 July 2026 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.  MonsDRAWsity – 5/10 MonsDRAWsity is a party game about drawing monsters. The judge takes a random illustrated monster card, looks at it for 20 seconds, then has to describe it to the other players to the best of their recollection. The other players then simultaneously draw a monster based on the description given to them by the judge player. The judge will then choose which player came closest to the actual picture. There are some amusing ideas here, specifically the game of telephone that can occur when translating a half-remembered description into a visual depiction. (Wait, the monster’s left or my left?) And yet in most cases, the importance of artistic skill far outweighs the importance of comprehension. This has the unfortunate side effect of making a game that is so lightweight as to be great for children, but so reliant on skills adults are better at (fine motor and auditory processing) as to slant the playing field in frustrating ways. MonsDRAWsity ultimately seems to lack that spark that the very best party games offer. It doesn’t create memorable moments or creative opportunities. You just kind of chuckle at the sketches and move on with life.  Honeypot – 7/10 There are lots of light drafting games out there, so anything new needs a bit of a twist to distinguish itself from being “just another Sushi Go!“. Honeypot’s main contrast is in how it executes the draft. Players don’t simply pick a card and pass the rest; instead, they will pass all the cards to their opponents, keeping none. The goal is to make sure you pass them in such a way that they can’t get much benefit from those cards. You are dealt a hand of six cards and will place them facedown in an order of your choice before passing them on. The player you pass them to then looks at the top two cards. They can either keep them, or discard them and move on to the next two. If they pass on those also, they get stuck with the last two. If you have a lot of cards that are good for your opponent, you may want to hide them at the bottom of the pile. But sometimes you put really terrible stuff on the bottom, with mediocre things above in order to bait them into taking cards that actively hurt their score. It’s a nice bit of psychology that creates lots of moments that let you feel pleased at your own cleverness or impressed at your opponent’s perception. To further complicate the matter, if your opponent accepts a set of cards other than the last two, the player after them has the chance to use a “swipe token” to take two of the remaining cards. You only start with a couple swipes, but there are ways to get more and they can be quite powerful. So you’ll have to also assess the goals of the player next to the person you are passing to. There is a lot to consider, but in the end it’s only a few cards so the players are unlikely to deal with any analysis paralysis. Honeypot is a refreshing twist on card drafting that is fast-playing and accessible. It’s not innovative enough to be a real game changer in the drafting space, but it does enough that’s new to earn its keep. A sweet way to spend 30 minutes.  Cataclysm Arcade – 7/10 Ever since the early 90’s, companies have been releasing new CCGs. Most of them are destined to fail very quickly. Sometimes its due to players being already entrenched in existing CCGs, though occasionally a new licensed product comes along and that built-in fanbase can help it survive (Star Wars Unlimited, Lorcana, etc.). But it’s a much taller order to create new CCG that can last without a licensed IP. The most recent one to do it was probably Flesh and Blood in 2019. Even so, I think Cataclysm Arcade might be here to stay. Part of the reason is how easy it is to get started. You can play a whole game (20-30 minutes) in which each player just has one booster pack. This kind of accessibility led to a few years of success for Keyforge (though it was certainly also buoyed by name recognition of its designer). Cataclysm Arcade, at least for the moment, seems to be using its blind buy booster packs primarily as a means to enable an enjoyable randomized experience rather than primarily as a means to line the publisher’s pockets. Each pack contains a boss character (who starts in play). Defeat your opponent’s boss to win the game. The other types of cards are Fighters (who also stay in play and can attack), Tactics (which are single-use effects that discard immediately), and Weapons (which can enhance fighters). None of these concepts will be unfamiliar to CCG players, but neither does Cataclysm Arcade feel like just another clone of an existing game. At most it could be said to be a Frankenstein-like mash-up of many other such games. At this point, the game is only available in early release and demo packs. It remains to be seen how the tournament scene, collectible chase cards, and price will proceed from here. But I really appreciate the low level of commitment needed to experience the thrill of solid CCG play. I’m keeping an eye on this one.  John Company: Second Edition – 8/10 John Company is the heaviest game I’ve played in a while, both in weight and in subject matter. The players are British colonizers attempting to take over India for their own economic gain, acting out a real historical time period. Many of the names are even real people from the period, with biographies provided. While the players all work for the same company, this is a competitive game. Accordingly, copious negotiation and occasional betrayal are present as the players each attempt to steer the mission of the company in ways that benefit them personally. It is sometimes advisable to stake out a strategy that others aren’t pursuing, but there are also paths to victory where you fiercely compete for the same goals as an opponent as you inadvertently aid one another by your agreement on overall company direction. Most of the points you score will come from retiring your colonizers to palatial estates. These require monetary upkeep each round, but money is very tight. You may find yourself relying on the other players to act as loan