New-to-me games played recently include …

12 RIVERS (2025): Rank 6164, Rating 7.2

12 marbles of different values drop down 12 chutes which gradually coalesce until there’s only 1 channel left. You need specific marbles to fulfil contracts so the gamble you face each round is whether to spend a lot and place your dam high up (and hopefully acquire exactly the high valued marble you need) or spend low and place your dam low down and get whatever’s left – the gamble being if you don’t spend max, will someone spend even more, steal the marble you want, and leave you paying lots for a dam now worth closer to nothing. Repeat for 5 rounds. There are some special effects to mix things up and increase your gambling risk. It’s playable, it’s pretty, but it didn’t make me give a damn.

Rating: 6

1 A.M. JAILBREAK (2024): Rank 8136, Rating 6.5 – Saashi

Hand shedder where you may add a card to the previously played set/run before playing a set/run of the same number of cards +/- 1. Or draw cards instead. Going out is dependent on your hand and the currently tabled set/run, aim to get lucky. Things escalate quickly and hands are over quickly so it’s a bit of wild ride.

Rating: 6

BUS & STOP (2024): Rank 4685, Rating 7.0 – Saashi

Cute filler where you must pick up all of one colour from the draft into your collection BUT they’ll have different icons and you score by discarding lots of cards of one icon. So you only want to minimise collection to one or two icons if you can because your hand size is fixed and you will have to score soon! And those darn cards don’t always fit in with your plans. Watch what others are collecting, go different, hope you get lucky with the draft. It’s nice and breezy, moves along fast, and finishes in a pleasant 15 minutes.

Rating: 7

FORK (2024): Rank 19155, Rating 5.9

Trick-taker where low cards are played face up and everything else face-down. High cards score if a card they ‘eat’ in the food chain is in the trick. If a middling card survives that, then it may score if a card is left that it eats, and any low non-eaten cards may score low points. Hope to draw a high hand, hope you get lucky that each card scores when played. Hmm. Pretty random, not a lot of fun.

Rating: 4

MOVIE TRICKS (2025): Rank 9332, Rating 6.9

In order of strength of cards played to the trick (best card first, worst last), take one of the cards played to the previous trick and add it to your tableau. You want to collect low valued cards because they have lots of icons (which score in various ways at end of game) but you also want high cards to score face value for rows and columns. Or take middle cards. It doesn’t really seem to matter. It’s pretty random what will be led and what you can play and where you’ll be in the pecking order anyway. Take what seems reasonable given what your tableau needs for balance. It’s one hand and done, it finishes in a reasonable time, and then you can see how it all panned out.

Rating: 6

PROJECT L (2020): Rank 377, Rating 7.5

It’s an action-based Ubongo, removing the real-time aspect (which makes me enjoy it even more). Spend actions to buy cards showing shapes, or placing shapes on cards to fill them earning points plus bigger and more varied shapes. What makes the game is the action to put out a shape on every card you have, which has you striving for efficiency – whoever plans these best will take the game. It has just the right amount of abstract thinky for me in a nice timeframe, especially when it’s 2p.

Rating: 7

RECALL (2025): Rank 2752, Rating 8.1

It’s more of a race game than Revive, spreading out from one corner of the board to claim stones, cubes, and building spots. Your action spots give different combinations of getting new meeples, moving them, and then spending them to claim stones, cubes, and buildings, all of which do good things re advancing up tracks, getting VPs, ongoing effects, and new techs. But you only have 13 actions – choose your strategy carefully vis a vis what opportunities are left you. You’ll only recall your action cards twice, and therefore only enable techs 1, 2 or 3 times – they’re still important but less defining than Revive. It’s less daunting, easier to get into, but still with plenty of hard decisions and intricate turns to navigate. I really like it, enough to have both in my collection.

Rating: 8

THEBAI (2025): Rank 7630, Rating 7.3 – Turczi

There’s no theme, don’t bother. There are new mechanics though to gain your smorgasbord of points and these I enjoyed exploring. You’re aiming to get resources to fulfil contracts, put out dice to meet end-of-round reqs, and increase dice in value for ongoing effects or end-of-game points. By mid-game you have 20+ options on where to place your die for actions, more options on where to move your meeple for actions, get more actions by fulfilling contracts, earn chained effects, and take advantage of earned eternal effects. The downtime is appalling. Our 3p game took 150 mins. With only 10 turns, that’s 5 mins a turn, and 10 mins downtime between turns. Even then I still didn’t feel I had enough time to optimise, settling for something reasonable but consequently suffering the dissatisfaction of a game half-played. Interesting game, sure, but I will only ever consider playing this again by correspondence.

Rating: 6

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Larry:  I’ve only played Recall once and I enjoyed it.  I think I like Revive better, but I”d like to play Recall some more to firm up my opinion of it.  Both games are well worth playing and there’s enough difference between the two of them to justify having both in your collection.

The main idea in FORK (which stands for Fox, Owl, Rabbit, and Kale, the four card types) is using food chains in a trick-taker, which is clever.  But since most of the cards are played face down, it’s primarily a guessing and bluffing game, which isn’t my thing.  It’s intended for families and casual players and its interesting mechanics and cute theme should work for those groups.  But hardcore trick-taking players should probably avoid it.

Fraser: Bus & Stop we played that a few times after Melissa brought it home from Essen.  Nice enough game.