2025 Indie Board Game and TTRPG Preview: Check My Small-Game Haul

This is adapted from the script of Episode 98, “ˆLight and Get Away, It’s the Fall Small Games Preview.”

So back in Episode 96 we met Walt, who told us about Carolina Death Crawl from Bully Pulpit games — a roleplaying game that turns you and three others into Carolina boys who signed up for the Union army and who just got stuck together behind Confederate lines after Potter’s Raid, a real life late-war action by the Union to strike at the Rebs’ railroad supply lines.

The longer I marinated on what Walt told me about the game, the more attractive the concept looked: A historically based TTRPG that quick-starts stories and characters that you bring to life. The handful of plot points of the mission are propelled by character flaws and motivations instead of tactical stuff, and the outcome always promises to be grim: Only one character is going to make it home.

Carolina Death Crawl TTRPG: “I have provisioned myself for the terrors ahead and tremble to think of what I may find.”

I got my set of cards in the mail yesterday and I just met Walt’s group on Discord. We’re gonna play this thing and I’m already thinking about whether I want to go method and try a Southern Carolina accent. Of course, there are other decisions to be made beforehand, including what tone we want to set: a comedic adventure, a mournful horror slog, or something else.

The cards in this Carolina Death Crawl box have a series of plot cues, each with surefooted period language and flavor, suggesting a propulsive and lean storytelling exercise with minimal overhead and lots of character development. 

The nice thing? I don’t have to sell the experience to anyone. I failed at that when I bought a Mork Borg design with a killer-looking book a few years ago and realized that when the locals say “roleplaying” they really just mean D&D. It’s like trying to talk food with people who only like Applebee’s.

Fortunately for me, Walt’s group are passionate indie TTRPG dudes, so I’m eager to see how one of these games are run and stretch my collaborative storytelling muscles inside Carolina Death Crawl’s economical framework. Look for a session report on that before the year is out.

Also on the way: Pyrotechnics, a two-player card game designed by Michael Byron Sprague and published by designer Jason Katzwinkel’s The Seahorse and the Hummingbird venture. I bought a one-yard-from-the-finish-line prototype of this because I watched Jason’s feed for years as he built small-game designs in public, wrestling with and solving everything from visual design to game structure to the undergirding math of the thing. It was fascinating. It’s the thing I want to point people to when they hear I have a boardgame podcast and I like playing games: “Well why don’t you make your own game?” Because that shit is hard, that’s why. Why don’t you make a game where you shut up?

Anyhow, Pyrotechnics promises a 10-minute playtime in which you and your opponent are fireworks designers, each trying to be the first one to empty out the cards in their hand. This effort runs off three simple actions — Research, Discover, and Showcase for when you’re ready to drop a new display from your R&D shed — but it looks like the fireworks in terms of thinkiness comes in the form of an economy of six colored token varieties called “Sparks.” When you pick one of the three actions, you trigger mandatory exchanges of Major and Secondary Sparks that keep them moving between your supply — and your opponent’s.

Pyrotechnics from The Seahorse and the Hummingbird: Two players compete via a three-action and token exchange system to set off the best fireworks and be the first to empty their hand.

I’m impressed by the quality of this prototype, but not surprised. Based on what I saw Katz post on the average day, even his preliminary output is sharp and tight and fastidious in the good sense of the word. Use of color, type, and space, down to the satisfying heft of the accordion-fold rulebook and guide, shows pro-level thinking from Katz, game designer Michael Sprague, graphics guy Gavin Pouliot and editor David Kessler.

“Think Deep and Play Light,” urges a piece of text on one of the player guide panels. The latter directive seems wonderfully easy to meet: I got all the pieces out, read the rules…it was late on a hot afternoon and my brain was half-spent, but even one trip through the components and I knew I could sit down and test-run this two-handed on any given morning. 

As for “Think Deep”: I’m curious to feel my way through how the flow of Spark tokens drives the tough decisions and creates opportunities for ruses. As a piece of descriptive copy on the game’s landing page promises, “You’ll bluff, block, and bait your opponent—timing your Research, Discover and Showcase just right to outmaneuver them.” 

Here’s hoping. As reported to me in DMs by Jason Katzwinkel, this pretty little game is 99.4% complete and will be available soon for a modest $15.

One thing missing from my summer mornings in 2025 has been a quick-player solo game to cycle along with the first few cups of coffee. Enter Battle Card from Postmark Games, who specialize in beautiful print-and-play puzzle and adventure games.

Battle Card is a bid to make a historically faithful strategic wargame that presents you with the same decisions a WWII general would have had to make, but at a highly streamlined satellite’s-eye view. 

This game unites a publisher and a designer I admire: Postmark’s typically brilliant and efficient graphic design with game designer David Thompson, who has a special knack for interpreting the drama and details of a wartime setting into a wide variety of accessible tabletop experiences. The hit Undaunted series was his brainchild. He designed Resist! a solo game set during the Spanish Civil War. Another of his designs, Pavlov’s House, is on my table right now. 

