October 2026

Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.

Soar – 4/10

Soar is a new reimplementation of 2024’s Fractured Sky. Soar dispenses with the elaborate components of its predecessor for a smaller, cheaper box that plays a bit faster as well.

On your turn, you will play two numbered tiles from your rack. Most of the time, your rack will only have three tiles on it, so you don’t have much control over the values you play. One of the tiles you play will contribute to your control of one of the cards on the table. The other will contribute to the control of the neutral player, the Skyborne. Some players may see this as a difficult and interesting decision. But some, myself included, will find this unintuitive if not downright unfun. Half of the actions I take in the game help the neutral player instead of me?

A couple design decisions attempt to ease this pain though. First is that the cards you are fighting over don’t always award the most points to the player with the most control. In some, you might be trying to get second place, or even last place. So the neutral tiles should be cleverly used to help yourself. Secondly, when the game ends, the player with the fewest points instead takes the points from the Skyborne. So a player who is not succeeding might end up switching roles into trying to help the Skyborne.

Unfortunately, I don’t think either of these design decisions does what it sets out to accomplish. Between the fact that half the tiles are placed facedown and the randomness of the tile values themselves, there is just too much chaos to satisfactorily execute a plan. You might try to give the Skyborne the negative points and end up getting them yourself instead. You might switch roles into helping the Skyborne and end up not ending the game with the fewest points.

Whereas Fractured Sky offered some mild deduction to help you asses your opponents’ strengths, Soar does not, making your choices even more of a shot in the dark. Full disclosure, I’ve never been much of a fan of area control, but this way of handling it seems even worse than most.

If you want to play a game like this, you should play Fractured Sky, a game I gave a 6/10. Soar seems to me to be lesser in every way than a game that already wasn’t knocking my socks off. But maybe I’m just a Soar loser.

Stereo Mind – 6/10

Stereo Mind is a party game in which players will listen to a piece of music and then decide which word best fits the music from a list of five possibilities. This is a fun idea, though obviously players’ answers are extremely subjective. Sometimes it seems like the music doesn’t fit any of the answers, and you just have to do the best you can.

The scoring is cooperative, and requires all players to have chosen the same response in order to succeed. This is honestly a pretty poor way of scoring. It makes the difficulty scale wildly over the player count from 2-5.

At player counts of three or more, one player gets a “pause button”, which excludes them from needing to match the others. In effect, it excludes them from participating at all except “for fun”, since their response becomes meaningless. In the next round, the player with the pause button must give it to a different player. The pause button allows the 3-player game to play similarly to the 2-player game (only two players need to match to succeed), but does not solve the scaling problem with scoring at higher counts.

We enjoyed the the activity of matching the songs to the concepts, but almost immediately discarded the scoring for one closer to Petiquette, where you need only match one other player to succeed. I have seen others who have suggested team-based or even fully competitive versions of the scoring. I can’t speak to any of these being definite improvements, but I think the amount of people who desire to do this shows a general dissatisfaction with the scoring method out of the box.

“Good idea, bad execution” is an all-too-common refrain for party games, and Stereo Mind is unfortunately no exception. There is a fun activity here, perhaps as a two or three player only experience, but otherwise you are likely to immediately start house-ruling. Alternatively, ditch the scoring altogether, and just enjoy the discussions.

Crits & Tricks – 7/10

Crits & Tricks is a tricking-taking game where each suit has a special ability that aligns with a typical fantasy RPG character class. Green-suited Barbarians modify the number, sneak red-suited Rogues make the low card win instead, etc. These abilities can only be activated by discarding the card alongside the card you actually play to the trick. For this reason, you will be dealt two more cards than the number of tricks, and so can only use these abilities twice per hand.

To add further interesting decisions, none of the cards have a printed value on them. Instead, each time you play a card, you must also give it a value from one of the dice you secretly rolled at the start of the hand. These dice are the classic six polyhedrals used in games like D&D, again leaning into the theme. This aspect of figuring out the best shape and value of secret dice to use is reminiscent of Lure. In a case where you don’t like any of your dice, you still pick one to use, but always have the option to re-roll it a single time for each die.

But how do you score points? Are you just trying to win tricks? Well, sometimes, but there’s a bit more to it. Each player will receive three secret goals (drafted at the start of the round). These are of varying difficulty and commensurate point values. Examples might be “win a trick where you re-rolled” or “don’t take any yellow cards”. Additionally, there is a public goal all players are trying to achieve, such as “win a number of tricks equal to one of your dice”. There is sometimes tension between these goals, but there is a decent amount of player control over them as well.

