by W. Eric Martin

▪️ At GAMA Expo 2025, I got a peek at Dark Pact, a deck-building game from Tom Lehmann that Trick or Treat Studios plans to release in 2025 — and now I'm finally writing about the game.

The hook of the game is clear in the title: The game includes thirteen Dark Pact action cards, and if you meet the condition of one of these cards in your play area on your turn, you win. "Keeper" Dark Pacts can stay in your play area instead of being discarded at the end of your turn, and they trigger based on the cards in your play area during a turn. "Instant" Dark Pacts are played as an action, and you need to meet their condition based on the cards you have in hand.

For your first game or two , you'll each start with a Dark Pact in your discard pile and the remainder of them in the deck, but you'll advance to having them all in the deck — and once you have one or more Dark Pacts in your deck, you'll have a victory condition that only you can achieve. Now you just have to get the cards to make it happen.

Dark Pact follows a basic deck-building set-up. At the start of your turn, you can play one action from your hand. An action might let you play additional actions; draw cards; gain cards from the supply; exile cards; and so on. Some cards attack opponents, and these players can reveal a react card in response, typically nullifying the attack, then return the react card to their hand. Played cards stay in your play area.

Next, you can buy cards, first playing treasures from your hand to gain coins. (Action cards played earlier might also have coins on them.) You can purchase cards from the ten-card supply, as well as one card from your grimoire, which starts the game holding three specific cards. One of these cards, "Inscription", allows you to move cards from the supply to your grimoire if it has fewer than three cards. Cards in your grimoire are not in play and don't count toward Dark Pacts. Purchased cards go to your hand unless they state otherwise, as is the case with Dark Pacts.


Aside from actions and treasure, the supply contains x2 and x3 multipliers. You can play one or more multipliers from your hand at the same time as an action or treasure, and multipliers affect all numerals on the action or treasure, whether for coins, curses, draws, actions, etc. Normally the "Talisman" treasure card gives you 2 coins and 1 coin per insight card you have in play, but if you play a x3 with it, you receive 6 coins + 3 per insight; play two x3, and you receive 18 coins + 9 per insight! Ideally you can do something good with all that money...

To end your turn, clean up, first carrying out "clean up" effects on played cards, then discarding all played cards (except those that can remain in play) as well as cards from your hand that you don't want. If necessary, draw to fill your hand to five cards. Note that you don't have to discard down to five cards, and this important for achieving a couple of Dark Pacts — which will be clear once you see which Dark Pacts are included in the game:


If no one completes a Dark Pact before the deck runs out, the player with the highest sum of insight minus curses wins. (Insight and curses aren't automatically good and bad outside of this situation. Sometimes you want curses to satisfy a Dark Pact or to interact with other cards.)

Dark Pact includes solitaire rules in which you compete against a bot that tries to win in one of three ways, most often by running out the deck and besting the opponent with an astounding amount of insight — just as you might expect from an aspiring bot.

▪️ German publisher Loosey Goosey Games has announced a pair of card games that will be available at SPIEL Essen 25 and in retail in Q4 2025, and continuing the tradition that it started in 2021, the game covers are bold and in your face!

YUM YUM Trouble Gum is a 2-5 player card game from Axel Streubel that the publisher describes as a shedding game, but it's unlike any other that I've seen:

▪️ Troublebot is an updating of Shun and Aya Taguchi's Dinky Dungeon, which JELLY JELLY GAMES released in 2023 and which was itself a new edition of Dangerous Mining, which debuted in 2021 from Taguchi's Studio GG.

Like those earlier games, Troublebot is an 18-card mini-game playable by up to four people, but instead of mining or exploring a dungeon, you are now a trouble-causing robot, with the game's slogan being "Cause trouble – 'cause causing trouble is fun!" Here's how to play: