While I generally try to avoid controversy on this site and stick to what I enjoy most, reviewing games, talking about games and, well… more games, now and then a subject comes along that is simply impossible to ignore.
This is one of those subjects.
As someone who reviews board games, I’m increasingly running into games that use AI-generated artwork, which means I have to make a decision about how I’m going to treat them. Do I ignore it? Mention it? Penalize it? Celebrate it? Pretend it isn’t there and hope nobody notices?
Sooner or later, I have to put my cards on the table, explain my position and live with the consequences. The internet being what it is, remaining silent makes you complicit, while saying anything at all guarantees that one tribe or the other will decide you’re the villain of the week. It’s a remarkable system we’ve built for ourselves in which you are always left with a lose-lose scenario.
I’ve touched on AI artwork in a few previous reviews, most recently Syncanite Foundation and Kingdom Legacy, and those conversations have helped me work out where I stand. But scattered comments buried inside reviews aren’t enough anymore. I need to make dealing with AI art work part of my rating system, so that I can respond to it in an objective and fair way.
So this article will be the official GamersDungeon position on AI artwork in board games, how I’m going to approach it as a reviewer and, most importantly, how it will impact the rating/scores that games receive going forward.
The Controversy
Unless you’ve been hiding under a particularly large and comfortable rock, you’re probably aware that AI is everywhere. In the tabletop hobby, and especially in board games, role playing games and miniature games, AI-generated artwork has become one of the most divisive subjects around.
Mention it in a comment section, and you’ll usually have enough material for a three-day flame war.
While there are dozens of individual arguments and plenty of grey areas, the debate generally revolves around three major points.
The first is that generative AI art is fundamentally a form of theft. The argument is that AI models are trained on existing artwork created by real artists and then produce derivative images without permission, attribution or compensation. In other words, the machine is standing on the shoulders of artists who never agreed to hold it up.
Adobe Firefly combats Generative AI theft by training it’s AI on public domain images and images willingly provided by artists. This is just one of many unique methods that put to question the argument that Generative AI images are theft. Hence the problem with this argument.
The second argument is economic. Every AI image used by a publisher is potentially one less commission for a human artist. If a company can generate an illustration in minutes instead of paying an illustrator, more profit stays with the publisher, while fewer opportunities exist for the people who built the artistic foundation AI relies upon. To critics, it isn’t just replacing jobs, it’s replacing them with something built from the work of those same artists.
Finally, there is the quality argument. Critics often describe AI art as soulless, repetitive, and creatively hollow, produced by systems that consume enormous amounts of computing power and energy simply to flood the internet with an endless stream of technically competent but artistically disposable images. The term AI slop didn’t appear out of nowhere.
There are plenty of smaller arguments, edge cases and philosophical rabbit holes that could fill an entire series of articles, but these three points are the heavy hitters. If I can explain where I stand on them, then I can also explain how AI artwork will be treated in reviews here on GamersDungeon going forward.
First, however, we have to talk about the elephant in the room.
Circumstances Matter
I’ve never had much patience for ivory tower thinking or the modern habit of treating every issue like it’s a football match where you have to pick a side and spend the next six months screaming at the other team.
The real world is a lot messier than that.
Real people have real jobs, real businesses, real families and real bills to pay. Artists, publishers, designers, consumers and even the people building AI tools all have different incentives and different circumstances. Any position that completely ignores one side in favour of ideological purity is, in my opinion, more interested in winning an argument than solving a problem.
Kingdom Legacy and Fryxelius Games is a great example of circumstances mattering. This is a family run business of creative people who are doing their best to bring great games to us. They however like all businesses have to make compromises. In the case of Kingdom Legacy, your talking about producing art for 140 quardruple sided cards requiring around 500 images for a game that can’t cost more than 10-15 bucks for it to be marketable. Had Fryxelius games hired an artist to create these images this game would never see the light of day and if it did it would cost more than anyone would be willing to pay for a game that is effectively a box with 140 cards in it.
That isn’t particularly useful to me.
So I’m not going to approach AI artwork from the perspective of absolute morality, nor am I going to pretend that technological progress can simply be wished away. My position has to account for the many people affected by it, which means it’s inevitably going to be a compromise.
To put it plainly, I’m not taking the easy route of saying “I refuse to review games with AI art” and I’m equally not going to shrug and say “I don’t care, embrace the future.”
Somewhere between those two extremes is a position that I think is both fair and practical. Whether you ultimately agree with it or not, I think it’s worth explaining how I arrived there before I tell you what the policy will be.
AI Art is Stealing
This is probably the biggest argument against AI-generated art, and it’s also the one I find the hardest to apply in practice.
Not because I know it isn’t true, but because I don’t know that it is.
I’m not an AI engineer, and I’m certainly not qualified to explain exactly what every image model is doing behind the scenes. More importantly, not every AI is trained the same way. Some models are trained on enormous collections of scraped images, while others are built from artwork that has been voluntarily submitted or properly licensed by the artists involved.
Those are very different situations.
A good example is Kingdom Legacy. After doing some research for that review, I discovered that the publisher uses an AI trained on artwork freely contributed by artists. If that’s the case, then the blanket statement that “AI art is theft” simply doesn’t apply.
The problem is that I can’t realistically investigate the AI training methods behind every game that uses AI-art I review, and even if I tried, publishers have no obligation to explain their workflow or be completely transparent about it.
So what am I supposed to do? Assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent? Or assume everyone is acting ethically until proven otherwise?
Neither approach seems particularly reasonable.
For that reason, I can’t base my review policy on the argument that AI art is inherently stealing. There are simply too many variables, too many different models and too many different ways of using the technology for me to conclude that every instance of generative AI is automatically unethical.
That’s not the same as saying the concern isn’t valid. It’s saying that, as a reviewer sitting behind a keyboard trying to decide whether a board game deserves a 3.5 or a 4, I don’t have enough information to make that judgment consistently or fairly.
So, for the most part, I set this argument aside. Not because I dismissed it, but because I don’t think it provides a practical foundation for a review policy.
They Took’ma’job!
I’m going to keep this one relatively short. Technology replaces people. It always has.
The printing press replaced scribes, photography replaced portrait painters, tractors replaced farm workers, digital distribution replaced video rental stores and the internet made life very uncomfortable for anyone who thought selling encyclopedias door to door was a long-term career plan.
We can resist it, protest it and argue about whether it’s a good thing, and sometimes those arguments are completely justified. History, however, has a habit of continuing anyway.
Dragonfoot Forums, one of the oldest D&D forums in existance has recently taken the decision to ban AI art from their forums and will moderate AI created material published through their site. This sort of reaction to AI art is common. Gamers everywhere are rejecting AI normalization and for good reason. Art is culture and AI is erasing it.
My personal philosophy has always been simple. Adapt and survive. Do I think it’s a good thing if artists lose work to AI? Absolutely not. But that isn’t actually what influences my reviews.
