solved” over time. Even with variability from card draw, there is nothing actively pushing back against your strategy. No one is getting in your way, no one is forcing you off your plan. And for me, simply chasing a higher score, even with solid play like this, is not always enough to keep me engaged once the novelty wears off.
That said, I have seen the other side of this, probably something akin to what is happening with Wingspan in the wider community. My daughter really enjoys Finspan and regularly asks to play it. From her perspective, the lack of interaction does not seem to matter at all. She is fully engaged in building her own board and improving her score, and that is enough.
Finspan, I think, would have done much better as a two-player game, especially if you added some interaction between players with card selection and competition for point scoring, akin to something like 7 Wonder Duel. Trying to turn Finspan into a 4-5 player game, I think, was a bad idea; it’s clearly not a good fit for that.
My point here is that whether or not this game has staying power, that all-important replayability is not inherently a problem for this game. This puzzle has many functioning solutions, and it’s sufficiently dynamic for each game to be a unique experience. The absence of interaction, that’s a matter of preference as to whether or not that kills it for you. I recognize that my view, that a lack of interaction and contention hurts replayability, is not shared by everyone. In fact, quite to the contrary, Wingspan is proof of that. It remains hugely popular and widely loved.
For that reason, I do not see any obvious barrier to Finspan having strong replay value for the right audience. It may not be my personal preference, but if you enjoy this kind of low-interaction, engine-building experience, there is no reason to think Finspan would not hold up over time any more or less than Wingspan has. There is plenty of mechanical depth to explore a wide range of strategies, and it has the advantage of being an easier game to get into.
Conclusion
Finspan is a bit of a quandary for me. I genuinely like it, and I do think it is a good game, but it falls firmly into that category of “good, but flawed.”
The good is easy to identify. The game is simple, mechanically polished, visually appealing, and genuinely enjoyable to play. It is streamlined without feeling shallow, approachable without feeling dull, and there is a satisfying rhythm to building your engine and watching it come together over the course of a session.
The flaw, at least for me, is the near-complete absence of player interaction. In a board game, I personally want tension at the table. I want players affecting each other’s plans, forcing reactions, creating moments of triumph and frustration. That push and pull is a huge part of what makes board games exciting to me.
At the same time, I recognize that this is ultimately a matter of taste rather than an objective design failure. A lot of players don’t want confrontation in their games. They don’t want their plans disrupted or their strategies blocked. The very things I see as essential to a great board game are, for many people, the exact things they try to avoid.
So while I have to judge Finspan by my own standards, because this is my review and not a committee decision, I also understand why games like this resonate so strongly with such a large audience. This is not a problem unique to Finspan either. I often feel this same disconnect with many highly regarded Euro games.
At the start of this review, I asked three important questions, and I think now is the right time to answer them directly.
Does Finspan stand on its own within this series?
Absolutely. In fact, I think Finspan is probably the best entry point into the Span series. It feels like the most approachable and newcomer-friendly version of the formula. If you enjoy Finspan, there is a good chance Wingspan or Wyrmspan will appeal to you as deeper and more complex variations on the same core ideas. If Finspan does not work for you, I am not convinced the others will change your mind.
Is it different enough to justify a place alongside the other games?
I definitely think so. In fact, I suspect many Wingspan fans may actually prefer Finspan’s more deterministic style of strategy. The cleaner resource management and more controlled gameplay give it a very different feel, even if the foundation is familiar. I see no reason why Wingspan and Finspan cannot comfortably exist on the same shelf, and for some players, I could easily see Finspan replacing Wingspan entirely. Personally, I think it is the stronger game.
Who is it really for?
Unsurprisingly, Finspan is clearly aimed at fans of Wingspan and Wyrmspan, but I do not think that is where its audience ends. I think Finspan works very well as a light, accessible Euro game that requires no prior knowledge of the series at all.
It’s easy to teach, easy to learn, visually inviting, and mechanically satisfying. While I personally find the lack of interaction holds it back, I suspect that will not be a major issue for the audience this game is targeting. If anything, that relaxed and low-pressure style may be exactly why so many people will enjoy it.
At the end of the day, I think Finspan is a fun game. More importantly, my daughter enjoys it, and honestly, that alone probably guarantees it a permanent place on the shelf. Any game you can get to the table and entertain people with is a good game, and Finspan definitely falls into that category.
When Dewan first landed on my table, my eyes didn’t go to the rulebook, the components, or even the promise of gameplay. They went straight to that absolutely mesmerizing cover art by Arthus Pilorget. It’s surreal, vibrant, and just the right kind of strange, like a dream you can’t quite explain but don’t want to wake up from. There’s an immediate sense of identity here, a bold, artistic swagger that practically demands your attention. And yeah… I love it.
Beneath that dazzling, slightly offbeat exterior lies something far more restrained: a deeply abstract puzzle game. There’s nothing wrong with that, far from it, but when the art sets the stage this dramatically, part of you can’t help but expect something equally theatrical underneath. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe that’s just the spell the artwork casts. Either way, I always like to capture my raw, first impression, the unfiltered “wow” before the mechanics settle in. So yes, let the record show: very cool art.
Anyway, enough gawking, consider me thoroughly impressed, and let’s dive in.
I feel compelled to put this piece on my blog; it really defines the term, artwork! Anyone who says that A.I. will replace artists is kidding themselves, a machine can copy it, but nothing like this will ever originate from a machine, no matter how much we invest in them.
