Dale Yu: Review of Last Lantern

Posted on July 16, 2026 by Dale Yu

 

 

Last Lantern

  • Designers: Jeremy Ducret, Gricha Cerman, Anthony Perone 
  • Publisher: Wonderful World Board Games
  • Players: 2-4
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher
  • Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4nP8h9F 

Last Lantern is a 2 to 4-player co-operative polyomino game with set-collection and bag-building elements. As residents of the canopy, players puzzle their way forwards to the now dimming last lantern by placing tiles. Rely on the powers of familiars to not give in to the isolating fog and—perhaps—discover a way to ward it off forever.  The game is played over seven to nine rounds. Players, without communicating, simultaneously choose one set comprised of a tile and a token. The tile is placed on the path before you, moving you closer to your goal, while gaining three different tokens that activate powerful abilities. Echoing the best co-ops, discover ways to communicate by analyzing both the board state and tokens in hand, bettering your group dynamic with each play.

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Dale Yu: Review of Sanctuary

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Dale Yu

 

 

Sanctuary

  • Designer: Matthias Wigge
  • Publisher: Capstone / Feuerland
  • Players: 1-5
  • Age: 12+
  • Time: 40-100 mins
  • Played twice with pre-production copy provided by publisher
  • Played six times more with a real copy (provided by publisher)

In Sanctuary, you will plan and design a modern, scientifically-managed zoo for animals and visitors. A supply of 135 unique zoo tiles provides you with animals, buildings, and projects. In every game, you want to find the best mix from those available to build the most successful zoological establishment. Different effects on the tiles will help you to achieve conservation goals and to increase the attraction of your zoo.

Each player has a set of four action cards to manage their gameplay, and the power of an action is determined by the slot the card currently occupies. One of those cards will let you play projects, and the other three cards will let you play animals of a specific habitat: forest, rock, or water.

Sanctuary is based on its predecessor Ark Nova, but modifies and simplifies many of the mechanisms of that game in an elegant and surprising manner. Your goal to find the best way to puzzle together your animals, buildings, and projects on your zoo map is an ongoing pleasure!

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Dale Yu: Review of Haunted Mouse

Posted on July 14, 2026 by Dale Yu

 

Haunted Mouse

  • Designer: Jonathan Cox
  • Publisher: Bezier Games
  • Players: 2-5
  • Age: 12+
  • Time: 30 mins
  • Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4dAliQY
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

Looming high above a forgotten village stands the remains of a forgotten cathedral. On cloudy nights such as this, only the flickers of a few candles light the empty aisles, bringing warmth to the five sole inhabitants: Parm, Brie, Gouda, Jaq, and Colby. With only embers of light to shield them from darkness, the purring wind wraps and winds its way through the pews, fueling the fears of our five little mice. Spine-chilling specters of carnivorous creatures haunt their dreams. Images of cat claws, glistening snake fangs, and ominous owl eyes lurk in every corner of their minds.  Will their fears bring endless hours of restless sleep or will they shed these ghastly nightmares? Be the first mouse to wake up and grab the most cheese from the kitchen. As we all know: the early mouse gets the cheese!

Haunted Mouse is a ladder climbing/shedding game where mice not only shed their own fears (cards), but can use the fears of others! After all, why work hard shedding your own fears when your opponents can do it for you? The earlier you get rid of all your fears, the more cheese you get! Be the first mouse to complete their cheese wheel wins the game and never goes hungry again!

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JinxO, Rebirth, and Mooki Island Are SdJ Winners

Posted on July 13, 2026 by huzonfirst

Yesterday, the Spiel des Jahres jury announced the winners of their three awards.  The big award (the SdJ) goes to JinxO, a party game from Martin Ang.  It beat out the other two nominated games, Cozy Stickerville and Morty Sorty Magic Shop.

The winner of the Kennerspiel (for “connoisseur” games) is Rebirth, from Reiner Knizia.  This gives Knizia an SdJ triple crown of sorts, as he had previously won the SdJ for Keltis and the Kinderspiel for Whoowasit?.  The other nominated games were Boss Fighters QR and Moon Colony Bloodbath.

Finally, the Kinderspiel for best children’s game went to Mooki Island, by Florian Sirieix, emerging victorious over Boo Party and Verflixt Verzaubert.

Congratulations to all the winners!

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Dale Yu: Review of One Round?

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Dale Yu

One Round?

Designer: Tobias Tesar
Publisher: DEVIR
Players: 2-12
Age: 8+
Time: 15 minutes
Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4h9uBt8
Played with review copy provided by publisher

What do the terms “work” and “banana” have in common? Perhaps the word “farmer”? What about “harvest”? And where does “fruit” fit in? In the co-operative party game One Round?, you need to close the gaps in the word circle — quickly! — in order to win. The game is played with one hundred numbered cards on which you can write.

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Heroscape: RenegadeCon June 2026

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Mark Jackson

Not quite a month ago, the good folks at Renegade Game Studios hosted yet another RenegadeCon – an online “convention” with new product reveals, painting videos, playthroughs, and general silliness. As always, RenegadeCon meant lots of information about the upcoming Heroscape releases… in addition to lots of extra ‘Scape related content. My job is to distill all that information down into a digestible blog post, enabling you to watch the video content you want to watch and get all the skinny on the cool items getting ready to come down the pike in October 2026.

Fall 2026 New Releases 

As the Secrets of the Citadel era continues, the newest wave is entitled Nastra’s Nightmare… which is not surprising what with Santa’s evil twin, the Frankenstein monster’s cousin, and a couple of common squads with unusual hardware. But the nightmare also has a silver lining with remastered “old skool” Heroscape favorites – a veritable bohnanza of Jandar-aligned heroes and squads that have long been out of print.

Good news for Heroscape players: all four of the boxes that contain common squads have TWO of each squad in the box. This makes it much easier (and less expensive!) to build armies based on these kind of squads and/or particular types of bonding/reliance with heroes. I’m really glad to see Renegade doing this and hope it continues as they move forward.

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