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Welcome to the desert, where water is scarce, fuel is precious, and your only friends are the scrappy misfits in your caravan. In Dirt and Glory, you’re not saving the world or building an empire. You’re just trying to get your convoy across the sand without completely crashing and burning. It’s a game about managing risk, grabbing opportunities, and trying not to flip that one card too many.
Over six rounds, players take on the role of convoy leaders travelling through ancient ruins in search of rare water sources. The goal is to claim territories and earn points, but doing that means walking a fine line between bold and reckless. With a small deck of troop cards, a couple of fuel tokens, and a bit of nerve, you’ll be trying to hit just the right number to succeed each round. Sounds simple, right? Sort of. But nothing’s ever that easy when your next card might blow the whole thing up.
👥 2-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Petr Vojtěch
🎨 Artwork: Petr Štefek
🏢 Publisher: Pink Troubadour (discounted review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
At the start, everyone gets a basic deck of seven troop cards, each with a value between one and five. You also draw three extra cards and keep two of them, which adds a bit of variety to your starting hand. After a quick shuffle, you’re ready to hit the road. You also get a help card, a scoring card, one fuel token, and a little scoring marker that’ll hopefully move forward at some point.
The heart of the game is all about trying to hit the target number on the location card. On your turn, you play the top card of your deck into your caravan and add its value to your current speed. The catch? You don’t know what you’re about to draw. If your total speed goes over the target, you’ve overrun the location and you won’t score any points that round.
Instead of playing a card, you can also choose to pass. If you do, you get to pick one of the available troop cards and add it to the bottom of your deck. This becomes quite important over time, especially when you’re trying to improve your chances in future rounds.
Fuel tokens give you a bit more control. You can spend one to put the card you just played into your reserve instead of your caravan, which can help you avoid going over. Or, if you’ve saved up, you can spend four fuel tokens to play a card directly from your reserve, letting you actually choose what to play instead of relying on luck. At the beginning of each round, you also have the option to shuffle cards from your reserve back into your deck, so there’s some planning involved as well.
At the end of each round, the player closest to the target number scores the most points. Players further from the target receive fewer points or a mix of points and fuel, depending on their placement. Players who overrun the location get no points but do get some fuel as a small consolation. If players tie, the number of cards they played breaks the tie. After six rounds, players count their points, add a small bonus for leftover fuel, and the winner is declared king of the desert. Or queen. Or just the person who took fewer unnecessary risks.
Art and Components
The first thing you’ll notice is the artwork. It’s big, bold, and somewhere between Mad Max and a vintage comic book. The troop cards are full of colourful vehicles and scrappy-looking characters, all colour-coded by player. Everything’s got this exaggerated motion that gives it a sense of speed and chaos, which really suits the theme.
Fuel tokens are round and feature a little gas canister icon, making them easy to spot and thematically right at home in the dusty chaos of the desert. The location cards have clear numbers in the middle so everyone knows what they’re aiming for. Score cards help you keep track of how fast your caravan is going, and the help cards give a handy reminder of how fuel works, which is honestly the bit you’re most likely to forget mid-game anyway.
It’s the kind of design that gets out of the way once you’re playing. The layout is clean, and the overall look supports the gameplay without being overwhelming. It’s not flashy for the sake of it, just clear and effective.
Our Experience
When we played Dirt and Glory, the first thing that stood out was how quickly the game got going. After the first round, everyone knew what they were doing. It has that lovely mix of simplicity and tension where every turn gives you something to think about, even if the rules are easy to grasp.
Each round built up nicely, starting with cautious plays and ending in big, dramatic moments where someone inevitably pushed one card too far. That “one more card” instinct is strong in this game, and watching someone flip a high-value card and overrun by a single point was hilarious every time. Unless it was you.
The reserve and fuel system gave us a bit to think about, especially later in the game when our decks had stronger troop cards. Deciding when to spend fuel, when to stash a card, or when to just cut your losses and pass added more depth than we expected. It’s not a complicated game, but there’s definitely more going on than it first appears.
We found that the game works well at all player counts, but three or four players gave us the best rhythm. It moves fast, turns are short, and there’s a constant sense of suspense. With the right group, the theme adds a lot of humour and drama. If your players enjoy a bit of theatre (think desert accents, engine noises, the works) it can get properly silly in the best way. If not, it still works mechanically, but it might feel a bit more like a little timing challenge than a thematic experience.
Our Thoughts
Dirt and Glory went down well at our table. It’s not going to change the world, but it doesn’t need to. It knows what it’s doing, and it does it well. The push-your-luck aspect is front and centre, but the deckbuilding and reserve mechanics keep things interesting across the whole game.
It’s a great fit for players who like push-your-luck games, or who enjoy that tension of drawing cards and hoping things don’t explode. It’s got some of the same energy as games like Quacks of Quedlinburg or Can’t Stop; quick to teach, fun to play, and filled with “I can’t believe that just happened” moments.
That said, it’s not the most original design we’ve seen. There’s a lot here that feels familiar, but the way it’s all put together is smart and satisfying. It sits comfortably in its genre, with a few nice twists to make it stand out just enough.
The players who did best in our games weren’t the boldest or the most cautious. They were the ones who knew when to take a small win, and when to spend fuel to stay in control. That balance between planning and reacting is where the fun really is.
It fits nicely into a game night, either between heavier games or as something you play a couple of times in a row. The 30-minute playtime is just right, and it’s the sort of game where, when you finish, someone always wants to go again.
📝 We received a review copy from Pink Troubadour.
