I received a couple of games over the weekend and figured I’d share some photos and first impressions of both with you — an early production preview copy of Pesky Penguins which is a Kickstarter planned for later this year I believe, and The Publish or Perish Game (along with The Full Campus Meltdown Trilogy expansion), which is available direct from their website publishorperish.games or via Amazon here: Publish or Perish Game plus Expansion…

Anyway, let’s take a look a quick look at both games…

Pesky Penguins

Pesky Penguins is designed by Mike Gough and looks like a fun quick-play game in which players battle penguins across Sea, Land, and Air. Players will start with 8 pebbles each and their three penguins face down in front of them, the idea being to call players out to battle for the grand sum of one pebble, with the game ending when any player has run out of pebbles. It’s designed for 3-6 players, a basic battle involves two players racing to turn over the correct card in front of them (following the roll of a custom die showing L, S, or A) and then be the first to grab the giant golden egg that sits in the middle of the table. Yes, I did say it’s a giant golden egg —a very large wooden one in fact— and there’s obviously a little more to it than that, which is where the introduction of Action Cards comes into play…

Action cards will allow players to enlist some help, up the ante on bets, call on fellow players to fight by their side, pick up and use additional action cards, and confuse or otherwise hinder the defending player by forcing them to play with their non-dominant hand, etc. The artwork throughout and on all the cards does look fun, and it certainly looks like an interesting twist on the more traditional Snatch-style pub game…

I received an early pre-production copy of the game, which included a single double-sided rulesheet on glossy card, 50 x thick cardboard pebbles, 6 sets of player cards, 50 x Action cards, 6 x quick reference cards, and the egg and single die as mentioned above. All were tightly packed in a slightly oversized box with what looks like a very fancy insert.

The Publish or Perish Game (2025)

A somewhat different beast altogether, The Publish or Perish Game is designed by Max Hui Bai Ph.D. and dubbed “A Humorous Party Game About Academic Publishing”. This too came extremely well packaged, alongside an even larger boxed expansion (The Full Campus Meltdown Trilogy which actually contains three Expansions inside it).

Also designed for 3-6 players, Publish or Perish is basically a set collection game of sorts, in which players use Action Cards to publish manuscripts on an assortment of humorous subjects in an effort to receive the most citations before the game ends. Before I say anything on this, I have to give credit the publisher in terms of production quality — there’s little to complain about here, with the main box holding a hardbound insert with all the relevant cards needed to play the game neatly inside it — and all the cards are of decent good quality, glossy stock, too.

I think it’s great value at just £40 (at time of writing), assuming the game appeals to you, although I do think it might still have a niche audience at the moment…

The first image below shows the insert for the main game — it’s actually quite difficult to get to the cards because they are tucked in so tightly, and while it’s nothing a piece of ribbon can’t sort it is nonetheless still a little frustrating, especially given the care taken with the quality of everything else inside the box. The bag is provided so you can take the game with you and ditch the box if req’d.

The second image below shows all the expansions in the Meltdown Trilogy box (which I’ll get to, but that is of similar quality re. decent glossy cards, etc).

In Publish or Perish players will start with just 3 Action cards and can play as many as they wish each turn. As well as handing research cards in to publish the manuscripts on offer (7 at game start), players can play a wide variety of other cards which will help further their own progress while hindering opponents — like artificially inflating the value of published manuscripts, picking up additional cards, stealing cards from other players or otherwise forcing them to discard cards, assigning mishap cards to ‘freeze’ opponents, or maybe protecting themselves from ‘negativity’, etc. Players then pick up 2-3 more Action cards (depending on player count) at the end of their turn.

The game ends when any player successfully publishes 5 manuscripts, and is designed to be funny, although there is a danger this can feel a bit artificial, even ‘forced’ — players announcing the publication of manuscripts have to be applauded by all other players around the table, with anyone forgetting to do so considered as having committed an unforgivable academic faux pas and thereby obliged to forfeit a random card to the relevant player. Similarly, there are short speeches to be made and 3 x special awards to be voted upon at the end of the game (see below), usually for those players voted to have the best academic trash-talk, or even the second-best… Again, this might not be quite to the taste of those tabletop gamers who are normally somewhat reserved around the table, but Publish or Perish is designed as a social party game so I can hardly call it out for encouraging active participation among all players!

The manuscript cards are all very amusing (see below — you don’t have to read the whole card to everyone else), as are the variety of things you can do with the Action cards, and there’s even a few Action cards that will have all players having to answer an academic trivia question correctly — at the cost of losing a card if they answer incorrectly.

All good stuff, really, although as mentioned above, the audience for this type of game might be relatively niche. For my part, I say everything is worth a go, but this could be a bit of a ‘hard-sell’ for certain types of boardgamers, so time will tell I guess…

I did say I’d mention the Meltdown Trilogy expansion box, and that comprises of all three expansions to the game (see below) as well as an accompanying little charm badge “blessed by the benevolent spirits of editorial boards, to bring luck and ‘Accept’ decisions your way” — this also has a cloth bag inside it if you wish to ditch the box…

The Revenge of Reviewer 2 includes 38 additional Action cards and will help accomodate a couple more players (up to 8 or perhaps 9?) and while some of them are additional research cards to help publish manuscripts (like Data, Theory, References and Idea cards), there are also additional Mishaps, the welcome addition of Research Grants (can be substituted for any other research card), cards that enable players to peek at and reorder the top of the Action card deck, reduce the citation value of published manuscripts, gain extra cards by successfully answering trivia questions, etc.

Academic Sh*tpost adds 12 new manuscript cards that set out to “elevate the absurdist narrative” of the game, including 8 x “significantly inappropriate” ones that grant unique additional abilities, and 4 x ‘sh*tpost’ articles that are designed as clickbait and thus not necessarily require much in the way of specialised research cards to publish!

And finally, Midterm Grading Extravaganza adds an extra 160 trivia cards to the game (there were only 100 in the base box), and although they are not designed to be standalone, there’s nothing to stop you adding them to any other trivia-style game if you wish to up the stakes a bit — all the questions have 3 answers to choose from.

In summary I genuinely like what they’re trying to do with The Publish or Perish Game, and credit where it’s due they’ve really gone to town with the production quality on everything here, but writing purely as a more ‘conventional’ boardgamer —I’ll leave you to argue the toss about what that means— I do have a few reservations about the target market, although it still deserves to do well…

— Alex Bardy, 24Aug26