Dewan sits comfortably in that delicious design space of deceptively simple mechanics wrapped around a surprisingly deep strategic core. At first glance, it feels approachable, almost gentle… but give it a few plays, and suddenly you’re in deep waters, wrestling with decisions that feel sharper, tighter, and far more consequential than expected. It’s a slow burn in the best way, subtle at first, then steadily revealing layers of tension, bite, and competitive edge. And make no mistake, this game can get spicy once players find their footing. It’s a lot more confrontational than it appears or the rules suggest; there is strong, in-your-face interaction here.
What really elevates Dewan, though, is its ever-shifting landscape. The game is map-based, and crucially, you build that map yourself at the start of each session. The result is that no two games feel remotely alike. Forget rehearsed openings or safe, go-to strategies; this is a game that thrives on adaptability. You’ll need to think on your feet, pivot constantly, and embrace the chaos of a board that refuses to play by familiar rules. I really liked that a great deal; it speaks to replayability and longevity, so we are off to a great start.
I find it interesting how wildly different I saw this map during the first 3 plays of this game and how I see it now. The learning curve is not steep, but there is understanding and meaningful knowledge, a transition that takes a few plays to appear.
I also struggled to pin down a clean comparison, and that’s a fantastic thing. In a hobby full of echoes and iterations, Dewan feels refreshingly, confidently unique.
So right out of the gate, we have a strong opening and a lot of great potential. The question is, does Dewan deliver on the promise? Let’s find out!
Overview
Final Score: (4.05 out 5) Outstanding Game!
If you really want to get a grip on Dewan, the cleanest way to unpack it is to think in three interlocking layers: the razor-thin scoring system, the slick card-driven action engine, and the ever-present, quietly cutthroat area control on the map. The game demands that a player be efficient, which, coincidentally, is how I would describe the way the game was designed.
Let’s start with the path to victory, because this one is tight. Points are scarce, precious, and just a little bit elusive. You’re not racking up big numbers here; instead, most of your scoring trickles in through the completion of story cards (think elegant little objective puzzles). These ask you to control specific terrain types, mountains, forests, and deserts, and convert that control into a sort of resource checkbox. There are a few bonus avenues for points, plus a shared scenario card that sweetens the pot for everyone, but the real magic lies in efficiency, not overwhelming acquisition.
The trick is to chain your story cards together so they overlap in clever, satisfying ways, squeezing maximum value out of minimal effort on the board. It’s less about doing more and more about doing just enough, brilliantly. If that sounds like a hobbit riddle, well, the game kind of is that.
The Story cards tell you what resources you must collect, but you unlock these as you go, and there is no telling what cards will be available when it’s your turn to pick one. This might be the only time a bit of luck can help you. Finding a way to make use of the same resource in more than one story is key to a successful run.
Actions are governed by the card system, the pulsing, strategic heartbeat of the game. Each round, you’re faced with an illusively tense choice: play cards to move across the board and establish settlements (your claim to territory), or pause to draft new cards from a constantly shifting market. It’s simple on paper, but in practice every decision feels like a tiny, meaningful gamble. Efficiency, again, is everything. Waste a move, and you’ll feel it, and while you may have a plan, opportunities difficult to pass up come up all the time, and knowing when to take them and when to pass is kind of the key to the game.
At the start of the game, the board feels wide open, brimming with possibility. Resources seem plentiful, and on the dynamically built map, opportunities are abundant. You might even think, “Hey, this isn’t so hard.” The game will correct that perception rather quickly.
Because Dewan hides a beautifully designed rule at its core: connected territories of the same type only count as one terrain type. I would imagine when the designer came up with that, the rest of the game laid out for him like a solved puzzle.
You might think that having 5 deserts so close together is a lucky break; it will make checkboxing deserts quick and easy, but the reality is that you are looking at one big desert, which is catastrophically bad. It not only forces you across it, meaning you need to collect desert cards to move through them, but settling more than one of these deserts is useless.
Those four cozy mountain tiles clustered near your starting position look like a goldmine… but mechanically, they’re just a single, lonely mountain. Suddenly, the board shifts from inviting to demanding. That one rule, simple, elegant, slightly cruel, completely reshapes how you approach the game. You can’t just carve out a neat little slice of the map and call it a day. You’ll need to spread out, stretch your reach, and compete across the entire board, and you can be certain your opponents will be doing the same.
And here’s the kicker: moving across that board costs cards. Every step, every expansion, every ambitious grab for territory eats into your limited hand. So once again, the game whispers its central mantra, do more with less. The game could have been called “Optimization,” and that would have been on point.
There’s a lot more bubbling beneath the surface, layers of nuance, timing, and tactical brinkmanship, but even at a high level, you can feel it: Dewan is one of those games where the rules are deceptively simple, but the decisions are gloriously, brain-meltingly complex.
And that’s fascinating. Genuinely.
But also very abstract, and if I’m being honest, just a little outside my personal taste. I can absolutely appreciate what it’s doing; there’s a deep, rewarding well here for players who want to dive in, explore, and master its many subtleties. This is a game that could easily sustain dozens, maybe hundreds, of plays for the right audience. It’s well designed, well balanced, everything you could want as a general board game fan, but general is not my sweet spot.
