Johannes Goupy is one of the best and most prolific new game designers to pop up in the last few years, making a name for himself with a number of small-box/big-thinking games like his hit game Faraway (which just got its third expansion), Rauha, and the lighter Pixies, as well as the heavy game From the Moon, the last of which is on my shelf of shame at the moment. Space Lab is in that former category, with a decent amount of tension and strategy in a smaller box, although it is definitely more luck-driven than Faraway and might frustrate players looking for something that gives you more control over card draws.

In Space Lab, players will draw and draft cards to fill out the ten spaces in their personal tableaux, working around three space stations that each have unique scoring objectives, similar to Forest Shuffle’s tableau format but much simpler with only one card going into each slot. At the end of the game, you score for the cards you played, the objectives you completed, and project cards you picked up, mostly through the cards you played above your space stations (three spots).

On your turn, you can draw three cards from the deck, keeping all cards of any single color and placing the rest in the ‘recruitment center.’ You can also take all cards of one color from that recruitment center area. As long as you start your turn with fewer than five cards in your hand, those two actions are available. You can also play any card from your hand, paying its cost (in the upper left corner, from 0 to 3) by discarding that many cards from your hand. Those cards go to the discard pile, not the recruitment center, so they’re out of play until the deck is exhausted and you have to reshuffle.

There are four colors in the game, representing different space agencies, and four roles on the player cards, both of which matter for scoring. Objective cards in your three space stations show three colors, anything from three different ones to three identical, and you score those if you place those colors in the four spots around the station. (You have ten card slots because there are two shared ones, between the left and middle stations and middle and right ones.) The roles matter mostly for end-game scoring, although there are some in-game options on objective cards where you gain something if you play that symbol below the station you gain a project or regular card. Finishing an objective card allows you to take the top point token from the stack for that location, with the points declining and the top left and right tokens giving you a one-time bonus as well.

The project cards are a bit of a lottery ticket, and from what I see on BGG, they’re the part of the game that engenders the most disagreement. When you play a card to one of the three slots above your three stations, you draw project cards equal to the number/cost of the card you played. You then keep just one of the project cards, all of which score more if you collect more of the set. Thus, playing expensive cards to those slots in your tableau means cycling through more of the project deck and increasing your odds of getting the card(s) you need. It is random, mostly, but you have some say in the matter here, enough that, for a medium-light game, I’m good with the balance.

The game progresses until one player fills all ten spots in their tableau or fulfills all three objective cards, at which point, you score. Many cards have variable scoring based on what’s in your entire tableau (e.g., 1-3 points per astronaut card) or just that card’s row, while others have fixed point values from 1-7. There’s a scoring pad here, but it’s not very difficult to score in your head.

I’m definitely higher than the consensus on Space Lab, which is about to get its first U.S. release from Pandasaurus (who sent me a review copy). It’s a fun filler that has a tiny bit of player interaction through the shared card space of the recruitment center, but where mostly you’re trying to cycle through the decks to get stuff you need. I wouldn’t put it over Faraway, but I’d probably take it over Rauha, just among Goupy’s games I’ve played. The solo mode is pretty tight as well, because it keeps all of the game’s rules but ends when the deck is exhausted and has a single automatic step that discards quite a few cards on each turn. It’s a B+ for me, and you can pre-order it from Pandasaurus now.

Tenby is a seaside town in southwestern Wales, and is a popular destination for beachgoers and vacationers, with two beaches and a nearby island you can walk to at low tide. Known as Dinbych-y-pysgod (Small fort of the fish) in Welsh, it’s small – fewer than 5000 people live there – and extremely cute, with plenty of shops and restaurants to cater to the summer visitors. I went there with my wife and her cousins in 2022, walking along the beach and stopping by the Park Hotel (owned by some more of her cousins) for a drink.

Tenby is also a new board game, loosely set in the town in that it borrows some of the colors of the buildings along the Croft and the Norton, and has players creating streets that combine buildings with various seaside features and piers. It’s a delight to play, if a bit of a table hog and tricky to score, and even comes with its own soundtrack (also on Apple) made by the game’s designer and illustrator, Ben Talbott.

In Tenby, players draft cards to build out their streets, with each card carrying some kind of scoring condition based on cards adjacent to it, or within two cards, or in their entire street. The game lasts ten rounds, and in each round, the players place their tokens on numbered action cards, where a higher number gives more/better actions but drops you in turn order for the next round. Selected cards can go on an existing street at either end, or can form a new street. Some cards also have check marks indicating that they end the street on that side. After the tenth round, players score their private objective cards, with higher rewards for streets that are are ‘finished’ by end cards, and every card on every street. The highest score wins, as that’s usually how that works.

There are four main card types in Tenby, as well as life jacket tokens which you can spend for extra actions, and your ability to draft those cards from the market depends on the action(s) on the action card you choose in the Day phase. Buildings are the lowest-valued cards, scoring only for the cards immediately adjacent to them. Piers score for the cards within two in either direction. Landmarks – they may be called monuments, same thing – score for the entire street. If you select an action card that gives you a Pier action, you can take a Pier card or a Building card but not a Landmark card – you can go down in value, but never up. There are also Resident cards that provide secret objectives; you’ll start the game with one, choosing from two drawn from the deck, and can add more as the game goes on with a Resident action.

Some action cards award the player one or more life jacket tokens, which they can use at any time. Spending one token lets the player draw another card into the market in any one row. Spending two lets the player select a Building card, or move a card already in their tableau, including placing it in the middle of an existing street. Three tokens yield a Pier card, and four tokens get the player a Landmark or a Resident card. The tokens are worthless at the end of the game, so there’s really no reason to hold on to them, and that one-token action to add a card to the market row of your choice is extremely useful later in the game when you might be looking for something specific and/or you find a row depleted by other players before your turn.

Most of the scoring in Tenby revolves around features found on the various cards, such as shutters, flowerboxes, birds, post-boxes, streetlights, happy little clouds, and so on. Some of these are small, and can be a little hard to distinguish. I’ve also read comments online from color-blind players who struggled with the scoring cards that relate to building colors. Those design questions aside, the various scoring opportunities are plentiful, so you’re rarely going to look to the market and come up empty unless you’re the last player to select.

The copious scoring opportunities do make the end of the game somewhat tedious; you’ll probably be scoring two dozen or more cards after ten rounds, some of which require you to examine every single card on a street. Pen and paper or a scoring app would help, of course, and the game comes with neither. Tenby also requires a lot of space for each player; your streets can be ten-plus cards long, and you’ll probably have 3-4 streets by the end of the game. With four people playing at a reasonably-sized picnic table, we still started to run into each other.

Tenby comes in a smallish box and has very clever packaging within it – there are four tiny boxes within it that fig snugly into the inner frame, and three of those boxes have symbols on the side showing you which card decks they should hold for optimal storage. The fourth holds the life jackets and player tokens. The art is appealing and different from almost any other game I can think of; there’s a Walking in Burano vibe because of the setting and similarly-colored buildings, but the art styles are completely different. It’s also a quick teach; the one rule that other players have found tricky is that adjacent cards have to match along the edges, which is hard to explain without showing the cards but does restrict your options for legal plays.

I’m a big fan of Tenby even beyond the Welsh connection; it’s an A- for me, one of the best new games I’ve played in 2026 . It’s a great family game that uses some familiar mechanics of pattern-building and action-selection, and a four-player game will take about an hour, maybe less once everyone knows the game. You can buy it directly from Mighty Boards, at Miniature Market (currently out of stock), or at Amazon.