What influences my reviews is that I have yet to see AI-generated artwork that was worth replacing a human artist for in the first place.
That’s the important distinction.
I’m not making a moral judgment about technological progress. I’m making an artistic judgment about the end result.
And, quite frankly, I’m not impressed.
To me, AI artwork is shallow, repetitive and creatively uninteresting. I have no desire to sit here debating whether a particular image is “good AI” or “bad AI” any more than I want to debate whether instant coffee is “good coffee.” At best, it’s mediocre. At worst, it’s visual wallpaper that exists solely because someone needed a dragon by Tuesday afternoon.
Talent is something people develop over years of practice. Style is something people earn through experience, experimentation and failure. If the artwork in a game can be produced by me, my neighbour and a reasonably motivated golden retriever typing prompts into the same generator, then I struggle to assign much artistic value to it.
As a reviewer, that matters.
If I believe components contribute to the overall experience of a board game, then artwork is part of that equation, and artwork that I consider generic, uninspired or interchangeable should naturally be reflected in the score.
But even that isn’t really the heart of the issue.
The real reason AI art matters to me is something much more fundamental.
AI Art Has No Soul
This is the argument that ultimately matters to me.
I’ve already said that I’m unconvinced by the blanket claim that all AI art is theft and equally unconvinced that I can somehow stop technological progress by refusing to acknowledge it.
None of that changes the simple fact that I don’t like AI art. Not a little. Not “when it’s used badly.” I don’t like it at all.
The ecological cost, the enormous computing resources and the economic disruption only reinforce an opinion I already have, which is that the end result simply isn’t worth it. It’s an extraordinary amount of effort and energy being spent to produce something that, in my eyes, is artistically mediocre.
To me there is no masterpiece hiding inside AI-generated artwork, only different flavours of competent wallpaper. It can be technically impressive, visually striking and even useful, but I have yet to see anything that makes me stop and appreciate the person behind it.
Because there isn’t one.
Syncanite Foundation is one of those rare exceptions where I thought the AI art was well curated. It was the first review I ever did for a project with AI art however and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. In the end, I chose to just judge the art as I would any other, but it felt wrong. I don’t want to judge AI art, it felt empty, like I was speaking to a void rather than complimenting a persons hard work. This is what I want to avoid having to do in my reviews.
What makes art meaningful to me isn’t perfection. It’s the evidence that another human being sat down with a skill they spent years developing and created something that could only exist because they chose to make it. The mistakes, the style, the personality and even the imperfections are part of the experience.
That’s the soul.
AI removes the very thing I value most about art and replaces it with automation. It turns creativity into manufacturing, and while that may be efficient, efficiency has never been the quality that made me love board games, role playing games or miniature games in the first place.
So this is where I draw my line. Not because I think AI should be banned. Not because I think everyone who uses it is acting unethically. And not because I believe technology can be put back into the bottle.
But because, as a reviewer, I want to reward human creativity wherever I find it. Choosing a human artist over a prompt is, in my opinion, an investment in the very creative spirit that makes this hobby worth celebrating.
That’s my protest.
To me, replacing genuine artistic expression with AI artwork is like spray painting over a beautiful mural. The person holding the can may have perfectly reasonable motivations and the paint may even look neat from a distance, but something uniquely human has still been covered up in the process.
And that, more than any legal or economic argument, is why AI artwork will matter in my reviews.
Conclusion
I should probably end with a confession. I use AI art in my own projects.
When I wrote my D&D adventure The Lost Citadel, a project I’m genuinely proud of, I used AI-generated artwork for one very simple reason. I couldn’t afford to hire an artist, or perhaps more accurately, I didn’t want to afford hiring an artist. It was a hobby project, I did it for fun, not as a business venture.
That doesn’t suddenly make the artwork great.
If anything, I fully accept that the book is artistically less than it could have been. The illustrations do their job, but they don’t define the identity of the book the way a human artist could have. They lack personality, style and, for want of a better word, soul.
And if someone looked at The Lost Citadel, decided it was AI slop and chose not to buy it, I wouldn’t hold it against them for a second.
I understand the position because I understand the compromise I made.
As a reviewer, however, I don’t think the answer is to draw a line so extreme that any game containing AI artwork is immediately dismissed as worthless.
A board game is more than its illustrations.
It is mechanics, design, theme, writing, balance, playtesting, production and countless hours of work by real people who may have chosen AI art for reasons ranging from budget constraints to simple practicality. Just as I don’t want my own work dismissed solely because I couldn’t afford an illustrator, I’m not going to do that to someone else.
But I also think there should be a clear acknowledgement that AI artwork is not something I value as an artistic contribution.
So this is the new policy at GamersDungeon.
Any game that uses AI-generated artwork will receive a maximum of 1 star in the Theme category of my reviews.
That doesn’t mean the game is bad. It doesn’t mean I won’t recommend it. It doesn’t mean the designers are lazy or unethical.
It simply means that, in my view, AI-generated artwork does not meaningfully contribute to the artistic identity of a board game and therefore cannot receive a higher score in a category where artistic presentation is a major consideration.
Everything else will still be judged on its own merits. Great mechanics will still be great mechanics. Brilliant design will still be brilliant design. An exceptional game can still receive an exceptional overall score.
In fact, Kingdom Legacy: Exploration managed a respectable 3.15 out of 5 despite receiving only 1 star for Theme.
So this isn’t a boycott. It’s a statement of values.
If you choose AI artwork instead of human artistry, I’m not going to refuse to review your game, and I’m not going to pretend the rest of your work doesn’t matter.
Gamersdungeon.net rating system will be updated with the new AI based rule put into effect. For me, this is a compromise and the most appropriate way to handle AI. It may change in the future, but for now I feel like it’s good middle ground I can work with.
I’m simply going to score the art exactly as I see it. The absence of effort, the equivillant of copy/pasting it from some other source, a non-contributor.
And from this day forward, that’s how AI-generated artwork will be handled on GamersDungeon.net.
When I reviewed Kingdom Legacy back in March, it walked away with a respectable 3 out of 5 stars. That’s probably worth explaining because, unlike much of the internet, I don’t believe anything short of perfection deserves to be launched into the sun. A three-star score is a very solid game in my book and absolutely worth playing. Anything above two stars is worth consideration.
That said, Kingdom Legacy wasn’t flawless from the standpoint of objective review. It had a few rough edges, and typically, I would say this is exactly why expansions exist. They’re often a second chance, the patch note in physical form, the opportunity to take a good game and turn it into a great one.
Kingdom Legacy, however, is a unique beast; the exploration expansion, like the many expansions that proceeded are not intended to fix balance or adapt playstyle, they are in a sense, a way to continue your legacy experience as you build up your own personal little world. It’s a bit more like a sequel or director’s cut with extra scenes for something you already love. This expansion isn’t trying to fix anything, for better or worse.
