Knights & Pigs & Frogs… Oh My! – A Gaming Weekend Report

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Mark Jackson

I love long gaming weekends… especially when one or both of my now-grown-up sons are involved. This last weekend, my eldest came back to visit along with three of his close friends to (a) celebrate his impending 24th birthday, and (b) play a whole lot of board games. 

Here’s the interesting thing – while we did play a couple of newer games, there was a lot of “dig into the depths of Mark’s game collection” that brought some unusual games back to the table. (In one case, it had been nearly 14 years since I played it.) So what follows is an archaeological expedition through the layers of strata that exists on the shelves in my game room. 

THURSDAY

Cabanga! (2024)

One of Braeden’s birthday presents… and one we convinced my non-gamer wife to join us in. In gamer parlance, this is a shedding game – aka “get rid of your cards” – but I like it as an excuse to yell “Cabanga!” and laugh a lot. Very non-gamer friendly (my wife enjoyed it) but a little crowd dependent. (I’ve played one time with folks who played slowly and methodically… and it pretty much sucked the fun out of it.)

Dungeon Lords (2009)

A long-time favorite game of worker (minion) placement and considerable humorous thematic bits, it’s a lot for new players. It probably didn’t help that we play with the Festival Season expansion added in… but great fun was had by all. I managed to parlay a “be the nicest dungeon lord ever” strategy into a commanding win.

FRIDAY

Battleball (2003)

The miniatures are cool – but it’s just dumbed-down Blood Bowl with a lot of dice rolling. That doesn’t stop it from being fun (just ask fellow OG writer Erik Arneson, who hosts a yearly Battleball event). I lost this one due to – no surprise – the dice.

Faraway (2023)

The trickiest part of teaching this excellent card game is helping people understand the reverse scoring mechanism. (Pro tip: have everyone turn all 8 of their cards over and flip them one at a time from right to left.) I’m curious what the upcoming expansion for Faraway will add to the game – it seems pretty well perfect as is.

Tales of the Arthurian Knights (2024)

I had the privilege of playing the prototype of Arthurian Knights at the designer’s home back in 2022 (hi, Andrew – thanks again for the wonderful day!). Finally getting to break out my early Father’s Day present (thanks again to both my sons!) was a delight – as was our long (3 hours) but highly enjoyable four-player “full” game. 

I want to get a couple more plays under my belt before writing a review, but my initial impression is that Arthurian Knights solved a number of the clunky design issues with its inspiration, Tale of the Arabian Nights:

  • Instead of look-up tables & cross-referencing, cards from two different decks are combined to create encounters and give paragraph numbers.
    • The two decks have different card counts, which means that you cannot have the same encounter twice in a single game.
  • Eliminating the hidden victory condition
  • Eliminating the weird land/sea movement rules
  • Creating “story” elements that can reverberate in later game encounters
  • Loosening up the way quests work (players can have two quests) and making them generally less difficult to complete

Couple all of that with the incredibly high quality of the writing (as someone who loves to read Arthurian legends, the team nailed the feel of the various stories throughout the game) and you have an excellent “choose your own adventure” game. 

Note: it IS a “choose your own adventure” game with a big book of paragraphs and dice rolls. And it’s not short. So, buyer/player beware.

I did play another game of this solo on Sunday evening after the guys were headed back home. While everything mechanically works (the solo system stands in for the other players and their choices), the game is better with other players involved – it has a definite RPG edge that I really like.

River Valley Glassworks (2024)

I like the production quality of this game – and I like the gameplay as well. For me, it’s a simple “draft stuff to score points on a grid” game (not unlike Azul or Splendor), but the short playing time and the tricky decisions makes River Valley Glassworks the best of that bunch for me.

New Frontiers (2018)

One of Braeden’s friends is a big fan of the Race for the Galaxy universe – but hadn’t had the opportunity to play New Frontiers. So, with The Starry Rift expansion (recommended!) added in, I proceeded to play one of my personal worst games of New Frontiers. I was a lesson in how NOT to win the game… meanwhile, my son was pushing the game end timer and running us over. Another personal favorite.

