Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
During my visit to Gen Con 2025, I dropped by a party hosted by the team with Hachette to see the wares of the publishers they work with for US distribution. As usual, it was a good time and fun to try some of the upcoming hits from publishers like Scorpion Masque, Randolph, and Sorry We Are French. On the way out of the party, our marketing rep handed me a copy of Leaders, the 2025 release from Studio H, and I was really impressed with the box.
In part, that was because the box had a secret.
The cover art, as one might expect from the folks who gave us Ratjack, Oriflamme, and Virtual Revolution, is great. Lifting up the box cover reveals a slot for a small board and a series of gorgeous tarot-sized character cards, with a player aid that is essential reading for anyone working through their first few plays.
But I found myself looking around…where were the character standees? Or the bases that I would need to stand everything up?
That’s when I saw it: a small blue pull string, which I tugged in the hopes of rediscovering Christmas magic. And inside, I did just that: there, hiding in the middle of this unnecessarily gorgeous packaging, was exactly what I needed: all the playing pieces. It was like Studio H decided to make the box a chess game up and down the line, including building in a drawer to the box to make it feel like I was pulling something much more expensive off the shelf.
The Leaders box is pretty cool. Luckily, the game is, too. The trick? A bit like the card game GOSU X from a couple years ago, you should dive into Leaders only if you are really going to give this a lot of time on the table.
“It’s Like the End of a Chess Game”
Leaders is an abstract strategy game for exactly two players. Using a small board with hex movement dictating turns, a player must capture the Leader of their opponent by placing two of their characters adjacent to the opposing leader standee or by forcing the Leader to end their turn completely surrounded by a mix of opponent and ally characters. Across three plays (one in person with my wife, and two with Meeple Mountain contributor Kev Brantley on Board Game Arena), I found the game to consistently last 10-15 minutes, max.
On a night when I taught my family how to play a silly family game called Push Push Penguin (a teach that took maybe five minutes), I taught Leaders to my wife in maybe two. Players can activate any number of their characters to take actions before recruiting one of the three cards in a small market at the end of each turn, adding new characters to the back line of a player’s side of the board. When a player has drafted their fifth character (really, their fourth, since one of their characters is their leader card), that’s the end of adding new characters to a player’s portfolio.
Each character card in the game does something different. Some characters break the normal movement rules, while others can’t move at all unless a different character is triggered, maybe by the opposing player. One character can drag an opposing character all the way across the map, if they have a direct, uninterrupted line of sight to that character. The Assassin is already a fan favorite at home: the Assassin can capture a leader by themselves.
Turns go back and forth until the win condition is met. I still haven’t seen a game take more than eight rounds. Kev called out that Leaders feels like “the end of a chess match” during one of our sub-10-minute games on BGA, and I’m inclined to agree. By the time you have finished drafting a starting five in this game, it’s almost over.
“She’s Crafty…She’s Just My Type”
I had a blast with Leaders, even though I spent a lot of time reviewing my player aid in real life or hovering my mouse over each character to remind myself of what everyone was capable of doing on their activations. That told me what I feared most as I completed my plays: I could see Leaders being magic for a dedicated group of two players who go after this one 10-15 times or more. (That’s easy to do with such a short playtime.)
That also means games can really bog down as new players—i.e., me and my wife—spend time looking at the small card market to figure out what each character can do. Like other games of this category, variety is the spice, so trying to draft characters that do different things will hopefully open up wild ways to take down the other player’s Leader. Just expect to spend a lot of time reading cards and reminding yourself of what’s possible, especially when there are a full field of 10 combatants in action.
Unlike chess, Leaders doesn’t allow for players to capture other cards, save for the leader. That means some players will think they are playing chess (or, in my house, Othello) when they are really just playing Leaders. The ruleset is quite simple, but the character powers really up the thinkiness.
As a one-off, Leaders was fun, but I am not the target audience who will get this to the table enough to make it a classic. No matter how many times you play Leaders, you owe it to yourself to check out the character images…oh my goodness, the work here by Xavier Gueniffey Durin (Tokaido) is gorgeous. My kids loved the artwork and they weren’t even playing the game! Some of the images are standout, and like the built-in drawer housing the pieces in the middle on the box side, Studio H’s reputation for putting outstanding product into the market remains unblemished.