Three times during the game, you will be allowed to slip a card under your board, which gives you both the terrain and resource on that card. This requires good timing and preparation, but is quite important for scoring purposes.
For me, Dewan lands squarely in that familiar category of: “This is excellent… just not entirely my thing,” which simply means I’m happy to play it, but it won’t necessarily find its way into my permanent collection.
It’s not so much a judgment as it is a preference, but I will say that games like Dewan sometimes win me over, over time. I’m not in a rush to cull it. I recognize that while I have my preferences, sometimes these sorts of puzzly games win me over, and Dewan certainly has the potential to do just that.
Components
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Outstanding quality through and through, the art is just a cherry on top!
Cons: I would have liked to see a rules reference for this one.
The component quality, judged across my three core pillars: physical durability, artistic execution, and clarity, puts Dewan on a clear path toward a perfect score.
Frankly, there’s very little to criticize here. The components are crafted from thick, resilient stock that feels built for countless plays. Visually, the game leans fully into its charming, whimsical art style, maintaining a cohesive and inviting aesthetic across every piece. The iconography does present a slight learning curve at first, but once it clicks, it reveals itself to be clean, intuitive, and thoughtfully placed; everything communicates exactly what it needs to, exactly where you expect it. And the box insert is exceptionally well-designed, snug, practical, and oddly satisfying in its precision.
The rulebook, however, is where things get a bit more nuanced. My initial instinct was to criticize it. It adopts a “teach-as-you-play” approach rather than functioning as a structured reference guide. While this makes onboarding smooth and approachable, it becomes less convenient when you need to answer a specific question mid-game. Instead of quickly locating a rule, you may find yourself digging through the flow of the gameplay explanation to uncover it.
The vivid and colorful art make this game a pleasure to look at, but I have to say it again, art this good belongs on something less abstract; this artist should be working on RPG’s!
This is a hill I will happily die on: every game should include a dedicated rules reference for quick lookups, especially for edge cases and commonly misunderstood elements.
In Dewan, those questions will most often revolve around iconography and scenario cards, which can feel slightly opaque during your first few plays. That said, this is far from a dealbreaker. The game itself is elegantly simple, and once those early uncertainties are resolved, you’re unlikely to revisit the rulebook at all. The rules are streamlined, logical, and easy to internalize.
Overall, this is a beautifully produced, impressively polished game, one that doesn’t just meet modern board game production standards but confidently exceeds them.
Theme
Score: Tilt:
Pros: If we were judging the theme on art alone, this would be 5 stars!
Cons: The theme is mostly irrelevant to the game, but as an abstract game, it doesn’t really need a theme.
The theme isn’t exactly the beating heart of Dewan, in fact, it barely registers as a pulse. Outside of its enchanting, fairy tale-inspired art style, there’s very little here to anchor the experience in a meaningful narrative, leaving me with surprisingly little to dig into.
Beyond a scattering of light flavor text in the rulebook, the game offers only the faintest hint of context. You’re… expanding a village, exploring, for reasons that remain charmingly vague and conveniently unexplained. It all feels more like a decorative backdrop than a driving force, pleasant to look at, but ultimately insubstantial. It’s an abstract game, plain and simple.
What this game lacks in theme, it makes up for in great gameplay and, more importantly, amazing style. The vivid use of light here is amazing!
I’m not even sure what else can be said. This is precisely where my tilting system earns its keep. While Dewan’s theme is undeniably thin, almost ethereal in its absence, it also doesn’t detract from the experience in any meaningful way. The game isn’t trying to tell a story, and it doesn’t need to.
So yes, the theme may be wispy, but crucially, it’s also harmless, an aesthetic flourish rather than a foundational pillar in an otherwise abstract puzzle game beautifully executed.
Gameplay
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Fantastic design, I foresee this game winning some awards.
Cons: Can be quite unforgiving, takes a few plays before it clicks.
While the theme in Dewan barely leaves an impression, the gameplay is the undeniable centerpiece, the beating heart and razor-sharp mind of the experience.
For a game with such elegantly simple rules, Dewan hides a remarkable amount of depth beneath its surface. It’s one of those deceptively “light” designs that quickly reveals a dense, cerebral core the moment you start making meaningful decisions.
If I had to distill what makes Dewan stand out, it’s that it belongs to a lineage of games rooted in mathematical integrity. This is a design built on balance, probability, and precision rather than flashy mechanics or familiar systems. It feels engineered in the best possible way, echoing the philosophies of designers like Reiner Knizia, Vlaada Chvátil, and Alexander Pfister. In that sense, Johannes Goupy and Yoann Levet have crafted something that feels refreshingly deliberate and structurally sound, without the usual copy/pasting that makes it easily definable as “just like X game”.
Where many modern games lean on familiar frameworks, worker placement, deck building, and action selection, Dewan confidently carves its own path. It doesn’t rely on genre shorthand. Instead, it builds tension and decision-making from first principles, and the result is something that feels both fresh and intellectually satisfying.
From the very start, variability defines the experience. Randomized terrain, shifting board layouts, and scenario (or “story”) cards ensure that no two games unfold the same way. Yet impressively, this randomness never undermines balance. The scenario cards feel meticulously tuned, difficult to achieve regardless of your starting position. You won’t luck into an easy 8-point score just because the board happened to favor you. That level of consistency in a dynamic setup is no small feat; it’s careful, disciplined design. Anyone who has ever tried to design a game knows just how painful balancing dynamic mechanics can be. It’s clear this game went through rigorous testing to achieve this result.
