I enjoy the Tiny Epic line of games published by Gamelyn games. Now owned by Tycoon Games, I was excited to see more of my favorite in the line, Tiny Epic Dungeons. Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures keeps the same lightweight dungeon-crawl mechanics but it also links up multiple games in a bit of campaign. The Phantom Voyage is a small expansion that adds a new hero, some monsters, and minions. It will serve as a bridge to an upcoming Dungeons Adventures sequel. While the original line of Everdell games has come to a close (no more expansions), there are still more games to be had in the Everdell universe. Everdell Emerland is in the original Everdell genre: an engine-building worker placement game. Everdell Journeys has players building up a little journey route of cards, which are activated as players’ tokens move along the path.

Smirk & Dagger Games had even more Boop in Boop Shuffle the cat-bumping 3-in-a-row abstract game is now available in a more portable, and chaotic card version. Hell of a Deal was a show hit. Here, players cooperate to build up a poker hand capable of beating the boss’s hand. Of course, the boss cheats, and so should the players – if they can. Devious has players collecting faerie cards for points. Players queue up three cards in a stack and pass them over. Everyone then looks sequentially through their pile, evaluating them one at a time, keeping only one but not able to backtrack to a previous card. Cards have powers and actions but generally a player only scores if they have a single card in a specific suit. The slasher-themed line of survival games, This Game is Killer, is back this year in Franchise of Fear where all the players are trying to survive as they are trapped within a fast food store. Blorp! is a tile-laying game in the Carcassonne genre, where players try to create a completed (all sides closed) blorp, earning the most points for their largest Blorps of each color.

Pivoting to a combat-oriented game, the constructable-miniatures space-combat game, Snap Ships Tactics, is back. In addition to reprints of past ships and content, there has been a new crowdfunding effort to release a new series of double-sized ships as well as a Capitol Ships Box with pieces and rules to build crazy big ships.

Tabletop Tycoon

Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures by Scott Almes

I’ve been a longtime fan of the Tiny Epic series since its very first Tiny Epic Kingdoms over a decade ago. Tabletop Tycoon recently acquired the line and continues to expand it. Probably my favorite title was Tiny Epic Dungeons.

It contained much of what I like in a dungeon crawl (cooperative, getting more powerful, final climactic battles) but compressed into a very short timeframe – under an hour. One of my favorite bits, players can discover loot sets that become more powerful as a set is completed.

Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures is a stand-alone dungeon crawl that builds on the system dungeon system to present a campaign of eight chapters.

To reduce setup, there is a spiral bound book with a start and end page for each chapter. Players start on one entrance page, go through a randomized dungeon, and end on the exit page. With a series of linked adventures, there is a bit more room for character development, mostly through gained equipment – including legendary items and item sets.

There are 9 new characters to play, although the game remains backwards-compatible with the previous game. Note, you can mix and match things up but may need to watch out for too many epic items appearing.

Tiny Epic Dungeons Adventures: The Phantom Voyage is an expansion to the base Adventures game. It has three new chapters to play as well as new heroes, loot, and monsters. It serves as the bridge between the first, base game adventure series, and an upcoming second installment. There’s a Deluxe Edition of the game available that includes the Skyward Revenge mini expansion and a few more mobs and minions.

Everdell Journeys by James A. Wilson, Clarissa A. Wilson

Everdell Journeys has players (1 to 5, up to 10! with the deluxe version) creating a journey for their little personal traveller. Each traveller is unique and has a special ability to help out in the game.

Using a simultaneous draft, cards are selected and added to one’s personal path to create a little route. The travellers then do their thing, travelling along and activating the cards as they go. Cards provide resources, points, and other abilities. Spend campfire tokens to move along the path and score points based on previously visited places. Score points along the way by obtaining the requisite resources/visits/etc… listed on one of your Journal tiles Once scored, new journals can be drawn by resting one’s traveller.

The game works best when you get into the theme as the cards represent places, people, and moments of interest in your story.

After three full rounds of play, scores are tallied. Players earn points for their journey cards, completed journals, and some points awarded to players with the most of a particular resource. As a simultaneous drafting game, although you can play a much slower open draft mode, it moves along at a fairly good clip. The deluxe version of the game has fancier bits and bobs as well as enough needed to play a 10! player version of the game.

Everdell Emerland by James A. Wilson, Clarissa A. Wilson

After the last crowdfunding, Everdell – the original game, is now considered complete. However, there are more games releasing based on that cute, colorful world.

Everdell Emerland is an example. At its heart is a worker placement game. Players are visiting sites, gathering resources, and spending them.

Players can “build” cards into their city to help with their game engine. These cards are double-sided. When they are upgraded, they flip over to reveal more powerful options – more resources, endgame points, or fancy power combinations.

Smirk & Dagger Games

Boop Shuffle by Scott Brady

The push-checkers type game of Boop is a hit around our house. This new version comes as a card game with a couple small spins on the formula. Originally a traditional abstract sort of game with wooden pieces and a board, this new version is even more portable as it is just a deck of cards and some borders to mark off the field of play. The goal remains to get three large cats in a row. Players start with small cats, upgrading them to large cats when they get three smalls in a row.

