Heroscape: Well-Armed Crabs and a Serious Boost to Revna’s Army

Posted on July 29, 2025 by Mark Jackson

The release of the Boiling Tension figures for Heroscape covered May through July… with everything coming in ahead of schedule! That means that the releases I’ll be reviewing here have actually been available at retail since last Monday. The Air Marshall dropped back in May – and he was a cool enough figure to get his own review!

A quick reminder for those of you living under a (virtual) rock when it comes to board games: Heroscape is a miniatures skirmish combat game played on a board constructed out of (incredibly cool) plastic terrain pieces. (Seriously: folks who play with other minis systems have used this 3D terrain because it works so well.) Since the theme is a battle for dominance in world where the Valkyrie Generals can recruit warriors from multiple times & dimensions, there is a wild mixture of heroes & squads – aliens & Matrix guys & Braveheart & dragons & robots & kung fu monks & gorillas with guns, to name a few. More recently, the good folks at Renegade have added polar bears & space pirates, to name a few more. And it’s one of my favorite games…

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Dale Yu: Review  of Typewriter

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Dale Yu

Typewriter

  • Designers: Tim Fowers, Jeff Beck, Skye Larsen
  • Publisher: Fowers Games
  • Players: 2-5
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

Spell words, flip your typewriter keys, and build combos in this new game in the Paperback series. This travel-ready game comes in a small box, and can even be stored in the included zipper bag. Acrylic tiles instead of cards mean even a bit of rain or ocean spray won’t dampen your fun.

Every turn, you will spell a word with the tiles in front of you. Use all your starting tiles in the word to send a tile to your scoring stack. And at the end of each round you’ll grab a shiny new tile for yourself from the offer. Since you can only take a tile from the offer after your turn, you can start spelling out your next word while the other players take their turns.  Sounds simple enough. But there’s one more twist: every time you spell a word, you’ll flip all the tiles in that word, revealing new letters and a completely new puzzle.

The tiles you take might have potent abilities that can be recharged by using a letter in your word to flip them back over, or you might grab tiles that help you score set collection points at the end of the game. Other tiles are bigrams that let you claim common vowels, and sometimes a tile just has a real tough letter that can score for real big points.

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Unmatched: Battle of Legends Volume III

Posted on July 25, 2025 by Mark Jackson

The good folks at Restoration Games keep churning out new boxes of Unmatched: Battle of Legends heroes – and continue to try new and interesting ways to echo the myths & stories that inspire the various characters. Whether it’s the trickster god of Norse mythology or an infamous 17th century pirate, the heroes in Volume III are well-differentiated from previous heroes and make this box an essential part of any serious Unmatched collection.

What is Unmatched?

For the uninitiated, the Unmatched system is a card-based combat game that pits heroes from across time, genres, and varying levels of historical validity in combat to the death. Similar to the John Wick films, “Why are we fighting?” is not really a question anyone is asking.  It’s because we can. 

Based on the Star Wars: Epic Duels game (released back in 2002), the team at Restoration Games “dreamed up a complete overhaul of the game… like you took your ’72 Ford Pinto into the shop and they sent back a Porsche 911. Both of them run on internal combustion engines, granted… but one has an annoying tendency to explode when it gets rear-ended while the other is one of the finest pieces of automotive machinery ever designed.” (The previous quote is from my original review of the system – in which I go into much more detail about how they fixed the game.)

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Dale Yu: Review of Burger Master

Posted on July 24, 2025 by Dale Yu

Burger Master

  • Designer: Jeppe Norsker
  • Publisher:  Korea Boardgames
  • Players:  1-6
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 20 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

Test your mettle in this competition to be the greatest burger chef of them all! Compete with other players in this fast-paced puzzle game to see who can complete the ever-more complicated orders to perfection in the shortest steps possible. Think you can do better than other players? Step up to the grill and prove it!

Complete the burger orders in the fewest steps possible to earn fries. Claim your title as the greatest burger chef by winning 5 fries!
. 40 unique challenges, hundreds of solutions.
. No down time.

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Dale Yu: Review of Paper World

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Dale Yu

Paper World

  • Designers: Alexandre Aguilar and Benoit Turpin 
  • Publisher: Pandasaurus
  • Players: 2-4 
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 20 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Paper World, each player takes on the role of a traveler trying to recreate the landscapes they have seen during their journeys using layers of paper. Stack the various layers of paper you find to have the most victory points at the end of the game.

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Developer Diary: The Game Makers

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Ted Alspach

The Hook

Summer 2023

I’ve known Ben Rosset for almost 10 years now, both as the designer of Between 2 Cities, and also as an employee of Panda Game Manufacturing. Ben has subbed in for our main contact at Panda occasionally, and he also approached me in 2016 about exploring a Between 2 Castles of Mad King Ludwig game shortly after Between 2 Cities was published. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought except that it sounded interesting…I do get a lot of people approaching me about various projects related to our IPs. Ben followed up a year later and set up a meeting for Jamey Stegmaier (one of his favorite games just happens to be Castles), Matthew O’Malley and himself at Gen Con to show me the progress they’d made. I was pleasantly surprised with the direction they had taken that, and after discussions with Jamey, it was decided to publish the game through Stonemaier Games. I provided a bit of development input during that process, and was thrilled with the final project. That was a great start to our relationship outside of Panda.

Since then, I was (and still am) enamored with The Search for Planet X, so much so that we ended up doing the reverse kind of a deal with Ben, Matt, and Renegade, where I designed the third game in the series: The Search for UAPs. Ben and Matt had various feedback during that process as well. So when Ben approached me (and Renée Harris, our Program Manager and License Manager) about a new project he was working on that might appeal to us, I was instantly interested. We met over lunch at Gen Con, and Ben’s enthusiasm for what he called a “simultaneous worker-aging game” was infectious.

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