The pacing is another standout strength. Every village placed tightens the board, increasing both spatial pressure and urgency. The game subtly transforms into a race, not just to score efficiently, but to act before opportunities disappear. You want to craft perfect, optimized turns… but the game rarely affords you that luxury.
This is a pretty fast-paced game, you’re going to take maybe 12-15 actions before the game ends, and you know you’re doing well if you are the one putting the pressure on other players to keep up. There is definitely a race here; faster is in fact, better. The result is that in a typical game night, you are probably going to play this more than once.
This creates a fun and sometimes frustrating tension. Dewan is a puzzle under pressure, a game where careful planning collides with the constant need to adapt and race to the finish. Mistakes are not easily forgiven; there just aren’t enough turns for you to course correct a mistake.
Player interaction is also more pronounced than it first appears. This isn’t a solitary optimization exercise; it’s a shared, contested space. You need to track opponents closely, anticipating their moves, disrupting their plans, and adjusting your own strategy accordingly. Blocking becomes just as important as building, and though this skill takes time to develop, it is more often than not the key to a tight victory.
One particularly elegant design choice is the terrain drafting system. When selecting terrain cards, you must take two adjacent cards rather than freely choosing any combination. It’s a small rule with enormous implications. Even when the exact pieces you need are visible, they’re often just out of reach. This forces compromise, sacrifice, and creative problem-solving, adding another layer of often painful decisions to the puzzle.
Drafting cards in Dewan is really very key. I’m not even exaggerating that one bad decision, especially when playing with experienced players, can make the difference between winning and losing. It’s very unforgiving, which I actually liked quite a bit.
And that’s really the magic of Dewan. With only two types of actions per turn available, the game manages to feel surprisingly weighty, filled with difficult choices. Every choice ripples outward, interacting with the board state, your objectives, and your opponents’ plans. It’s tight, demanding, and deeply engaging.
That said, this style of design comes with its trade-offs. There’s no real catch-up mechanism. Strong, optimized play is rewarded, and mistakes can be costly. In fact, the game is so tight that even a single bad call can and often will cost you the game. It is a puzzle game that demands perfection. In many games, you may find yourself identifying the likely winner well before the final turn. Fortunately, Dewan keeps things brisk, typically wrapping up in 30–45 minutes, so even a losing position never overstays its welcome. You won’t have to wallow in your defeat for long.
At its core, the gameplay loop is beautifully simple: control space, match terrain to objectives, and position your camps to maximize scoring opportunities. But the path to doing so is filled with clever constraints and constantly shifting decisions that keep every turn engaging.
Dewan succeeds because it embraces one of the purest goals of game design: when you lose, you know exactly why, and you immediately want to try again with a better plan.
That’s not just good design. That’s great design.
Replay-ability and Longevity
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Dynamic starting setup and unique scenarios make this game very replayable. Works with all player counts equally well.
Cons: Playing with new players can be a little unfair; it’s not that much fun until it clicks for everyone.
The first couple of plays of Dewan, I have to be honest, felt a little… samey. Not bad, not boring, just oddly flat. The competitive edge hadn’t quite surfaced yet, and I struggled to see where the long-term excitement or replayability was supposed to come from. It all felt a bit too neat, a bit too contained, like a clever puzzle that might not have much more to say after a few rounds.
And then, somewhere around the third or fourth play, it clicked for me and I’m glad I stuck around to see it.
That’s when it hit me: everything I thought I had learned was not nearly as useful as I expected. The game’s dynamic, randomized setup completely reshuffles the puzzle every single time. What worked before doesn’t necessarily work again. There’s no “perfect opening,” no reliable flowchart to follow, no cozy strategy to fall back on. Dewan quietly pulls the rug out from under you and says, “Figure it out… again.”
And that’s where it comes alive.
Each session feels like a brand-new puzzle with familiar rules but a wildly different personality. The structure stays consistent, but the execution constantly shifts. The game is constantly demanding adaptation. It’s like solving a new riddle using the same language, recognizable, yet endlessly surprising.
Now, sitting here after about a dozen plays, I feel pretty confident saying this: the replayability here is, for all practical purposes, limitless. You might eventually step away from it, but it won’t be because you’ve “solved” it or fallen into repetitive patterns. This game doesn’t let you do that.
You’re not going to score a lot of points in this game, and most end-of-game scoring is going to be very tight. Every point matters in this game; you have to squeeze it for everything you can get out of it, there is no room for sub-optimal play.
If you have a soft spot for light, puzzly Euro games, the kind that reward clever thinking, efficient play, and a willingness to adapt on the fly, then Dewan is going to feel right at home on your table. It’s a sharp, thoughtful design with a wonderfully dynamic core, and that ever-changing setup does a ton of heavy lifting when it comes to keeping things fresh.
A great design, a tight balance, and endlessly shifting starting conditions, together, give Dewan a replayability that feels not just strong, but effortlessly alive.
Conclusion
I always find games like Dewan uniquely difficult to review, and not because they’re flawed, but because they’re so clearly, so quietly excellent. After decades of playing board games with near-obsessive enthusiasm, and more than ten years of dissecting and reviewing them, you develop an instinct for design, an ability to recognize when something is finely tuned, meticulously balanced, and thoughtfully constructed.
