Inca Empire: The Card Game – Thomas Wells
At some point I’ll have to review Inca Empire, as it’s a pretty neat take on a cube rail, shared incentive track-building game. Inca Empire: The Card Game, in the storied tradition of X: The Card Game, is less than a pale imitation of its predecessor. It’s a game with some novel mechanisms, but because of turn order problems and really uninteresting cardplay, because essentially Inca Empire: Munchkin Edition.
You have a hand of multiuse cards, which can be used for four things. You expand the shared card tableau, using cardboard chits to mark routes you claim. You’re limited by available chits, Hansa Teutonica style. You can play one-shot cards, you can add cards to an income tableau for yourself (called terraces) or you can play a trade agreement card between you and another player, which give you both a special rule and you an extra action at the end of the round. To win, you’re trying to plot down tons of chits and score the best 3 of 5 secret goal cards at end of game.
The rules for expanding the card tableau are pretty restrictive, and the goals arbitrarily reward players who’ve drawn ones that don’t interfere with other ones. One player scored 72 points from a pair of two of the same goal cards, which was nuts, because everyone else was getting like 12 to 18 from theirs. Too much abstraction of concepts into too small of a play space, and ultimately, playing well felt like rolling dice. Play Inca Empire instead, it’ll last 40 minutes longer, but c’mon man.
Ease of entry?
★★★☆☆ – There were a few questions
Would I play it again?
★☆☆☆☆ – Would play again but will cry about it
Read more articles from Thomas Wells
ARDEVUR: The Game of Resources – Justin Bell
It has the worst game title of the year, it has the worst imbalance issues this year, it has one of the worst rulebooks of the year…ARDEVUR: The Game of Resources might be the absolute worst game of the crop of bad games I’ve had the distinct pleasure of playing in 2026.
ARDEVUR is a game about the mining business, but the game’s veil of economic strategy elements quickly deteriorates. ARDEVUR positions players as the head of mining corporations (the game’s first-time designer, Gabriele Areolite, says that he previously led a real-world mining corporation), and play begins with an “auction” to secure land grants to mining sites. Unfortunately, Areolite may not be aware of how auction games work, and in ARDEVUR, auctions are conducted strictly through the roll of a six-sided die, not auction elements you may be aware of, such as…well, bidding. (I would have called the existing format here a draft, but designers usually don’t consult with me first!) Some game elements make the mining business seem like the mobster life best captured in TV shows like The Sopranos; should mining corporations need protection money? I’m all for overselling a game’s theme, but I didn’t realize mining would be this exciting.
Turns are straightforward, as players need to follow a slow process to first explore a site, then build a mine on that same site, before building infrastructure and assets to conduct the business of mine extraction, resource production and sales to the global market. On paper, this is my kind of game. The reality is that ARDEVUR feels like it just came out of the oven and needs time to cool, and that’s before I launch into a tirade about the action cards each mining faction can use on their turn or the turns of their opponents. Some of the action cards are absolutely hilarious, in a bad way. On back-to-back turns, fellow contributor Kevin Brantley unleashed a card that removed my only active mine from the game, essentially forcing me to start the game over. (“Take that” is different than “Now, you need to rebuild your business operations from scratch.”) On another turn, I simply got to take half of everyone else’s earnings by playing an action card. ARDEVUR was terrible in most ways modern games can be terrible; 2026 is quickly becoming my least favorite tabletop year ever. (Designers: playtest your game hundreds of times! It shows, almost right away, when you have not done that.)
Ease of entry?
★☆☆☆☆ – Rough
Would I play it again?
☆☆☆☆☆ – No chance
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
Exactly as Planned – Andrew Lynch
I love the idea of a real-time cooperative game themed around a heist, but the reality of Exactly as Planned falls short of that idea. The main problem, I think, is that playing feels neither like we are cooperating nor like we are executing a heist. Disfunction could be the point of a game like this, and I would probably love that game, but instead we have a bland and lackluster rush to grab cards to fulfill your goals, everyone else be damned. Based on the art, it seems to me that we are supposed to be career criminals, international jet-setters, gentleman thieves, but the game plays like a group of teenagers who came up with a convoluted plan to nab the register from Cold Stone Creamery.
Ease of entry?
★★★☆☆ – There were a few questions
Would I play it again?