Expedition (1996)

I love this game – and somehow, I’m preternaturally good at it. (It’s just one of those game systems that I grok without even thinking deeply about it. My younger son has the same grasp of It’s A Wonderful World.) This share route-building game is a must-try if you’re new (or newer) to the hobby… and it’s actually in print again.

The Magic Labyrinth (2009)

While it’s relatively easy to find this wonderful memory/hidden maze game, the very helpful expansion (with additional one-way walls/traps and three magical items per player) was sadly never published in the U.S. As Magic Labyrinth is a memory game, I get worse at it every time I play (I blame old age and rising senility), but it is still a fantastic game for kids and adults.

7 Wonders: Architects (2021)

I know some folks have disdain for this much simpler take on 7 Wonders… but it’s proven to be a hit with most of the groups I play with due to easy rules, playable with 7 players, and short (30 minutes max.) playing time. I enjoy Architects even more with the Medals expansion, which offers another way to score points. 

Cosa Nostra (1990)

Also known as Vendetta, this is a backgammon-ish race with a drive-by mobster spinner in the center of the board. If that description doesn’t excite you, you should just find something more sedate to play. 

Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014)

My eldest was actually a credited playtester on the Secrets expansion – and he worked the whole “moat” strategy to a win. I really enjoy Castles – though it’s a bit trickier to incorporate new players as correctly valuing rooms is a learned skill.

Memoir ‘44 (2004)

21 years after I had the chance to help demo one of the first convention Overlord games at KublaCon, I’m still playing Memoir ‘44. (The excellent implementation on BGA is just increased my play count.)

We played the Bastogne Overlord map (one of the oldest Overlord maps) and had a historically accurate ending, as the Americans (my team) defeated the Axis forces (my son’s team). 

King of Monster Island (2022)

We played King of Monster Island (a birthday gift from my sister to my son) twice – once with five players and the weakest boss, and then a second time with three players and the next most difficult boss. Our five player experience felt “off” – the game was too short and didn’t really have any arc to the cooperative attempt to defeat the boss. 

In contrast, the three player game worked well and gave us plenty of chances to do clever things. I’d need a few more games to be sure whether the problem was player count or boss difficulty.

Mechanically, it’s King of Tokyo against an AI-run boss… but there are a number of nice changes to KoT that give the players more flexibility in their decision-making.

Thunder Road: Vendetta (2023)

To end the night, the five of us drove into the Carnival of Chaos (last year’s Thunder Road: Vendetta expansion) and mayhem ensued. Cars launched into space by killer pillars, a dune buggy shoved off the entrance road to its doom, spotlight hogging, and more than one vehicle on fire.

It was glorious… even though I got edged out of the win by a single point of scrap.

SATURDAY

Can’t Stop (1980)

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again: THIS game, not Acquire, is Sid Sackson’s masterpiece. (Again, the implementation on BGA of Can’t Stop is great – and if you haven’t played it before, you owe it to yourself to enjoy the king of push-your-luck dice games.)

Froschkönig (2003)

From the sublime to the ridiculous… this Zoch game is thematically about extending your frog tongue long enough to kiss the princess. Yes, you read that right.

Mechanically, you are attempting to “bid” the longest without going over (Price is Right vibes) pair of sticks in order to add to your tongue. 

No, this isn’t the weirdest game in my collection – but it’s up there.

7 Wonders (2010)

I love 7 Wonders – my complete set (including all the expansions + the promo card and wonder packs) is the first edition. That means we don’t often play with Leaders, as the iconography is sometimes inscrutable.

My son owns the second edition – and so we played with Leaders, Cities, and Edifice. Hats off to Repos for fixing three different things in the 2nd edition:

  • Each box (base game & expansion) has multiple copies of the sheet that explains the icons).
  • The icons (and tokens) for Leaders were cleaned up and made much easier to understand – meaning Leaders is no longer as much of a drag on playing time as it was.
  • The icons in general have been changed to mimic the style of 7 Wonder Duel – which is MUCH easier to read across the table.