And make no mistake: Dewan is exactly that. It is subtly, almost deceptively, brilliant.
But the beauty of a conclusion is that the analysis is done. The score is set. The critical lens can finally be set aside, and I can just speak as a player.
And as a player, I can say Dewan is a game I deeply respect more than I personally love. It’s excellent, I’m just not its target audience.
It’s an elegantly engineered experience that will absolutely resonate with the right audience. For me, though, it sits just outside my usual preferences. That said, I have no doubt it will continue to hit the table. Its quality all but guarantees it, people will discover it, appreciate it, and want to play it again and again. And importantly, I never found it frustrating or grating in the way more abstract, puzzle-heavy games sometimes can be. It’s thoughtful without being exhausting, challenging without being punishing.
In the end, Dewan is a game I would confidently recommend to players who appreciate clever, finely crafted systems and enjoy abstract, brain-burning puzzles wrapped in a clean, distinctive design.
It may not be my perfect game, but it is, without question, a remarkably well-designed one that will make it someone’s top 10 list.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Great Western Trail. It sits comfortably at number 10 on my all-time list, and it has held that spot ever since I first discovered it many moons ago.
Since the release of the second edition, two new entries have arrived. Until now, I had not managed to get either to the table. Great Western Trail: Argentina still manages to avoid me, but I finally got to try Great Western Trail: New Zealand.
And honestly, I was not prepared for how much I would enjoy it.
After just one play, I am already tempted to say something slightly controversial. This might actually be better than the original.
Great Western Trail 2nd edition did a fantastic job of tightening up the rules and creating a great, balanced experience. The game, however, does have quite a few static elements, which, if you play often enough, you will begin to see certain patterns emerge. It’s not a problem per say but I think for fans looking for something more robust, the other two Great Western Trail games (Argentina and New Zealand) are going to be great options to get some variety using the same system.
All the magic is still there. The familiar rhythm, the satisfying engine building, the constant push and pull of optimizing your route. But what New Zealand does is loosen the puzzle just enough to let the game breathe. It feels less like solving something fixed and more like navigating something alive.
Take the buildings, for example. At first glance, everything looks familiar. But then, halfway through the game, four of the neutral buildings flip. Suddenly, the board shifts under your feet. Plans that felt solid now need a second look. Routes that seemed optimal might not be anymore.
The new neutral buildings cover the same core game effects as before: buy more sheep, hire workers, build new buildings, but there are a few buildings that have two sides that switch on you mid-game and that is going to create a bit of chaos for people who are accustomed to the static state of buildings in the original game.
It is a small twist, but it has a big effect. The game nudges you out of autopilot and asks you to adapt. I love that.
Then there is the biggest change of all. The train is gone.
In its place, boats take over, and with them comes a much more flexible system. Instead of a straight line forward, you now have branching routes. You can move back and forth. You can pivot. You can chase opportunities instead of just advancing.
Progress is still important, but now it is a choice rather than a track you march along. It adds just enough freedom to make every decision feel more intentional.
And then there is shearing.
The shearing value on the sheep cards creates reason to hold on to duplicate cards you might have otherwise simply disregarded. Having sufficient sheep herders and several white sheep cards, for example, can yield a considerable payout. Being able to earn a considerable amount of coin mid-route is an effect that was usually quite impossible in the original game.
Since this is New Zealand, cows are out, and sheep are in. With that comes a new way to earn money during your turn. Hire shepherds, shear your sheep, and watch the gold roll in.
But it is more than just an extra income stream. It opens up an entirely new strategy. You can cycle your deck faster, trigger more effects, and lean into a style of play that feels very different from the traditional cattle focus.
There are also new layers built around this. Bonus cards that replace themselves. Tracks to advance on. Tiles that reward clever timing. None of these overwhelm the game, but together they create a web of possibilities that did not exist before.
These bonus cards can be added to your deck through different effects. Note that each one gives you a benefit, but then immediately replaces itself, so you don’t have to stress about having too many of these. Quite to the contrary, the more the better.
It all adds up to something that feels richer, busier, and more ambitious.
That said, this is not the version I would hand to a first time player. There is a lot going on here. If the original game is a deep strategy experience, this one feels like the advanced course. Familiarity helps a lot.
But if you already enjoy Great Western Trail, this is a fantastic evolution.
I have only played it once, so I am not ready to deliver a final verdict. But first impressions matter, and this one made a strong case.
Call me impressed. I am already looking forward to getting it back to the table.
When my review copy of Fate: Defenders of Grimheim arrived in the mailbox, the folks over at FryxGames slipped in a little bonus: a low-footprint solo legacy card game from 2024 called Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom.
Naturally, that caught my attention immediately. Not only is it another Jonathan Fryxelius design (love!), but it’s actually part of a whole series of games. I love a good game series with lots of expansions. There is nothing quite like finding a game you enjoy and then having lots of avenues to explore!
Now, before we go any further, I should disclose something: I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to legacy games.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the legacy games conceptually. But I also have a long-standing beef with one of their core components, which puts me in something of a philosophical quandary.
I adore the sense of discovery: opening secret packs, unlocking new rules, and watching the game evolve over time. That part is fantastic. What I don’t love is the idea of marking up boards and cards, tearing components apart, and ultimately playing through a game once before tossing the whole thing in the trash.
