Ticket to Ride: London features the familiar gameplay from the Ticket to Ride game series — collect cards, claim routes, draw tickets — but on a scaled-down map of 1970s London that allows you to complete a game in no more than 15 minutes.
So I didn’t attend TGM but I did manage to acquire a few games. TGM designers continue to astound me with clever designs for trick takers and shedders as well as capturing unusual themes. Here are some of the stand outs for me:
Sumidagawa Red Town, by Mashilamaru and published by Sunny Bird, is a reimplementation of a grail game, Sumida River, for those that don’t follow the TGM card game scene. You play as rival gangsters moving into your opponents territories shedding your hand of cards along the way. The first to go out wins. What makes it different from your casual shedders is that after hands are dealt, you are allowed to pass your cards to another player also interested in passing hands but you add a hitman or wild card to your hand before passing and this can be repeated as long as you have hitmen and a willing opponent.
In addition, players may play melds to one of 8 locations. Each location requires a specific meld like a pair or a run. To play, you must play a higher meld to an open location, where one of the cards played must equal or be higher than the previous meld’s highest card.This edition also comes with a nice 2 player variant. Red Town lived up to the hype.
Keeping with the gangster theme is The Four Deuces, from Geonil. The Four Deuces is the
next in Geonil’s fantastic series of 2 player trick takers. You play as Al Capone or Bugs Moran. Like previous designs, Jekyll vs Hyde and The Yellow House, Geonil makes use of changing suit strength. Here the 4 suits have no ranks. Players roll 7 dice each at the beginning of the round. The first player leads a suit and assigns one of their 7 dice as the rank. It’s a must follow. If cards of the same quit are played the higher card wins. If different color suits are played, the higher ranked suit advances up the strength chart and the suit determines the winner of the trick. Each player’s hand is divided with players playing the first 4 cards and then the last 3 cards. The goal is to win exactly 4 tricks. Each of the protagonists have a special power which may be used once. Al can force a swap of cards and Bugs allows a swap of dice. This is a really interesting 2 player game giving you open information about each player’s ranks and limited knowledge of the suits. Managing the suit strength is a neat challenge. It may be my favorite from this designer.
Mate is the pup themed trick taker I’ve been waiting for. It’s a standard must follow trick taker. The Stay Go cards which are numbered like the deck. Are shuffled separately and one is flipped over each hand. The number will be trump for the hand. Then if it is a stay card the winner of the trick will receive negative points and if it is a go card positive points can be earned by the players with the winning number and the second place player. So nothing too “tricky” here but we had fun and I enjoyed the cute little dogs on the cards.
Many Stories Mansion from Jupiters Club was high on my want list. It is a mash up of
tetris like games and shedding games. It utilizes fixed hand order so your melds must come from adjacent cards. Cards that you have played then form your mansion and the cards are moved down in the order played tetris style onto your building. If you are the first to shed your hand you get a bonus roof card for your mansion. Your goal is to make shapes of adjacent cards of the same suit which complete missions and to try and have many floors in your mansion as well. Your score is equal to the number of completed missions x the number of floors in your mansion minus the number of leftover cards in hand. Love the innovation here and glad it met my expectations.
For something a little different, consider giving Cats’ Secret Night Tales in the Museum a try. Designer Asami Yamanaka has done a solo game travel series but has only recently started to have works in English as well as Japanese. I’d love to see an English version of her manga game Van Gogh and Theo. This is a solo RPG where you play as Bastet, the cat goddess, and work your way through the museum to fight the big baddie at the end. The big baddie has stolen the color from the museum’s paintings! Along the way you must gather paint and mix colors to restore color to the paintings. Help is available from the other cats in famous paintings in the museum.. Game play is easy but it’s a cute little story and you might learn about some works of art along the way.
In Gruntz, you’ll command units like infantry, tanks, and aircraft with rock-paper-scissors-like relationships. For example, Gruntz are slow-moving and can’t defeat all enemy units, but they’re the only ones who can capture the control points at the middle of the map. Planes wreak havoc on the battlefield, but carefully placed Anti-Aircraft stop them in their tracks. When you deploy tanks and trucks, you’ll outfit them with different Magnetic attachments! Choose a cannon for extra firepower, or a cargo hold to transport troops. This flexibility creates awesome counterplay and tactical decision-making. Capture the zones in the middle of the board to gain points. First to three points wins!