Unlike many of the other expansions for Kingdom Legacy, Exploration is not a modest little add-on either. There are almost as many cards here as in the original box, which means there is an awful lot of new content to explore. Yes, the pun is entirely intended, and no, I refuse to apologise for it.
So the question here isn’t whether Kingdom Legacy: Exploration fixes the game; the question is more about how it expands on the already awesome gameplay you know and love.
Overview
Final Score: ( 3.15 out 5) Good Game!
One thing worth pointing out about my rating system is that it’s not necessarily a reflection of how much I like a game. Instead, it is an attempt to score games against a consistent structure that’s intended to be as objective as possible and fair as possible across all game reviews.
If you don’t believe me, consider that Blood Rage is still the only game in GamersDungeon.net history to receive a perfect 5 out of 5 stars, yet it does not even make my personal top twenty games of all time list. Meanwhile, Great Western Trail has sat comfortably on that list for nearly a decade despite earning only 3 out of 5 stars in my review. What I play and what rating a game gets using my rating system are not always going to align. Preference is not the same as judgment.
I consider Blood Rage to be a master class in game design and publishing. It is a perfect game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it flies to the top of my playlist. I enjoy it, but perfection and preference are not always bedfellows.
Kingdom Legacy falls into exactly that difference and, ultimately, so does Kingdom Legacy: Exploration.
If you asked me over a cup of coffee what I think of Kingdom Legacy, I would tell you it’s one of the most addictive solo card games I have played in years. It has occupied an embarrassing amount of my table time, and this expansion simply gives me even more reasons to keep shuffling cards instead of doing something sensible with my time.
As my wife says when she catches me on the deck shuffling cards, “Are you gonna do that all day?”, The answer is, yes, now fetch me a beer, wench!, I have a kingdom to run! (Note: this joke was approved by the wife; no husbands were injured or killed during the writing of this joke.)
Kingdom Legacy is an exceptionally simple game to learn and an addictive game to play that is just perfect as a solo experience. It has a ton of nuanced decisions that will have you asking the question, what if I… quite a bit.
In fact, this happens often enough that I am seriously considering adding a personal score to future reviews just to separate objective analysis and my personal preferences.
Kingdom Legacy: Exploration does quite a bit to change the overall rating of the original game, not so much because the latest edition of the game (2nd edition) changes anything, but my entire reflection on what this game is and how it is played was vastly altered by adding an expansion to it. Not that it changed how you play, but more like it opened a new avenue of understanding just what this game is about and what about it makes it so brilliant while also simultaneously exposing some of its flaws as a product.
In Exploration, you will find lots of cards that play off each other, but you won’t get them all in play, so there are some tough choices to make that you will have to ponder, but as was the case in the base game, it’s not always 100% clear how these will impact you in later stages of the game. That is the fun part with this system: you do stuff to see what happens.
If you already enjoy Kingdom Legacy and your first thought after finishing a campaign was “I wish there was more of this,” then congratulations, your wish has been granted ten times over. This expansion adds more cards, more scoring opportunities, and more crucial decisions to the expansion of your kingdom than the core game did to this point.
On the other hand, if the base game never clicked for you, Exploration is unlikely to perform some sort of cardboard miracle. It is unapologetically an expansion for existing fans, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. While many expansions try to patch weaknesses or inject additional or new systems to attract new players, Exploration instead looks at Kingdom Legacy, nods approvingly, and says, “Here, have more.”
All of the new content focuses on the later stages of the game, where your kingdom is already sprawling, but like the core game, every decision has layers of consequences attached to it. Just like the base game, you will only see a fraction of the available cards in any single campaign, meaning it will take many plays before everything reveals itself. In a way, that is a flaw with Kingdom Legacy as a product, as it is a legacy game designed to be played once.
Thankfully, the designers anticipated that. Unlike the core box, Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is designed to be played twice, meaning two base game campaigns (two kingdoms) can make full use of a single expansion.
And, as has become almost standard practice with this legacy game, sleeving the cards allows you to preserve and reset the experience if you prefer your kingdoms recyclable rather than disposable.
So what new treasures does Exploration offer? Well, if you’re a fan of this game, you’re in for a treat!
Components
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Good card quality cards with great documentation and online support for the game.
Cons: No major flaws, but there is nothing awe-inspiring; it’s just good.
Component quality in Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is identical to that of the core game, which is to say, quite good.
There is admittedly not a great deal to discuss here because, at the end of the day, it’s still a box full of cards. Thankfully, they are good quality cards with a nice finish and perfectly in line with what you would expect from a modern collectible card game. They shuffle well, hold up to repeated play, and serve that aesthetic and addictive process of card handling we all love perfectly.
The instructions for integrating the expansion into the base game are clear and straightforward, avoiding the all too common expansion tradition of making you search three rulebooks and a forum post from 2022 just to figure out where one deck is supposed to go.
It also benefits from the same excellent online support as the core game, making setup and rule questions easy to resolve.
Most importantly, the expansion feels completely consistent with the original release. Nothing about the presentation feels rushed or tacked on. It looks, feels, and plays like it was always intended to be part of the Kingdom Legacy experience, and for that reason, it earns exactly the same score as the core game, which is to say there is nothing particularly awe-inspiring; it’s just good.
Theme
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Mechanics and theme connect to create an addictive engine-building game with personality.
Cons: The use of AI images absolutetly kills this game’s spirit, it makes it feel generic and uninspired with many poorly curated images. It’s all rather soulless.
The central theme of Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is exactly what the title promises. Exploration opens up vast new lands to discover, unique buildings to construct, interesting people to recruit, and specialised equipment to uncover. All of this greatly expands the number of scoring opportunities available while also giving the impression that your kingdom has matured and is entering a much more robust level of growth. It’s all thematically well-connected.
In terms of expansions, there is no official order in which expansions for Kingdom Legacy are to be played, but to me, it felt quite right to have exploration be the first; it just feels like a natural fit.
Mechanically, I would not say the expansion dramatically changes the experience. It’s very much just more of the Kingdom Legacy you already like, which is exactly what fans are looking for. There are a handful of new events and scoring opportunities that are genuinely clever and produce the same little moments of surprise and satisfaction that made the base game so addictive. Nothing here fundamentally changes my opinion of the theme, but there are plenty of memorable moments that will leave you smiling just the same, and that is all I can say about that without spoilers.
Unfortunately, there is one grim topic that still hangs over Kingdom Legacy like an unwanted random event card, and it is more relevant now than when this game was first released.
Neither the second edition nor the Exploration expansion addresses the game’s reliance on AI-generated artwork; in fact, it leans fully into it as if this is not a major controversy in the board gaming world, a major miscalculation on the part of the publisher. The visual style remains inconsistent, with AI images that often look poorly curated and disconnected from one another.
