 November 2025 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.  Skyjo – 5/10 Skyjo is a very light card game, roughly the weight of other card games you might find at big box retailers. It is a variant of the traditional card game Golf, so you might notice some similarities to other “improve your hand then go out” games like Cabo. Each player will be dealt 12 cards facedown in a 3×4 grid. Choose two to turn faceup, but the rest remain a mystery from all players. On your turn, you will exchange a card from the pile with one of the cards in your grid. You are trying to end up with the lowest total score in your grid, so getting rid of high cards is the most obvious option. The new card is placed faceup, and will either come from the top of the discard pile or a random draw from the deck, your choice. The replaced card becomes the new top card of the discard pile. Naturally, you will occasionally accidentally replace a better card with a worse one, which not only makes your score worse, but leaves a good card on top of the discard pile for the next player to take. There is also a minor element of shooting-the-moon here, as a column with all three of the same card is discarded entirely. Perhaps with two of the same bad card in a column, you should try to find a third? However, this is rarely a good strategy, as it only takes two turns to replace the bad cards. What are the odds you’ll find a matching card quicker than that? Skyjo is a family-reunion-type card game. Good for all ages to play together while eating and chatting, not at all taxing mentally. I’m going to prefer and suggest a different option, but it’s not as painful an experience as some others in this genre.  The Grand Carnival – 6/10 In The Grand Carnival, players will compete to build the best fairground, both in its layout and the attractions it offers. Think Roller Coaster Tycoon without any coasters. You’ll first need to purchase foundation tiles. These consist a combination of grass spaces and construction spaces. You can only build attractions onto construction spaces and you’ll get endgame penalties for any construction spaces that haven’t been covered. But the grass spaces are an important consideration as well, providing the walkways for your customers. Without a carefully planned walking path, your point scoring opportunities will be quite limited. The foundation tiles appear in a queue, ranked from 1 to 5. Un-purchased tiles will move down in price, and eventually be removed altogether. In each round, you get to take a 5-power-action, a 4-power-action, etc. So is it worth spending your 5-power-action to take the perfect foundation? Or will you need it instead to build a building. The buildings themselves are generally worth more points the larger they are, but larger buildings also require higher power actions. With your building underway, the customers can start walking through, even if everything isn’t finished yet. The number of spaces they can move is also determined by what power of action you spend on this movement. Most of the tactics happen in deciding what power level to use for each action, while the strategy is more about planning the park overall. So far, this might all seem pretty straightforward, or even fun and challenging. And that’s all true. But the scoring system is by far the weak point of the game. At every turn players seem artificially thwarted (or at least capped) in trying to generate lots of points. So constrained and unintuitive are the scoring methods that it seems to funnel all players towards the same non-specialized approach. It’s the very antithesis of “multiple paths to victory”. Multiple players in our game ended up with wasted actions at the end of the game because there was no feasible way for them to generate any more points in the categories they had been working on. I think there is some fun to be had here in spite of this complaint. And it’s possible that if you know going in that you need to plan for the unintuitive scoring, the experience would improve. I enjoy the theme and the gameplay here, but it really feels like the scoring was a kludgy concession to degenerate strategies identified during playtesting. There was surely a better way to address those problems.  Carson City – 6/10 Carson City is a worker placement game that came out in 2009. For those that have been in the hobby since that time, that first sentence might tell you everything you need to know. It shows a strong influence from Caylus, has a lousy rulebook and player aids, and doesn’t reflect modern design sensibilities when it comes to tolerance for randomness and aggression. Over four rounds, players will place their cowboy workers onto various action spaces, which are then resolved in a pre-determined sequence. Rather than merely being a first-come first-served situation, players can place onto spaces already occupied by their opponents. In these cases, a duel will occur, with the winner getting to take the action and the loser having all their plans ruined -er, I mean, getting to place an extra worker in the following round. Spaces do not provide options to get extra workers or build an engine around actions. Rather, the action spaces are concerned with generating money, turning that money into points, and boosting your firepower to win duels. How much money you can convert and at what rate you can do it are primary strategic considerations. While there are spaces that simply grant money