Palm Laboratory (2024)

Overview

Creating unique monsters, powerful devices, and fantastic potions is a dangerous business. As you gain power and succeed in your experiments, you must also maintain your laboratory to prevent catastrophe. Take on the many challenges of Palm Laboratory anywhere you go with this handheld resource management game.

Palm Laboratory is a solitaire game that uses a small deck of four-sided cards and deck-transforming mechanisms to flip and rotate cards. As you improve each card, each will increase your resource production, gain more points, or make progress on the goal of your current game — a goal that you choose and that defines the rules for victory or defeat. Some goals add additional cards to generate new resources or other goal-specific objectives.

Each turn, you review the top two cards of your deck and take an action listed on the top section of either card — or you discard the top card by placing it at the back of the deck. When you take a card action, you do so by paying any required cost, then following the action type: rotating it 180º, flipping it over, or storing the card by rotating it 90º so that it sticks out from the other cards. After manipulating the card during an action, you place it in the back of the deck; stored cards provide resources you can use on future actions.

—description from designer