Crits & Tricks doesn’t have the strategic depth of the very best trick-takers, but it is a lot of fun. I could certainly see it being a casual gamer’s all-time favorite game, especially if they come from a fantasy RPG background.

Grabble – 7/10

Grabble is an irresistible five minutes of stupid fun. Dump the game pieces into the box lid (meeples, dice, and other similarly-sized objects). Grab as many as you can to fill your tiny pail. Then take turns returning them to the box, one at a time. If someone chooses a piece to return that you don’t have any of, you’re out. Last one standing wins.

Is it a dexterity game? Well, sort of. It certainly demands players be reasonably similarly physically-abled. And interestingly, many of the pieces come in two different sizes. You’ll be able to fit more dice into your pail if you pick the smaller ones, but that might cost you time in trying to pick them up.

You also have to grab pieces only one at a time, which does allow for a touch of strategic planning. Specialize in one particular piece, maybe cornering the market on golden bananas? Or try to have a wide variety of pieces to prepare for any piece your opponents call?

Your opponent has called traffic cones the last two turns. But this time they called dice. Are they out of traffic cones? You still have one, should you give it a try? Or is that exactly what they were baiting you into doing?

This is probably more discussion than a game of this weight really warrants. But everyone who plays it for the first time says “one more time” immediately upon its conclusion. It’s inessential and gimmicky, but also a lot of fun.

Duel for Cardia – 8/10

A 2-player card dueling game, Duel for Cardia has each player start with their own copy of an identical 16-card deck. From these, each player draws a starting hand of 5 cards. Each player secretly chooses then simultaneously reveals a card, with the higher value card earning a “signet”. Refill hands and repeat these steps until one player has wins the game by earning five signets.

This is a simple structure, but of course there is a wrinkle: each card also has a special ability. You might expect the more powerful abilities to appear on the lower-ranked cards for balance, but you’d be wrong. The most powerful abilities are found on the highest cards. This is because the ability only triggers if you play a lower value card than your opponent, thus conceding a signet to them.

Obviously, the design stands or falls on how interesting these abilities are and what kind of play patterns and tactical choices they create. I’m glad to report that Duel for Cardia passes this test with flying colors. Not only are the individual reveals interesting, but the revealed cards all remain on the table and can be interacted with by later cards. This can even lead to losing or gaining previously won signets. You are simultaneously attacking and defending on several axes, all by choosing a single card to play.

Duel for Cardia sits comfortably along other great 2-player card duels like Hanamikoji or Air, Land, and Sea. It doesn’t rise to the complexity of something like Radlands, but still delivers a lot of fun in a small package.

The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth – 8/10

I played the new versions of Sushi Go! and Orapa Mine this month, but both were so similar to their predecessors that neither really warranted their own write up. Conversely, The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth is a whole different beast compared to the other Crew games, and worth discussing on its own merits.

Like the other Crew games, this is a co-operative trick-taker with four suits 1-9 and trump cards from 1-4. Typical following and leading conventions apply. But the co-operative nature gives it the feeling of a partnership game, except the whole table is your partner instead of just one other person.

In the original, the goals for each mission are explained in a booklet, and get progressively more difficult over the series of missions. The sequel instead has the missions drawn from a deck of cards, injecting variety but also an unfortunate amount of variance. Journey to the Ends of the Earth takes a “best of both worlds” approach, with some missions in the campaign being run fully from the booklet and others using the decks of goal cards. Even the rounds that use the goal cards will also use the booklet though, adding some much-welcomed constraints and a similar feeling to a given mission each time it is played. This approach really hits the sweet spot for me.

Additionally, the designer seems to have pulled out all the stops when it comes to innovating on what those missions and goal cards can be. Yes, some will be familiar if you’ve played the other games in the series, but others are startlingly inventive. What’s more, even the off-the-wall scenarios work really well. Having now played through five missions, I’m fully confident in the balance (even if the rules wordings themselves often leave something to be desired).

This is the best version of The Crew and I don’t think it’s particularly close. For me, it fully obsoletes both of its predecessors, especially Deep Sea. Though I could see a certain type of player that would enjoy the simpler, more repetitive experience of the original, for anyone who enjoys the variety offered by goal cards, Journey to the Ends of the Earth is the way to go.

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A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.



­Agricola – 10/10­