The Dice Tower announced the winners of their Dice Tower Awards during GenCon. Their Game of the Year award goes to Galactic Cruise, the breakout title by designers T.K. King, Dennis Northcott, and Koltin Thompson. It’s the third significant victory for the game; earlier, it won the Golden Geek for best heavy game and was one of five games to win the Meeples Choice Awards. It’s a tremendous success story, since prior to this, neither the designers nor the publisher were well known in the hobby.
A total of 10 titles received Game of the Year nominations. Here they are, together with their designers and publishers. Continue reading
The battle of Moytura has begun. As a leader of the Tuatha Dé Danann, spread your influence across the land to succeed in your quest to become High Ruler of Ireland, invoking the powerful deities of the Tuatha Dé Danann to aid you in your cause with their command of water, travel, war, and creation — but the road will not be easy for in your path to legend stand the sinister Fomorians and other mythical beings hungry for battle, not to mention a rival clan with ambitions of their own. Steel yourself and prepare for a legendary struggle. Rewrite the myths of Ireland, chieftain, and take your place as the true High King!
Moytura features seven map set-ups for any combination of clans. The game also includes three special enemy clans that replace 1-3 of the standard Fomorian clans. These special clans introduce more challenging foes with asymmetric abilities: the Ellén Trechends (three-headed beasts) expand in all directions, the Oilliphéist (sea serpents) expand rapidly along the coast, and the Banshees invade targeted regions instead of spreading out from their largest group.
You can also enjoy a solo / cooperative variant if you prefer playing that way! Thanks to the intuitive enemy faction system built into the main game, Moytura lends itself easily to these optional variants.
In Moytura, you and your opponent command competing factions of the Tuatha Dé Danann, but you are not the only ones struggling for control of ancient Ireland. Three enemy clans act together as a third opponent faction that competes with the players and scores points. Points are gained by having the most influence across Ancient Ireland at the end of each era. Within each of the eleven regions, the faction with the most or second most units across all the spaces of a region will score the indicated points. After two eras, the faction with the most points wins.
Gulf Games started in 1998… and I’ve had the honor of being a part of it (on and off, due to living halfway across the country for a decade) for twenty-eight years. In 2015, I started bringing my oldest son with me, followed in 2017 by bringing both boys with me. With them grown up (25 and 21 -sigh) and living away from home, Gulf Games is not only a wonderful 4+ days of gaming, it’s also a really special time for the three of us.
The aforementioned fish-shaped ice cream sandwiches…
I won’t bore you with our family conversations, which covered everything from the haplessness of the Tennessee Titans to the merits of a fish-shaped ice-cream sandwich… but I will attempt to entertain you with my thoughts on the 41 different games I played over nearly five days. (They are grouped by number of plays and then alphabetical order.)
Natera: New Beginning (designers: Eric Fugere & Hugo Tremblay-Ledoux)
My good friend (and former boss – who my sons affectionally hail as “King Bob!”) described Natera: New Beginning as being “the right amount of crunchy”. I would heartily agree.
Thematically – in what should be no surprise to us here in 2026 – humans did something stupid and manage to kill themselves off… leaving behind animals getting smarter & smarter due to the “something stupid”. Which means that each of the players is part of an animal group trying to gain dominance by utilizing the stuff humans left behind. Natera is not that dark in its theme – it’s closer to Everdell than to Watership Down. It does remind me of Everdell in some ways – worker placement with resource management and tableau building – but with some interesting twists and its own rhythm.
Bob & Braeden making beaver faces in honor of Bob’s victorious beaver tribe.
Over the week, I had the opportunity to play Natera three times: once with three players, once solo (in my hotel room), and once with four players. While I am perfectly happy to play it any player count, I think the sweet spot will be three players – balancing length of game with some extra freedom of tribe member worker placement. The solo game pits your animal tribe against the robots the humans left behind, who really aren’t trying to kill you as much as they just get in the way over and over again – I liked it.
Collin (my younger son) won the three player, while “King Bob” and I tied in the four player game – which was resolved by him having SLIGHTLY more progress on the authority tracks than I did. All hail King Bob, indeed. Continue reading
