Dewan review: every good spot is only there once

There is a kind of arithmetic that only exists at a games table. You want to get from here to there, that is four spaces, so four cards. You have three. The fourth has to be a mountain, and there is no mountain in the card row. And the person next to you is looking at the same space you are. It is not difficult arithmetic. A child of ten can do it, and the box says so. What the box does not say: you will do it about forty times in the next forty minutes, and on about ten of those occasions the answer will be no.

Dewan is really a game about that no, and about what you do next. This Dewan review is about the six games we played with it, at two, three and four players. One moment came back every single time: you know exactly which space you want, and you hope nobody else wants it too.

Space Cowboys gave the game a wide release in early 2026, after a small print run sold out within days at Spiel Essen in the autumn of 2025. Since then it has won one prize in the Netherlands and picked up a nomination for another. More on that in a moment, because first the question that brought you here: is it any good?

What is Dewan?

Dewan is a tactical game of camps and terrain for 2 to 4 players aged 10 and up. You lead a small nomadic tribe in a world that nature has quietly taken back. Here and there the landscape still holds remnants of what came before, artifacts the game calls them, and nobody in the game seems terribly bothered by them. Neither are you. You are busy placing camps on a map of large hexagonal tiles that is laid out differently every game, with five kinds of terrain: badlands, mountain, desert, forest and water.

Behind the game are two Frenchmen you may know from very different work. Johannes Goupy made Faraway, Yoann Levet designed Turing Machine and Myrmes. A light card game, a deduction machine and a heavy ant colony, and here they meet somewhere in the middle. The art is by Arthus Pilorget, and it hides a small secret: every story tile shows exactly as many people as the tile scores points, and exactly as many lights as it gives fire. You can play the whole game without noticing. Once you do notice, you never look at those tiles the same way again.

The name, by the way, is not an ancient word for anything. The working title was First Culture. Somebody at the studio suggested "Day One", somebody else said it with a French accent, and suddenly the tribe was called Dewan. The game is named after the pun, not the other way round.

You can see it landed well by looking at the trophy shelf. The expert jury of Speelgoed van het Jaar 2026 (the Dutch Toy of the Year) picked Dewan as a winner in the connoisseur and strategy games category, and it is shortlisted for the Nederlandse Spellenprijs 2026 in the Connoisseurs category. In Germany the Spiel des Jahres jury politely passed it by. That tells you precisely where it sits: a very good gateway game with one extra layer, not a heavyweight.

Designers	Johannes Goupy and Yoann Levet
Art	Arthus Pilorget
Publisher	Space Cowboys (2026)
Players	2 to 4
Playing time	40 to 45 minutes
Age	10 and up
Awards	Speelgoed van het Jaar 2026 (expert jury, connoisseur and strategy games); nominated for the Nederlandse Spellenprijs 2026 (Connoisseurs)
BGG rating	7.4 (2,197 votes, September 2026)

How do you play Dewan?

The teach fits on a beer mat. On your turn you do one of two things. Either you take two terrain cards from the open row of six, and they have to be next to each other. That sounds like a footnote, until the two cards you want are sitting at opposite ends of the row like two uncles avoiding each other at a wedding. Or you place a camp. You start from a camp you already have on the map, pick an empty space and walk there. For every space along the way, start and destination included, you discard a card of that terrain. Four spaces, four cards. Water is the exception: a single water card carries you across an entire lake, however big. That turns the wet parts of the map into motorways, and suddenly everyone at the table is very interested in geography.

Then there is the toll. If your route runs through an opponent's camp, you do not discard the card for that space. You hand it to that player. The rule takes one sentence to explain and the rest of the game to understand. Blocking still exists, because a taken space stays taken, but pushing past someone is not forbidden, merely taxed. And the tax goes to the person you push past. What would be a dirty trick in another game becomes a small trade here. You find yourself working out whether a forest card in your neighbour's hand is worse than the detour. That depends on whether she needs forest, and she is no fool, so she is not telling.

