We’ve started a tradition of writing a group document with very short takes on the games that we play.  Of course, you’ll not get as much info as in a full review, but as our reviews likely won’t start for awhile, you can at least get a glimpse into what we think about certain games.   The OG writers can leave their initials at the end of a comment if they want attribution…

We’ll post this to the blog every few weeks to give some thoughts on each game. This will be the final one for the year… 

• 3 chapters (1). One of the hits of the year for me. Maybe 7 plays now. Draft like fairy tale in Chapter 1, making your hand of 7 cards, Then in Chapter 2, play a trick taking game, using the scoring abilities on the cards to score based on the cards in the trick. Keep your cards, then score your full collection Fantasy Realms style in Chapter 3. Cannot wait for this to come out in English. 
• 3 chapters (2) . Liked it so much, we played it twice in a row. That’s all you need to know. We did add card holders which was fairly revolutionary as we could easily read our cards while drafting. 
• 3 of a kind – a party game where players get to choose the category as well as the three adjectives. Players then write one answer down for each category. Score points for the total number of people who matched your answer. Do it six times. You do get to write your answers on a teeny tiny 
• Australis – somewhat old-school mechanisms and and no way to catch up. At the same time, it did not feel derivative, which is to its benefit. We did not feel the theme at all. Not really my thing, but might be for OG bg fans.
• Bable – a clever card game that is a combination of an experience game and with the the rules as written, quite a bit of memory. We played with a variant that removed the memory element by letting players leave cards face up in front of them from the end of their turn to the start of their next one if they are revealed by another player. Ifyou are interested in how language changes over time and the confusion it can cause, give it a whirl. Like it.
• Bable – cooperative game where you speak a make up language to try to successfully build a tower. Made up words refer to each of the four basic actions. You have to figure out which words tell people to do which things so you can command them to do what you want. It is a super great idea but man it involves so much memory that I’m not sure that I have the brain power to play this as the words change really more frequently than my brain can handle. 
• Beasty bar down under. I am continually surprised how popular this series is and how many expansions there are (and how many different sets of twelve animals). The game works, has its zany moments but players still have to learn what all the animals do. Pretty decent iconography helps 

• Beutezeug – a perfectly fine dice game that is an enjoyable pastime, especially as a bar game or at a social event. As a game night game, not so much. Neutral
• Beutezug – a game from AMIGO about theiving. Did not get a good response on our first game in Essen but I wanted to try it again because it’s not uncommon to have w bad first impression due to bad rules reading, too much Radler or other reasons. Roll dice of different colors to try to collect cards (after putting priority tokens on them). Winning a card gives you VP as well as dice abilities to use on later rolls. Do it seven times. It’s not as bad as I first thought, it is just a simple dice rolling game. A nice pastime but not one you need a lot of brain power for. I would play it again if asked, so that’s an improvement. 
• Black Forest – Broke my head, as I could not plan ahead due to the traveling wagon and players taking the spots I planned on. For me, not enough fun to be worth the AP. Not for me. I did not like Glass Road because of the Witches Brew style card play, but it was more fun than Black Forest.
• Blast track – a re-release (? Upgrade) of an older roller-coaster building game, Slide Blast . You all work together to make a single coaster complex. You increase attributes on your player board for speed, tunnels, loops, steepness, etc. Penalty for doing too much of a thing, but otherwise score for how far you go forward on an attribute. It is a fun puzzle game getting the tracks to all connect. Rules could be better written. We should not have as many questions as we have for a family game. A couple of rules are assumed but not actually written in the rules. One is in a caption which is not a place for rules. We aborted because three adult gamers couldn’t agree on the rules to a kid’s game. We could agree to put it away early. 
• Bomb Busters – a great co-op with high tension and an arc in each game has a slower start, then the tension builds, then some mop up. As it is a card game, with 66+ levels, I don’t feel qualified to say anything about the remaining 80% of the game we have not played. Like or Love It – not sure yet.
• Bomb Busters – Pretty great little group activity around pairing up the right wires. After the rules explanation I wasn’t sure how the game could work, but it really did. We played on a few of the easier levels and didn’t break a sweat defusing the bomb, but I could see it getting way too hard really quickly. What I experienced was enjoyable, anyway. -NB
• Bone Wars: absolutely nothing new about this game. And nothing is especially smoothed out either. One of our players misheard a rule and hobbled themselves accidentally. There is potential for player friction, but not much. I was hoping the publishing and bone digging would cause more strife, but the game makes it too easy to avoid your fellow players. Not for me.
• Bus & Stop – a pleasant game, fast to play and easy to learn. I’ve only played this with two so far but we enjoyed it and it took under 15 minutes for our first play. I feel there’s a limited amount of strategy there but certainly some opportunities that we haven’t yet taken.  -MJR
• Bus & Stop – this plays better with four than most Saashi & Saashi games. DB
• Cahoots – cooperative uno (think the Crew). Play cards and meet goal cards with the cards you play. A re-release from 2018.  A good time, and we all enjoyed playing it.