Still one of the best games for groups of 5-7 players (and it works well with 3-4 or with 8 playing with the team rules from the Cities expansion.)

Suburbia (2012)

My game group back in Fresno was one of the groups who blind-playtested Suburbia… and even though we managed to get rules wrong (confusion about what qualified as a borough), we loved it. I bought the first real copy I saw… and when the deluxified version came out a few years ago, I got myself a copy and handed down my original set to my eldest son.

Five player games are tricky in Suburbia – tiles which trigger for “every X” can be really valuable and thus leave other valuable tiles untouched. 

My only gripe about the game is how long it takes to set up – but I prepped the tile stack a couple of days before the weekend, so set up was much easier. I think I’ll try to do that from now on when I know we’re likely to play.

Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age (2008)

After years of playing with the downloadable Late Bronze Age scoring sheets, it was weird to go back to the original Roll Through the Ages game – but I still find the cross between Civilization & Yahtzee to be a lot of fun. (Honestly, my favorite implementation of this is now Era: Medieval Age… probably because of the cute 3D city you end up building.)

Rüsselbande (2001)

Dungeonquest (1985)

Set the Wayback Machine for the year my son was born – and I’d already been stockpiling kids games for him. That includes this silly racing game with stackable pigs. For four adults, Rüsselbande is a pleasant time-waster; for kids & parents, a great game.

I’ve been playing Dungeonquest since the mid-80s… it’s a 40 year old game now. And, to be fair, it definitely shows some of its age, what with the need for cheat sheets to explain some of the cards.

On the other hand, it has been a reliable source of fun and laughter for forty years… and last weekend was no exception. For the first time in a long time, three of the four adventurers managed to make it to the dragon’s lair… at the same time. Only one of them (not me) got out alive.

I wish I could point you towards a good source to purchase the game – but I can’t. It’s way OOP… and the reimaginings by Fantasy Flight from more than a decade ago are also incredibly difficult to find.

The Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018)

It’s a lot of fun to introduce a new group of players to Quacks (and no, I’m not a fan of the new box art… but I’m also not going to be a butthead about it). As well as it went over, I’m guessing we’ll throw in the Herb Witches expansion the next time they’re all here.

Race for the Galaxy (2007)

Yes, some folks whine and cry about the iconography in Race for the Galaxy – but they’re missing out on a tremendous game while they do that. 

We played with the Xeno Invasion rules – which my son and I had always wanted to try with a bigger group of players. It was tricky – and enjoyable. (I feel the same way about the Alien Orb rules… I don’t want to use them all the time, but they’re a nice change of pace every once in a while.)

In the Footsteps of Darwin (2023)

I’m not sure exactly what people/companies mean when they describe a game as “cozy” – but for me, In the Footsteps of Darwin pretty much covers it. Reasonable playing time (30 minutes or so), great artwork and graphic design (including all the information you need to remember rules on the player mats and game board in icon form), and simple decisions. 

Adrenaline (2016)

The boys & I have described Adrenaline as “an area control game cleverly disguised as a first person shooter (FPS) game” – and that’s pretty much what it is. I will note that as much as I enjoy the game, there are two potential problems:

  1. The card iconography is sometimes a little weird – and there’s only one manual that explains each card. (I’ve added some downloadable things from BGG to help.)
  2. It has one of the worst expansions I’ve every played. I own it, but I never want to use it in actual play.

SUNDAY

7 Wonders Duel (2015)

We tried to play the original 7 Wonders using the 2 player rules back in the day – it wasn’t very good. 7 Wonders Duel is good – very good.

Happy to play any version: base game, with the Agora or Pantheon expansions, or Lord of the Rings style. 

Family Business (1982)

We’re talking ‘old skool’ now… a take-that game with pretty much unrelenting meanness. We’ve been playing it since the early 90s… and strangely enough, my non-gamer wife still likes it. (I think there’s a lot of good memories of playing with friends over the years.) 

