Palm Laboratory arrived (via kickstarter), and I gave it a whirl. It’s a no-table-required solo card game, designed so that you can manipulate the cards in-hand throughout (which is a bit fiddly, but not too fiddly).
The game is an engine-builder (not something I tend to enjoy greatly, but those physical aspects were appealing enough for me to want to try it, and it was a pretty cheap punt). It features “upgradable” cards: you use only the top half of any card, but can spend resources to rotate them to get the version on the bottom half, or to flip them to their reverse side. As such there are four states that each card can be in and, depending on how the rotation and flipping actions are allocated, you might have an obvious linear progression through each of those states from worst to best, or you might have choices about which variant is most useful to you.
There are three different mission cards to choose from, which affects the kind of engine you’re trying to build, but in all cases you’re aiming to possess enough resources in hand at the end of each round to upgrade the primary mission card to its next state, with each mission upgrade being more expensive than the last. In order to afford the later expensive mission upgrades, though, you’ll need to be spending resources upgrading other cards along the way so that in later rounds they will give you more/better resources. If you cannot progress your mission at the end of the round, the “danger meter” card is upgraded to a more urgent state instead, and you lose the game if you would need to push that beyond its limit.
It succeeds in being an in-hand card game, but the gameplay didn’t instantly grab me, and the first game took longer to play than I was anticipating (certainly more than the 15min suggestion, but I reckon with practice the time will drop – and so long as I can get through a game in a 25 minute train commute, it’ll do what I wanted).
I’m not sure whether this is really for me, but I expect to find out :).