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Last Will Deep Dive
What the Community Thinks About Last Will
Coverage of Last Will ranges from a straight strategy pitch to an unboxing to a couple of monthly top-ten rundowns, and the reaction lands consistently positive. Cardboardrhino calls it "a very well balanced game" built around a comedic premise, and points to multiple viable strategies as the reason engagement stays high through all seven rounds. The Board Game Garden, working through a monthly top-ten list, singles the theme out as the standout element and describes the whole experience as "a very different game" from what they normally play. BoardGameCo frames Last Will as a stranger cousin to Life and CV, arguing that a theme built around losing a fortune should feel grim but instead comes across as "strangely horrifying and strangely compelling all at once."
Foster the Meeple's hosts liked it enough that one called it a favorite of their weekend, though they spend nearly as much time debating where the game actually fits at the table as they do praising it, since it shares a design lineage with the heavier Prodigal Club. Nights Around a Table approaches the game before ever playing it, unboxing a copy that was, in host Ryan's words, "generously supplied" directly by publisher Czech Games Edition. Their disagreement with the rest of the field is narrow and specific: they are lukewarm on the cover art even while enjoying nearly everything else about the box.
Core Mechanics That Define Last Will
Planning Board and Turn Order
Cardboardrhino describes each round opening with a planning phase, where players take a spot on a planning board that determines how many cards they draw, how many errand boys they will have, and how many actions they get for that round. Foster the Meeple describes the same system as effectively a bidding step: players choose a spot in a range, and that choice sets their action count, card draw, and how many worker placement spots they may use that round, while also setting up next round's turn order, so going first can mean fewer actions now in exchange for priority later. The Board Game Garden's account matches this: a piece placed on a spot determines both turn order and how many cards and actions a player receives for the round.
Spending Down Your Estate
Once turn order is set, cardboardrhino explains, errand boys can be sent to take cards from the offer, extend a player board, adjust property market modifiers, or draw an unknown card, after which players spend action points playing cards from hand and activating cards already on their board. Estates and other properties depreciate over time, and since a player cannot go bankrupt while they still own property, selling one is the only way to shed it, which unhelpfully puts money back in hand. Foster the Meeple and The Board Game Garden both describe a tableau of estate and event cards: houses can be bought high and must be sold for less before the game ends, guest cards act like standing reservations that cost money every time they are used, and hands are capped at two cards at the end of each round. A player with no money and no property left declares bankruptcy on the spot, ending the game at that round's close; otherwise play runs the full seven rounds, and the player holding the least money, or the most debt, wins.
The Last Will Experience
A Race to the Bottom
Every channel that actually played Last Will comes back to how satisfying it feels to lose on purpose. Cardboardrhino calls the whole exercise "super fun," adding that spending ridiculous amounts of money "just feels good." BoardGameCo frames the appeal as a kind of inverted efficiency: players are still optimizing, just toward zero instead of toward a fortune, which is what makes the theme land as "strangely horrifying and strangely compelling all at once." The Board Game Garden echoes that, saying the theme of trying to spend all your money "feels pretty good" and recalling a session spent buying and selling houses and running up a string of boat and yacht events.
Table Talk and Convention Pacing
Foster the Meeple's hosts describe the teach as pretty straightforward once the iconography clicks, and specifically call out convention play as a strength: with time at a premium, a shorter, lighter game with a similar theme to Prodigal Club lets a table find out if a new player will enjoy that family of design before committing to the longer game. They are careful to note this only really matters for groups who have not already settled into Prodigal Club, since anyone already comfortable with that game would likely just set it up instead.
What Makes Last Will Stand Out
A Theme Nobody Else Is Using
Nights Around a Table leans hardest into the theme's novelty, calling it "a Victorian version of Brewster's Millions" and pointing out that a rich uncle's will rewarding whoever spends fastest flips the usual acquisitive board game goal on its head. BoardGameCo agrees the concept is unusual enough to be worth checking out on its own, calling it "a very unique theme," while cardboardrhino leans into the game's humor, describing it as a strategic game that finds comedy in watching players race to blow through their inheritance.
Components That Sell the Victorian Fantasy
Nights Around a Table spends most of an unboxing praising the physical production: tiny wooden top hat components in each player color, cardboard money instead of paper, and interior card art that they preferred to the cover illustration. They also note the rulebook runs eleven pages and reminds them stylistically of other Czech Games Edition manuals, dense with text but full of worked examples.
Potential Drawbacks
Rough Edges in Presentation
The same unboxing that praises the components also flags two presentation issues. Nights Around a Table is not a fan of the cover art, describing it as reminiscent of an illustration style they generally dislike even though the game's actual illustrator is a different artist, and they find the box insert visibly warped rather than intentionally shaped.
Finding Its Place at the Table
Foster the Meeple's biggest reservation is not about quality but about fit: the hosts like the game but struggle to say who it is actually for, since any group already willing to learn Prodigal Club would probably just play that instead. They also flag a practical gap, saying the game "could use a reference card," and note it may be a rough starting point for someone who has never played a board game before, even though it works well as a faster, lower-commitment introduction to that heavier design.
If You Enjoy Last Will
- Prodigal Club, per Foster the Meeple, is the heavier game in the same family: Last Will plays as a condensed take on its systems, and the two can even be combined into a bigger, beefier session.
- The Mad Magazine game, per Nights Around a Table, is the only other game they had played with the same conceit of racing to get rid of money first, built as a direct parody of Monopoly's opposite goal.
What Reviewers Are Saying
"The idea of being left a fortune that you have to spend as fast as possible is both strangely horrifying and strangely compelling all at once, but it's a game that is incredibly mechanically satisfying, great art and production, and a very unique theme that is worth checking out."
— BoardGameCo
"It is a Victorian version of Brewster's Millions, that movie that they remade with John Candy and Richard Pryor that I watched on TV as a kid. And what an amazing concept! You got a big pile of money that you have to spend in a matter of a couple days to get an even huger pile of money! That's hilarious."
— Ryan, Nights Around a Table
"We played that. It was pretty quick with teach and everything, the teach is pretty straightforward. The only thing, like Jeff said, is God could it use a reference card. It really could."
— Foster the Meeple