June 2026

Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.

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Llama Llama – 6/10

­I’ve been pretty impressed with Allplay’s recent collection of small box games. None of the ones I’ve played are actually bad and some have even become favorites (Lure). Lllama Llama is probably closer to the bottom of the list than the top, but it’s still well worth the $9 Allplay charges for it.

This is a drafting game where you try to score points by collecting sets of cards. The catch is that each card you collect could instead be used as a scoring goal. You will know which scoring goal you’ve secretly selected, but the goals the other players have chosen will only become revealed partway through the drafting round.

There are different amounts of each color of cards. For example there are ten red cards, each only worth a single point when collected, which could instead be used to set a goal of collecting one of each color for 50 points. But there is only one yellow card (and you’ll need it if you want to achieve that one-of-each-color goal). If someone uses the yellow card as a goal, there’s no chance of anyone ever collecting it to achieve the red goal.

These interlocking goals and will pull you in different directions as you draft, which can sometimes make for interesting choices. But a lot of the time you’ll get the experience of being just one card short of achieving a goal and never even seeing the card you need to make it happen. Pulling off your plan feels good, but there are a lot more feel-bad than feel-good moments.

To be clear, this is perfectly fine for a 15-minute filler. Get a few thrills and groans and move on. But I think the randomness and player chaos here are bit more overriding than I personally desire.


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Dnup – 6/10

­Dnup is a shedding game from the designer of Scout. I’ve played Dnup three times now and my initial impression is that it’s a good deal weaker than its predecessor, but still offers some casual fun. Being worse than Scout is hardly an insult though, as Scout is currently ranked as the #1 climbing and shedding game of all time (yes, surpassing Tichu).

Naturally, the goal is to get rid of all the cards in your hand. But playing cards to the table in front of you doesn’t shed them permanently. Instead, if an opponent is able to play the same quantity of cards, but with a higher rank, the cards you played go back to your hand. Not only that, but they rotate to their alternate value. Yes, as in Scout and some other recent card games, Dnup is one of those in which the cards have a different value on the top and bottom.

Naturally, there are times when being forced to pick up played cards will rotate them to stronger values, but usually this is an inconvenience. Cards are always played in sets (not runs), so this rotation will often break up your set, even if it increases the values overall. Fortunately, when you find yourself wishing that your cards were flipped the other way, you can always spend your turn rotating your whole hand instead of playing cards to the table.

Dnup also offers another intriguing method for getting rid of those pesky cards that have no matching rank in your hand. You can play a single card to the table in front of an opponent, adding it to the set in front of them so long as the rank matches. This has the unfortunate side effect of strengthening their position, making it less likely someone can force them to pick up. But on the other hand, if they do get forced to pick up, they’re now taking one of your old cards as well.

Dnup is good light fun, but it doesn’t seem to offer tons of tactical options in the way other shedding games can. It’s worth playing a few times to see what twists it offers, but I don’t think it has the staying power of the very best new card games.

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Primal: The Awakening – 6/10

­Primal has a really big box. It’s the first thing you’ll notice when you see it in real life, so it might as well be said. It doesn’t even fit in a typical game bag. But its footprint on the table isn’t nearly so egregious; it’s primarily storage for the many different monsters you can team up to fight. And I am a sucker for that kind of variety.

That said, the enormous minis are surprisingly unnecessary given the gameplay. The monster minis never actually move around the board. All they do is turn to face one of four directions. Likewise, the hero minis simply move between the four possible spaces that the monster could be facing. There are almost no tactical considerations to this movement. You mostly move because if you stay in one place, the monster gets an extra chance to damage you. But considerations about flanking, retreating, range, and support of teammates are either extremely minor or totally non-existent.

What is present is hand management and card sequencing. You’ll generally have a hand of five cards at the start of each turn, and you’ll need to discard some of them to pay the costs of others. This is a tried-and-true mechanic and it works well here. Not only will you need to decide which cards to play, but also what order. Many cards receive bonuses based on how they are sequenced, but rarely is there a perfectly obvious path, so you’ll have to make some tough choices.

The co-operative elements are less mathy than you might expect. Some games like this ask the players to calculate their damage outputs and collaborate in planning out a whole round before executing their turns. Not so with Primal. Players can largely just play out their turns as they see fit while their teammates occasionally remind them of a bonus or offer minor assistance.