Most of your points come from story tiles: small illustrated contracts you draft from an open display. Camps in three different forests, camps next to two different lakes, that kind of thing. Everyone can see what you are hunting. One camp may count for several tiles at once, and that is where the craft lies: finding the one space that ticks three boxes. And that is where the pain lies too, when somebody else sits down on it. Your second, fourth and sixth camps earn you a new tile. On your third, fifth and seventh you tuck a card under your board, so that terrain counts from then on as if you were standing on it. A small mercy for the spot you never reached. As soon as somebody places their ninth camp, the round is finished and everyone counts up: completed tiles, fire, groups of adjacent camps and berries. Four sources, no point salad.

What Dewan gets right

Nine camps. That is fewer than it sounds. A couple of them you place only to get somewhere, so every camp has to be useful two or three times over. There is no such thing as a wasted turn. Even the turns where you take cards, dead time in another game, carry their own tension. Every pair you take leaves a different pair on the row for everyone else, and it is a turn in which you placed nothing. At our table that produced a rhythm: someone takes, the rest look at what was taken and work out which space just became reachable. A Dutch reviewer on Bordspelmania compared that feeling to Ticket to Ride and Wolven, only quicker. After a few games we could see exactly what they meant.

The teach takes five minutes, and it does not lie to you. Two actions, one page of scoring, and a rulebook edited by Paul Grogan of Gaming Rules!, the kind of credit nobody reads and everybody benefits from. The components carry that simplicity well. Wooden camps, double-layered tribe boards with slots for your cards, and everything runs on icons. There is not a single sentence of text on any card or tile that you need to read in order to play.

And then there are four scenarios in the box. A volcano whose lava eats spaces for good. A downpour that floods the land one space at a time, inspired (the studio says) by an ant invasion at a developer's home that only ended when it started pouring. Villages you build out on the lake. And a 2-versus-2 mode where you score together with a partner. The rulebook tells you to leave all of it in the box for your first game. Good advice, and also a promise. We tried the team mode first, and it gave us a completely different game straight away: suddenly you want someone to walk through your camp.

Where Dewan grates

The theme is set dressing, and the game knows it. Camps, berries, fire and stories make a tidy vocabulary, and Pilorget's tiles genuinely read as little scenes, but nothing during play ever feels like a tribe surviving anything. It feels like an efficiency puzzle in a very good coat. Several reviewers call it cool and calculating for that reason, and we recognise that. If you are hoping for a story that carries you along, you will be disappointed. It stopped bothering us after the first game.

At two players it is cramped. Some people enjoy that tightness, others say the game falls flat. And with terrain that scarce, some story tiles become nearly impossible to complete. That happened to us even in a three-player game: the landscape simply did not allow one tile to be finished. Then you are a tile behind without having done anything wrong, and the game has no answer for that.

The card row is luck, and the game does not apologise for it. There is no catch-up mechanism. One bad placement halfway through can leave you with no way back, and that is a hard thing to explain to a ten-year-old who has just made one. The same tightness that makes the puzzle sing also makes some people stare at six cards for a very long time. Analysis paralysis is lurking, even with only two actions.

Who is Dewan for?

Families with children who have outgrown Ticket to Ride and want something with a bit more bite, first of all. And anyone who feels quietly proud when one placement completes three contracts at once. It wants three or four people at the table; the BGG community votes "best at three", and that feels about right. If you almost always play as a pair, try it for free on Board Game Arena first, where it has already been played more than forty thousand times. Then you will know whether that tightness is a plus or a minus for you. Veterans of heavy euros will admire it, play it three times and move on. That is not a criticism, more a forecast.

Buying Dewan at Kapitein Spel

We stock Dewan in Dutch: Dewan (NL). There is also an English edition, and it plays exactly the same at any table, because there is not a word of text on the cards or tiles. Only the rulebook differs, and you put that away after the first teach anyway.

Still browsing? Dewan sits between our strategy games and our family games. Looking for something for a fixed player count? Have a look at board games for 2 players or board games for 4 players.

The verdict on Dewan

Dewan sits in the seat between the family game and the hobby game, and that is a difficult seat. Most games that try to sit there end up disappointing both sides. Dewan sits there comfortably, does its nine camps' worth of work and gets up before it outstays its welcome. After half a dozen games we also know precisely what it is good at: making you hesitate for a whole turn between taking two more cards and placing now. If you lose, it was usually that one time you waited. A game about having exactly enough cards, with one lesson: wait, and your spot is gone.