• Canopy evergreen. This is apparently an improvement over canopy, which I never played. Another game in the current crop of Cascadia wanna-bes, both in theme and art. A fairly unique card drawing mechanism, get cards and then add them to your forest. You both try to start / build / finish trees as well as collecting wildlife that score points or provide special abilities. Definitely beautiful. Definitely family level, a little long for gamers for what it provides, but if you were a newbie this is the right length and level of complexity to be a serious game for that demographic. There is advanced variations in the box and while I haven’t played, I’m not sure this game wants to be more complex. 
• Canopy Evergreen – An enjoyable game with a Winston draft. If you liked Sea of Cloudsand wanted more game, this is it. There is fun in building the trees, but the card play is the star. Neutral or Like It – tbd
• Caracas – I like Cwali games in general and was excited to play this one. It is a quick puzzly game with a nice tile selection mechanis, where you put your tile in your tableau determines the next tile you get. It was quite a tight game of mathing out moves, so maybe less open feeling than Habitats. Neutral to Like It
• Caracas – This felt a little bit like the Ultimate tic-tac-toe, in that you place your piece on your board and where you do determines which piece you take to play next turn. Both games make clever use of that kind of recursion, though Caracas adds on more layers with the contents of the tiles themselves. It had a whiff of a point salad odor to it, but that almost felt necessary because you really often didn’t have great options that lined up with the spots you wanted to play: it was crucial to have multiple ways to score. I liked it and I think it would be an easy one to bring out with gamers and non-gamers alike. -NB
• Castle Combo. Finally a filler that is my speed. I loved it when I played in Essen. Draft 9 cards into a 3×3 grid, each with its own immediate ability and unique end game scoring ability. Maybe pays off for the cards location in the grid, for characteristics of adjacent cards or cards anywhere in your grid, or maybe for gold placed on it at the end of the game. Score each of the nine cards at the end. Ten minutes for two players. My only complaint might be that the coin supply is a little tight at 5p. 
• Castle Combo – A fine game of building a 3×3 grid, which is flavor of the year for card games. It has a Fantasy Realms style scoring along with two rows of cards and you have to pay if you want a card from the other row. Neutral.
• Castle Combo – It’s fine but there are better games in the same space (e.g. Faraway). DB
• Chu han – two player only shedding game with lots of special abilities. Very clever game. Also super interesting production, which I’ve not seen recently, the big box also includes a tuck box and duplicate basic components to allow you to also have a travel set. 
• Combo up – the advanced Krass Karriert. I just learned I maybe have been playing the original wrong? Each hand is only a single play per player, not continuing around the table until someone wins? Of course, my memory could also be faulty. Anyways, the new action cards do add a little of spice to the game and now make this a more worthy comparison to Scout. I would happily play this though I fear at 5p it would go on too long as you still have to wait for someone to lose three life. 
• Concilium Urbis – another i split you choose game. This one with voting on two rules each round that change one of the six scoring rules.. The art is really nauseating and it’s one of those games where the graphic design actually hinders play. I would have even preferred plain tiles as opposed to the illustrations.  The scoring definitely is a bit convoluted as well.  Also it would have helped for the translation to have been better. I really like the game idea but it’s going to be a hard sell to play again. 
• Context – more word games to finish the afternoon. Come up with two nouns and adjectives for the axis and then work together to get your fellow players to guess the correct coordinate. Score 3 points for getting it exactly right, 1 pt for being orthogonally adjacent. Weirdly nothing for diagonals. If you score you leave the word on the board to use as a further anchor. Weird to not be able to leave the diagonal adjacent, even if for no points, just to help you make more words. As it stands, people who draw cards with one of the extreme coordinates were more likely to give answers as those are the easiest. Play for ten cards and see how well you did.  
• Cook Islands – a tile laying game from Klaus Jurgen wrede. Play a tile, it forces you to play into a certain column of the board. Find treasure, establish settlements on islands to score points. The tiles must be played from the top down which causes you to not be able to do much at the start. Once the sea is full, decent exploration can be had. 
• Daitoshi – A game with a rondel at its heart always holds promise for me. Indeed, this one started well enough, as we explored the various town actions and fumbled our way through running our factories. I could even see pretty quickly what I was trying to do, strategically. But before long the experience just bogged down. Adding inventions to my factory should have been fun, but the ability to do so depended highly on what was available that it lost any fun anticipation. Building in the town wasn’t fun either–it was just one of the few ways to fight off bad relations with the Yocai that we felt we had to do. The only thing I truly enjoyed in the end was the few moments of upgrading inventions in the factory. That felt like progress. The rest of the game just felt like work. Four of us played to the bitter end, and were all ready for it to be over at least an hour before it was. -NB
• Die Trodler aus den Highlands – pick up and deliver goods to the different towns. Though it’s by Carlo Rossi, it has a very Knizia like endgame situation where one player is possibly eliminated from winning based on the numbers of a specific special card played and undelivered goods. Oh and did I mention there’s a step that involves rapid memory of cards dealt to piles (think It’s Mine).  The game works fine but the elimination rule seemed to slow things down (as players didn’t want to be eliminated) but that’s not the speed this family level game wants. Graphic design isn’t great, the special cards that eliminate you can’t be discarded and people screwed it up because there is no icon reminding you to not do it.  That being said it made the game twenty five minutes instead of the fifteen it wants to be. So it’s fine.  
• Dinky dungeon – super mini game. Play one of two adventurers in your hand. Do what it says. Try to collect dungeon cards. First to the target score wins. That’s literally all the rules. It’s apparently not new to me as my records show I may have played the original version.  That being said, I totally didn’t remember that play which might tell you a lot about how this play went.

• Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo – A beautiful and enjoyable card game that has voting  without pain – basically the card you play from your hand determines whether you are voting for or against something, which relates to your secret scoring card. Special abilities and clever scoring make this game a winner – Like it and might love it with more play. Not sure how easy it will be to get.
• Don quixote The Ingenious Hidalgo – a game where you play thru the events of the novel,well in a different order. A super short game of 7 or 8 rounds, each taking about a minute. Use your cards to vote on the card, which moves one of the colored tokens. At the end of the game, score points for the cards you played as well as gems you picked up along the way…  Super quick and super clever. 
• Dungeon Kart – essentially Mario Kart the table top game. Each character and car has unique abilities so that’s cool. Like almost all ports of video games, it takes so much longer to accomplish the same thing. A forty five second race on my Nintendo takes ninety minutes in real life. And it felt like three hours. Also so many weird rules in this game that seem to not be in line with other racing games. 
• Endeavor: Deep Sea – I enjoyed my first play greatly and look forward to more. It has more flexibility than the original due to the fluid map composed of modular mini-maps along with variety and movement – I think I love it.
• Fellowship of the ring trick taking game – has really enjoyed this as a prototype, and now the real thing is in my hand. Cooperative trick taking where the team has to meet the goal.  The theme that pervades this game is amazing. This pretty much fires The Crew for me. 
• Fischen/Fishing – we really enjoyed this. I’m a big fan of trick-taking games, so this was probably not a surprise. -MJR
• Fishing. The genius trick taking kinda deck building game. So many things to think about, one of the most innovative trick takers in a long time. I have been in love with this game for two years now and having the finished product has been highly anticipated. 
• Free Ride USA – The only difference from Free Ride is that the number of coins entering play varies depending on the route cards flipped, so if you do stupid stuff — as I did in one game — you can run dry and find yourself unable to grab many of the late-game routes. Still love this game.
• Galileo Galilei – A nice game that did not end up exciting me much. The action tiles and upgrading were fun, but overall I was not sure how variable things would be, as moving lots of inquisitors down the track seems clearly better than just having a few and never being able to get out of the negative part. Maybe just not my sort of game.
• Galileo Galilei – I thought this worked fine and was instantly forgettable. It doesn’t do anything special and there is zero actual connection to the theme. DB
• Galileo Galilei – this was surprisingly not as complicated as I had expected. Rules teach was super smooth as Ryan P had played before. I had been warned that the rulebook was a little dodgy. Your player board has a rondel of sorts that you use to take actions to make astronomical observations. You gain and modify dice to use them to look at things. Each turn is short, so again, despite moderate game length, you’re not waiting long to do your next thing. Some room for coming up with interesting combos to play. Most of us grokked the game. 86-82-81-40. 
• Gardlings – a combination bag building, tile laying, push your luck game. Every round build a garden with your tiles. Gain buying power based on the number of complete gems, but if you bust, you take a penalty. Tiles bought for 4/7/10/14, win if you get 20.  Think of quacks but with an added tile laying puzzle on top of it. Definitely my style of game. 
• Grachtenpand – a nice game of building a row of Dutch houses in nice colors with flowers, cats, and simple scoring. Some were concerned that roof cards are too hard to score and could be handing another player the victory because the cycle is draw a card, play a card, and pass the cards to the left. Some hate drafting might be beneficial, but it does not seem designed to be that thinky – Like it

