In the last month or so, several things seem to have appeared through the letterbox, not all of them necessarily expected, but here’s a sneaky peek at two games that come in very small boxes. Tulip Season actually appeared a while ago, whereas an early review copy of The Dealer arrived not too long ago…
The Dealer (2026)
The Dealer is a new title from Invisible Typewriter, designed as a rather fun push-your-luck deductive / co-operative game for 3-6 players set in the Starlight Galactic (the greatest casino in the universe, of course!), although the most striking thing about it is almost certainly the excellent artwork from Carly Berry — I’d certainly be keen to see much more of her work!
Designed by Shaun Graham and Scott Huntington, in The Dealer players take on different character roles each round (there are ten altogether), with each having their own unique special ability and / or power, not least The Dealer role of the title, whose job is to basically try and get all the other players to bust!
Cards are valued 0 to 3, and most players (excl. The Dealer and The Giant) are aiming to end each round with between 3 and 5 points worth of cards in their hand to score those points (although again, some of the characters will have additional ways of scoring or losing points). The key point to note however, is that players are dealt cards facing away from them, so each player doesn’t necessarily know what cards and values they actually have in their hand of cards, only what everyone else has! Players do get 30 seconds to discuss things before committing to another card or stopping and banking what they have, and pretty much anything goes in those 30 seconds, with the only rule being that players cannot look at their own cards.
That said, some of the roles like The Secret Keeper, The Prophet, The Witness and The Supercomputer may have some idea of what they’re holding because their special power enables them to make guesses when cards are dealt, but there are other characters that will score slightly differently…
Take The Frenemy for example, who will declare another player as friend or enemy and potentially score bonus points if that player succeeds or busts in the round; or The Gambler, who may draw an additional card if they succeed, and add those points to their score (unless they draw a zero and ‘bust’); or The Giant, who succeeds if their final hand sits between 3 and 7 points (and scores points accordingly); or perhaps The Sniper who gets to predict their final hand and earn additional points if they’re correct…
Like I say, all the character roles have their own special power and they all look interesting to play, although some perhaps moreso than others. The final role not mentioned above, is The Destroyer, who declares a number between 0 and 3 (which isn’t actually explicitly mentioned in the rules), and then discards all cards of that value out of their hand once they’ve banked / stopped taking more cards.
It certainly looks promising, and since character roles and The Dealer will change every round, full games should rarely last more than 25-30 minutes or so (when The Dealer has been passed around the table to each player — twice in a 3-player game), so there should be plenty of opportunity to try other characters in future games.
The Dealer is available directly from Invisible Typewriter, or on Amazon right now, and it’s probably worth noting that the back of the pocket-sized box suggests there are 215 cards inside, but there are actually only 115: 100 x number cards (0-3), 10 character cards, and 5 additional cards for The Sniper and The Frenemy special powers.
Tulip Season (2026)
Tulip Season is from Sinister Fish Games, and comes in the tiniest box, but that doesn’t stop it packing an awful lot of stuff inside it: 62 small tiles, a scoring pad, a selection of wooden tokens in four colours (16 windmills, 4 greenhouses, 4 bicycles, and 4 drones — yes, drones!), and a 16-page rulebook, complete with solo and mini-expansion rules for the aforementioned bicycle and drone pieces. Wow!
Of the 62 —very small— tiles, 45 of them are flower tiles depicting tulip fields in two colours, 15 are greenhouse tiles (which have objectives on them), and the remaining two are an ending tile marker (shuffled into the last 9 tiles), and a tile to indicate the Starting Player — used to ensure all players get the same number of turns, hopefully!
To be fair, the tiles are quite thick, and the wooden tokens are nice and chunky, so I can’t fault the production quality, and if it was designed as a pocket game Sinister Fish have done a remarkable job of shrinking the overall footprint of the game. I’m sure larger tiles would have been welcomed, but the consequent increase in production costs was probably not worth the effort: as things stand the game plays pretty well all its own, without taking up half an evening or half the available table space in the room. Games of Tulip Season are never going to last very long (maybe 25-30 mins at a stretch?), and with 3 or 4 players I suspect it’ll be over very quickly indeed unless you’ve got an AP-sergeant (Analysis Paralysis – yes, that’s a thing) at the table…
Each turn, players have just 3 options: play a flower tile and optionally put a windmill on one of the colours to ‘claim’ that field, place a greenhouse tile (and your greenhouse token onto it), or retrieve a windmill to relocate it elsewhere in a future round (and gain a flower tile that’ll be worth a single point at game end). Points are tallied at the end depending on how large your various fields are, what greenhouse objectives and adjacent tiles you’ve managed to match, and how many face-down flowers you have in front of you from doing the retrieve your windmill action.
The Bicycles mini-expansion adds unnecessary fuss to the game, I think, but the rules for Drones are much easier to add into the mix, and I probably wouldn’t even play it without the Drones rules, tbh — they score points for matching adjacent tiles, etc. but in a very different way to greenhouses.
All told I’m quite impressed, although I do have a niggle about how tightly the tiles need to be packed into the box for everything to fit properly – if they’d made the box just a tiny bit wider it would’ve been much quicker and easier to organise and set up the game, but hey-ho, for such a small box, this does pack a tidy punch!
— Alex Bardy, 17Sept26