It’s not a horrible game – but Red Dragon Inn covers the same general territory with more interesting decisions and more humor.

Ab die Post! (1996)

I miss the publisher Goldsieber – even when the games in the big rectangular boxes weren’t perfect, they had sparks of whimsy and interesting ideas. (Excellent example: Klaus Teuber’s sedan chair racing game, Galopp Royal, or Vino’s round grape markers.) Their children’s games were excellent – I still own many of them – and I’m glad to be carting around the brick load that is two copies of Carabande and an Action Set.

Ab die Post! Is essentially “blackjack for children” along with a cloud shaker. (The shaker mechanism would show up again in Starfarers of Catan.) It’s lighter than air and a bit stupid – but we had fun with it.

Nur Peanuts (2001)

Also from Goldsieber, I described Heinz Meister’s coolest ‘adult’ design as “Monopoly reduced to its evil essence.” My son later named it “Sunk Cost Fallacy: The Board Game.” Neither one of us is wrong.

Nur Peanuts is a highly abstracted property game with a sickening lurch of debt spiral and the illusion of control with a variety of dice you can choose to roll. I’m still smitten by it nearly 25 years later.

Giro Galoppo (2006) 

The weekend ended with the meanest kid game I won – the really pretty (wooden painted horses! Jockeys with felt caps!) and evil racing game from Selecta. Giro Galoppo is a simultaneous selection game where going last is better as you try to avoid getting pushed backwards or forced into an obstacle. I don’t play it with kids much – too many chances to get feelings hurt – but it’s a great “end of the night” game for adults.

Final Thoughts

It wasn’t on purpose – but we managed to have at least one game from every five year time period going back to 1980. 

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Josiah’s Monthly Board Game Round-Up – May 2025

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Josiah Fiscus
N/A

May 2025

Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.


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The Loop – 5/10­

The Loop is a cooperative game in which the players must travel through time to stop Dr. Faux and his army of clones from destroying the world. The theme is novel and the graphic design is garish and eye-catching, though the mechanics themselves are a bit rote. This is essentially another “each player uses their unique power to stop the thing from spreading all over the board” type co-op, made most famous by Pandemic.

At the start of each turn, you will add some clones to the board. Then, you will randomly select one of the board sections and point the central cube tower at it. This indicates Dr. Faux’s location for the turn. Then, you will drop some red “rift cubes” into the tower. They are likely to tumble onto Dr. Faux’s board section, but might end up in an adjacent one instead. If there are ever more than three rift cubes in one section, an outbreak -er, I mean, “vortex”- occurs. If a fourth vortex ever happens, you’ve lost the game.

The amount of cubes dropped into the tower is equal to two plus the number of clones on that board section, so controlling the amount of clones is an important task. But more importantly, you need to complete missions. These are often things you want to do anyway (defeating clones, removing rift cubes, etc.), but will sometimes specify a specific location they need to be performed at. Complete four missions to win the game.

Obviously, there is variance in the difficulty based on how many rift cubes show up where and when. But there is also randomness in the available actions you can take. It’s not as simple is “spend an action to move a space” or “spend an action to remove a rift cube”. Instead, you will draw three cards from your personal deck at the start of each turn, and these will give you your possible actions. Desperately need to clear a rift cube, but didn’t draw a card that allows it? Tough luck.

Like many cooperative games, this is essentially just an optimization puzzle with regular random events to add challenge. The initial scenario seemed remarkably easy to win, but scaling up the difficulty really just means adding even more variance. This is an issue I have with most co-operative games, with the very best ones like Pandemic Legacy and Defenders of the Last Stand avoiding this fate through strong thematic elements. But The Loop doesn’t have enough strength of theme to commend it over any other cube-pushing co-op.­­


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Kinfire Delve – 6/10­

Kinfire Delve draws you in immediately with its beautifully illustrated and foiled cards. Each player gets their own set, representing the character they will play and their abilities. This is a cooperative game, though it really might be closer to a solo experience, since it caps out at two players.