sharks so your wealthy pensioner doesn’t end up on the street, scoring you no points. When you feel confident in your position, it’s time to run up the company debt until the whole thing collapses, leaving your opponents’ un-retired colonizers holding the bag and scoring no points. John Company is a game that knows what it wants to be and executes on it well. It’s apparent even from a single play that every session would unfold in completely different ways. It’s virtually impossible to script out your turns and yet this adaptability is demanded mostly by the chaos created by other players’ choices. The length of the game can vary wildly, as can the level of aggressive interaction, but these are treated as features, not bugs. One final note on the thematic elements though. Some reviewers have noted that John Company is darkly ironic, yet respectful of the human rights abuses depicted, and therefore it’s “okay” to enjoy taking on these evil roles. But any ways in which John Company distinguishes itself from other colonial enslavement games like Puerto Rico are not present in the mechanics or even the theme of the game itself. It’s hard for me to imagine being okay with one and not the other, when John Company’s repudiation of this time period is little more than a disclaimer in the rulebook.  Jibber Jabble – 8/10 It seems every year at Gen Con, I am impressed by another new Allplay game that costs a whole $9. Last year it was Tearable Quest, and this year it was Jibber Jabble. This is a cooperative party game in which all players but one must work together to give clues to the remaining player. These clues are given one letter at a time, so if the players aren’t mind-melding, there can be some hilariously unhelpful clues. Draw a card and look at the word. Pass it to everyone except the guesser. Then, say a letter. The person after you says another. Eventually when it comes to your turn you can say “stop” and begin a new word. Once you’ve given three clues. the guesser gets one try to get the word. Then, pick a new guesser and a new word from a new card. The words get progressively more difficult through each of the six rounds. And every time you get one right it feels like a full team victory. It’s immensely satisfying to mind meld with the other clue givers and also to make a successful guess. And along the way, you’ll laugh a lot. There is a sublime moment in the very best party games, like Codenames, where you feel you’ve come up with the perfect clue and are rewarded for your creativity. But Jibber Jabble is totally fascinating because it demands adaptability over creativity. That moment of sublime satisfaction comes when you can recover from a disaster of a clue that’s going totally off the rails and still turn it into useful information for the guesser. If this game can continue to consistently generate such moments, it’s destined to become a staple favorite.  Toy Battle – 8/10 There are a lot of two-player battle games out there, especially ones that tend towards the abstract. In a field this crowded, it’s hard to get me excited, though I’ll admit the theme of Toy Battle has caught my eye. I finally got a chance to try it this month and I was pleasantly surprised by its clean gameplay, fast pace, and unrelenting playfulness. Players take turns placing units onto the board. If you can make a chain of your units that goes from your side into the opponent’s base, you win the game. But you can also win the game by being the first to surround designated areas of the board, which award stars. Each of the eight maps specifies the amount of stars needed to win and the varying layouts dictate the difficulty of making a chain to the opposing base. This means some maps may push you more toward one way of winning than another, but in all cases you need to defend against both methods of victory. The units have special abilities and numbers. Higher numbered units can be placed overtop of lower numbered ones, but the better abilities are found on low-numbered units. Units are played from a Scrabble-esque tile tray that allows your opponent to see how many units you have available, but not which ones. You will eventually run low on options, and need to take a turn off from playing a unit to draw two new units to your tray. The timing of this simple decision is also crucial. Toy Battle is wildly successful in its goals. It has great strategic depth for a 15-minute game while its random elements eschew endless beard-stroking in favor of fast-paced fun. Highly recommended.  Wroth – 8/10 Wroth is a dudes-on-a-map game that plays in about an hour. It provides players with extremely asymmetric powers that interact in fascinating ways. In a break with tradition for games of this type, your actions are determined through dice drafting. The goal is to score the most victory points in a set number of rounds. At the start of each round, the action dice are rolled. They provide abilities like adding new troops to the board, moving existing troops on the board, attacking with your troops, or getting gems which can be used to activate the special powers of your faction. They’re all good, but you’re only going to take two of them. Unless you’re in last place, then you get the leftover one after the drafting is done as well. Once the drafting is done, you will take turns executing these actions, spending a die each time. There are ways to spend multiple dice for a more powerful action, but this will see you taking fewer turns over all. Despite a simple structure, there are lots of different ways you could play out your turns, all of which can seem pretty reasonable. Wroth doesn’t quite rise to the level of an absolute favorite like Nexus Ops. The fast-playing combat is still there, but there is still a strong focus on area control, which is less my jam. What really makes it stand out is those player powers. They play really differently from one another, and each has a couple abilities that seem totally broken, so unlike are they to what anyone else can do. I’ve played a couple times now, and the mix of different powers saw the games play out totally differently. You’ll always be keeping an eye on your opponent’s abilities, not to strategize against them, but enviously, because you’ll want to try that faction next time.  