October 2025
Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.
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Soda Jerk – 5/10Â
I’m always a sucker for a punny title and Soda Jerk fits the bill. The theme is extremely pasted-on, but you are ostensibly working an old timey soda fountain. And you will try to be a jerk to your opponents.
The structure of the game reminds me of Queen of the Cupcakes/King of the Beasts. You will play cards from your hand into the matching row to increase the overall value of that type of card in your hand. So let’s say you have a 1, 2, and 3 of blueberry in your hand. You could play the 1, making each blueberry worth 1, leaving you 5 points in hand. Or you could play the 3 and the 1, making each blueberry worth 4, leaving you 8 points in hand. This is essentially a stock holding game.
But whereas in QotC/KotB all cards are played face up, Soda Jerk has you playing cards facedown. This not only obscures the value of each row, it also allows for playing cards to the wrong row. Such wrong cards are negative points. This is where the “jerk” part comes in. Depending on the group, it’s reasonably likely to end up with every single card type scoring negative points by the end of the round.
There’s no reason to be too hard on an ultralight 15-minute game, even if it has some nasty take-that elements. It does present some difficult choices about whether to give up a card in hand to push the price higher and how to subtly cooperate with with your opponents. But the more aggressive approaches seemed overriding in my single play, which didn’t do this game any favors in my book.ÂÂ
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Life in Reterra – 6/10Â
You’ve probably played something like Life in Reterra before. This is a 30-minute tile-laying game where you add polyominos to your personal tableau. It’s heavier than Kingdomino but lighter than Planet Unknown.
Thematically, we’re in a cheerful post-apocalyptic world, a la Wall-E. Humans are still around, trying to build the best society they can out of the garbage of the past. This takes the form of placing polyomino building tiles atop the 4×4 grid of terrain tiles you’ll also be placing.
You’ll score points by creating contiguous terrain areas of at least 7 spaces. Some of these squares will also have gear icons on them, indicative of a space onto which a polyomino building can be placed. But all the polyomino tiles are at least two squares in size, and a tile will never offer two adjacent gears onto which such a tile can be placed. So you’ll need to plan ahead, especially for the very large buildings.
At the time you place a tile, you’ll need to decide if you want to instead cover a gear on it with an “inhabitant”. These will score you one point each, so you should definitely do it if you have no intention of ever putting a building tile atop it. But the end of the game is likely to see your board with several empty gear slots, the remnants of a building plan gone wrong, making you kick yourself over why you didn’t just put an inhabitant there in the first place.
If Life in Reterra has a distinctive from the many similar games of this type, it’s probably that many of its buildings offer interactivity in the form of messing with other players. If you think so-and-so is in the lead, you can build a building that lets you put negative-point garbage tokens onto his board. Personally, I think this mechanic is out-of-place in a game of this type, and likely to be a turnoff for the kinds of players who enjoy games like this. Yet I’m sure there is an audience out there that thinks this is just what their favorite light tile-layer needed to really get to the next level.ÂÂ
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This Game is Killer: Frozen Horror – 7/10Â
This Game is Killer: Frozen Horror is a recently-released sequel to last year’s This Game is Killer: Alien on Board. Both games are 15-minute party games that see players trying to survive elimination at the hands of an otherworldly creature. The original drew its inspiration from Alien while this one evokes The Thing.
Each player will be dealt two cards. Each card can be used either to move to a new location or for the action it specifies. But you do choose which one happens first. On your turn, choose a card and either take its action or its move. When its your turn again, you will be forced to use the other card in the opposite way you used the first card. So each player will move once and take one special action, but the order these things happen in is not set.
Then the horror attacks, killing a player that shares its room. In the original game, the attacked room was drawn randomly. But in this version, one of the players has been secretly possessed by the horror. This is honestly a nice change to the formula of the game. Rather than an arbitrary attack, the death of a character has likely been carefully orchestrated by one of their opponents.
On the other hand, this can feel a bit thematically jarring. In the next round, all players who are still alive have their roles reassigned, so the player who is the horror is likely to change from round to round. While this represents them being imitated, it doesn’t explain where the actual character was all this time.