The goal of the game is to get through the entire enemy deck, though this does not mean defeating every card in it. Instead, the reward for defeating one of the four monsters is to discard several cards from the top of the deck, before finally replacing the defeated monster with the next monster from the deck. This means that the specific monsters you face can be quite varied game to game. That does incentivize replays, but it also injects a good bid of variance in the difficulty, especially since many monsters have abilities that get stronger in the presence of other specific monsters.

Hand management is paramount here. If you run out of useful attacks, you will need to take a turn off, using one of your precious refreshes. Each time you do this, the enemy will give you a curse card that will make your life harder. Get too many of these before getting through the deck and you lose the game.

When you finally make it through the deck, you will fight the boss. These boss fights also come in several versions, with the boss abilities randomized each game. They take a long time, as they should, and often feature resetting or healing, creating some groan-worthy moments. This works well, as it really makes the boss fight feel significant and different from the rest of the game.

Kinfire Delve is well-designed and well-produced. But, even in two-player, it has a solitaire kind of feel. Much like a bored grandma playing Klondike on her front porch, you might occasionally have a moment of reductive realization, where you go, “So I’m just flipping cards off the deck all by myself?” For some, this may not be a problem. But for me, I strongly prefer games to be played with other people. And even the two-player version doesn’t provide enough interesting team collaboration to elevate the experience.


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The Six of VIII – 7/10

­The Six of VIII is a trick-taking game themed around the six wives of Henry VIII. There are six suits in the game, each representing one of the wives. And the amount of cards in each suit corresponds to the length of time he was married to them.

While there is a three-player variant using a dummy hand, this game is specifically designed for four players in two partnerships. I love team vs. team games in general, so this is a plus for me. But it does of course bring with it the drawback of limiting how often you can get this one to the table.

Each hand consists of 15 tricks, with the trump suit changing periodically. It starts with the Catherine of Aragon suit as trump, and then after a few tricks changes to the Anne Boleyn suit. This continues through each of the wives, with the amount of tricks corresponding to the length of their marriage. This is the primary twist to the trick-taking genre, and it works well. It creates interesting decisions about whether to throw off a low card now or to save it for later when it will become trump.

Teams score a point for each trick they take, with bonus points awarded by some cards taken (usually middle values). Decisions abound here as well, such as whether to throw a high-point, but potentially useful card into a trick your partner is already winning. There are a few other little wrinkles as well, such as giving the losing team the “church” card, which lets them annul any trick that was just taken, once per hand.

As you’d expect, the theme is not strongly-integrated here. And yet, it does a reasonable job of “making sense” and serving as a mnemonic to aid in play. Maybe you’ll even learn some history. The Six of VIII succeeds at its goals, but it is nevertheless “yet another trick-taker” in an increasingly crowded field. I’d like to see more designers take the partnership approach to their designs like this, but also to find ways to do this while allowing for more player count flexibility.­­


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Five Tribes – 7/10

­It’s strange that a game that came out over a decade ago and has been in the BGG Top 100 ever since has not made it to the table for me until now. Better late than never, I suppose. Five Tribes uses a Mancala-style mechanic, similar to Trajan or Istanbul, though it feels much closer to its abstract roots than either of these games.

On your turn, you will choose a section of the board, pick up all the meeples in it, and then move an equal number of spaces, dropping off one meeple in each space travelled to. There are two aspects that set this apart from a traditional mancala mechanic though. First is that you aren’t obligated to move in just one direction. In fact, with each move you can go up, down, left, or right, though no backtracking is allowed. This opens up a lot of decisions. Second is that your final move must see you dropping off a meeple of a color already present on your destination space. While this does restrict your choices, it also incentivizes planning, sometimes several turns ahead. Each of the five colors of meeple (tribes) lets you score points in a different way. Some give immediate points, some are a competition to get the most of a color, others can be turned in for cards or special abilities, and so on. Many of these are interactive with your opponents, either by competition or by directly interfering with them. As mentioned, there is some planning ahead, but Five Tribes is far more about opportunistic tactics than game-long strategy execution.