Ever since my experience with My City, which, incidentally, is one of my favorite legacy games to date, I’ve made it something of a personal mission to find ways to “cheat the system” and turn legacy games into replayable ones. In other words, I try to enjoy the legacy experience while quietly circumventing its main gimmick.
So when I opened Kingdom Legacy, the very first thing I did was exactly that: figure out how to bypass the whole “play it once” concept.
The most obvious and easiest way to circumvent the whole one-and-done legacy thing is to sleeve the cards and use a whiteboard pen instead of stickers. That effectively turns this legacy game into a replayable…for the lack of a better word, normal game.
My issue with disposable legacy games is really twofold.
First, if I discover a game I genuinely like, for which Kingdoms definitely qualifies, I’m probably going to want to play it more than once. As I learned with My City, simply buying another copy isn’t always an option. Games go out of print, sell out, or become difficult to find. Discovering a game you love, playing it once, and then being unable to replace it can be a frustrating experience.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, it just feels wrong to throw games away. It’s not really about the money; that part is mostly irrelevant to me. But there’s something inherently wasteful and eco-unfriendly about creating a product that is intentionally designed to become garbage. It’s the equivalent of putting bananas in plastic shrinkwrap. Why people? Why? Is there some kind of race to see how fast we can blow up our planet or something that I don’t know about?
Board games already require a fair amount of material to produce; the entire process is very ecosystem-unfriendly. There’s cardboard, paper, ink, plastic, shipping, the whole production chain has a pretty shitty footprint, especially since most things are made in China. Designing a game specifically to be destroyed after one playthrough feels… a little out of step with the spirit of the 21st century. There is enough crap going into the dump without us creating games with that sole purpose.
Alright, rant over.
The good news is that most legacy games aren’t particularly difficult to adapt if you want to make them replayable. Personally, I suspect the “destroy it as you play” concept is more of a marketing trend than a design necessity, and one that will fade over time.
With that said, let’s talk about Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdoms.
I say that with a slightly raised eyebrow, because reviewing a legacy game is always tricky. A big part of the experience is exploration and discovery, uncovering new rules, cards, and surprises as you progress. Spoiling those elements in a review would unravel that fun, and I don’t want to do that.
So instead of giving away details, I’m going to focus on impressions and sensations. Think of this less as a traditional breakdown and more as a guided glimpse into what the experience feels like, without ruining the surprises.
With that in mind…
Let’s get into it.
Overview
Final Score: (3.15 out 5) Good Game!
I always love it when I come across a game that’s difficult to compare to anything else. That usually means we’re dealing with a genuinely original idea, and Kingdom Legacy fits that description remarkably well.
At its core, it’s a solo card game, which on paper might not sound particularly groundbreaking. But the elegance of the design and the flow of the gameplay elevate it into something truly special.
The premise is simple: you are building a feudal kingdom from what feels like its absolute earliest beginnings, essentially planting a flag in the wilderness, and gradually developing it into a thriving micro-empire.
The game begins with a humble deck of just ten cards. Each round, you draw and play four cards face up, deciding how to use the resources on them and whether to upgrade one before they are all discarded. Then you draw four more and continue until your deck runs out.
These are your starting 10 cards as you open the box, which includes 139 cards. It’s a humble begining but before too long, these empty fields and forests are going to be a thriving feudal empire filled with people, structures, and much more.
Once the deck is empty, you reshuffle and begin a new cycle. But this time things are different. Some of your cards may have been upgraded, and two new cards have been added to your deck from a hidden stack, let’s call it the legacy stack.
And just like that, your kingdom grows.
Throughout the game you’ll also discover additional cards from the main hidden box, steadily expanding your deck and unlocking new possibilities. Each cycle through the deck represents another stage in the growth of your kingdom as you develop buildings, resources, people, and capabilities. The goal of the game is to score points, but there is no victory condition; you are effectively competing against everyone else playing the same game in a sort of ladder, which you can review online.
On the surface, the system is incredibly simple.
But once you start playing, you quickly realize that every decision, every card played, every upgrade chosen, every new discovery, nudges the game in a different direction. And thanks to the many surprises hidden within the legacy box, the experience becomes wonderfully varied and highly decision-driven, and quite personalized. Your experience can and will be quite different each run through.
In fact, the idea that this is a “play it once” legacy game, considering how dynamic things are, struck me as almost absurd after my first session.
I don’t just find playing Kingdom Legacy one time an absurd concept; I find that to be true with all the legacy games I have played. My City is one of my all-time favorites. I have played it through the campaign at least a dozen times. I don’t really understand the appeal of making games that you are supposed to play once and then toss. I love these games!
On the very first day I had the game, I had already completed a second run. By the end of the week, I had played through it four times, and I still wasn’t even close to feeling finished with it. A great sign for the game’s addictive nature, not particularly good as a legacy concept. With legacy games, I want to play them once, be satisfied, and be done with it. For it to feel unfinished, which is almost certainly going to be the case here, as if I’m missing out on something, that is a feel-bad moment.
This is a game that I simply could not put down. It was addictive, surprising, and consistently engaging. Even after multiple playthroughs, I was still discovering new cards and exploring different strategic approaches. I can’t imagine anyone being satisfied playing this game through just once.
Simply put, this game is quite brilliant.
I loved it from the word go, and I’m extremely glad I found a clever way to sidestep the “play it once” limitation (sorry, FryxGames!). If I hadn’t, I might have needed to buy this game ten times just to satisfy my curiosity, and even that might not have been enough.
