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.
Shards of Creation is a great idea. I haven’t read any Brandon Sanderson, and my understanding of his magic system can be charitably described as patchwork—“There are…metals?”—but from what little I do know a trick-taking game in which each suit corresponds to a shard—don’t ask—is spot-on. That’s a wide-open design space that invites exploration and could result in some great ideas. It really could.
Shards of Creation is a trick-taking game with set collection tendencies. This immediately sets the game up for an uphill climb in my experience. There are eight suits in the box, five of which are randomly chosen for each game, and the winner of each trick selects one card to add to their scoring tableau. You score points for complete sets of the five suits and for numerous copies of the same suit.
The trump suit changes across each of the game’s three rounds, and each trump suit brings with it a corresponding rule. Autonomy cannot be led if you have any other choice. Cultivation allows players to draw extra cards at the start of the round before discarding back down to a normal hand size. Dominion forces the winner of each trick to score the highest rank. Many of the cards in each suit have their own powers as well. Some get a power boost from the cards in your or other players’ scoring areas. Others let you draw and then discard a card. You get the gist.
If the ideas animating Shards of Creation are great, the reality falls short. There’s shockingly little player agency, even for a trick-taking game. Trick-taking is often about managing the ebb and flow of your opportunities, but that simply doesn’t happen here. A hand starts, and you go along for the ride. The powers have little impact on what’s happening. Everyone ends up with a similar tableau by the end of the game, and scores don’t tend to vary much. Even if they did, though, you wouldn’t feel like you had much to do with it.
Shards of Creation isn’t bad. It avoids being a mess of tangled edge cases, which would be its own nightmare, but it also has no personality, which feels very much the opposite of the idea. There are no interesting textures. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything new. I don’t feel like I’m doing much of anything, really.
To designer Hayden Dillard’s credit, this is a hard brief. It may be that the combination of all these flavors kept any one from getting sufficiently developed. The trump rule for Ruin, which forces the winner of each trick to score the lowest card in play, combines nicely with the negative-value Ruin cards that cost you points when a part of your tableau, but that rule comes up in roughly 3/8s of the games you play, and it isn’t present enough as a component of the game to make much of a difference. A game centered on that mechanic could have been something really good.
It may also be a question of audience. I learned to love the Lord of the Rings trick-takers by playing them with people who don’t spend a good portion of their time playing board games, and I have not had a chance to put Shards of Creation in front of a similar group. Even so, I maintain that Shards of Creation feels like Coke Zero in comparison to Bornmueller’s original recipe. My issues with the latter had more to do with the arbitrary nature of co-op victory in that system. It always worked very well, dare I say compellingly, as a trick-taker.
Whatever the issue(s), with Shards of Creation, the great idea promised by the premise isn’t to be found here. Medusa Dollmaker turns in some characteristically magnificent art—I’m a mark for Art Nouveau—and I am told by those more familiar with Mr. Sanderson’s books that the suit powers do get the general idea right. Even that Sandersonian was unmoved. Shards of Creation is just that, a collection of dissociated pieces, yet to be compellingly assembled.
Shards of Creation details
- Designer: Hayden Dillard
- Artists: Medusa Dollmaker
- Publishers: Brotherwise Games
- Release Date: 2026
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Set Collection, Trick-taking, Variable Set-up
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.34669 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
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