Either one of these games is a solid choice for a large group looking for something a little different than a typical party game. The card actions themselves are what defy the game’s simple rules structure to really make it shine. Each action presents you with a fascinating choice about how best to survive and win, and also demands a bit of prediction of what your opponents will do. It’s not a deep game, but it delivers tension, laughter, and fun with very little overhead and demands to be played many times in a row.ÂÂ
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Fives – 7/10
ÂFives is a trick-taking game originally published in Japan in 2022, but recently released in a US version. Japanese designers have been a source of many of the recent twists on the genre, though Fives is a considerably tamer and more familiar take than some of its kin.Â
You’ll mostly be observing the standard trick-taking rules: you have to follow suit, highest card in the led suit takes the trick, there is one trump suit (which is always the silver cards). The pink suit doesn’t have the simple 1-13 that that others do, instead replacing its 5 with a 0. The 0 merely serves to indicate who leads the first trick. But the missing pink 5? Well that’s another story.
The back of every card in the deck is a pink 5. It is therefore possible to play any of these cards facedown as a pink 5 instead of its value on the face of the card (limit once per trick to prevent ties). Now you still do have to follow suit if possible, so no playing a pink 5 onto a led blue card when you have plenty of blues in hand. But this rule does not apply if you have only one card of the led suit remaining. So no getting forced into taking a trick you don’t want with your last card of a suit, so long as no one else has played a pink 5 yet.
Why wouldn’t you want to take a trick? Well, that’s the other twist. The card you use to win a trick stays faceup in front of you, contributing to your running total for the round. You’d like to get as close as possible to 25 without going over. Go over and you’ll end up losing a point for the round. Have the highest without going over, and you’ll take those lost points from each player who busted, plus three additional points. Second place and third place get 2 and 1 respectively, assuming they haven’t busted. Busting happens a lot, especially with newer players. The overall feel is generally of trying not to take tricks, and then striking at the right moment to win just a couple.
Like Marshmallow Test, Fives is simple enough to serve as an introductory trick-taker with a minor twist, yet still has something to offer veteran card-floppers. The limiting factor is player count, which is technically three or four, but really was designed for four exactly. A minor drawback in an otherwise worthy addition to a collection of lightweight trick-takers.ÂÂ
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Smartphone Inc. – 8/10Â
There are a lot of midweight euros these days. Many also leverage area control and network building mechanics. So in order to stand out from this crowded field, you need to have those mechanics honed very tightly, but also offer something fresh and new. And on that count, Smartphone Inc. delivers.
The hook is the way in which you generate your resources and actions. You start the game with two large chunky cards, each of which depicts some resources and actions. These are both double-sided, offering even more choice. Before each round, all players will, behind their privacy screens, set these cards to whichever side seems best to them. They are also required to overlap them in some way, potentially covering and thus negating useful actions. But each covered space also generates an extra resource. Right from the start, there are fascinating decisions to make. And this becomes exponentially more true as players acquire additional smaller cards that can also be overlapped onto their stacks.
One of the things these cards do is set the price of the phones you are selling. Lower priced players get to take their actions first, which is a serious advantage. Yet players going later can generate way more points by selling their phones at higher prices, assuming all the spaces for selling aren’t taken up by that point. This design walks the line very nicely between asking players to execute a personal strategy and while also needing to do just a bit of reading the other players.
Should you prioritize expanding your network to have more places to sell to or expanding your technologies so you can sell more to each location? Should you try to generate lots of phones at low prices or just a few at high prices? Is it more important to get extra cards that open up options for you or to research new special abilities? All of these choices are interdependent, as you give up one thing to do another, but also as you are influenced by the choices others are making. You can approach your strategy in lots of different ways, just make sure your plan isn’t “exactly what my opponent is doing, only worse”.
Smartphone Inc. doesn’t have eye-catching components or a flashy theme. Much of its design feels well-trodden. But the gimmick of the overlapping cards combined with some fascinating strategic and tactical choices help it rise above what you might expect from merely looking at the pieces or even reading the rules. There is emergent, intuitive gameplay here that demands to be explored.