There are quite a few mini and larger expansions for the game, so plenty to explore is already available for this one.
In fact, I actually think it would have negatively affected this review had I only played it once. The first go felt very unsatisfying. I realized a bunch of things about the game, and I was eager to correct my mistakes. Had I finished with the game at that moment, I think that addictive aspect would have waned into something I did once and moved on, which is what I usually do with games I don’t like.
This is a legacy game that begs to be played again and again. It’s clever, engaging, and endlessly fun. Even now as I write the review, I think I rather be playing it.
Without question, it’s one of the most enjoyable solo gaming experiences I’ve had in quite a while. Really great discovery.
Components
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Good quality cards, far better quality than you would expect for a game you are intended to play through once. These cards will last.
Cons: It would have taken very little effort to un-legacy this game; it’s an unnecessary gimmick.
Since Kingdom Legacy is essentially a card game, there isn’t a huge amount to say about the components themselves, but what’s here is perfectly solid.
The card quality is more than adequate for the job, in fact, arguably, these cards are as good as any collectable card game you could buy. The artwork maintains a reasonably consistent aesthetic across the deck, and the rulebook is clear and easy to follow.
One particularly nice touch is the inclusion of a QR code that links to a tutorial video. The video is exceptionally well done and walks you through the basics quickly and clearly. After watching it, you’ll be more than ready to start playing.
Fryxgames does bang up job of supporting their games, the tutorial is one of the best I have seen for a game in a really long time. After watching it, you won’t need a rulebook.
There’s also an additional website that provides a card-by-card explanation of the entire deck. It’s almost overkill in terms of support, but it’s certainly appreciated, especially if you run into a card interaction that makes you pause for a moment.
All things considered, it’s a very competent production.
Theme
Score: Tilt:
Pros: The flow of time and empire building engine support the feeling of progression. The card effects and thematic elements of the cards are on point.
Cons: The use of A.I. art is going to annoy people; this is effectively an A.I. art-generated game; there is nothing original here.
The theme in Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdoms is surprisingly strong for such a small card game. As you progress through the deck, you genuinely get the feeling that time is passing and your tiny outpost is slowly evolving into a functioning kingdom. That steady sense of growth taps directly into the addictive appeal of civilization-building games.
Each new round feels like another step in the development of your realm. You shuffle up, draw your cards, and start experimenting, trying to find clever ways to make your engine run just a little more efficiently. When everything lines up, and your kingdom starts humming along, it’s incredibly satisfying.
The game offers a surprising number of directions you can take your civilization. There are many ways to generate victory points and multiple development paths to pursue. In my experience, the most effective kingdoms tend to become broadly capable across several areas while leaning into one or two specialties.
Over repeated plays, I suspect most players will naturally gravitate toward their own preferred style of kingdom-building.
Even after several playthroughs, it’s difficult to say exactly how far you can push the scoring ceiling, but the important part is that the scoring system feels tightly connected to the theme. You are often faced with the classic “do I advance my engine or do I score points?” dilemma. In most cases, efficient expansion is the path to scoring more points, but eventually, you need to finish projects, which are the main way to get points. Growth and victory are closely intertwined, which reinforces the sense that you’re building a thriving realm rather than simply chasing numbers.
The artwork does a perfectly adequate job of representing the theme, though it’s obvious that all of it was generated using A.I. tools. The styles vary quite a bit, and the level of detail can fluctuate from card to card. The obvious is obvious here.
I’ve been fairly vocal about my position on A.I. art in games, and in short, it doesn’t bother me much. From a practical standpoint, it doesn’t impact gameplay. In a card-heavy game like this, hiring a team of illustrators would dramatically increase production costs, I get it. As it stands, Kingdom Legacy sells for around ten dollars. With fully commissioned artwork, that price could easily triple.
People are quite vocal about A.I. art, to the degree that if a game is discovered to be using it, people will not buy it on principle. While I personally don’t care, it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of a game; I would not recommend it for professionally published games. A.I. Art is for freeware and print-to-play stuff; it’s for amateurs, not professionals.
Some people feel very strongly about the issue, and that’s fair. Personally, coming from an IT background, I tend to view A.I. as another step in technological evolution, something that will either find its place or fade away over time. Either way, it’s not a battle I feel particularly compelled to fight.
That said, from a purely artistic standpoint, A.I. art does tend to cap the ceiling a bit. At its best, it’s mediocre, but rarely exceptional. And because of that, it does have an impact on the overall presentation of the game.
I think the answer to A.I. art is, if you’re a publisher of professional games, don’t use A.I, period. Find another way.
Gameplay
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Excellent card-building engine, very addictive, hard to put down, big design space to expand into.
Cons: You’re not going to be satisfied playing this as a legacy game once, like most legacy games.
At the heart of Kingdom Legacy is a deceptively simple idea: draw four cards and try to do something clever with them. But as the game unfolds, that simple premise gradually blossoms into a web of interesting decisions and opportunities.
Each round begins with those four cards, which represent the resources, actions, and opportunities available to you at that moment. Your goal is to combine them in ways that allow you to upgrade cards, expand your kingdom, or unlock new elements from the hidden deck.
One of the key decisions each round revolves around the Advance action. The catch is that whenever you upgrade a card, everything else in your hand is immediately discarded. That means a lot of the resources you generate in a turn will often go unused.
