Palm Laboratory Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Palm Laboratory, a solo game published by Portal Dragon Games. Palm Laboratory is the follow up to Palm Island and can be played in the palm of your hand.

In-hand games (also called no-table-needed games) are a personal fascination of mine. As the name implies, these games are played entirely in your hand, with no playing surface necessary. It’s an odd restriction, but can lead to some very interesting designs that you would never see otherwise.

Not many in-hand games are actually published, but that doesn’t stop me from greedily devouring any new design I can get my grubby mitts on. Palm Laboratory is the latest entry in this extremely limited space, and is actually a sequel of sorts to Palm Island, which kind of invented the entire genre. Palm Laboratory trades sunny isles for dank sewers, and a beat-your-own-score framework for individual missions with distinct win/loss conditions, but the core of the game is largely unchanged.

Palm Laboratory is an engine-building game for just 1 player, and plays in 10-20 minutes.

Depending on the mission, Palm Laboratory uses anywhere from 18 to 25 cards. Some are seeded at the back of the deck to track end-of-round miscellany, and the rest are shuffled and placed at the front. This deck is held in your hand for the entire game.

Each turn, you may take any action on the active (upright and facing you) section of one of the top two cards, placing it at the back of the deck after you do so. Some actions let you store that card, rotating it 90 degrees so the icons at the top can be used as resources. Other actions require you to pay stored resources for them (by rotating those resources back into the deck), but allow you to reorient that card, making it more useful in the next round. For example, a card may start with the ability to store it for a single resource, but provide additional resources if you instead choose to upgrade it.

These upgrades are necessary to fulfill your mission objective. When you encounter the