and guns, the big bucks and heavy firepower will come from building buildings onto the shared board. This requires first claiming a plot of land, then purchasing a building to put onto it. These often provide ongoing income without the need of any future workers being placed there. However, they too can be dueled over, with a successful opponent stealing half of the building’s income for the round. Certainly there are many decisions to make, and they are meaningful. Will you gain more money by robbing a building or making your own? Where should you claim a plot of land, given how all the buildings interact with their surroundings? How much should you prioritize your firepower, especially considering the strong random element involved? Carson City was a mixed bag for me. It mostly feels like its time has come and gone. The claiming of plots and building on top of them is executed much better in Kutna Hora. And the need to constantly be aware of the arms race in dueling reminds me of my least favorite part of Through the Ages. Nevertheless, I can see how this would be a favorite game for some people. If you think Caylus is one of the best worker placement games (it’s not) but it just needed more confrontation (it doesn’t), you might find Carson City right in your wheelhouse.  Rumble Nation – 7/10 That’s a weird, overly-literal translation of the Japanese title, if you were curious. “The World Resounds” or some such thing would probably get closer to the meaning. But you’re not here for the linguistics. (If you are though, let’s talk privately; I love that stuff.) Rumble Nation is a 30-minute dice-rolling area control game. The area control aspects are rather rote, but the dice rolling has an innovative slant to it. In order to place units from your supply onto the board, you will roll three standard dice. One of the dice indicates how many units you place (half the value rounded up, like a d3) and the other two dice are added together to indicate the location where those troops are placed. This decision about which two dice to pair is reminiscent of Can’t Stop. Due to how probabilities work, the 2 and 12 are obviously much rarer locations to get to place troops at all, with the 7 being the most common. Strangely enough, these values are also the points granted for controlling the area, making the 2 spot both difficult to control and worth very little, while the 12 spot is equally difficult to control but worth the most. The locations are not scored until all the troops of all players have been placed. The player who finishes placing sooner will win ties against later players, but this is generally not enough incentive to want to finish too quickly. Finishing later allows you to see where other people’s troops are and to know exactly how many you need to add to win the spot, as well as to be opportunistic about locations that may have no troops placed at all yet. The final twist are the tactics cards. Once per game, instead of rolling dice for your turn, you may select one tactics card to perform. These are generally things like relocating already-placed troops in various ways. The available tactics cards are a subset of dozen possible options, adding some variety to the strategic considerations they offer. Area control games tend to have and odd dynamic I don’t particularly enjoy where getting into an arms race with another player can spell doom for both of you, but never competing for spaces at all is also a poor approach. That dynamic is definitely present here. But if this doesn’t bother people who love El Grande and the like, it probably won’t bother them here either. Rumble Nation succeeds at its goal of being a fast-playing area control game with light but interesting choices generated by the dice mechanic and tactics cards.  Spectral – 7/10 Spectral is a deduction game with a haunted house theme. It plays in about 30 minutes and includes a healthy dose of luck along with the more solvable aspects. This makes it reasonably accessible, but it does demand some personal bookkeeping that less experienced gamers may find arduous. Each player receives a booklet with a layout that matches the 4×4 grid of tiles laid out on the table. This should be kept secret from the other players and notated in whatever manner seems best to you, though there are some suggested methods. The primary purpose of this tracking is to remember the locations of gemstones (good) and skulls (bad). If it was as simple as looking under a tile and seeing a gem or skull, this would essentially be a children’s game. But it’s not so easy. Instead, each tile points to a different tile (example, “the tile two spaces away from this one diagonally”) and tells you what that one contains (gem or skull). Because these tiles are randomized, it is possible that multiple tiles point to the same location, in which case it may contain multiple gems. But a single skull there nullifies the whole cache. Spectral won’t be for everyone. I expect many new players to find it confusing, even frustrating. But it has enough opportunities for a lucky placement that no one should feel totally out of contention, even if their logic and deduction are a bit faulty.  