Tulips, Tims, and Tudor Trash: A 2026 Kickoff with Rolling Dice & Taking Names

Rolling Dice & Taking Names kicks off the new year with Episode 368, moving quickly from the archaic ritual of writing paper checks to the brutal economy of 17th-century sanitation. Tony and Marty are back to filter the signal from the noise, providing a deep look at games that turn historical crises into compelling table dynamics. This episode is a masterclass in evaluating how simple mechanics—like placing a meeple or bidding on a card—can create surprisingly complex social friction.

The Dirty Business of Night Soil

Grail Games has released a title that is as mechanically interesting as its theme is visceral. Night Soil, designed by John Moffat, is a worker placement and engine-building game for 2 to 5 players that clocks in between 60 and 90 minutes. Set in Tudor England, players act as industrialists tasked with cleaning the streets of London.

What sets this apart from your standard worker placement is the lack of a guaranteed retrieval phase. In most games, you place a worker and get it back at the end of the round. In Night Soil, you only get your workers back if the neighborhood you have claimed is completely cleaned of "night soil" (the brown cubes representing waste). If you don't manage your labor correctly, you could find yourself with zero workers for the following round, forced to twiddle your thumbs while others dominate the board.

The game adds a hilarious yet strategic layer with meeple sizes:

Large Meeples: These count for more but "poop" twice, dropping two cubes into a district.
Small Meeples: These only drop one cube.

This forces a constant calculation of whether an action is worth the mess it leaves behind. You are constantly pushing waste into the River Thames (which Tony learns is pronounced 'Tems') to collect coins, while simultaneously trying to block your opponents from cleaning their own sectors. It is a high-interaction affair that punishes players who treat it like a multiplayer solitaire experience.

Riding the Tulip Bubble

If sanitation isn't your preferred flavor of history, the duo also looks at the reprint of Tulip Bubble, a stock market simulation designed by Koyu. This game captures the infamous Dutch tulip mania of 1637 over the course of 9 rounds—though the bubble can burst as early as round 7.

Players navigate three different tulip markets (red, yellow, and white), buying low and selling high to either the general market or specific collectors. The bidding mechanic is particularly clever; if multiple players want the same bulb, the winner pays the high price, but the losers actually split the difference between the market value and the final bid. It’s an injection of capital that keeps the game moving, even when you lose an auction.

The Golden Nugget

"The large workers on the board, they’ll be placed in neighborhoods... A large worker is going to poop twice. He’s going to drop two cubes down on you. So you have to be cognizant of that... big people poop more."

Quick Hits: Ichor and Things in Rings

Beyond the heavy hitters, the episode touches on two lighter but equally sharp titles:

Ichor: A 2-player, 15-minute asymmetric game from Reiner Knizia and Bitewing Games. It plays out on a 6x6 grid with Greek gods and monsters. It feels like a mix of Chess and Othello, where movement involves placing colored discs and flipping your opponent's pieces. It is a small-box tactical gem that proves Knizia still owns the abstract space.
Things in Rings: A party game from All Play that uses actual cloth rings to create physical Venn diagrams on the table. Players must deduce the hidden attributes of each circle (e.g., "made of wood" or "two syllables") based on where words are placed. It is a refreshing, less ambiguous take on the deduction genre.

Rolling Dice & Taking Names remains one of the best barometers for what actually deserves space on your shelf. Whether you are manipulating the Dutch economy or cleaning up London, this episode reminds us that the best games are often about how we manage the mess we make.

Listen to Rolling Dice & Taking Names Gaming Podcast: https://podranker.com/podcast/rolling-dice-and-taking-names-gaming-podcast