Dale Yu: Review of Hell of a Deal

Posted on August 30, 2026 by Dale Yu

 

Hell of a Deal

  • Designer: Cameron Reid
  • Publisher: Smirk & Dagger
  • Players: 1-4
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 90 minutes
  • Amazon affiliate link: 
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

Hell of a Deal is a cooperative poker game against The Devil Himself & all the minions of Hell. Of course, they all cheat! To compete, you’ll have to cheat like Hell… and the more you do, the more doomed you all become. Welcome to The Last Resort & Casino… and winning IS your last resort. To get to the Big Table, you’ll face off against diabolical bosses like Dedly Aloor, Jack Potts, The Brothers Dreadful, & Roul-ette, each of whom twists the game in unique ways.

It’s real poker – as far as playing poker in Hell goes, with you all trying individually to beat the house. Every Boss changes how you will approach the hand and has a bare minimum hand to beat, should their dealt cards not pan out. It’s a Texas Hold’em style game – and players get not two but three cards dealt to them (one up their sleeve for more options). You may earn powerful Favor cards that let you cheat, like making a four-card Flush, but at the cost of a Curse or suffering Temptation.

Your chips will earn you Souls (the coin of the realm) which you’ll need at the Big Table against The Devil Himself – or betting one of your five Power chips will gain you immediate abilities, like revealing one of the Boss’s cards, or taking a face-up discard into your hand. But lose the hand and your wagered chips flip over to deliver harsh penalties. Suffer too much Temptation and the game ends in a loss. Manage to win against The Devil Himself and you might just earn your way back to the living.  It has the feel of high stakes poker, with no cash on the table. And delivers a whole Poker Night in just 90 minutes.

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Gen Con 2026 – Asmodee Part 1

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Matt J Carlson

Lets face it, there a LOT of publishers joined together under the Asmodee label. Just swing by the Asmodee booth(s) in the dealer hall and it’s pretty obvious. So much so that we’ll be diving into Asmodee titles for at least two days. While some titles, like Azul Kids or Dixit Kids are explicitly Asmodee games there are more out there that are distributed by Asmodee. Moodbox Games has two lightweight games in the word-association Link Out Loud and Hundo, a Price-is-Right type card game where players are trying to get a “hund”red points. Rebel Studio had the slightly heavier adventure-esque The Trial of the Forest and the tile-laying, apartment-building Happiest Cat in the World. Zygomatic had the lightweight card game, Crashed Out, where players attempt to get the lowest sum of their hidden cards. Spot it: Connect! Power Up takes the hexagon-matching of Spot it! Connect and adds in some special black-background hexagons that change up how tiles are placed. Finally, their Only Colors is a minimalist cooperative party game where players try to give clues by stacking colored sticks. The game with the best presence was LEGO Ninjago Destiny’s Bounty Adventures from Dotted Games. Players take on the role of the ninjas and work through a series of scenarios defending the ship from pirate (or other) attack.

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Dale Yu: Review of Oracle: Predict Your Tricks

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Dale Yu

 

 

Oracle: Predict Your Tricks

  • Designer: Marni Abramowitz
  • Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards
  • Players: 2-6
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 20 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

In this fresh new spin on trick taking, the tricks don’t matter—only your ability to foresee the future! Gaze into the future and predict your results to win!  Each round, roll the scrying dice to determine the rules for this round. Then, based on your hand and a single card from each of your opponents, you’ll predict both the number of tricks you’ll take and bet on how an opponent’s round is going to go. Winning or losing a trick means nothing, you only score through correctly divining the future. Push your trick taking skills to the limit. Become the one true Oracle!

 

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Dale Yu: Review of Blancat

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Dale Yu

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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Gen Con 2026 – Renegade Game Studios

Posted on August 27, 2026 by Matt J Carlson

Renegade Game Studios continues to fire on all cylinders to bring classic (mostly army/fantasy) boardgame titles back into print while pushing forward with some of their IP licensing. The classic worker placement Lords of Waterdeep is out along with its expansion, Scoundrels of Skullport. The dungeon-crawling Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft is back. On the military side you have the Axis & Allies reprints Battle of the Bulge, 1941, and the brand-new Risk G.I.Joe: Special Missions. Robo Rally Dice ditches the card programming for dice programming to make a faster, slightly friendlier game. Due to its IP, Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable was getting a huge amount of interest. This is fine by me as I found Unstoppable to be an excellent solo game. If you’ve read this far, you may wonder where the Heroscape love is…. There continues to be an almost overwhelming amount of Heroscape releases. Try to tell that to those of us who are Heroscape addicts, however, and we will note your lips are moving, but you clearly aren’t making any sense.

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Dale Yu: The Gang Deluxe Edition

Posted on August 27, 2026 by Dale Yu

 

 

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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