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Great Western Trail: El Paso – 8/10
ÂThe Great Western Trail trilogy are some of my favorite games. Common to all of them (as well as to this new, lighter version) are that you will build a deck of farm animals that you will then have to deliver to the market periodically. In addition to the deckbuilding, there is a track movement element, whereby you have some control over how quickly you return to the market to score points, but doing so too quickly might mean skipping over spaces that offer other benefits.
El Paso maintains all those elements, but removes a lot of the complexity that the trilogy offers. As a side benefit, this probably cuts a good hour off the playing time. This is a distillation of the various complex elements down to their heart. Your turn is simply move to a new space, take the actions of the space, then refill your hand of cattle.
In addition to the deck of cattle, you start with a worker card of each type. Cowboy workers will let you buy better cows to add to your deck. Builder workers will let you construct new building spaces along the trail that only you can use. And Conductor workers will let you ride the train, getting bonus tiles for both endgame scoring and immediate benefits. When used, these workers will go to your discard pile, but this is only temporary. As your deck is reshuffled, these workers will be drawn, put back into your personal supply, and then immediately replaced with another card. Thus your hand of cards will only ever consist of cattle, but this provides a clean and elegant way for your workers to be temporarily unavailable for a slightly unpredictable amount of time.
I can understand how some people who are very invested in the original trilogy might see El Paso as an inferior “junior” version, or at best a gateway introduction to the “real” Great Western Trail. Those critiques are not entirely off-base; El Paso ranks a bit lower than its brethren in my view as well. Yet I also think El Paso has plenty to offer on its own, and I can see reaching for it above any others if the mood strikes. Like each sequel to the original, it offers enough twists that your shelf probably has room for all of them.ÂÂÂ
A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.
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Orleans – 9/10Â
Orleans was on my “to try” list for quite some time. When I finally got to play it, I was so enamored of that I immediately purchased it, along with some upgraded components and an expansion I’d never even played.
I love deck-builders and bag-builders, so perhaps it’s not shocking I found this game appealing, but even I was pleasantly surprised by how well-integrated that mechanic was into what is ultimately a lovely middleweight euro. While Orleans also includes elements of action selection, racing, and pick-up-and-deliver, these elements work seamlessly together to create a complex tapestry of strategic decisions comprised of really simple individual mechanics.
Each turn, players will draw a set number of tokens out of their bags. Each of these tokens represents a different role. Most actions you can take involve two or three of these different roles teaming up to execute an action. So right off the bat, deciding how to allocate your worker tokens can create deliciously difficult decisions. One of the most common actions you can take allows you to add another token to your bag. Not all roles even appear in your bag at the start, so taking actions that require these roles is a multi-turn process. But in the meantime, other players may begin traveling around the village, picking up and delivering goods and building buildings. Once a good is picked up, it’s gone, and once a location has a building, no more can be added, so being first to these locations is crucial as well. Still other actions allow you to permanently reduce costs of your actions, get new action options only you can take, and many more as well. There is strong tension in sequencing your actions, being aware of other the other players’ progress, and monitoring the ever-dwindling resources.
You might think that with so many interlocking systems that the scoring would be one of those “point salad” affairs where the last 5 minutes of the game are spent doing arithmetic. Not so! Orleans is remarkably simple in your goals. None of the tokens you add to your bag contribute to scoring in any way; they are simply a means to an end. Your buildings are each worth the number you progressed to on the development track, then this score is simply added to your money and trade goods. The end.
Orleans is easy to grasp, but tremendously difficult to play well. Nevertheless, it doesn’t feel punishing or mean-spirited. My favorite new-to-me game of 2021 and the second best game of 2014 behind only Xia. |
Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 28)
Every now and then I remind readers that all my snapshots are stored in BGG as comments – that’s roughly 3450 games and 270 expansions and counting. My username is alzsara.
One approach to get easy access to these is to make me a GeekBuddy. Then, anytime you’re interested in my take on a game, access the GeekBuddy analysis at the top of the game page and if I’ve played it (chances are) you can either take my mini-review as gold or as a bucket of tripe depending on how well our game tastes correlate. Hopefully you have a feel for that by now after this many years.
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