★☆☆☆☆ – Would play again but will cry about it
Read more articles from Andrew Lynch
Grimcoven – Kevin Brantley
I’m a fan of boss battlers and have dipped my toe into plenty of them, from Townsfolk Tussle to Kingdom Death: Monster to Too Many Bones. Though most of these titles are structurally similar, they all come with different flavors that make them unique experiences in their own right.
In Grimcoven, players go toe-to-toe with one of six “Griefbounds,” each with varying mechanics and five different difficulty scenarios, adding up to a highly replayable game. Players are hunters who start with a base pool of dice and carry out actions depending on the faces they roll. Hunters level up by obtaining Lament, which pushes them along a track and unlocks upgrades. But going too far corrupts the hunter, possibly turning them against the other players, similar to Cthulhu: Death May Die. After the hunters take their actions, the game follows a programmatic path of minions and elites attacking, followed by the Griefbound.
At its core, Grimcoven is a dice-management game. The faces you roll are extremely important for teeing up attacks, and more dice means getting to do more stuff. Many rounds were painful because we didn’t have the exact rolls needed to quite pull off everything we wanted to do, but the game touts its punishing nature, so you know what you’re signing up for.
Because the game flow remains relatively static, players know what attacks are coming and can plan accordingly. However, the game also has a timer, and the longer a battle goes, the stronger the baddies get. It adds just the right amount of stress to keep players on their toes, and a lack of planning can result in some painful hits from the boss.
When jumping in, you know you’ll be seated for a two-to-three-plus-hour experience, and that runtime helps build the tension that makes the heroics feel much more epic. However, it still feels a tad long for a game night. It could be hour three when you realize you’re getting punched in the face pretty severely and likely aren’t going to make it. Some might see that as a waste of time, spending hours building toward a fight just to lose.
The game is brutal, but it’s upfront about it. Quelling one threat only gives you a brief respite before several others come crashing in. Oh, and stacking conditions can cascade into even worse things if they aren’t taken care of right away. There are plenty of directions the face punching can come from, and managing bad dice rolls becomes an uphill battle of figuring out which problem needs to be addressed first.
How you navigate those threats, though, is a fun puzzle. Each experience is essentially a roguelite, as your hunter will be built differently each time thanks to the massive upgrade deck every character has access to. The base box—and I’m so glad there’s a standee version—has so much packed into it that if you love the game, you’ll have plenty to keep you busy even before getting to the dreaded “E” word (expansions).
For me, though, it’s just not that fun when 70% of your turns feel like you’re on the back foot. I get it: it’s meant to be hard, and maybe it’s a skill issue with my group, but many times I’d look around the table and see my friends’ faces looking somber, with only the occasional expression of “hell yeah.” We won maybe once or twice across all our plays, and even then, it felt more like surviving a grind than achieving some grand triumph.
Maybe I need to tap in some difficulty modifiers, but repeated defeats and the high skill ceiling didn’t exactly inspire us to immediately rerack and play again. I think the system is solid and unique enough to stand out against other boss battlers, and fans of “hard” games—à la Dark Souls players—will enjoy this through and through. But for me, I’ll leave the Griefbound hunting to the pros, as it appears I simply don’t have enough mettle.
Ease of entry?
★★☆☆☆ – Not an easy onboard
Would I play it again?
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
Read more articles from Kevin Brantley.
Vanuatu (first edition) – Thomas Wells
I had a great time with the first edition of Vanuatu, which is just the kind of teeth-punching eurogame I enjoy playing. Basically, players have five workers which they place on action spaces in tranches of 2/2/1. Then, going around clockwise from the start player, players can execute actions where they have a majority of workers or are higher in turn order priority. What this means is that on your turn, if you don’t have a majority or tiebreaker anywhere, you REMOVE your action discs, effectively losing a turn. The rest of the game is a pretty standard economic game. There’s things to pick up and deliver, and there’s things to mine for cash. With the exception of one of the game’s resources, nothing replinishes, so from the first turn, it’s a knife fight to get all the stuff you need. There’s also a role selection component where players get to draft a special power each round.
I think this game could offer some interesting collusion and negotiation possibilities, though at five players (the count we played at), I would shorten the game to seven turns, rather than 8, which ran a little long. Would definitely play again.
Ease of entry?
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?
★★★★☆ – Would like to play it again