Petiquette – 7/10 Sometimes when you hear a game described or even read the rules for it, it doesn’t really give you a good sense of how it works or why it’s fun. That’s definitely the case with Petiquette, a game about dogs, cats, and ducks wearing fancy hats. Each round begins by dealing six random cards from the top of the deck. These will depict dogs, cats, and ducks wearing one of three types of hat. Each card will also have a number from 1 to 5. Humans are pattern-seekers, so it’s almost unavoidable that the players will see some. “Hey, all the dogs have top hats! The numbers are in ascending order! Every other card is a duck!” But these are inside thoughts. And in fact, they are they very heart of the game. You see, one of the six cards will instead show a question mark, with only the other five depicting our charming anthropomorphic friends. What configuration that question mark should have is an exercise left to the players. Each player secretly selects the perfect combination of animal, headgear, and number that they think best fits the pattern. So long as at least one other player perfectly matches your configuration, you get a point. This isn’t a game about what is “correct”, but neither is it a game about reading the other players. It’s really about collective pattern recognition and the spark of joy that comes from two players delighting in being on the same wavelength. The rules also provide a co-operative variant, which is equally good. In this version, only one player secretly selects a configuration while all the other players collectively discuss what that player chose. Either way of playing Petiquette will lead to lively discussion; it’s just a matter of if you want those lighthearted arguments to happen between rounds (in competitive mode) or as part of the game itself (in co-operative mode). Petiquette can be learned in seconds and played in minutes, but it will continue to charm you longer than it has any right to. A solid filler choice for groups of nearly any type who have 15 minutes to spare.  The Hobbit: There and Back Again – 8/10 There have been a surprising amount of recent board game releases in the Lord of the Rings universe. I don’t know if this is driven by Rings of Power or if the property has become so culturally entrenched that this is just the new normal or if there’s some other reason. But in any event, I am very much here for it. The Hobbit: There and Back Again thankfully ignores the movie aesthetics to provide a cozy and pleasant roll-and-write experience for up to four players. Like Dungeons, Dice, & Danger, this is a surprisingly low player count for a roll-and-write. Still, it’s more forgivable in this case due to the components involved. Rather than a consumable sheet of paper, each player gets what is essentially a dry-erase board book filled with the various scenarios. And these scenarios have very different rules from one another. Set collection, path drawing, racing the other players and many more mechanics are all present here in various amounts depending on which board you choose to use. It is possible, maybe even recommended, to play several times in a row with the same group, progressing through the scenarios (and thus the story of The Hobbit) as you go. Still, even if you do this, the scenarios won’t be scored as a whole or mechanically tied together (with the exception of the final two which can be played as a duo). There are eight different scenarios in all, each taking about 30 minutes to play, which is honestly a decent amount of value if you just played through all of them once and then got rid of the game. But I think there is good replayability here as well from what I can tell. I haven’t replayed a scenario personally, but others I played with have, and I certainly had my fair share of things I’d approach differently after my first game, usually a good sign. The Hobbit: There and Back Again is not particularly groundbreaking, but it is re-markably (get it?) fun. Especially if you connect with the book it’s based on, you’re likely to get good enjoyment out of rounding up dwarves, riddling with Gollum, and defeating Smaug. This is an approachable game that combines meaningful decisions with evocative theme.  Radlands – 8/10 Radlands is a 2-player card game with a theme of post-apocalyptic battle in a surprisingly neon wasteland. Each player starts the game with three base camps. Lose all your camps and you lose the game. Base camp selection is the first thing that happens. Each player will be dealt six camps randomly, each choosing three to keep. This is from a deck of dozens, ensuring lots of variety from game to game. These camps are what dictate your long-term strategy, so choose wisely and synergistically. Though “long-term” is a bit of a misnomer, as games will generally run less than 30 minutes. With your camps selected, it’s time to play. You get three “water” per turn, the currency of the game. You’ll use it to pay costs to play characters as well as to activate abilities, such as those on your camps. You’ll also draw one card from a large shared deck. It will likely be a character, which is played in front of one of your camps, defending it. You can also play characters in front of that character, for a maximum of three cards per column (character, character, base). Cards in front are the most vulnerable, often protecting the ones behind from taking damage. So you’ll need to weigh the water costs, the cards you play, and the positions into which you play them. Choices are plentiful and meaningful. There are lots of small, self-contained two-player card games that might feel similar. Games like Compile, Hanamikoji, and Air Land and Sea feature players trying to attack and