Moon Colony Bloodbath – 9/10 I’ve been a fan of Donald X. Vaccarino’s designs ever since Dominion, so I was excited to get to try his latest. This is a competitive deckbuilder, yet deck is collectively built by all players. You will have a few opportunities to add cards that only help yourself, but most of the time you will be adding cards with the understanding that others will benefit from them as well. You’ll just need to plan how to benefit even more. As the founder of a moon colony, the most important thing is your population. You need more and more people (especially to replace the ones that keep dying in unfortunate robot accidents). When someone’s colony completely fails due to running out of people, whoever has the most remaining will be the winner. It’s the old “you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your friends” model. Each turn, you’ll choose one of five possible actions, all of which give you a resource of some kind. Though there’s no way to simply “gain population”. Instead, you’ll need to draw cards, play cards, and get money to pay for cards. Those cards will build an engine that lets you gain population and other resources more efficiently. In addition, you will need food to feed the people you already have generate crates to activate certain extra powers on cards. As the game proceeds, the demands placed upon your resources will quickly outstrip your production capability. There may be times where you simply have to hope the good cards are drawn before the bad ones so you can survive just a bit longer. But even these tense moments are lightened by the game’s dark humor. The contrast of happy-go-lucky midcentury marketing and horrible violent death is reminiscent of the aesthetics of Fallout. I knew a bit about Moon Colony Bloodbath going in, and that some players had been frustrated by how the game gives you a short time to build up your engine and then immediately starts tearing it down. And I was a bit on the fence as to whether I would enjoy this aspect or not. But it was honestly the best thing about the game. The players are in competition with one another, yet the bad things happen at roughly the same time for everyone, so you get to grouse together at how unlucky you’ve all been. It’s a much better dynamic than one player having a worse go of it than everyone else.  I went to Gen Con! I demoed or heard pitches for some offerings that I didn’t play a full game of, but still got enough of a taste to share a few thoughts. These also are discussed from least to most interesting to me.  Crab Rage – Great theme about crabs engaging in professional wrestling. But it’s completely disconnected from the gameplay. A very rote area control game where actions consist of spending cubes to push other cubes around. Sandcastles – An extremely basic drafting game with no kind of innovative twist at all. You already know how to play this game, you just need to learn how each tile scores. White noise. One Round? – Cooperative party game where players get a number card (from 1-100) and have to give a one-word clue that leads the other players to that number, based on the words already on the table. Reminiscent of Wavelength. I thought I would like this more than I did. Foxglove Farm – I got a very poor demo of this which consisted of me watching the booth worker solo the game (yes, the entire game) without explaining why she was making the choices she did. She was unable to answer rules questions I asked and at no point invited participation. Open drafting tile placement, with transportation of resources across laid tiles. Might actually be an okay game. There’s no way of knowing. This Game is Killer: Franchise of Fear – The latest addition to the TGiK series, each of which is a take-that party game with some hidden roles, hidden movement, and light deduction. I’ve enjoyed all of them, and liked this one as well. The first one was basically Alien, the second one (which was better) was basically The Thing, and this one is basically Five Nights at Freddy’s. I haven’t played enough of this one to know where it ranks, but it’s definitely a worthy successor if you enjoyed the others. Aetherspire – A beautifully produced cooperative game that dares to ask “What if Castle Panic was actually good?”. You’ll place tiles in an attempt to build up your spires, but each turn more bad guys will come out of the bag and set up camp on top of them. You need to clear them out in order to continue building. But between the dice rolls that control your actions, the different ways you can combine elements for extra actions, and the unique special power each player has, there are a vast array of choices for how to do this. It strikes the right balance between joint player planning and “I know my powers best, so I alone decide”. Mythologies – A card drafting game themed around various cultural mythologies that seems to present tough choices. In each game, four of the eight possible decks will be selected. Cards from each deck will be laid face-up on the board, but you’ll only have the option to choose from 3 of the 4 decks each round, and one of those will simply be blocking another player, rather than getting the card. Seems highly tactical and interactive. The blocking and aggression may be a little much for my taste, but hard to tell without exploring more. Keeping it on my radar. Into the Machine – The goal is to move your robot tokens down the conveyor belt and back. It’s a race, and your efficiency in action selection will dictate your success. The board is an array of various non-intuitive symbols, all slight variations on upgrading and moving your robots. I was very interested in this one going in, but the booth was offering only a rules overview, not a demo. Which gave me a good sense of how the game works, but not how the game feels. It wasn’t enough to sell me on it, but I still think this one might be worth looking into a little further. |
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