Primal’s biggest problem is the amount of minor rules and administrivia that it asks of the players. It’s the kind of game where it seems highly unlikely anyone has ever played the first few times without missing a rule or trigger. But what’s worse is that these minor rules often barely change anything anyway. Is it necessary to have a player take 1 damage when they cycle their deck or for a special rule that only comes up when a fire token is almost out but then gets re-lit? These tiny rules add up into an overburdened rule set for such an otherwise snappy experience.

You will probably enjoy playing Primal from time to time. You might even enjoy it more if you play it a lot, experiencing the different boss monsters and having those minor rules become second nature. But it probably would have better positioned itself as a casual 60-90 minute co-op with some rules streamlining and a bit more restraint in its production.

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Luz – 7/10

­Luz is a trick-taker where you don’t get to see your own hand, but all your opponents do. Each player is dealt a hand of cards, which are then arranged in ascending value within each suit. But all you get to see is the back of your own cards, which display the suit. You might already be noticing some similarities to Xylotar, but it’s otherwise a pretty different approach to the genre.

As the players pick up their hands (facing away from themselves) and look around the table, some information starts to take shape. Hmm, I don’t see the highest purple card in anyone’s hand. I have a purple card. Could that be it? Or is it one of the leftover cards that wasn’t dealt?

Based on this information, each player will make a bid of how many tricks they intend to win. If you predict incorrectly, you will lose 5 points for each trick you won above or below your bid. The only way to score points is to predict correctly, which will give you 10, 20, 30, or 40 points, depending on the round. This Family-Feud-style scoring system where the later rounds are much more important is a bit kludgy, but it does generally give everyone a chance to win until the bitter end. It’s also an option to make a “safety bid”, where you can declare something like “3 or 4 tricks”, but then receive only half the point value if you are correct.

I enjoy how Luz offers a touch of deduction along with it’s standard-fare card play. This goes beyond the usual “counting cards” and into a bit of logical reasoning and even player psychology. (My opponent wouldn’t have played that yellow if they thought I had this yellow, which must mean I have a different yellow!) Even with it’s rather inelegant scoring system, Luz is an enjoyable experience.

Vivo – 7/10

­Potato Man is one of my all-time favorite trick-taking games, and Vivo reminds me of it in some ways. The twist that both of these games offer to the genre is that instead of “you must follow the led suit” the rule is “you CAN’T play a suit already played”. Though in Potato Man, that’s true all the time, but in Vivo that’s only true some of the time. Let me explain.

Before each trick, a card is revealed from a separate deck that explains the rule for the trick. In case of a “quartet”, each of the four players must play a different suit, exactly like Potato Man. In case of a “solo”, all players must follow the led suit, exactly like a standard trick-taking game. There are also “duets” and “trios”, where two and three suits must be played, as you’d expect. In case a player does not have a valid card to play according to the rule, they play any card they like, but it is ignored (it can’t ever win the trick).

Leading is often quite powerful, especially if you are lucky enough for the trick you are leading to be a “Solo” since there are no trump cards. A run of “Solos” from the deck is likely to grant a pretty strong advantage to the player in lead position. But there are interesting tactical choices to make as well, especially when sloughing cards while trying to maintain a strong position in all four suits, just in case.

Vivo is shallower than Potato Man, but that does make it a bit more accessible. It’s very fast (20 minutes not including rules explanation), the scoring is simpler, and theme has less potential to be off-putting. Still, you really want exactly 4 players for VIVO, while Potato Man shines anywhere from 3-5, and, as already mentioned, offers a bit more depth in its play patterns and scoring.

Trickadee – 8/10

­Trickadee is the most interesting new trick-taking game I’ve played in some time. While many trick-taking innovations focus on ways to subvert standard conventions (the way trump works, the bidding structure, etc.), Trickadee instead uses a standard trick-taking chassis and puts a set collection game over top of it.

The winner of a trick not only maintains the lead, but also gets first choice of one of the played cards. These cards are collected face-up into “flocks” of cards with similar properties. Maybe you try for a flock of all one color or a flock of a sequence of numbers. Maybe you even manage to pull off both of these things in the same flock for double points. The catch is that once a bird is in a flock it can’t be moved, so you need to commit to your flock plans.