However, the Advance action lets you draw two additional cards into your pool. You can repeat this action multiple times if you wish, expanding your options, but the trade-off is that the more cards you draw this way, the fewer you’ll ultimately be able to use efficiently.
This simple decision point ends up driving much of the strategy. Ideally, you want to accomplish upgrades using only the original four cards. The more often you can do that, the more efficient your kingdom-building engine becomes.
When you play your opening hand at the start of the game, it’s not hard to imagine where the game is going. The coins on the top left are resources you have to spend, and the middle right shows you the cost to upgrade the card, which allows you to flip it for the improved version of it. This is kind of the core procedure in the game. The catch is that, regardless of how many resources you have, you can only upgrade 1 card, and then everything is discarded.
Another fascinating aspect of the design is how the card pool is structured. Roughly half of the cards in the game are not part of the standard legacy draw deck. While you might encounter around seventy cards during the normal flow of the game, the rest can only be accessed through specific upgrades or special effects.
In a typical playthrough, you might only acquire a third of those cards. That means if you play the game once and move on, as the traditional legacy format suggests, you’ll never even see a huge portion of the content.
Which is exactly why the “play it once” idea feels a bit absurd here.
There are 139 cards in the deck, but in an average game, you might see around 100 of them. If you played this game only once, you would be effectively throwing out close to 40 cards you never even saw or used. That is so strange to me, I can’t get my head around it.
Even after my sixth playthrough, I was still discovering cards I had never seen before.
On top of that, each card has four possible upgrade levels, and they’re not always linear. Some upgrades branch left or right, forcing you to choose between different development paths. Because of this branching structure, it’s practically impossible to see every upgrade chain in a single game.
This is why I described the game earlier as a kind of card-based crack. Once you start discovering new cards and exploring different upgrade paths, it becomes very hard to stop. I ended up playing 3-4 hours at a time.
Another important element of the game is the appearance of enemy cards in your deck. Without spoiling anything, these cards represent threats to your kingdom and can seriously hinder your development if left unresolved. Having a plan on how to deal with them is crucial to success.
The good news is that there are often multiple ways to deal with them. The game rarely forces you into a single solution. Instead, you’re constantly weighing different approaches and considering which path will serve your long-term strategy best.
And that’s really the beauty of the design. Very rarely are you staring at only one or two possible actions. Most turns involve several viable choices, each with its own risks and rewards.
For me, this is exactly what I want from a solo game: something thoughtful, puzzle-like, challenging, and highly replayable. Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdoms absolutely nails that formula.
There is one minor issue worth mentioning, though it’s more of a physical component quirk than a gameplay problem.
The orientation of cards in your deck actually matters. As a result, when shuffling, you have to be careful to keep every card facing the same direction. Inevitably, at some point during play, you’ll drop a few cards, or perhaps the entire deck, and when that happens, it can be difficult to remember which way everything was facing.
Late in the game, especially, that can be a bit of a headache.
It’s not a major problem, but it does mean you’ll want to shuffle carefully and treat your deck with a little respect.
That small quirk aside, from a gameplay standpoint, Feudal Kingdoms is superbly designed.
Replayability and Longevity
Score: Tilt:
Pros: If you circumvent the legacy gimmick, this game is highly replayable with lots of expansions you can get into.
Cons: Like all legacy games, replayability is technically not a thing at all.
Feudal Kingdoms is an addictive game for all the classic reasons that empire-building games tend to be addictive. There’s that familiar “one more turn” feeling, the excitement of resetting and trying a different approach, and the satisfying sense of time passing as your tiny settlement slowly grows into something resembling a proper kingdom. All of that works together to make the game very easy to play repeatedly.
That said, this is a legacy game. If you strictly follow the intended “play it once and retire the game” philosophy, then the replayability score is effectively zero.
So this puts me in a bit of an awkward position when it comes to scoring replayability in the review.
If you approach the game the way I do, finding a way to keep everything reusable so you can play it multiple times, then the replayability is outstanding. Under that approach, I would easily rate it 5 out of 5 stars.
If, however, you follow the traditional legacy model and treat the game as a one-and-done experience, then what you really have is a 5–6 hour campaign. After that, the game has essentially completed its life cycle. Under that interpretation, the replayability score drops dramatically, probably to a 0 or 1 at best.
Even then, it’s worth noting that the value proposition is still pretty good. It’s honestly hard to think of many ways to entertain yourself for five or six hours for around ten bucks. So it would feel a little unfair to judge it too harshly purely on that basis.
In the end, I decided to split the difference. I scored it a 2, but applied a tilt of 1 so that the overall review isn’t overly penalized by a design choice that is, in many ways, inherent to the legacy format itself.
Conclusion
Whether you buy into the legacy model or not, for 10 bucks, this game is an absolute steal. I have already gotten more enjoyment out of it than most of the 40-50 dollar games on my shelf; it’s a fantastic value and an awesome night’s entertainment.
I do, however, think that circumventing the legacy thing is something you will want to do so that you can enjoy this game over and over again, and I do think most people will want to. It’s a great game, and it deserves repeated plays.
High recommendation from me, especially if you like empire-building games and don’t have any sort of affliction about playing a solo game. For me personally, it triggered an almost immediate response to buy up all of the other expansions for this game series, of which there are several.