This is a very common opinion about the use of AI images in board games. I would recommend that anyone publishing a board game in the future avoid AI art like the plague; whatever the benefit is, it’s not worth the backlash. AI art used to be disliked; at this point, using it makes you a pariah.
My position on the use of AI in board games hasn’t changed, which is to say, I don’t really care that much about it for hobby projects and small struggling publishers trying to get their game out, but I recognise that it’s an obvious shortcut, and it typically quite dramatically reduces the quality of a game. This is very true for Kingdom Legacy; it’s a considerably lesser game because of the use of AI images.
When I reviewed the original Kingdom Legacy release, I was willing to overlook AI in the rating because Kingdom Legacy was clearly a passion project from a small team experimenting with a new idea, and I was happy to give it the benefit of the doubt that this shortcut was taken out of necessity.
That argument and the leeway given are no longer appropriate. Kingdom Legacy has found an audience. It received a second edition. It has successfully launched many expansions. It is no longer an unknown experiment but an established product from a successful and prominent publisher with a proven record of success.
Simply put, any excuse given by an established publisher about why they use AI Images rather than hiring a real artist simply does not fly and should be vigorously opposed.
I think board game fans are justified in not supporting AI-generated games, as it damages the hobby as a whole. The more people that do this, the more it will normalise, and the less distinct and unique games will become. As hobbyists, we should fight against, speak out against, and reject AI art in our games, especially from established publishers who should know better and have the means to do better.
Gameplay
Score: Tilt:
Pros: It has that addictive, just one more turn presence, lots of cool surprises for existing fans.
Cons: The legacy component of this game is out of place; it’s more a nuisance than a feature.
Writing a gameplay review for a legacy game is a strange challenge because the entire point is that I am not supposed to tell you what happens. It’s a bit like reviewing a detective novel by saying, “The ending is great, trust me,” and hoping everyone simply accepts that.
So I am going to dance around the spoilers as gracefully as I can.
Kingdom Legacy: Exploration focuses, like all of the Kingdom Legacy expansions, on the late stages of your campaign. The core game is all about building your tiny kingdom from a few acres of land. The expansions are where you get to take that creation out for a victory lap and see what else it can become.
I think that is one of Kingdom Legacy’s greatest strengths. That feeling of civilisation building.
By the time you reach Exploration, you’ve already made dozens of unique decisions that shaped your kingdom. You have watched opportunities come and go, suffered through disasters, stumbled into unexpected successes and built something that somehow feels distinctly yours. It’s just a deck of cards, yet it develops a surprising amount of personality.
That is also why Kingdom Legacy is so addictive.
The attachment is not really to the mechanics but to the story that emerges from your choices and micro experiences that feel great in solitude. You want to see what happens next, even if what happens next is another tax collector demanding resources you no longer have.
Exploration gives you exactly that. It hands you another toy box filled with new lands, new scoring opportunities and new cards to weave into your existing kingdom. It’s undeniably fun, and there is plenty to discover.
At the same time, I never felt that the expansion fundamentally refreshed the experience in some meaningful way. Unlike most expansions to games, there wasn’t this “oh wow, ok that changes everything” moment. It was basically the same game with new cards.
By the time your kingdom is fully developed, when you complete the base set, those additional rounds in the expansion feel more like extending a great evening than starting a brand new adventure. I enjoyed every minute of it, but there is an unavoidable sense that you are still playing with the same systems and the same ideas.
The best comparison I can think of is playing Magic: The Gathering with your favourite deck after adding a handful of exciting new cards. The deck is better, you have a few new tricks, and you are happy to keep playing it, but part of you is also looking forward to the next expansion that introduces an entirely new set and shakes everything up so that you can build new decks.
There were also a few moments that genuinely caught me off guard.
Without spoiling anything, Exploration hides several clever little surprises that feel almost like easter eggs for dedicated players. Those moments produced exactly the kind of grin that made me keep turning over cards long after I probably should have gone to bed.
The expansion also introduces some additional resources and gameplay elements. Whether these originated here or appeared in other expansions first, I can’t say, but they were new to me. They add some welcome variety and interesting decisions without dramatically changing the flow of the game.
I realise this entire section has been frustratingly vague, but that is the price of reviewing a legacy game without ruining the experience.
So let me keep the gameplay conclusion simple.
If you enjoyed Kingdom Legacie’s mechanics and addictive just one more turn nature, then Exploration is an easy recommendation. There is a huge amount of content packed into the box, plenty of new ways to develop your kingdom, lots of satisfying scoring combinations and a handful of genuinely delightful surprises waiting to be discovered. It never reinvented the game for me, but it absolutely reminded me why I enjoyed it so much in the first place.
Replayability and Longevity
Score: Tilt:
Pros: The experience of building up your kingdom is dramatically enhanced by a large library of new cards to explore and add to your kingdom
Cons: It’s too confined and short; you’ll finish this expansion in a single sitting, and then it’s over forever.
Replayability in a legacy game is always a slightly awkward subject because, technically speaking, there is none.
The game is designed to be played once, experienced once and then retired. It is an engine built with a finite amount of fuel; eventually, the tank runs dry.
Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is essentially an extra fuel tank bolted onto the side of the original game. It extends the journey, gives you more places to visit and more things to discover, but eventually you arrive at the same destination.
There is something genuinely satisfying about the finality of that experience. Picking up a kingdom that you thought was finished, dusting it off and giving it one last adventure feels surprisingly nostalgic. Your little collection of cards has history. You remember why that building is there, why that character survived and why you still refuse to forgive that one event card that nearly ruined everything.
The problem is that while the game’s end is satisfying, it’s not a game end where you’re done with the game forever.
One of the most common comments you will see about Kingdom Legacy is that everyone is trying to figure out how to avoid the legacy component. It’s just a bad fit for this game.
That is perhaps the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Kingdom Legacy.
When you finish, your immediate reaction is not relief or closure. It is the overwhelming urge to shuffle everything up and play again, because that is what we do with games we love. Replayability is, after all, one of the defining reasons this hobby exists.
Thankfully, Kingdom Legacy offers a very easy way to bend the rules. Sleeve the cards, use removable markers and suddenly the entire legacy experience becomes reusable. It is not difficult to do, and it is absolutely the approach I would recommend to anyone buying the game.
However, I have to judge replayability based on the experience the designers intended, not the one clever players can engineer for themselves.
Viewed through that lens, Kingdom Legacy: Exploration is still a one-time journey. It is an excellent journey, a memorable one and a longer one than before, but once you reach the end of the road, there are no official turns left to take.
You can always get another expansion, though, so there is that.
Conclusion
As a system, as a gameplay mechanic and as an overall experience, I think Kingdom Legacy and Kingdom Legacy: Exploration are fantastic. I have absolutely no hesitation recommending them to anyone who enjoys card games and is looking for a satisfying solo experience.