The other players will each also get to choose a card to keep in their flocks, with the players who played weaker cards going later, but also getting some seed tokens, which are bonus points at the end of the game. In fact, these seed tokens are often powerful enough that players will often try to play the weakest card in a trick just to acquire them.

Because instead of merely giving you bonus points, you can spend seeds in different ways each round to adjust the cards you’ve collected. This might be swapping collected cards with ones from your hand, changing the suits or values of collected cards, or even drawing brand new cards from the deck. This aspect reminded me of the tool cards in Sagrada, which also allow you to give up some endgame points to bend the rules a bit now.

Spending seeds for these abilities is what pushes Trickadee from good into great. There are some really tough decisions to make for a game so easy to learn and fast to play. I’ve only played a couple times, but I’m hopeful that this depth will continue to reveal itself.

Off With Their Heads! – 8/10

I’m a big fan of Wonderland’s War, so I was interested in Off With Their Heads! right away, even though they are very different types of games. OwtH plays in only about 30 minutes and offers an intriguing combination of roll-and-write and classic card game.

Players are each dealt a hand of standard playing cards, then each turn begins with a blind bid of a card from these hands. The player who played the highest card played gets to make a mark in the top row of their sheet, the middle player(s) make a mark in the middle row, and the player who played the lowest card makes a mark in their bottom row. It’s likely that you will only want to focus on two out of the three rows, and the cards you are dealt may guide you in that decision.

The value and suit of each card played also dictates what you get to write and where it can go within the designated row. So how can I ever use a high card in my bottom row or a low card in my top row? Well, that’s one of the brilliant design decisions going on here. After each turn, the order of the suits changes, with each one getting a chance to be the highest. So for example, in a round where spades is the low suit, you might be able to play the king of spades and still have played the lowest card. And because the order of these rotating suits is known, you can engage in quite a bit of planning ahead. Not only that, but there is a surprising amount of player control. You might think that the blind bid system would lead to some unpredictability, but in my experience I was almost always able to play in my desired row, with just a couple hiccups here and there requiring tactical adjustment.

Two of the cards in your hand will not get played. Whichever two are left over become part of your final “poker hand”. So ater three rounds, you will choose five of your six cards and make the best poker hand you can. This gives you your final points of the game, at which point it ends. This too becomes a fascinatingly difficult choice. By round three, you have already committed pretty strongly to a certain poker hand, constraining your choices in the card play. But round three is also when you most need to finish rows that you’ve started working on and when your options may be more limited. It’s a really enjoyable conundrum.

I really love the way the two halves of this game come together. Both aspects present decision paths that feel wide open, while at the same time demanding tactical adjustment and some prediction of your opponents’ choices. That’s pretty lofty stuff for a game that demands so little of your time to play.

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A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.



­Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit – 10/10

­There is a reason this game is so highly sought-after and it goes beyond the hundreds of plastics minis. To be sure, there are few games with as much table appeal as this one. It’s impossible not to be sucked into what is happening when you see it in action. But the real appeal here is a well-crafted game that clearly had a top-down design (i.e., theme first, mechanics flow out of that).

The main focus of the game takes place in the three-level palace, with guards rushing to get to the throne room either by the stairs or by grappling hooks through the windows. But several other mini-games are going on at the same time. Anakin needs to pilot his ship through the blockade to shut down the droids while the Trade Federation keeps putting more ships in his way. The Trade Federation also attempts to move its droids off the battlefield and into the palace while the Gungans try to stop them and kill them off. Meanwhile, an epic duel rages between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Darth Maul. The winner will rush into the palace and be a serious threat there. With so many things to manage, it could seem overwhelming, but the cards dictate what actions are available each turn, leaving meaningful but manageable choices.

Each section of the game has a different feel. I love how the battle droids and palace guards are so plentiful and yet so weak. It creates this big battle with tons of carnage, as multiple figures die each turn. I love how Nute Gunray and Rune Haako literally just stand there and do nothing until they finally get surrounded and surrender. This game plays out the events of the movie so well that it actually makes the movie better. What other game can say that? This is a must have experience for any Star Wars fan, any Ameritrasher, any light wargame fan, and well, really anyone.