Blancat

• Designer: Nutgoo Lee 
• Publisher: Korea Board Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You’ve made new blankets for your cats, but they want their old ones back! Remake the original patterns quickly before the yowling begins! Each round, a goal card is revealed for everyone to see. All players try to recreate that pattern as quickly as possible by weaving threads on their personal player boards. Players grab a cat token as soon as they finish. The player who fails to complete their blanket before the tokens run out receives a penalty, unless another player wrongfully claimed a token with an incorrect pattern. It’s a unique, pattern-matching puzzle game for friends and families alike.

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The Gang Deluxe Edition

• Designer: John Cooper and Kory Heath
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players: 3-10
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher
• https://amzn.to/4gCclIb

Round up your gang and get ready to pull off a series of bank heists using the power of poker! In The Gang, a co-operative version of Texas Hold’em, players bet on how good they think their hand of cards will be relative to the other players, then try to make their predictions a reality. Early in a round, without talking to each other, each player chooses a chip indicating how good they think their hand is. Then they begin dealing cards into the middle of the table and have a chance to reassess their hands as more cards are revealed. At the end of the round, players see whether they correctly evaluated their hand. If all players did, you get to open one of the bank vaults! If not, you trip the alarm! If you manage to open three vaults before you trip the alarm three times, your gang wins!

The Gang: Deluxe Edition is a blinged-out edition of the co-operative card game The Gang that includes the base game, the The Gang: More Players expansion that brings the player count to ten, as well as three expansion packs for more variability in game play. This edition also features ceramic poker chips, casino-quality cards, and a custom playmat. 

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Tap 4

• Designers:Marilyn Dick and Dorene Mills 
• Publisher: The Op Games
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4vvKj5l
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Get ready for an exciting and strategic card game – Tap 4!

To play, the first player puts down a card, preferably their highest point card. Players take turns laying down cards equal to or lower in value than those on the top of the “Stack” (the play area in the center).

You can play cards from your hand or those on the table. When a player completes a set of 4 or more identical cards or plays a “TAP IN” card, they shout “TAPPED” (and for extra fun, give the table a tap), move the “Stack” out of play, and continue their turn.

Watch out for special “Trick cards” like the “TAP IN” card, which acts as a wild card to grab the “Stack.” The “TAPPED OUT” card gets passed to a player, causing them to lose their next turn.

The goal? Be the first to eliminate all your cards to win the round. The player with the lowest score after a series of rounds becomes the ultimate “TAP FOUR WINNER.”

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Dale Yu: Review of Triangulation

Triangulation

• Designer: Peter C. Hayward
• Publisher: Allplay
• Players: 3-8
• Age: 9+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/4fy6qDB
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Each round in Triangulation, you give three clues, trying to get your teammates to guess the secret answer using word association. The twist? Your opponents get to guess first, using the first two clues.  Can you be obscure enough so that they can’t suss it out, but make it perfectly clear for your team when they get all three clues?

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