“21 New Hand Games for Everyone! If you like hand games but are tired of Rock Paper Scissors, these games are for you!
Here are 21 new hand games to play with your pals. Flip to any page, read the rules and you’re ready to go. Featuring fresh takes on classics as well as totally new designs, these games are a cinch to learn, play and teach, and they work great just about anywhere. Let’s play some hand games!
What is a hand game?
I bet you’ve played a hand game. At least Rock Paper Scissors, right? Players throw hand signs in the air, cancel each other out and the last player remaining wins. Easy! So, there’s one.
In Odin, you want to empty your hand as quickly as possible, sending all your Vikings out into the world.
The game lasts several hands, with each hand consisting of one or more rounds. The deck contains cards in six suits, each numbered 1-9, and each player starts with a hand of nine cards.
Burned is a new game from Stone Circle Games. Burned is designed by Jon Moffat, who also designed “Horrible Hex”, “Traders, Raiders & Runners”, and “Pirate Kings”. Burned bills itself as a two-player asymmetrical game of cat and mouse that plays in 20 minutes. The cat and mouse part cannot be understated.
Each player’s goal is to eliminate their adversary. One player plays as a Burned Asset that is using equipment and stealth movements to evade capture while targeting and laying traps to kill the Director of the Agency. Across the table, the Agency employs a host of agents to try to flush out and kill the Burned Asset.
When Tokyo Highway debuted in 2016 it was an instant must have. It was one of the coolest looking games I had ever seen.
The little cars and the road construction were fantastic. Of course it was quite a challenge to play without causing a total disaster as it was super easy to knock everything down. In addition, there wasn’t that much game to be honest.
On a turn you build columns from your limited pillars and place roads. If your road crosses another player’s road either above or below you place a car. The first player to place all their cars won.
Forward to 2023 and Itten has released a new and improved version! Released domestically in Japan in 2023 and now on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for wider international release in 2024, Tokyo Highway Rainbow City has several improvements whilst keeping the same stylish components. To start, the cars are now made of rubber. The old cars were wood, which I tend to prefer, but they could slide easily off roads, especially steep inclines. The new rubber cars grip the roads a bit better which brings us to the second improvement. The roads now have little rubber ends on one side which let them stay better on the wood columns. The new version also comes with the all new tower, rainbow and municipal buildings as well as development plots for the previous buildings.
In addition and more importantly, there have been improvements to the game play. The advanced games provide Mission Rules. Mission Rules add just enough direction to your building to make the game more interesting. For example if you encircle a building with your highway, have the tallest column or build under the rainbow you earn extra points.
Overall I find the new version of Tokyo Highway much more to my liking. It still has a tremendous tabletop presence. The addition of the rubber feet for the roads and the rubber cars mean you also spend less time rebuilding the city or at least for those of with less dexterous abilities. I love the addition of the Mission Rules. It adds an increased level of competition for prime spots within the city and also a little more strategic planning. Trying to go get an off ramp at the airport of go through the rainbow is so much fun! Definitely worth the upgrade for a game already owned.
Thoughts From Other Opinionated Gamers:
Mark Jackson (1 play): It’s really satisfying to see and make a move that threads through the various roads whilst scoring you points. Additionally, Lorna is correct that the rubber feet & cars make the game much easier to play.
Love it: Lorna Like it: Mark Jackson, John P Neutral Not for Me
In Monumental, each player will control a civilization that will evolve through his city: a grid of 3×3 cards (coming out from the player’s starting civilization deck) that can each be activated to gather various resources such as Science, Military, Production, Culture, and Gold that will allow them to trigger many actions. But there’s a trick: one cannot activate all their cards at once, which means that tough choices will have to be made each turn in order to select the cards that are the most needed.
The resources gathered from the activated city cards will allow the players to acquire cards from a common pool, allowing them to get improved buildings, technologies, wonders, etc. and therefore to leverage their civilization deck to new heights through more and more efficient card combos. As the common pool of cards progresses (either as players have acquired cards or because they didn’t – which leads to one card from the pool to be discarded per turn), the game progresses through eras. Medieval cards are better than classical cards, and industrial cards are even better, but of course those cards are more and more expensive to acquire.
A modular board, at the center of the table, holds each civilization’s army. The board is made of Provinces to be conquered. Unoccupied Province’s inhabitants are barbarians who will provide resources to the player who defeats them. Holding a conquered province also brings victory points. The player with the most impressive civilization at the end of the game will be remembered for all time (and they also win the game!).
Lunar Rush is a simultaneous-play Euro-style board game that combines time-based resource management, market economics, bidding, and tableau/engine-building into a refreshing new genre. You play as one of Earth’s four major corporate conglomerates, competing to mine the Moon for the newly-discovered “wonder materials”: lunethyst crystals and lunarium ore. Every turn, players use their GigaCredits (GC = VP) to bid for the best space routes to and from the Moon. The slower the route, the more you can load on the ship. On the Moon, players simultaneously upgrade their bases and place their astronaut workers to produce the resources needed to maintain the base, as well as mine Moon goods to sell in Earth’s bustling dynamic markets. The game ends after seven turns, and the winner is the player with the highest score as measured in GC! The race to win the new gold rush is on!