Battle Card lets him flex his gift for lightweight elegance inside Postmark’s maximum-value-with-minimum pieces ethos: All you need is a printout of whatever map you want to try and a fistful of your own six-sided dice, which represent division- or army group-level units whose values change as they attack or defend.

Battle Card, The Malayan Campaign: Allied forces (white dice) try to find the best mix of “fight and flee” to lose with honor against the Imperial Japanese Army (big red craps dice).

Right now I’m looking at a map of the Malayan Campaign, when Japanese forces swiftly overran British Commonwealth and Allied defenses. In this one you take the role of Allied forces who had to slow the advance of the surging Imperial Japanese Army long enough to organize a retreat to Singapore, a major British stronghold.

As the Brits and their cohort, you’re not going to “win” in the pure sense, but you get the essence of the pressure the commanders were under — find the right balance of retreat and rearguard attacks to get the bulk of your men and machines back to Singapore without getting blown to shit. All with one page of rules.

This could be a long string of fun mornings, I thought to myself. Then I looked at the download folder and realized that for five pounds UK, I also had map files and concise rules for:

• Operation Market Garden, when the Allies tried to airdrop their way to a European invasion foothold in 1944.

• The Battle of Moro River, where you play as Canadians contending the Germans for key ground during winter conditions in Italy.

• Operation Brevity, a Commonwealth forces effort to relieve the siege of Tobruk in North Africa while seizing key ground from Rommel. 

• The Battle of Mortain, when Americans tried to fend off German counterattacks during the big summer of 44 push in France. 

• Operation Eidelweiss, where a German player races to lock down southern Russian oil fields in ’42.

And it doesn’t look like the same rules and challenges were just cut-and-pasted into a different-shaped maps. I’m seeing wrinkles that change dynamics, objectives and tactics — for example, the effect of weather is factored in for Moro River. 

Jesus Christ. All for five pounds? This is simply an insane value right off the bat. More on this as I get my teeth into the introductory sheets. [UPDATE: I’ve recorded my impressions of the introductory battles — Malaya and Market Garden — in Episode 99: Battle Card Review + Meet The Lads of “War With a Mate”]

Speaking of insane value, “free” ranks pretty high up there. My big bro Noisy Andrew — who is my opponent and teacher for learning Squad Leader — has been prepping a copy of his print-and-play design, Dive Dive Dive, for me.

It’s a coop game for 1-4 players inspired by The Hunters — a classic solitaire U-boat game from GMT Games. Andrew wanted to present his own twist on it. So when he’s done trimming cardboard, I’ll also be trying my hand at dueling with Allied Atlantic convoys per his system.

Dive Dive Dive: Cutaway of your sub and key systems status. Image: partymeeple

Noisy is like your kind big brother who knows how to do everything. Every day he’s elbow deep in fixing a friend’s car, working on real boats he knows how to sail, playing with instruments, and also making small games, many of which are free to try.

This is a good chance for me to engage with something a pal made and broaden the range of wargames I get to experience without committing to a big-box purchase and a six-week grind with a ruleset. We’ll circle back to ol’ Noisy with complaints and questions, not only about how the game works, but why he was inspired to make his own tweaks to one of wargaming’s most beloved modern naval campaign designs.

Oh yeah, remember Walt and Carolina Death Crawl from the beginning of this preview? He is also shipping me a copy of Lichoma, a meatpunk TTRPG designed by Strega van den Berg, with writing and editing support from Tessa Winters; Ashley Kronebusch, Ian Long, and Walt, who operate under the Bogfolk collective banner. 

They successfully Kickstarted this grim and bawdy commentary on capitalist reductionism in a town where meat — to wear, to eat, to sell, to kill, to screw — is the last economic cornerstone of a collapsing city’s economy. There’s nothing left to extract — except your muscle tissue and a few laughs. 

“Bodies are grafted together pieces of shit that solely serve as meat-machines to perform labor. It doesn’t matter anymore who you are.” Image: Strega Wolf van den Berg/Bogfolk

In a future episode, Walt’s going to talk me through how and why this was made — and how it is played. Get an eyeful of Lichoma for yourself on itch.io or watch the crew play it on YouTube, where the Plus One Exp channel hosted a live session.

I’ve been watching it in bits; they seem to be going at it in a highly comedic way. I just saw a buildup scene where the party hit a giant weapons store en route to a contract grudge demolition of a popular ferris wheel and a character named Grub Grub, who keeps a seeing-eye cockroach in a kangaroo-like pouch on their midsection, was musing about whether or not the roach should have its own firearm. I’m also digging the group’s rapport and in-character banter.

Watch this blog and future episodes of Breakup Gaming Society for impressions and playthroughs of titles from this grab-bag of indie tabletop inspiration.