Review: LAG

Introduction & Overview

A game in which the pieces move toward opposite sides of the board, but the distance they travel depends on the number of groups of your pieces on the board. When a player can no longer move any pieces, the player with the fewest objects wins. To achieve victory, you must skillfully control your pieces, which often behave unpredictably, as if experiencing input lag.

This is how LAG is presented to us, a design by Takuro Kawasaki, this being his first design to hit the market. It was first published in 2026 by Kanare_Abstract in an English and Japanese edition. Kanare Kato is responsible for the cover illustration.

It is not published in Spain, so you will have to resort to importing it (the game is completely language-independent). It allows 2-player games, with a suggested minimum age of 10 and an approximate duration of 30 minutes. The retail price is €20.95. For this review, a copy of the English and Japanese version from Kanare_Abstract was used, kindly provided as a review copy by the publisher itself.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 11.1×11.1×2.8 cm (a small square box similar to the minis from Gerhards Spiel und Design), we find the following items:

• Hexagonal Board (cloth)
• 22 Pawns (11 white and 11 blue) (wooden)
• 2 Cubes (1 white and 1 blue) (wooden)
• Rulebook

How to Play

LAG is an abstract game in which two players compete to cross a hexagonal board and consolidate their pawns into as few groups as possible. At the start of the game, each player deploys their 11 pawns on opposite sides of the board and adjusts a tracker that indicates how many “objects” (single pawns or groups of adjacent pawns of the same color) they control. After this, players alternate turns moving one pawn in a straight line by the exact number of spaces equal to the number of objects they have at that moment. Pawns can jump over other pieces and move forward or sideways (the latter only if the move merges pawns and reduces the total number of objects), while moving backward is strictly prohibited. If a pawn ends its movement on a space occupied by an opponent’s piece, it is captured and removed from the game, forcing both players to re-evaluate and update their object trackers after every action. The game ends immediately when the active player cannot make any legal moves. Whoever has the fewest objects at the end of the game is declared the winner.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the Board. It is a hexagonal surface made of hexagonal spaces (with 5 hexes per side). Along its sides, it features two tracks numbered from 1 to 9, each facing one of the players.

Next up are the Pawns, the fundamental element of the game. Each player controls the set of pawns of their color, which are initially placed on their starting spaces. Players will use them to navigate the board, capture opponent pieces, and form or break apart groups throughout the game.

Finally, we have the Object Tracker. Each player has one of these wooden cubes in their color, which is placed on the corresponding track. It serves to track the exact number of objects (single pawns or connected groups of pawns) that the player maintains on the board at any given moment. The current value determines the exact distance in spaces that the player’s pieces must move on each turn.

That is enough to get started.

Preparación de la Partida

• Unfold the board in the center of the table.
• Each player chooses a color and receives:
  • 11 Pawns to be placed on the spaces on the side of the board closest to them, filling the first two rows.
  • 1 Object Tracking Cube to be placed on the space marked with the number 1 on their side’s object track.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of LAG takes place over an indefinite number of turns alternating between players, always starting with the white player.

On their turn, the active player moves one of their pawns in a straight line by an exact distance in spaces equal to the number of objects they currently possess (indicated by their cube on the object track). The following rules must be observed:

• The chosen pawn can jump over any number of pawns (friendly or enemy) in its path.
• The pawn cannot end its move off the board or on a space occupied by a pawn of its own color.
• If the destination space is occupied by an opponent’s pawn, it is captured and permanently removed from the game, with the active player’s pawn moving into that space.
• Pawns normally move forward. Lateral movement is only allowed if it immediately reduces the player’s total number of objects on the board. Under no circumstances is a pawn allowed to move backward.

After this, both players check if their number of objects on the board has changed as a result of the active player’s move, adjusting their respective cubes on the track.

Finally, the turn passes to the opposing player.

Game End

The game ends immediately when the active player cannot make any legal moves on their turn.

At that moment, the player with the fewest objects is declared the winner. In the event of a tie in the number of objects, the active player (who has no legal moves available) is declared the winner.

Personal Opinion

It is disheartening to see how local gamers systematically turn their backs on abstract strategy games—that is, designs featuring perfect information, an absence of luck, and a struggle for position on a shared board. The topic of thematic immersion is another story entirely.

The general feeling is that this is a niche plagued by a persistent prejudice of being dull, dry, or soul-less, without players ever giving them a fair chance. It saddens me to see brilliantly designed titles go completely unnoticed on store shelves, while any overproduced product drowning in plastic immediately steals all the spotlight, regardless of the actual depth of its mechanics.

Fortunately, we will always have those brave publishers who keep the flame alive for these kinds of designs. Publishers like Gerhards Spiel und Design or Gigamic, with their superb wooden components that elevate the product almost to the status of a decorative piece, or NestorGames, which tragically announced the end of its operations after years of offering us an endless catalog. Their Herculean effort to dignify the genre in our country, given all the struggle involved in simply gaining visibility, deserves our full recognition.

