Havalandi

• Designer: Reiner Knizia
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Edition Spielwiese

You stand at the railing of the viewing pavilion, your gaze wandering into the distance. The soft colours around you glow in a soft light. From this beautiful location, fleets of your hot air balloons will soon dapple the sky with radiant hues. You couldn‘t be prouder, but as the horizon fills with these graceful flights of fancy, it will take careful planning to make sure that your balloons attract the most attention.

You are trying to score as many points as possible with clever placement of your balloons. Points are earned by launching the balloons of your fleets and forming the largest possible groups of your own balloons within the different regions. The launch sites at the pavilions are also highly coveted and offer you further opportunities to earn points. Choose the right launch site at the right time and score lots of points for your fleet!
The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Continue reading →

Sunrise Lane

• Designer: Reiner Knizia
• Publisher: Horrible Guild
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with copy provided by publisher

In Sunrise Lane, players take on the role of construction companies attempting to build up a residential neighborhood, and to do this, they need to pick prestigious plots of land on which to build houses and town structures.

In more detail, the game board depicts a grid of spaces that each show 1-5 dots in a single color, and each player has a set of colored House pieces, with the colors having no connection to the space on the board. On a turn, you either draw 2 colored cards from the deck and add them to your hand (with a limit of 5 cards in hand) or discard cards to place buildings, then draw a card.

When you build, you must build adjacent to a pre-existing structure (or the central space at the start of the game), and you must discard 1 or more cards of the same color as the dots in the space on which you want to build. You can discard 1-5 cards, after which you place 1-5 of your House pieces on this space, then score points equal to the number of dots on the space multiplied by the number of House pieces you placed. You can build multiple buildings on a turn as long as you build your next one adjacent to the last one you built.

When a player has 2 or fewer House pieces in their supply, the game ends, then players score endgame points, with two of the districts awarding points for the highest buildings and the other two for the most buildings. Additionally, points go to the player with the longest group of adjacent buildings.

Continue reading →

At The Office

• Designer: Renier Knizia
• Publisher: Trefl
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Trefl

At the Office is a roll-and-write game in which you roll five dice, choose a result, and assign it to a member of your team on the score sheet. When the active player chooses one result of the roll, it becomes unavailable to others. You need to consider the big picture and manage your team to score as many points as possible and win the title of Boss of the Year. Grab some pencils and dice, and get to work!

Continue reading →

Namiji

• Designer: Antoine Bauza
• Publisher: Funforge
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30-45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Flat River Group

In Namiji, you are fishers from the Japan of yesteryear, navigating south of the Japanese archipelago, a few kilometers from the famous Tokaido road. You will need to have a fruitful day at sea to win the game. To do this, you will have the opportunity to contemplate magnificent marine species, to fish with a line or a net to fill your racks with colorful fish, and haul in your crustacean traps. You can benefit from stops to improve your fishing equipment, and you will also have to contend with the gods of the sea by setting offerings afloat, or by fulfilling their wishes that they express during your contemplation with the Sacred Rocks, for which they will reward you.

Namiji features gameplay similar to Tokaido. The action spaces are laid out on the game board in a linear track, with players advancing down this track to take actions. The player who is currently last on the track takes a turn by advancing forward on the track to their desired action and taking that action, so players must choose whether to advance slowly in order to get more turns, or to travel more rapidly to beat other players to their desired action spaces. What players are doing on the track differs from what they do in Tokaido.

Continue reading →

Daybreak

• Designers: Matt Leacock + Matteo Menapace
• Publisher: CMYK
• Age: 10+
• Players: 1 – 4
• Time 60-90 minutes
• Played with copy provided by publisher

Daybreak is a co-operative game about climate action. Each player controls a world power, deploying policies and technologies to both dismantle the engine of global heating and to build resilient societies that protect people from life-threatening crises.

If the global temperature gets too high, or if too many people from any world power are in crisis, everyone loses. But if you work together to draw down global emissions to net-zero, you all win!

Continue reading →