A chunk of our personalities is made up of the things we like, and those likes speak volumes about us. Me? I’m mad about cats, ghosts, spiritual themes, Asian movies and anime, fantasy books, and fantastic artwork (can’t draw for toffee meself, but I love to look at other talent people’s work). Shake all of those things up, and out pops me! Hopefully you as well, because these ingredients make for a pretty amazing cake.
Restless Spirits is an easy-to-learn tactical card game where you play as a Spirit Guide, whose job it is to help Lost Spirits find their way home. There are 30 unique Light and Dark Spirits to encounter, with a different set of Totem requirements listed at the bottom of each card. You get two Action Points per turn: attracting Spirits to your board, buying Totem cards from a marketplace, and playing them to fulfil a Spirit’s requirements one by one.
You’ll also be using powerful Spirit abilities to gain an advantage over your opponent – Light Spirit abilities will help you win even faster, whilst Dark Spirit abilities will slow down your opponents instead! But Spirit abilities are single use, so tactical timing is important to get the most out of them. If you can meet all three of a Spirit’s Totem requirements, it will be released into the Spirit Realm, becoming one of the cards you need to win the game! (I personally like to pretend that they actually join me for a human/spirit/cat spirit team up and we go on to dominate the world.)
Restless Spirits combines elements of set collection, tactical card drafting, ability combos, and push your luck!
I’ve had the pleasure of playing Restless Spirits, and I’ve got to tell you, I kinda fell in love with it, to the point where I played it more in the three week period I had it than anything else this year. I mean, did I mention the fact that there’s a cat spirit? I think I might have dropped a hint somewhere. You can see for yourself that the artwork is amazing – it’s like starring in your own Studio Ghibli movie, that’s how imaginative it is. The spirit cards are tarot sized, which means extra room for all that lovely artwork, and the game is dripping in lore. Given that this is a news article, I’m probably meant to stay impartial and not say things like ‘this is one of my favourite games of 2025 so far’, so I’ll make sure that I don’t say anything that sounds anything like that. Yeah. It’ll be fine.
Head to this Kickstarter page and sign up for notification of the launch date. The cat is called Miki the Explorer, by the way. Just so you know.
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here.
