Trick’N Treat

• Designer: Icerain Lin
• Publisher: Icerain Games
• Players: 3-5
• Age: 12+
• Time: 10-15 minutes
• Played with review copy from Taiwan Boardgame Design

Trick’n Treat is a trick-taking game with cooperative and competitive modes! Venture out in costumes on Halloween and collect candies, but beware of the ghosts who can bring you all sorts of cute surprises.

Players follow standard trick-taking rules without a trump suit, with one candy card being selected for scoring after each trick. Players can play ghost cards that always follow suit and trigger special effects. After resolution, ghost cards are added to the Trick-winner’s hand. In Cooperative Mode, each player needs to collect 4 different candy cards. In Competitive Mode, players are divided into two teams; the team that collects all ghost cards loses the game, otherwise the team with the higher score wins.

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Designer: Alexandros Kapidakis

Artist: Gong Studios

Publisher: Phase Shift Games

Players: 1-4

Age: 8+

Time: 40 minutes

Played with a review copy from Phase Shift Games

Reviewed by Jonathan Franklin

Boblin’s Rebellion is thematically a dungeon builder and mechanically an engine builder. If ever there were an argument for goblin unionization against the Goblin King, it would be Boblin’s Rebellion. Luckily, in the advanced version, the goblins can also fight off the trolls who inhibit their work in the dungeon.

To set the stage, Phase Shift Games ships their games in little square boxes. Their past games have been light and fun. Boblin’s Rebellion is a bit of a departure in that it packs ~100 cards, 4 player mats, and lots of goblin and troll cubes into the box. The play has action chains and multiple different resources all represented by where the cubes are placed on your player mat, so you need to pay attention to what you are doing and plan when it is not your turn.
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Designers: Katarzyna Cioch, Sylwia Smolińska, Wojciech Wiśniewski, Mateusz Wolski

Artist: Tomasz Bolik

Publisher: Portal

Players: 2-5

Age: 8+

Time: 20 minutes (per scenario)

Review copy provided by Portal

Review by Jonathan Franklin (played six times with different players playing the AI & multiple scenarios)

You are stranded in space with four fellow astronauts. The players are in charge of getting the correct astronauts to the correct rooms in the space station. Sometimes that is not enough and they need to have numbered keys with them. If you get them to the right rooms with the right keys, you escape.

Oddly enough, none of you has any clue where the astronauts and keys should be. Only the AI knows. If you despise AI, just change the name to Ground Control and start calling the players ‘Major Tom’. Like in Mysterium and other cooperative one-with-many games, the AI (another player) needs to guide the other players to get the configuration correct within a certain number of rounds. Can your team of humans and AI live to try another mission? You’ll know after playing AI Space Puzzle.
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