defend cards on the board, attempting to win more than their opponent does. But such games can also feel small in a negative sense, due to the limited amount of cards they contain, with gameplay quickly becoming mundane and predictable. For some, this may actually be a positive. After all, Chess has done just fine for itself without unpredictable variety in its available pieces. But my tastes tend towards the “big deck of cards so it’s never the same game twice”. Usually that kind of experience in a two-player card game requires far more complexity, as with CCGs. Or else it generates a silly amount of randomness, as with Smash Up. Radlands avoids the ditches on either side of the road here, beautifully walking the tightrope of a highly strategic and tactical game that also delivers constant surprises that demand adaptability. I’ve only played Radlands once, but I was very impressed. I can see this one moving to at least a 9 if further plays deliver as much fun as the first one did.  Wonderous Creatures – 9/10 If ever there was a hook to make you want to play a game immediately, a meeple that magnetically attaches to ride atop a wooden dinosaur surely qualifies. Each player will in fact receive three of these dinosaur-esque workers, and proudly slot their captain meeple atop one, giving it a special ability. Yes, this is a worker placement game, but it handles the placement in an innovative manner. Instead of placing your worker on top of a space to take the action, you will place it onto a hex map, taking all adjacent actions. This engenders a surprising flexibility in those actions. The same action space could be used from multiple adjacent spaces, and so blocking other players is a fascinating consideration as well. You will be asked to consider not just which actions to activate, but how. Most of these spaces generate resources. Resources will pay for cards to add to your tableau, but you can draw new cards to hand instead of taking those resources. Cards in your tableau are a primary source of endgame points, though each provides a special ability as well (often a one-time bonus). Cards that provide ongoing or periodic bonuses instead are rarer, but more desirable for their ability to help you build an engine. Other points are generated by a race to various randomized goals. These mostly revolve around playing lots of the same type of card, a challenging prospect given the variety of cards and the resources they require. Mostly, the goals are rewarding you for doing things you want to do anyway. But there is just enough incentive to make slight detours from your card plans to pick up goals along the way. I’ve only played Wondrous Creatures once so far, but it’s the kind of game that checks all the right boxes for me. A mid-weight euro with gorgeous components and giant deck of unique cards demanding tactical adaptability. Fans of Wingspan and Everdell looking for something just a slight step up in complexity will not want to miss this one.  A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.  Ra – 9/10 Ra is one of the absolute best auction games ever made. Players will bid on various ancient-Egyptian-themed tiles in an attempt to get the highest score. There are a variety of different tiles, and fully half of understanding the rules is just understanding the scoring. Despite this, the rules themselves are extremely simple. Each turn, you essentially have only two choices: add a new tile to the lot of tiles up for bid, or start the auction on said lot. The auction is a once-around affair, with the person who started the auction getting the advantage of the final bid. (Certain tiles, once taken, can give you a third option: taking only a single tile from the lot.) Not all the tiles will help your score. Some are actually bad, and will cause you to discard a type of your good tiles. Of course, if you have none of those good tiles, the bad tile doesn’t hurt you at all, while it may hurt someone else quite a bit. This makes the valuation of the tile lots very different depending on which player is bidding. I love that the bad things that happen don’t just happen to you; you have to decide if you want to bid on them as well. This really avoids any “feel bad” moments. The auction economy itself is completely closed, with just 16 pieces of currency in rank order. Whatever you pay to win an auction doesn’t go to a bank. It instead becomes part of the next lot of tiles up for bid. In other words, there may be times you want to bid on a lot of zero tiles, simply to get that 16-value tile that just won the previous auction. My rating has risen the more I’ve played it. There are multiple paths to victory here, and this rewards players who really dig into the game. I often don’t like games where at the end you have to count everything up and see who won, but the mechanics of the game itself more than make up for this drawback. |
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I did not like the look of the newest edition of Ra. I’m glad I didn’t back it. But what is the edition in the photo? That looks way nicer.
The newest edition of Ra has some lovely components, but the design is a bit too busy to be functional. The earliest editions of Ra were functional, but not so pretty. This version from 2016 by Windrider Games seems to me to strike a nice balance between the two.
Carson City is great fun. Modern design sensitivities regarding randomness and aggression are way overrated.