Enlarge / There's still a lot of stuff in this box. (credit: Cephalofair Games)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

There’s a reason Gloomhaven (read our 2017 review) is so popular. There’s also a reason why half of my friends who own a copy have opened it once, stared in despair at the contents within, and loosed a timid box-fart as they reassembled the package. “More is better!” can be true, especially when it comes to fighting your way through a dungeon. “More” means more monsters, more classes, more loot—even additional varieties of stonework decorating the corridors. It also happens to mean, you know, more. More to learn. More to remember. More to sort and keep sorted. Gloomhaven basically defines "more."

But now there’s Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, the largest box to ever feel small. With only four classes, a single (mostly) linear campaign, and some clever quality-of-life improvements, this is Isaac Childres’s attempt to make a Gloomhaven for the rest of us. (Or the rest of you, since I played Gloomhaven until I was well and truly sick of it.)

Enlarge

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Since it was first published in 2009, the hyper-competitive family strategy game Small World has become a perennial tabletop favorite. Ironically, given its name, its success has caused its fantasy realm to grow over the years, with a steady stream of expansions introducing new factions to command and new regions to explore. Now, though, the game has shifted to an entirely new setting with Small World of Warcraft, a standalone game set in WoW's orc-infested land of Azeroth.

For the uninitiated, the original Small World has players control rival factions, all competing to seize territory and expand their empires. While it’s a premise shared by countless "dudes-on-a-map" strategy games, Small World's unpredictable take on the concept comes with a handful of twists that help it stand out from the crowd.