…My first day without appointments, and a chance to play more games and wander round the smaller publishers too…here’s what I found.
The day started off with a play of Cardia Tide and Storm, the new standalone expansion for Duel for Cardia, – for which I had the honour of presenting the International Gamers Award for best two-player game 2025. Tide and Storm consists of 2 new decks to play with – an Island deck and a Storm deck! These decks can be played standalone or mixed with the original game, and I gather involved a lot of work to ensure that the game still functions well with the different cards played. As with the original game, each player simultaneously reveals their played card; the higher card wins a victory point while the lower card can enact its action – which can lead to all kinds of interesting effects on the opponent, on cards already played in previous rounds, etc. One feature of the new game is the increase of the number of points needed to win from 5 to 6. In the Island decks, the game features 3 island cards and 3 ships which may be moved by players. Should you move a ship onto the island nearest you, you will gain a VP – if the ship stays there! Moving onto the middle island forces a player to lose a card from they deck or allows you to draw an extra card. Indeed the deck features a number of cards which move the ships and which invite you to reduce your hand size for a benefit or occasionally to increase your hand size. Plenty to think about here! The second deck uses a new resource called “Phials” and involves abilities in which you place the phials onto cards to trigger their abilities. Such abilities can modify the value of other cards already played, for example, to switch around who actually won a previous round. The deck is more complex and requires more planning than the Island deck. I really enjoyed playing the new expansion and I’m excited to get it back to the table soon; and really admire the depth of development and the ideas that I saw in the game!
Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2026 (Part 16)
Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2026 (Part 16)
New-to-me games played recently include …
216 (2026): Rank 25178, Rating 6.0
Roll three dice. If you can fulfil one of the 4 contracts in the open draft, score it. If you can’t, roll once more and if you miss, take a help card that allows you to do dice wibbles to help fulfil contracts later. That’s it. Your strategy? Roll well. There’s nothing interesting, and nothing to do on opponent turns. At least it goes quickly enough.
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