 March 2026 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.  Paint the Roses – 5/10 Paint the Roses is a co-operative deduction game with a light Alice in Wonderland theme. Players will take turns placing flower tiles onto the board in an attempt to communicate information to the other players about their secret card. Correct guesses will advance the player along the scoring track, while incorrect guesses allow the Queen of Hearts to draw closer. Fill the whole garden board with flowers before the queen catches up in order to win the game. All of the information that can be deduced is publicly available to all players, which means player participation isn’t really mandatory. In some ways, it’s oddly disincentivized as well. When a player places a flower on the board, should you and the other two players who didn’t give the clue all independently race to sort out the implications? Or should you let the most-experienced, quickest-thinking player just tell you the conclusion? This is not really a typical co-op quarterbacking problem, it’s more a matter of slower-processing players feeling like they have nothing to contribute at all. It also needs to be said that Paint the Roses typifies a common complaint I level against co-operative games: that they are just group puzzles with some randomness added in. The co-ops I enjoy most fight against this tendency by giving each player their own responsibilities through hidden information or unique abilities and also masking the mechanical flaws through excellent narrative. This game does none of those things, which can at times give it all the thrill of watching someone else complete a sudoku. Paint the Roses is at its best when a player can cleverly place a flower tile in just the right way to share the maximum amount of information with the group. Those mind-meld moments can be thrilling. But more often than not, they are restricted by the available flower tiles. And the more often this occurs, the more the losses can feel totally out of the players’ control as well. Gamers looking for a peacefully-paced, cerebral experience may find something here to love, but it will be in spite of its flaws.  Fractured Sky – 6/10 Fractured Sky is big on table appeal. Plastic airships cruise around the board, visiting various floating islands. Players outfit these ships behind their personal screens to ensure secrecy. Then the shards begin to fall from the sky. Sometimes you will know where, and other times you will only have an inkling, but since you win by gathering the most shards, you’ll want to pay attention here. This is an area majority game with tons of hidden information. There are mild deduction elements that can aid you in determining how much to commit to an area in order to win it, but in many cases you are basically just guessing at how strong your opponents are in each area. As a person who isn’t super keen on area majority anyway, this injection of additional chaos seems like a negative on the face of it. Despite this though, it’s hard not to be charmed by the overall experience, from the snappy flow of the turns to the luxurious magnetic components. Is it totally necessary for the secret value you assign to each airship to magnetically attach to the bottom of it? Of course not, but it does contribute positively to the overall experience. This is a fast-playing game, in the range of an hour or so, and that is definitely to its credit. Its whimsical and capricious nature could easily overstay its welcome otherwise. I get the impression that the designers of Fractured Sky think that it is deeper than it really is. Either that, or my single play just hasn’t revealed the depth. There are tips given about watching the other players’ moves more than the board, not over committing to too many places, etc. But it still felt like a game that you could end up firmly in last place by guessing one number away from the truth a few times.  Slay the Spire: The Board Game – 7/10 It is a peculiar idea in many ways to create a tabletop game based on a video game. But Slay the Spire is better-suited than some because its gameplay was already based on tabletop game mechanics such as deckbuilding. In the video game, as here, you will start with a basic deck of cards that you use to battle ever-stronger creatures through a series of levels. After each battle, opportunities exist to improve your deck of cards; opportunities without which you would quickly find the battles impossible. Players will proceed through a series of three “acts”, each taking about an hour (and allowing for pausing the game between each one). Each act will have about four battles, culminating in a boss fight that is tougher than the previous ones. Between these battles are shops to buy new cards, places to heal, chances to remove weak cards from your deck, and story elements that add a touch of flavor to the world. If any player dies, the whole game is lost, so players need to utilize these interludes to find ways to defend and heal one another while also improving their own damage output. Having played the video game before, I had some concerns about the level of arithmetic previously offloaded to the CPU that would now instead be required of the human players of this tabletop version. Fortunately, the numeric values have been simplified and downscaled considerably. That’s not to say there aren’t calculations to do, but they are much more in line with what you might expect from a mid-weight tabletop game. Likewise, the administrivia of tracking monster health and whatnot is handled relatively painlessly. Slay the Spire: The Board Game also provides ample incentive for players to plot and scheme together, calculating the perfect sequence and role that each player should perform in order to ensure success. And it is this co-operation that helps justify purchasing and storing an enormous $125 cardboard box as opposed to downloading the app for $10. Solo play, while supported, seems like it would bypass much of the enjoyment on offer here. This is a solidly-designed co-operative deckbuilder that is sure to appeal to fans of similar efforts like Aeon’s End and Shadowrift. There are significant decisions in deck construction and character choice that will shape each play into a very different feel. Those solo decisions combined with the group decisions in execution lead to memorable plays that you can discuss even after the game is over.  Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age – 8/10 Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age is a heavy-ish engine-building euro that leverages a fascinating dice mechanic and strong player interaction into a cohesive whole, albeit one pretty light on thematic resonance. Strap on your sandals ’cause we’re advancing up progress tracks and trading the Mediterranean. Minos has tons of different things going on, none of which are complex in and of themselves. But taken together they can make for a daunting teach, due solely to length. Fortunately, many of these are things you’ve likely seen before (track advancement, area majority, etc.). So let’s talk about the most innovative part of the game: the dice. Before each round, all the dice are rolled and then drafted by the players. When you draft a die, you also place it onto one of the action spaces on the board, planning out one of the actions you will take on your turn. The numbers on the dice serve three separate functions, so choosing the right one is crucial. Lower numbers are better, because the lowest number on each action space gets to take the best action there. But higher numbers are also better, because you get to add up your dice of the same color and if they total 9 or more, you get a free advancement on the track of the corresponding color (oh right, so color matters too). But sometimes you just need a good medium-size number, because you have to take the actions in order of your highest to lowest dice and often the sequencing of these actions is very important. The dice aspect of the game is very fun and honestly pretty flawless. Always a fascinating series of choices in quick succession. Unfortunately, the following execution of the actions themselves can be quite lengthy. For example, one of the spaces lets you take two cards into hand, which can be chosen from the faceup row or drawn randomly, then advance one of the tracks of your choice (another decision), the advancement of which triggers another bonus action, and then also trigger bonuses from your played cards that may generate further actions and bonuses. Chaining and comboing like this are definitely part of the game’s appeal, but you pay for it in overall game length. Yes, the primary complaint most people seem to have about Minos is how long it takes. The setup and rules are already rather protracted, and you’re looking at a couple hours of playing time at least on top of this. For this reason, most people recommend against playing Minos with its maximum four players, limiting it to only 2 or 3 unless you fancy delving into another whole rulebook to understand the solo mode. Those concerns may keep Minos from becoming an all-time classic, but if you have the time and patience there is still a lot here to like.  Stonesaga – 8/10 Video games have been doing “crafting systems” since forever. What happens if I combine this thing I found with this other thing I found? Surprise! But how to transfer that sense of surprise and discovery into board game form has been a tough nut to crack. First of all, because to be interesting it requires scads of different base components. Secondly, because it requires a way to make the results consistent but still surprising. And thirdly, because you need to spend many hours with the game to appreciate the depth of its crafting system, as a very simple one would lose all its wonder after the first game or two. Stonesaga has addressed all of these obstacles better than any other board game I’ve seen. Being a campaign legacy game allows players to spend the needed hours to see the depth of the system. Consistent yet surprising results are generated by a large book of lookup tables akin to Tales of the Arabian Nights or Vantage, pared with huge decks of mysterious cards. And, most creatively, the variety in base components is achieved by having each one having a different symbol on each of its sides. To craft, you put the symbols of two sides together, and look that up in the table. This essentially quadruples the possibilities without requiring more base components. Players will experiment with combining the same types of resource but in different configurations, a brilliant solution. Thematically, this is a game about cavemen trying to explore and survive in a harsh wilderness. The crafting elements are things like sticks and stones, with rarer elements like teeth being acquired only after fierce battles with predators. So while you’d probably like to sit around turn after turn just trying to craft with various configurations, time is of the essence. You can’t just keep putting a stick and a rock together without first finding food, water, and shelter unless you don’t mind dying. But even the acts of foraging and bivouacking can be exciting, with the lookup books also used to provide daring adventures with great rewards and costly consequences. The rating above is very preliminary, based on only a single play. But I can see what the game is trying to lead towards, and I’m very excited to see how well it sticks (and stones) the landing. This could definitely go up in rating when all is said and done.  A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.  The Quest for El Dorado – 9/10 The Quest for El Dorado combines two of my favorite types of game (racing and deckbuilding) into one beautifully elegant whole. Players will take on the role of explorers, hacking their way through endless jungles and deserts to be the first to find the City of Gold. The cards in your deck can be used either as a method of progressing through the board or as currency to buy even better cards to put in your deck. These choices are the real heart of the game, and they finding the right balance for yourself is crucial. Despite its short playing time, this game packs in a lot of high-level strategic decisions as well as low-level tactical ones. You can see the board setup at the start of the game (which can be randomized or chosen from literally hundreds of pre-made setups) and this will allow you to plan a general approach (e.g., I’ll need to buy lots of cards that let me cross water because I’m going to take the more direct river path). Your opponents could choose a completely different approach to the very same map (e.g., forget the river, I’ll go around it by buying much more efficient machete cards and hacking my way through). But the best laid plans require strong tactics to execute. When you start your turn next to the river with nary a paddle card in your hand, what then? Skip a turn of movement to buy more cards? Or adjust on the fly to an alternate route? This game is an absolute delight, and never seems to lose its luster for me. The options provided by the expansions make this even more true. |
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