In particular, if you enjoy engine-building games that capture the feeling of growing a tiny settlement into a thriving civilisation, Kingdom Legacy delivers that experience in abundance. Every new card feels like another chapter in the story of your kingdom, and that sense of progression remains one of the most addictive gameplay loops I have encountered in recent years.
That said, I would be remiss if I did not climb onto my soapbox for a couple of minutes.
The first issue is the legacy component itself.
I have never quite shaken the feeling that Kingdom Legacy does not actually want to be a legacy game. It is almost as if someone designed an excellent solo engine builder and then, somewhere late in development, another person walked into the room and declared, “What if we made players throw it away when they finish?”
Nothing about the underlying design really benefits from being disposable, and unlike most legacy games, Kingdom Legacy is too short to give you that sense of finality and closure when you’re done playing.
In fact, I would argue the opposite. Once you understand the systems and discover the different paths available, the natural instinct is to immediately start another campaign and try something completely different. The game is packed with meaningful choices and interesting combinations that beg to be explored.
That is the mark of a highly replayable game. Yet, by design, replayability is intentionally limited.
Yes, you can sleeve the cards and preserve everything, and I strongly recommend doing exactly that, but I still find the official approach to be an unnecessary restriction on an otherwise brilliant design.
The second issue is the continued use of AI-generated artwork.
I genuinely do not understand why publishers continue to ignore what has become one of the loudest conversations in modern board gaming. Whether you personally love AI art, hate it or fall somewhere in the middle, it is impossible to deny that a majority of the hobby simply does not want it in professionally published games.
Art is one of the cornerstones of board games; it is a thriving place of creativity and imagination, to trade that in for AI slop, which is all you will find in Kingdom Legacy, is a tragedy. This game deserves so much better!
It’s so unfortunate because beneath those visual shortcomings lies one of the most charming solo card games I have played in years. Kingdom Legacy: Exploration expands everything that already works, adds meaningful content and provides several genuinely memorable surprises without losing the addictive engine-building that makes the original so compelling.
FryxGames understands and is perfectly capable of producing great art for their games, as was illustrated in the amazing work done on Fate: Defenders of Grimheim. The use of AI in Kingdom Legacy was a conscious business decision, and FryxGames has been quite open about it, offering its own take and justification for its use. The debate regarding AI in board games is far from settled, though the most likely conclusion is that we will continue to see its use with increasing consistency.
For existing fans the recommendation is incredibly easy.
There is more kingdom here, more discoveries, more clever interactions and more reasons to spend another evening telling yourself, “Just one more turn.”
If, however, you’re protesting this game because it uses AI art, know that I get it; The publisher does as well. In fairness, the official position of the publisher is that it’s too expensive to have that much art in a small, cheap solo card game, and that very well may be the case and logic behind its use. That may even be sufficient justification, a reasonable excuse, but there are plenty of other ways to work around the cost associated with art; people have been printing games without AI art for a very long time. There are other solutions; this is not a new problem.
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.
Full disclosure time. When it comes to Star Wars Unlimited, I need to lay my cards on the table. I think Star Wars Unlimited is one of the best collectible card games ever made. Full stop. No exaggeration. Which means doing an unbiased review of one of its expansions is going to be challenging, but we will take a crack at it.
When I put together my Top 10 Collectible Card Games of All Time list back in 2024, Star Wars Unlimited landed at number two. Yes, I did place The Lord of the Rings cooperative card game above it, but the gap between first and second place was razor-thin. The only reason one ranked above the other is that lists demand a winner. On another day, depending on my mood and what deck just crushed me the night before, the rankings could easily flip. Besides, even though my son’s name is Luke, with a middle name Skywalker, not joking, I tend to be more of a fantasy guy. I just couldn’t have a blond, blue-eyed Gandalf running around the house. Some sacrifices had to be made.
Now we arrive at A Lawless Time, the latest expansion for Star Wars Unlimited. While I could spend several paragraphs talking about the game itself, I generally avoid reviewing collectible card games as a whole. Trying to review a living card game is a dangerous business because everything changes over time. New sets release, metas evolve, balance shifts, and suddenly an article written six months ago feels like it belongs in a dusty Jedi archive somewhere.
Expansions are a bit different. A set exists in its own little bubble. You can judge the mechanics, themes, artwork, and overall experience without worrying that future releases will completely rewrite the conversation.
Before we go any further, though, I do want to address something that confused a few readers when I wrote my comparison between Star Wars Unlimited and Star Wars Destiny. In that article, I ultimately chose Destiny as my personal favorite between the two games. Naturally, some people looked at me like I had just claimed a stormtrooper was an excellent shot.
“How can Destiny be your favorite if Unlimited is the better game?”
Well, the answer comes down to the difference between quality and preference, objective review and “what do I want to play ?” These are different constructs, different ways to look at a game.
I don’t think Star Wars Destiny is a better game than Star Wars Unlimited, not even by a long shot, but I love it just the same. It was a chaotic mess, but it was really fun to play.
In my opinion, Star Wars Unlimited is the better-designed game, no question about that at all. I made that clear in the original article. It is tighter, deeper, and far more competitive. But Star Wars Destiny, despite its flaws, is just incredibly fun to play. You roll dice, ridiculous things happen, and the randomness creates moments that feel cinematic and chaotic in the best possible way.
Deck building matters in Destiny, but it does not completely dominate the experience.
Star Wars Unlimited is a different beast entirely. This game is a serious competition for Magic: The Gathering. The deck building is deep and meaningful, the gameplay is more deterministic, and the competitive structure feels extremely solid. The meta evolves constantly, with one dominant deck rising to power only to get hunted down by the next clever creation waiting in the wings.
Star Wars Unlimited is a traditional collectable card game in every sense of the word; it’s all about opening up those boosters, trying to find rare and powerful cards, and trying to build that perfect deck. Whenever a new expansion like A Lawless Time comes out, the game sort of resets as everyone scrambles to come to grips with how the game has changed as a result.
It is also much more of a traditional collectible game, complete with premium cards, hyperspace variants, showcase leaders, foil treatments, and enough ultra-rare cardboard to make collectors quietly question their financial decisions.
And it is a blast, pun intended, but I can’t explain why I would still rather play Star Wars Destiny on most days because it’s just silly and fun, for me, that usually trumps “good design”.
But this article is not about Star Wars Unlimited as a whole. We are here to talk about A Lawless Time, the newest expansion for the game, and whether this set deserves a place among the best releases the game has seen so far.
Alright, that was a lot of rambling right out of the gate. Enough nonsense. Let us get into it.
Overview
Final Score: (4.95 out 5) Near Perfect!
The focus of A Lawless Time leans heavily into the murky criminal underworld and rebellious fringe of the pre-Original Trilogy era. Characters like Saw Gerrera, Tobias Beckett, Jyn Erso, Director Krennic, and Enfys Nest all make appearances, drawing heavily from Rogue One and Solo. That also means we get younger versions of some familiar faces like Han, Lando, Leia, and Chewbacca, which gives the set a nice sense of timeline identity without feeling overly restrictive.
