You’d think a new Star Wars racer launching in 2026 would begin life using only the most cutting-edge of tools. A brand-new engine, perhaps. Giant screens, for sure. And somebody wearing a very expensive headset while talking seriously about speed.
Well, apparently not.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer began life as a homemade board game. At least, that’s how Fuse Games is telling it. Rather than relying on the latest development software, the team turned to Post-its and dice, figuring it all out on the physical plane before even booting up their hines.
Why? To allow the developer team to feel whether the system worked or not. While it was cheap and easy to tear apart and rebuild. That’s pretty savvy!
Not just that, but it’s also a wonderfully low-tech original story for an AAA release. But maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised. Even today, digital game design has a habit of bridging older ideas into new spaces…
Roulette’s Still Spinning After All These Years
There’s one sector in which core games are veritably ancient when compared to video gaming standards, but these blueprints are still riding high on the waves of digitization and innovation.
Roulette doesn’t need much explaining at all, really, immortalized as it is in pop culture! There’s a wheel, a ball, and a table of possible outcomes. That very same structure has survived centuries of physical casinos coming and going, early digital experiments, and the move to the online realm.
Nobody’s ever needed to “fix” the underlying game at all, freeing up developers to experiment with ways of delivering it as a gaming experience. Case in point: live dealer roulette games. Here’s a format that keeps the iconic wheel and a real-life croupier at the centre of play, but adds HD streaming and real-time access through a digital casino lobby.
Despite all that, though, the old mechanic is still driving everything here. It makes sense, since there wouldn’t be a game at all without the ball rattling around on the numbered wheel!
Deck Building With A Digital Brain?
That’s Slay the Spire 2, in a nutshell. And we know how far deckbuilding stretches back…
It’s really not an overstatement to say that humans have been playing with decorated pieces of paper and calling it leisure for millennia. Now here’s Mega Crit, implementing that same concept of building something useful out of the hand you’ve been dealt in the follow-up to its smash hit original game.
Released on Steam Early Access a few months back in March 2026, Slay the Spire 2 still revolves around drawing digital cards and building a deck, with the added fun of trying to survive whatever monstrosity happens to be waiting upstairs.
Sure, so the gameplay itself isn’t an exact replica of Dominion, boosted as it is by relics, status effects, and a bunch of clever systems. But you’re still facing those same decisions that plague card players across everything from bridge to poker.
Do you play that top-of-the-line card now or save it for later? Be single-minded in your deck-building strategy, or keep your hand flexible? Pick up that powerful-looking card, even though you know you’ve already got more than enough to play with?
The core difference is that the computer’s working away to handle the tedious stuff (nobody needs to remember 12 simultaneous modifiers), but you’ve still got to avoid making bad decisions yourself!
Absolum, AKA, The Beat ‘Em Up That Learned A Few New Tricks
Beat ‘em ups have been around long enough that most of us already know the deal: pick a character, move across the screen, and clobber whatever gets in the way.
That’s still very much the foundation of Absolum, only Dotemu and Guard Crush have layered a few newer ideas over the top. Branching routes, repeated runs, and permanent upgrades mean that the road ahead isn’t quite as predictable as it would have been in the arcade era.
You’re still getting that instant satisfaction from landing a KO combo or clearing a screen full of enemies, but there’s a whole strategic layer added on top. Okay, so Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6 do need you to play with your brain switched on. It’s a whole other thing, though, to turn a straightforward punch-your-way-to-the-end run into something where you have agency and choice.
Galactic Racer Literally Went Back To The Table
Which brings us back to the headline event. What’s especially interesting about Galactic Racer is that, on the surface at least, Fuse has taken the entire relationship between old and new rather literally.
The studio’s stuffed with former Criterion developers, so there’s already plenty of arcade racing experience in the room. But rather than just building another traditional racer, Fuse has mixed all of that with roguelite progression, meaning what you do between races matters just as much as what happens on the track itself.
It’s starting to make sense now, why the team decided to test with dice and Post-its first.
There were things in the development process that could only ever be revealed by playing the ideas through on a table. Was it actually satisfying to earn an upgrade? Does choosing one reward over another create an interesting decision? More importantly, can the whole experience make a player want to carry on for another race?
It seems that, for all the hot new tech that’s available to game makers today, sometimes the only way to find out if a game works or not is to strip it back to the simplest version possible!