Five Tribes provides depth of skill with very simple rules, much in the way that an abstract game does. However, this also brings with it a risk of analysis paralysis. It’s often hard to tell who is winning until the very end, which is great if players are willing to make tactical decisions based on vibes. But more analytical folks may have a nagging feeling that they could math it all out if they just took ten minutes per turn, a compulsion that would turn the game from fun to insufferable. And of course, played with more than two players, inadvertent player chaos is a real risk as well, wherein an opponent might mess up your plans without even realizing they’ve done so. Nevertheless, Five Tribes delivers on thoughtful fun in a 60-minute time frame.­­


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Bomb Busters – 8/10­

Bomb Busters has just been announced as a Spiel des Jahres nominee, so I was excited to give it a try and see what all the buzz was about. I’ve mentioned how co-ops generally need to have a strong thematic element to get me really excited, and that’s not entirely absent here. But there is another way in which a co-op can catch my interest: rewarding mind-melding teamwork. Bomb Busters excels at generating thrilling collaborative moments through limited communication, in the same way that games like Hanabi, The Crew, and Sky Team do.

Players will take on the role of a bomb squad, albeit a cute anthropomorphic one, likely to make any failures seem less dark. Each player gets randomly dealt about a dozen “wire” cards, which they arrange in numerical order, but with the actual values hidden from the other players. The goal is then to match a wire number from your own set with a wire number from another player’s. Match up all the wires to win.

But of course it can’t be as simple as that. Wrong guesses will give you information, but will also push the team closer to failure. There is also a red wire lurking in one player’s cards, that if selected will cause an immediate loss. And as the 66 scenarios progress, they get even more difficult, with further special wires, rules, and complications.

Bomb Busters’ rules are easily grasped, but the strategic elements reveal themselves more gradually over several plays. And those plays are addicting, the failures even more so. “We we’re so close! Just one more try!” you will exclaim. That’s a real positive for a game so simple to learn.­­


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Paper Tales – 8/10­

It can be a challenge for a gateway-weight card drafting game to do something that feels different from its competitors, but Paper Tales pulls it off nicely. Rather than focusing on mechanics like set collection, you will try to draft a mini-engine of sorts. But the drafting is the real heart of the game, presenting brutally difficult decisions with every card you choose.

The game is played over four rounds, alternating passing left and right each round. Each hand in a round only has five cards, which is quite a small number of total cards drafted throughout the game. Not only that, but each card also has a cost to play it, meaning it’s possible to put yourself in a situation where you can’t actually use all the cards you take. These two factors combine for an experience filled with the satisfaction of being rewarded for making disciplined choices. You can’t just take the flashiest stuff, but you also have to make the most of each one of your draft picks.

To further complicate things, the cards you draft will work differently depending on how you arrange them in front of you. Only your front line cards contribute to your attack strength, so taking too many strong cards is pointless since you will have to place some in your back line. You will also have to decide how much to prioritize cards that generate income. Your starting money is likely going to be depleted after the first round, so if you ignore income generation, you’ll be priced into only taking weak cards in the next round.

In yet another wrinkle, the cards you take will “age” each round, meaning you are likely to get only two rounds out of each one. It’s rarely possible to keep a card you drafted in the first round until the end of the game, so you will constantly need to adapt your strategy. Should you commit resources to building buildings that generate ongoing value each round? Or is it more important to score points by having higher combat strength than your neighbors?

Paper Tales crams a ton of decisions into a 30-minute time frame, while still remaining lightweight enough to be accessible for almost anyone. Since its debut in 2017, it’s received a couple expansions, but only one of them is even available in English. The game seems largely to have gone under the radar, which is a shame. The game is good, and not just on paper.­­­


N/A

A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.