Cards like Tobias Beckett harken back to movies like Solo, but while that in itself is fun, the real trick is going to be coming up with clever ways to use new leaders like this in decks. The theme is awesome, but the real juice here is deck building oppertunities and A Lawless Time is chock-full of them.
There is also a healthy dose of material from the Disney television series, particularly Andor, which feels like a natural fit considering the expansion’s focus on spies, thieves, mercenaries, and morally questionable operators who probably have at least three bounties on their heads at any given moment.
At the same time, A Lawless Time continues Star Wars Unlimited’s habit of treating the Star Wars universe like an enormous toy box rather than a rigid timeline simulator. Expanded universe oddities make appearances too, including Lepi characters, the rabbit-like humanoids that still somehow feel less strange than some of the creatures hanging around the Mos Eisley cantina.
The set is technically rooted in a specific era, but aesthetically it plays much looser with the timeline. Jabba the Hutt, Bib Fortuna, and Boba Fett all make perfect thematic sense here, but several cards clearly use imagery and inspiration pulled directly from the Original Trilogy era. Characters like Malakili, the unfortunate rancor trainer from Return of the Jedi, and Garindan, better known to casual fans as “the weird elephant spy guy” from New Hope, are very clearly channeling classic trilogy energy.
Personally, this does not bother me in the slightest. If anything, it is part of the charm. At this point, I do not particularly care what exact slice of Star Wars an expansion focuses on as long as it delivers more smugglers, bounty hunters, shady deals, blasters, cantinas, and people making terrible life choices in space. Give me more of it. Always.
Mechanically, A Lawless Time introduces two major mechanics to the game, one of which feels almost guaranteed to shake up competitive play in a meaningful way. Credit Tokens.
Credit Tokens are essentially temporary resource acceleration, but unlike traditional ramp cards, they give players short bursts of explosive momentum instead of permanent growth. Cards like Unmarked Credits can generate a Credit Token for a very small investment, allowing players to effectively jump ahead on resources for a turn. Play it early enough and suddenly aggressive decks are threatening plays a full turn ahead of schedule, which is the kind of thing that tends to make control players stare nervously at their opening hand while reconsidering all of their life choices.
What makes Credit Tokens especially interesting is that they create tempo spikes rather than long-term economic advantages. That distinction matters. Traditional ramp permanently changes the pace of the game, but it works out as a sort of slow start to gain a resource advantage later. Credit Tokens instead create windows of opportunity, which feels very appropriate for a set themed around criminals and opportunists looking to cash in fast before things inevitably explode around them.
While credit tokens can produce a short-term burst, some cards like The Max Rebo Band can act as a slightly more permanent ramp. The art on this card is iconic!
The other major addition is the introduction of Multi-Aspect Cards, including the new Triple Aspect cards. Characters like Ezra Bridger and Zeb Orrelios require significant deck-building commitment, but they also reward players for branching into combinations that normally would never exist together.
Some of these cards gain additional bonuses depending on which aspects are present in your deck beyond their basic requirements, which quietly opens the door to something Star Wars Unlimited has only lightly touched until now: true cross aspect synergy and hybrid design space.
That may end up being one of the most important long-term additions in the entire set, or it might end up being a gimmick that doesn’t quite stick the landing; it’s really impossible to say at this point.
Multi-Aspect cards are either going to be a major part of the competative meta game, or irrelevant. Right now, it’s really hard to say which way its going to go.
Up until now, aspects have largely maintained fairly defined identities and playstyles. A Lawless Time starts poking holes in those walls. Suddenly, you can see the possibility for decks that blend mechanics, keywords, and abilities in ways that previously felt awkward or outright impossible. It rewards experimentation, and collectible card games are usually at their best when players are encouraged to become slightly deranged scientists in search of broken combinations.
Beyond the new mechanics, A Lawless Time also revisits many existing keywords and gameplay systems, often remixing them into new combinations. One thing I noticed almost immediately was how many cards feature “When Played” effects. They are everywhere in this set.
Is this a good card. I find it increadibly difficult to tell, it would require many….many games to make that determination, at least for me. From a simple reading though, this sounds awesome, but is it cost effective, that is the real question with multi-aspect cards.
That gives the expansion a very active, tempo-driven feeling where cards often generate immediate value the moment they hit the table. Even units that may not survive long enough to act can still impact the game instantly, which creates faster pacing and more tactical decision-making.
Of course, the real question with any new expansion is never whether it will affect the game. It absolutely will. The real question is whether players will use the cards the way the designers intended.
History suggests the answer is probably “not even remotely.”
This is the eternal challenge of designing a collectible card game. Developers can spend months testing interactions, balancing mechanics, and carefully tuning power levels, only for players to collectively lock themselves in metaphorical garages for two weeks and emerge with some horrifying deck combo capable of breaking the laws of nature by turn three.
And frankly, that is part of the fun.
Components
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Top-tier card quality, the best in the business.
Cons: The tokens included with the game have and continue to suck, and most people continue not to care, myself included.
I will keep this section brief because component quality in collectible card games falls into a very strange category. It is simultaneously one of the most important aspects of the hobby and also one of the easiest places for a modern publisher to score points because there is only one acceptable quality level. It’s an all-or-nothing deal.
At this stage, premium component quality is not a luxury in the CCG world. It is the bare minimum requirement for entry. If players are going to spend money chasing rare cardboard rectangles like bounty hunters tracking fugitives across the galaxy, those rectangles better feel fantastic in the hand.
And Star Wars Unlimited absolutely clears that bar with room to spare.
The cardstock is excellent, the printing is sharp, the colors are vibrant, and the overall presentation has that polished, premium feel you want from a modern collectible card game. The hyperspace cards, foil treatments, showcase leaders, and other premium variants continue to look spectacular in A Lawless Time. Pulling a high rarity card still delivers that little burst of dopamine that convinces your brain that opening “just one more pack” is somehow a financially responsible decision.
More importantly, the readability and usability of the cards remain excellent despite the increasing mechanical complexity of the game. Fantasy Flight has done a very good job maintaining clean layouts and visual clarity, which becomes increasingly important as more keywords, mechanics, and interactions enter the card pool.
As has been the case throughout the entire Unlimited run, the tracking components, like health, shields etc.. have and continue to suck. They are paper-thin cardboard pieces, something you expect to get from a cereal box rather than a CCG. No one actually cares because no one actually uses these, but if this is your first venture into Star Wars Unlimited, you will be disappointed.
Most avid fans of Star Wars Unlimited will tell you that the first order of business is getting some acrylic tokens. They are relatively cheap and an almost manditory replacement for the crappy tokens that come with the game, which coincidently are not worth the paper they were printed on.
Star Wars Unlimited meets all standards of quality effortlessly.