When one door closes, another opens. Since 2021, Kanare Kato (whose first design was actually published by the dearly missed NestorGames) decided to embark on the brave adventure of founding his own publishing house, Kanare_Abstract. With a minimalist and intensely personal approach, Kato has taken up the mantle to show us that abstracts are alive and kicking. It is admirable to see a designer take the reins of his own work to keep nourishing this niche market.

Today, we are analyzing one of his latest releases, which we have already gotten to the table quite a few times. Let’s see how LAG plays, but not before thanking the publisher for sending us the review copy that made this long write-up possible.

In LAG, two players compete on a hexagonal board using a set of 11 pawns per side. The main goal is to finish the game as the player with the fewest groups of pieces (called “objects”) on the board, where an object is defined as either a single pawn or a cluster of connected pawns of the same color.

On their turn, each player is required to move one of their pawns in a straight line by an exact distance in spaces equal to the total number of objects they currently control on the board—a value tracked on a side track. Pawns move in straight lines and can jump over other pieces, but they can never move backward. Moving sideways is only allowed if the maneuver reduces the player’s total number of objects. If a pawn ends its movement on a space occupied by an opponent’s piece, that piece is captured and removed.

The game ends at the start of a player’s turn when they have no legal moves available. The winner is the player with the fewest objects on the board or, in case of a tie, the player who could not complete their turn, thus ending the game.

Well, I think that gives you plenty of context to get an idea of how the design works. The first thing that jumps out is that we are dealing with a race game built on the premise of rushing your entire group of pawns to the opposite side of the board as fast as possible.

However, simply marching forward without looking back won’t cut it; each player must carefully weigh every move to evaluate what makes the most sense at any given moment. That key concept of “objects” introduces a fascinating twist to the calculations.

This concept of objects is the stroke of genius around which the design revolves. This parameter transforms a race game into a fascinating tactical puzzle. Splitting your pawns into more groups with a simple move increases your movement range, but it also leaves you exposed to losing control over the tempo of the match.

Moving far requires a high object count, but excessive dispersion leaves your pieces clumsy and hard to regroup, demanding pinpoint accuracy to know when it pays off to spread out and when you need to seek cohesion immediately.

Interaction reaches a higher level when opponent pressure comes into play. It is not enough to plot your own path; you must anticipate how enemy captures can drastically alter your movement capacity. Having an opponent capture your pawn doesn’t just strip away a piece—it can fracture a compact cluster into two or three separate objects, suddenly spiking the number of spaces your next pawn must travel or even leaving you with no legal moves.

The handling of captures is plain brilliant and breaks away from traditional genre norms. In almost any abstract game, thinning out the opponent’s forces grants an advantage, but here it turns into a dangerous double-edged sword. If you execute a reckless capture without managing to split the opponent’s structure or alter their movement range, you are actually doing them a favor by making their trek across the board easier as you lighten their overall piece load.

A common issue with this style of design, such as Quoridor (here is its tocho-review) or Linja (here is its tocho-review), is that once the opposing pawns pass one another, the final turns of the game are resolved almost on autopilot as player interaction vanishes.

In LAG, however, while the final turns do end up playing out fairly directly, it remains engaging because the end game turns into a sprint to optimize those last few moves. Every displacement becomes a maneuver aimed at regrouping pawns to minimize the total object count. Successfully assembling your final pawns into a single block creates a immensely satisfying climax, though doing so requires precise planning and keeping track of how many turns remain for the player closest to becoming blocked.

As you can see, this is an abstract game packed with nuance behind a minimal conceptual ruleset and a fast-paced game flow that keeps players engaged and on edge from start to finish, even with all those dynamic shifts I mentioned.

As for the production, we get a board made of satin cloth (a very practical choice for this type of product). The pawns are a hybrid between a disc and a pawn, which looks striking and makes moving them across the board effortless (if they were just plain discs, moving them might have felt clunky). The rulebook is well-structured and leaves no room for ambiguity. That said, the box retains the format the publisher has used since its inception: a plain white cardboard box with a sticker for the cover and a plain white back. Functional, but not particularly eye-catching for retail display.

And let’s wrap this up. LAG is a brilliant abstract game built around a clever group-management system that alters your movement range. The constant tension between spreading out your pieces to gain range or keeping them grouped to maintain control, combined with a approach to captures that defies genre tropes by turning them into a double-edged sword, makes for deeply tactical, dynamic, and demanding gameplay. Although the final stretch loses some interaction and can feel like a direct calculation exercise, the constant drive to optimize that final regrouping and the sheer genius of how the pacing shifts after every capture turn each move into a delicious dilemma. A game full of depth, swift pacing, and a bare-minimum rules load that will keep both players engaged from turn one. For all these reasons, I give it a…