• King’s Coalition – let’s draft character cards over six rounds but weirdly you don’t build an array but rather build your hand (kinda like Fantasy Realms). Each turn draw one and discard one in general. Each has some special abilities. Three scoring rules always in effect for runs and sets as well qs face value of cards. We also reveal a randomly drawn scoring bonus each of the first four rounds (of six total). The idea is great but I’m not sure it does this idea better than say Fantasy Realms. The rulebook does not help the game because the rules made it sound not for me due to the poor organization, but once we started playing it and got the feel for it, there was a pretty neat game underneath. 
• King of Tokyo duel – hey it’s a two player version. Destroy your opponent or have the most fame or cause the most destruction. When you buy cards you also get to place special tokens down on the path that give you bonuses or shortcuts. It’s a fun twenty minute romp. If you like KoT, sure you’d like this. If you somehow haven’t played the franchise, it’s a decent entry point though it’s a bit more complicated than regular KoT. 
• Let’s Go to Japan! – In retrospect, it did seem like the scores were all really close in our game, maybe artificially so, and that we were all doing a lot of work to make a couple points difference in the end. That turns off some of our players, but for me that didn’t really matter much. I thought the activity was enjoyable, kind of peaceful actually. And as someone who loves to travel to Japan I found the theme captivating. I dug it, but I can see why others wouldn’t. -NB
• Mini dinosaur – still waiting to win my first game of mini dinosaur. One of my most played games from Essen 24 and not just because it’s short in duration. It’s lots of fun each time. 
• No thanks (2024) – add in some cards with special powers to make it more “interesting”? I guess it all depends on how much you liked the base game 
• Pixies – another 3×3 game that did nothing for me because my cards we controlled by the player who went before me in turn order. Intriguing art and a light game means it might be a good game to pull out with non-gamers. Neutral/Not for me.
• Pixies – this is clearly the year of make 3×3 grid games. I have liked this one more than other OG gamers. Some of my love is for the light game play, some for the great ratio of fun to volume, some for the awesome photographic art on the cards. 
• Polaris – We played with four and it was not good at all with that number as the board gets too full to do anything interesting very quickly. It’s probably better with fewer but it’s still not going to be that interesting. The English rules are poorly translated, at least on the back where the scoring cards are explained. DB
• Polaris – what is this? Two Luciani games in a weekend? What? A lighter game (less than an hour) about stargazing. Well it’s no Barrage (thank goodness). Draw a card or play all cards in one of the five segments of the board. Each round end is triggered by playing a certain number of cards with a dawn symbol. At the end of the round, score a pre determined objective card. Do this for five rounds. Then score your personal goal card you got in setup. Market is a bit stagnant at the end, the game really wants a market wipe ability.  Luciani isn’t really known much for his middle-weight games, and this will do nothing to change that perception.

