Cloudspire

Chip Theory Games has a reputation for build quality that precedes them at this point, and Cloudspire lives up to it, the poker-chip-style unit tokens and neoprene mats are genuinely beautiful and hold up to heavy use. Great components, plenty of people said that exact phrase and I’ll say it too. What surprised me is how much strategy is packed underneath that production value, this is basically an RTS or MOBA translated into cardboard and chips, spires you build up, waves of automated onslaught units you have to defend against, and unit abilities as deep as any real-time-strategy faction roster.

The terminology wall is real though, and it’s probably the single biggest barrier to entry. There’s a specific vocabulary you have to absorb before any of the turn structure makes sense, and the rulebook, by more than one account including my own, needs work getting you there. It’s not an unclear game once it’s in your head. Getting it into your head is the hard part.

Setup is its own tax on a weeknight, there’s a lot of components to lay out and track before the first turn even starts, which makes this a worse fit for a casual “let’s throw something on the table” night than for a planned session where you’ve budgeted the time. Solo play is genuinely good early on, the automated onslaught AI keeps you honest and reinforces the systems while you’re learning, but I noticed the same thing other reviewers flagged, after you’ve run through the included solo scenarios once, the novelty thins out fast. It shines more in the two-player space, where the strategic back-and-forth actually gets to breathe.

I’ve enjoyed my time with it, but it’s a game I have to be in the mood for, both the setup commitment and the learning curve keep it from being an easy weeknight pull the way some of the other games on this list are.