"While building cities, zoos, and civilizations is a staple of the board gaming hobby, Entropy offers something of a much grander scope - creating your own galaxy!" This is the high-concept premise of Entropy, a board game announced earlier this week by publisher Board & Dice, previously known for titles like The Networks and Barcelona.
Entropy is a tableau building game, where your tableau represents an entire solar system. Players will be igniting and evolving stars, adjusting the climate of planets to make them habitable, and finally seeding them with life in order to amass victory points, complete objectives, and prove that they are the greatest galactic architects this side of the Milky Way.
While players are given limitless power to create life, they do not have the same freedom to make in-game decisions. During turns in Entropy, players can move a meeple one to three spaces across a circular central game board, with each space corresponding to a different action that they can take. You also have a token corresponding to each action type (as well as a wild one) that must be placed down, and later collected, before you're able to repeat any actions.
There's a lot about Entropy that feels familiar. You've probably already played plenty of games focused on gathering victory points and completing missions that contribute to your endgame score. The cosmic scale of Entropy's premise, coupled with the restraints built into its action selection system, both ensure that there's still depth to this game about stepping into the infinite.
Entropy is scheduled to release in quarter three of 2026. It's being conventionally published and not crowdfunded. You can browse an early iteration of its rule book, and see a design diary put together by its developers on its official page.
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