It aced the assignment. Moving on.
Theme
Score: Tilt:
Pros: A Lawless Time represents, in my humble opinion, the best parts of the Star Wars Universe.
Cons: I couldn’t come up with anything.
Getting the theme right in a Star Wars Unlimited set is incredibly important, but let us be honest, Star Wars as a setting does a lot of the heavy lifting here. Give me almost any vaguely thematic expansion title tied to this universe and I could probably brainstorm two hundred card ideas before my coffee gets cold.
That is part of what makes Star Wars such an absurdly powerful setting for a collectible card game. The universe is so rich with characters, locations, factions, ships, weird aliens, criminals, bounty hunters, and background cantina weirdos that the design space feels almost endless.
So naturally, A Lawless Time absolutely nails the theme. The real discussion is not whether the expansion succeeds thematically, but how it succeeds and which cards really sell the fantasy.
As the name suggests, the underworld side of Star Wars takes center stage here. Smugglers, mercenaries, syndicates, criminals, bounty hunters, and opportunists dominate the set both mechanically and aesthetically. This is the dirty back alley side of the galaxy where everyone looks suspicious, every deal feels illegal, and trusting anyone is generally considered a tactical error.
One of the things I really appreciate about this set is how strongly it leans into recreating specific Star Wars archetypes and scenes through deck building. You can build a proper Jabba’s Palace-themed deck, which is fittingly one of the spotlight archetypes for the set. There are strong hooks for Syndicate and Black Sun style builds, Rogue One-focused rebel groups, Solo-inspired underworld crews, and classic Original Trilogy infiltration themes.
From the art to the impact, everything about Star Wars Unlimited cards just oozes theme.
You can even recreate the entire “absolutely nothing suspicious happening here” sequence from Return of the Jedi with cards like Lando’s Underworld Disguise and Leia’s Disguise. The fact that these cards exist at all makes me irrationally happy.
In fact, I think A Lawless Time may be one of the richest sets yet for thematic deck building yet. There is a very noticeable focus on recreating scenes, crews, and faction identities from the films and shows, but importantly, the cards are also mechanically designed to work together.
That matters more than it might sound.
One of the occasionally awkward things about Star Wars Unlimited in earlier sets was that cards clearly inspired by the same scene or faction did not always synergize particularly well in actual gameplay. You would build a deck that looked perfect from a lore perspective, then discover half the cards were fighting each other mechanically like rival bounty hunters arguing over a contract.
A Lawless Time feels much more deliberate in this regard. The thematic decks are not just flavorful; they are functional. The set actively rewards players for leaning into those themes instead of accidentally punishing them for trying to build something cinematic.
That is a huge win for this guy who loves a good thematic deck!
This also feels like the perfect place to talk about a few of my favorite cards in the set from a thematic perspective.
The Triple Aspect Cassian Andor is fantastic. As somebody who absolutely loved the Andor television series, this card immediately jumped out at me. Making Cassian a multi-aspect card feels incredibly appropriate because the character himself operates across so many different worlds and moral lines throughout the story.
Mechanically, the card is excellent too. At four cost for a 4/4 body, Cassian already presents a legitimate threat, but the additional support he provides to your other units gives the card real presence on the board. It feels versatile, tactical, and quietly dangerous, which is basically the perfect representation of Cassian Andor as a character.
Then there is the new Jabba the Hutt leader card, which I absolutely adore and strongly suspect could end up being one of the sets defining cards.
The design here is brilliant because it captures the feeling of Jabba operating an entire criminal empire built on favors, debt, and recycling disposable employees. The ability to return Underworld cards to your hand while immediately refunding part of the cost with Credit Tokens creates this constant sense of greasy value generation where Jabba always seems to come out ahead somehow.
And that is before he even deploys.
Once Jabba enters play, things get ridiculous in the best possible way. Being able to play Underworld cards directly into play and potentially grant them Ambush if you spent a Credit Token opens the door for some genuinely terrifying combinations. Giving units Ambush is an enormously powerful effect, especially in a set already built around tempo swings and explosive turns.
The card feels dangerous. It feels manipulative. It feels unfair in that very specific way great villain cards often do.
Most importantly, it feels like Jabba.
This may be my favorite card in all of Star Wars Unlimited. I have so many deck ideas that I suspect I’m going to end up with multiple Jabba The Hut decks.
That is really the strength of A Lawless Time as a whole. The mechanics and themes are constantly reinforcing each other. The cards do not just reference Star Wars lore; they actively recreate the feeling of these characters and factions at the table.
There is far more happening in this expansion than I can reasonably fit into a single review, but thematically speaking, A Lawless Time absolutely sticks the landing.
Gameplay
Score: Tilt:
Pros: New mechanics introduced in this set are easy to use and impactful.
Cons: There is nothing revolutionary about these mechanics; in a way, they are overdue concepts we expected to get at some point.
It is very difficult to separate reviewing the gameplay of Star Wars Unlimited as a whole from reviewing a specific expansion like A Lawless Time. In many ways, they are inseparable. Every new set becomes part of the larger ecosystem immediately, like tossing another dangerous creature into an already overcrowded trash compactor.
That said, I do think there are a few ways to specifically judge what A Lawless Time brings to the table mechanically, particularly through its two major additions: Credit Tokens and Multi-Aspect cards.
Starting with Credit Tokens, I think this mechanic has the potential to significantly impact the game, both immediately and long-term.
What makes Credit Tokens interesting is that while they technically function as ramp, they do not behave like traditional resource acceleration. Previous ramp strategies in Star Wars Unlimited were generally about long-term advantage. You invested resources now so you could build toward massive late-game turns later. The goal was usually to outscale your opponent and eventually start dropping absurdly expensive threats while they stared helplessly across the table, wondering where everything went wrong.
Credit Tokens operate very differently.
As there are ways to earn credits, naturally their is a way to counter them. I love the image on this card, so bad-ass!
They create temporary bursts of momentum rather than permanent economic advantage. A card like Unmarked Credits can effectively push you one turn ahead on tempo, allowing aggressive or tempo-focused decks to accelerate into stronger plays much earlier than expected.
That distinction matters a lot.
Temporary ramp changes the pacing of the game in a completely different way than permanent ramp. Instead of slowly building superiority, Credit Tokens encourage explosive sequencing and pressure spikes. It is not about dominating the late-game economy. It is about kicking the door open early and throwing your opponent into survival mode before they can stabilize.
That alone is enough to create entirely new archetypes.
And while the initial card pool supporting Credit Tokens is still relatively small, there are already hints of where the mechanic could go. Jabba the Hutt is the obvious standout example because he does far more than simply generate temporary resources. He turns Credits into an engine. Bib Fortuna also plays in this design space, generating Credits in more creative and synergistic ways.
That is what makes the mechanic exciting. Right now, it feels restrained, but you can already see the future design space opening up behind it like a blast door slowly creaking apart.