• Rebirth – a Knizia title not published by a traditional German big publisher. Always makes me wary. In this case, unfounded fears as this is a solid Euro. Possibly two solid Euros as each side of the board plays differently. How many games do you expect to see that the player with the most points isn’t guaranteed to be the winner.   You can play any tile you want in your hand on your turn, but I haven’t yet mentioned that you only have one tile in your hand. In Russia, sometimes game plays you. In Scotland, Rebirth plays you. Turns are quick and not much AP because you only have one tile to choose each turn 
• Rebirth – One play each of the Scotland and Ireland game boards. Smooth Knizia action in which your one tile placement ideally serves 2-3 purposes — or 2-5(?) purposes in Ireland.
• Rikka – Simplified Mahjong-ish game. Played quickly and was as inoffensive as it was non-memorable. -NB
• River Valley Glassworks – A lovely production, but the base game did not excite me – is a dressed up abstract. I look forward to trying the special powers and other cards in the special/advanced/expansion deck. Neutral for the base game.
• Roaring 20s – a challenging game of card drafting and dinosaur buying. We are bidding on dinosaurs, either feeding them with food they like or giving them gems. In the auction, each player will get something, either winning the dinosaur and paying the cost or dropping out and gaining a new money/gem card from a supply set out at the start. Go thru whole Dino deck (20+ rounds) and score. Dinos have base value. Bonus for pairs / triplets. Big points for sequences. 
• Rumblebots – an auto battler where you build a deck of robots but instead of fighting a bunch of simultaneous 1v1 duels, you fight in the round with one player defends against the other, the winner fighting the next one in turn order, continuing until one player is left. That player wins the round and gets some crystals that help them build more. Maybe a richer gets richer? Anyway, it is a bit different from Challengers. Nothing is simultaneous so there is a lot of waiting around… The art is cute at least? The building is kinda fun but the economy is so tight that it was not uncommon to have small decks. Like three or four cards total. Weird. As someone remarked, so much churn we could have made butter. 
• Saer – a bluffing game with a nice balance between keeping information hidden versus giving information in return for playing more cards to increase your strength. Got better with additional plays as there are some tricky strategies that aren’t apparent on the first play. 
• Sail or die. A shedding game (with even turns) where you play the same number of cards or one more. Pay VP for most plays (anything except same number but unique color). When you pass, get your vp penalty back unless you are last one in trick. Pay further penalty of one vp per card left at end of hand. Have most vp left at end of three hands.  I don’t know how I feel about all the butts in the art.
• Seers Catalog – A truly excellent theme that is wasted as chrome on a dull card game. Will try it one more time but this was not a hit on our first play through. Disappointed. -MJR
• Seers Catalog – I don’t care for it with five but it was decent with three, at least with the suggested starter artifacts. Some of the others seem as if they will add too much chaos. DB

• SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – There was quite literally a whole lot of wheel spinning in this one, but none of it felt all that satisfying. The best part in the moment was changing the nature of the game after the aliens were discovered. But even that just seemed to give new ways to putter about for a few points. I could see loving this game if it was more elegant. As it was, I didn’t hate it. It has great bits. – NB
• SETI – A long game where i like parts of it (probes and tech) without liking the scanning/area majority part. I would not suggest it with four players (or play four rounds instead of five). As it is, it was not for me,but I would play again with 2 or 3p to see if I like it more on a second play.
• Spotlight – My concern about the game taxing my not great eyesight was thankfully unfounded. It was a delight! I think the art, a mix of Where’s Waldo and The Wizard of Oz maybe, helped elevate the experience. Would happily play again. -NB
• Spy Guy: Fantasy – not sure whether this is actually a new release but it is new to me. The gameplay is both the same as and different to Spy Guy: Pyramid, which is a good thing – this is not a simple duplicate. Our sense is that this one may be harder than Pyramid – the tension is definitely there. A children’s game that makes a great filler for adults. – MJR
• Spy guy pyramid – kids game. So much fun. The adults here love it. 
• Stephens – I wanted to play this right after black forest and river valley Glassworks for theme day. But we didn’t. A rather complex game where you do some resource management, contract fulfillment, activation of special actions all while modifying a mini tech tree – all in about 30 min / player. That sentence hasn’t scared you off? Then this is the game for you. A really tight game experience. It starts a bit slow but honestly that’s ok because we needed the easy turns at the start to learn what you can do. Surprised to discover it’s a long game that I love. Each individual turn doesn’t take long so even though the game lasts two hours, you’re constantly active 
• Stress Botics: holy heck there’s a lot going on here. We only played five rounds to get a feel for it and missed an important rule around delivery timing that would have led to earlier exploration of the tech leading to asymmetric play. Never need to own it, but want to play a full game.

• Superstore 3000 – draft tiles from a market, building your mall. Try to move your customers from the entrances to their desired store. Super quick game, our three player initial game was 29 minutes. Really neat puzzle of building the mall and getting the customers to the right place. I dig it. 
• Superstore 3000- we played this at the Messe, where it took a little longer than it should. Nice and fairly fast game about attracting customers to a mall (we called it “Space Mall 3000” until we considered why the customers were lying down – spoiler, it’s now “Only Murders in the Space Mall”). +1 for the lovely pieces. My daughter was particularly enthusiastic about this and insisted that we pick up a copy before we left the booth. Currently only in German, I think, but the pieces (and name) are language-independent. -MJR
• Surfosaurus MAX – unsure how new this is but it was new to us! It’s a fun enough game and the fact that you have a large purple dinosaur meeple riding a surfboard is definitely worth at least one extra ranking point. -MJR
• Time Trouble: Clever coop game that I enjoyed more than its cousin, Kazooka. Players have a hand of transparent cards that are played atop each other in a way that symbols are added or covered up. The symbols lead to common character movement toward the capturing of Fuzzys and eventual escape. Each character has asymmetric abilities that players need to coordinate together.
• Upcake – roll and write from zur linde and Wrede. Choose two dice from a pool of 5 trying to write an ever ascending number in the next level. Bonus points for matching some preseeded numbers. Do it twice and that’s the game. I’m getting a bit of general burnout state on X and writes is showing. That being said we laughed our way thru the game so I can not complain too much, and I’d probably play this again. 
• What the Fog?! – You’re weather forecasters who try to predict how well you can predict the weather, so to speak. Typical Colovini abstractness that needs the (barely) advanced variant to give you more say over which weather patterns hit during the days.

• Wilmot’s Warehouse – I enjoyed the game, though it felt unnecessarily stressful for what it was–a silly memory game. It didn’t rise to the level of Eselsbruecke, my favorite memory game, though it did introduce a cooperative element that was welcome. And the daily challenges were generally pretty fun. This may end up in our collection because my wife absolutely loved it. I just wish the box wasn’t so darn large. -NB
• YRO – a Masato Uesugi from PlayToZ. Let’s draft a bunch of cards with various abilities on them and then build a grid, you get bonuses for having matching icons in a complete row or column.  You have a fighting value that scores as well as powers that outright score or earn you money. Great game.  You don’t have enough cards to do all the things you want in your 3×3 grid, so you’re always faced with a tough decision.

We still have lots of SPIEL 2024 games to review (you can only play so many each week!) – but the Quick Takes will come again next November after the next SPIEL fair!