What makes the game different is the pushing mechanism. Adding a cat to the board will “boop” (push away) all the adjacent cats, if possible. Of course, little cats don’t push big cats. If cats fall off the board, they don’t warp to the other side. There are several new twists in the card game. First, players don’t have their own pieces, they pull a card off the top of the deck and must play it, even if it’s the opponent’s cat. Next, there are three special cats present. Wild cats count as either type when looking for 3 in a row. Super cats are able to “bump” cats up to two spaces away, and when scared kittens are booped, they will go on and boop again. Finally, there is a blanket card that will cover-up and nullify a cat card.

I found a very cool heavy metal version of the original Boop! in the play area.

The game comes with two neoprene borders to help lay out a board for the required 6×6 grid. However, one game option is to free the field up entirely and let the game board grow dynamically to any size.

Hell of a Deal by Cameron Reid

The co-op poker game Hell of a Deal was a huge hit at the convention. One to four players gang up against a boss monster rather than playing Texas-Holdem poker against each other.

Players go through several rounds trying to create a better poker hand than the boss. Of course, this is easier said than done because the boss will always cheat. They get a minimum hand value (even if their cards are crap), extra cards, and other tricks up their sleeves.

Since the boss cheats, it’s only fair for the players to do something as well. As part of their bets, players can bid one or two soul coins per round. Won soul coins provide cool ways to adjust your own (or another player’s) bet, or interfere with the boss’s hand. Of course, lose the soul coin in a bet and you get hit by several penalties.

If the players go negative in soul coins or two players get to 10 temptation (due to penalties and other options) the game automatically ends in a loss. Once players make it to the end of the game, at least one player’s hand must be better than the boss’ for the team to win.

Devious by Glenn Cotter

Devious is a set-collection game, but you only want one of each suit, no multiples please. Basically, players score points for their highest singleton in a suit. Duplicates of a suit don’t score and more than two gives a negative total. “Shoot the moon” and get 5 or more in a suit and score points for every card you own in that suit.

At the start of the game a set of 6 suits are chosen from many available in the box. Suits have two 1’s, 3’s, and 5’s and two of each 2 and 4.

After setup, players make a stack of three cards to give to their neighbor. These are passed and then every player goes through to pick which one to keep. The cards are revealed in order and they can be kept or discarded. However, if neither of the first two cards are taken, the third must be picked.

In addition to their numerical value, cards have special powers. These range from active ones that change the game state to special scoring options. The game only lasts 5 rounds of play (card drafting) and then everything is scored. Some faerie cards have special scoring that supersedes the normal values.

This Game is Killer: Franchise of Fear (2026) by Bajir Cannon

This Game is Killer has 4 to 10(!) players running around in a classic slasher movie, trying to be the last player standing after the bad guy kills off everyone else – although players can band together to take out the killer for a shared win, but realistically, is that going to happen? Players move around, gather materials, and use up those materials to get away (or even better, put someone else in the way…) This year’s Franchise of Fear is the third game in the series, sealing the players inside a restaurant with all those chairs, tables, and cutlery just lying around for the taking. Next year’s release will be Shark Themed (maybe “Blood in the Water”?) and will feature a shark that homes in on one person at a time rather than sitting around sharing a room with the players.

BLORP! by Garth Kauffman

BLORP! is a tile-placement game for 2 to 6 players. Players draw tiles, displaying blorps of up to three colors, and then place the tiles into their personal area.

The goal is to create complete BLORPS of a single color. Play continues until all the tiles are used up.

Players get 2 points per tile for the largest BLORPs of each color and 1 point per tile for all other completed BLORPs. No points for incomplete BLORPS. There are special spore cards that score 5 points if orthogonally surrounded and 6 points if surrounded by all 8 adjacent tiles. Finally, the game has a real-time mode if you want something frantic, or maybe you’re just an impatient gamer?

Snap Ships

Snap Ships Tactics: Capital Ships Box by Josh Derksen

Snap Ships Tactics is a “miniatures” game built out from the foundations of a set of inter-connectable spaceship figures. Snap Ships is a line of buildable plastic ships. Like LEGOs, they come in a box of pieces and can be used to make a specific ship or adjusted (or mixed & matched) to create all kinds of different space ships.

The Snap Ships Tactics game was created to give another use for the miniatures. (I say minis, but most ships are about the right size to hold in two hands.) Thus, the game portion is a sort of add-on (cards, dice, etc…) you purchase to use with the ships you already own. In the game, players start the game with a tableau of cards that is keyed off the parts used to build their space ship. These cards are activated to move the ship and use its systems.

Every ship is compatible with every other one, so players can build whatever they want. However, players always had to build a single ship at a time, so each ship sits upon a single “base” on the playing field. There was therefore a bit of a limit on how big a ship could be.

Along comes bigger ships and the Capital Ships Box. There will be three new “battleship” releases containing ships that operate on two bases at once.

Meanwhile, the Capital Ships Box is designed to give players access to even bigger ships – specifically ships large enough to need three or more bases for balance – including some linking pieces to help with structural integrity.

These new, giant ships could be big battle ships, or even some sort of spacecraft carrier. New cards, new terrain, and new rules will bring these giants into the battle in an appropriate way. Note, the Capitol Ships Box, specifically, isn’t going to have a big ship model inside, it will have the rules, cards, and pieces one needs to field and play with large (3+ base) ships.

There was a Kickstarter for a reprint of everything that came before as well as all the new stuff. It has ended but gamers can still get in on the new stuff through the late pledge option.