As a gameplay mechanic, I think Credit Tokens are excellent. They are mechanically useful, strategically interesting, and thematically appropriate all at once. That is usually the sweet spot for a great CCG mechanic.
It is also exactly the kind of mechanic that sends players sprinting back to their old deck boxes looking for terrible ideas they are suddenly convinced are brilliant.
Now, the other major addition, Multi-Aspect cards, is much harder to evaluate right now.
Unlike Credit Tokens, which immediately slot into existing strategies fairly naturally, Multi-Aspect cards feel more experimental. Their true strength is going to depend heavily on how the competitive scene evolves over the next several months.
Still, their arrival feels almost inevitable.
The so-called “rainbow deck” has been a staple concept in collectible card games for decades. At some point, players always start asking the same question: “What happens if I ignore all reasonable deck-building restraints and jam everything together anyway?”
A Lawless Time finally opens that door properly.
It was inevitable that bases would play some sort of roll in bringing rainbow decks to life, there are a few different combinations of this epic base action.
Personally, I find the mechanic fascinating, though not necessarily revolutionary for my own playstyle. Most of my current decks already function primarily around two aspects, with the third aspect often feeling more like a light splash than a core identity. Going beyond that starts to feel increasingly unstable to me.
But that is preference, not criticism.
Because, from a design perspective, Multi-Aspect cards massively expand what is possible in Star Wars Unlimited. They allow abilities, strategies, and mechanics that were previously locked away inside separate faction identities to start interacting in entirely new ways.
That is a huge deal.
Even if the first wave of Multi Aspect decks ends up inconsistent or awkward, the mechanic itself represents a major expansion of the game’s design space. In the long term, I suspect A Lawless Time will ultimately be remembered as the set where Star Wars Unlimited fundamentally widened its mechanical horizons.
And if I had to make an early prediction, I would not be surprised at all if Multi-Aspect cards eventually become a dominant force in the meta. Players love flexibility. They love experimentation. Most importantly, competitive players love discovering combinations the developers never intended.
That combination usually leads to madness eventually.
As a whole, A Lawless Time introduces two mechanics that almost feel overdue in hindsight. I am actually a little surprised neither temporary ramp mechanics nor Multi Aspect cards appeared earlier in the game’s lifespan because both concepts are fairly classic territory for collectible card games.
But perhaps that timing is exactly why they work so well here.
Star Wars Unlimited spent its early sets establishing strong foundations and clearly defined identities. A Lawless Time feels like the point where the game finally loosens its collar a bit and starts exploring just how weird and creative things can become.
Replayability and Longevity
Score: Tilt:
Pros: This game is not only addictive to play and collect, but deck building is endless and amazing. A Lawless Time raises the stakes exponentially.
Cons: If you can find something to complain about here, leave a comment. I would be curious to know what it is.
When it comes to a collectible card game, replayability is not just important; it is everything. You can have great mechanics, beautiful artwork, and clever design, but if the game does not keep pulling players back to the table, it simply does not survive.
Fortunately, Star Wars Unlimited handles replayability with absolute precision, and A Lawless Time continues that trend without missing a beat.
There is almost something unfair about judging replayability in a CCG expansion, because the system itself is built for endless play. Once you are invested, the game becomes a constant cycle of tweaking decks, testing ideas, adapting to new cards, and occasionally convincing yourself that this next version is definitely the one that finally works.
A Lawless Time adds fuel to that fire in exactly the right way.
I’m not a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering anymore these days, I personally don’t think it has aged well but there is no doubt that I’m in a minority opinion here. Suffice to say that Star Wars Unlimited is a superior game in every measurable category, so if MTG has lasted for decades, I suspect there is a lot of hope of seeing Star Wars Unlimited have a nice healthy run. At some point however I suspect just like Magic: The Gathering they are going to start running out of ideas. Are we going to see Star Wars Spider Man cross-over at some point?
New mechanics like Credit Tokens encourage players to revisit older decks and rethink their tempo and resource curves. Multi Aspect cards open the door to entirely new archetypes that did not previously exist. Even if you do not build around them immediately, they linger in the back of your mind, quietly suggesting increasingly questionable deck ideas at inconvenient times.
On top of that, the strong thematic focus of the set encourages a different kind of replayability. It is not just about winning, it is about building something that feels right. You are not only asking “Is this deck good?” but also “Does this feel like the crew I want to play?” That combination of mechanical depth and thematic freedom is a powerful hook.
And of course, every new expansion reshapes the broader ecosystem. Existing decks evolve, old strategies get new tools, and entirely new approaches emerge. The game never really resets, it just keeps expanding outward.
That is the magic of a well-designed CCG.
There is no real ceiling here. Like Magic: The Gathering, this is the kind of game that can stay in rotation for years, even decades. As long as new sets continue to deliver meaningful additions, the replayability effectively becomes limitless.
A Lawless Time does exactly what it needs to do. It keeps the engine running, adds new layers to explore, and gives players even more reasons to come back for another game.
Conclusion
I have to admit, reviewing a CCG expansion is a bit of a strange experience. It is the first time I have done it on this blog and I am not entirely convinced I have done it justice. Part of me feels like I should have spent more time diving into individual cards, because that is really where this expansion shines.
A Lawless Time taps directly into the parts of Star Wars that I personally enjoy the most. Not just the characters, but specific moments and scenes. There is something very satisfying about seeing those moments translated into cards that actually work together on the table.
For me, the Jabba’s Palace sequence has always been a standout. There is a lot of nostalgia tied up in that whole section of Return of the Jedi, so being able to recreate that experience through themed decks is a huge win.
So I will just say it plainly. This is my favorite expansion for Star Wars Unlimited so far.
That is not purely because of the mechanics, although they are solid and interesting. It really comes down to the setting, the tone, and the sheer number of opportunities to build decks around some of my favorite parts of the Star Wars universe. That is what pushes it over the top for me.
If you are already playing Star Wars Unlimited, you probably do not need me to tell you to pick this up.
The more interesting question is whether this is a good entry point if you are new to the game.
My answer is fairly simple.
Start with the core set. It is called the core set for a reason. It lays the foundation, gives you the essential tools to understand the game, and offers a lot of value right out of the box. You can technically jump straight into an expansion, but you will get a much better overall experience if you begin there.
After that, expansions are largely self-contained in terms of theme and direction, so you can absolutely start with A Lawless Time. In fact, I would argue it is one of the more approachable sets. The new mechanics are easy to grasp and the themes are clear, which makes it a comfortable place to begin building decks.
I would also recommend Jump to Lightspeed alongside it, simply because it is another strong set with a lot of fun and interesting cards to explore.
At the end of the day, A Lawless Time is a great expansion. It brings meaningful mechanics, strong thematic cohesion, and a lot of personality to the table. More importantly, it captures a very specific slice of Star Wars in a way that feels both playable and memorable.