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Heroscape – 10/10

­I picked this up in college at Walmart on a whim, thinking at least I could use the cool dragon for another game as this one would probably be bad. But then it wasn’t. And I just kept playing it. And they put out expansion packs. And I kept buying them. I joined a fan site and posted constantly. Within just a few weeks, the gamer who had always said “Oh I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite board game” suddenly could. 

Heroscape is a tactical minis game where you roll boatloads of dice to try to kill all of your opponent’s figures. (Usually. Scenarios and alternate win conditions are plentiful.) The board is built out of plastic Lego-esque tiles that provide not just visual variety, but actual strategic consideration. The rules themselves are simple and intuitive, but each of the hundreds of offical figures (and thousands of community-made figures) breaks the rules in its own way.  

If Heroscape has a drawback, it’s the setup time, but this is a necessary evil for the incredible variety in the maps. You can build anything you want from tundra to jungle to enormous castles. And then fight your dudes all over it. Dudes who can be anything from cowboys to ninjas to robots to orcs riding dinosaurs. 

Easy to teach to everyone, and everyone I have ever taught has loved it. Lots of dice rolling, yet the real strategy comes from army synergy and clever piece movement. The role of luck is overstated in this game; in tournament play the same names have risen to the top year after year. Infinitely replayable, truly never the same game twice. The permutations of maps and armies are uncountable. If you had to play only one game for the rest of your life, that game should be Heroscape.­
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Dale Yu: Review of Ingenious: Single-Player Travel Edition

Posted on June 3, 2025 by Dale Yu

Ingenious: Single-Player Travel Edition

  • Designer: Reiner Knizia
  • Publisher:  Kosmos
  • Players: 1
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 1 to 5 minutes per challenge
  • Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4myaaGM
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

Spark your inner genius with this pocket-sized puzzle game. Your goal is to place the colorful domino-style tiles in exactly the right places to complete each challenge. With 200 challenges in four difficulty levels and a compact case, this game provides hours of puzzle-solving fun, virtually anywhere. Play solo, or pass the game around to challenge your family and friends. Put your logical thinking skills to the test! Can you master all of the challenges?

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Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 12)

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Dale Yu

I played Oranges and Lemons recently. It’s another new should-be-90min Euro that went 150 minutes. Or as I’m starting to think about these types of games, how many times can I go to the bathroom before it’s my turn again. In early rounds it was a 0-bathroom game but it became a 4-bathroom game by end-game.

When I started in the hobby, the gloried games tended long. Think Advanced Civ, 18xx, Avalon Hill, Die Macher, Roads & Boats, as well as grail games like Fugger, Welser, Medici and Das Verschwinden. These were niche though. With the rise of the SdJ games became shorter, simpler, and (being more accessible with more interesting mechanisms than roll-and-move) more popular. 45-60 minutes was the ideal. Think Settlers of Catan, Euphrat & Tigris, Ticket To Ride. Long became old-school.

 

But as the years go by, there’s only so much simplicity one can bear before getting jaded by same-old, same-old. The term JASE arose – Just Another Soulless Euro. Designers started blending Ameri-Trash and Euto in response.  The increased tolerance for longer games led to appetite for increasing Euro complexity. The big popular games nowadays are often seen coming in at 120-180 minutes.

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Dale Yu: Review of The Case of the Curiously Correct Blueprints (Spoiler Free)

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Dale Yu

The Case of the Curiously Correct Blueprints

As a member of the SHhhh, We’re Reading Book Club in Hincksville, you’ve been patiently awaiting your turn to read the advance copy of the highly anticipated new Ells and Ernie mystery, when Mr. Hincks gives you some shocking news: your copy of the book is at the bottom of a vat of candy! Never fear, Mr. Hincks will save the day! (Which is only fair, seeing as he was the one that ruined the day.)

Mr. Hincks has recorded an abridged audio version of the book and put together a box of peculiar reference materials in order to recreate the story for you before the book club meeting. But there’s one problem: the first rule of book club is, NO SPOILERS! How can Mr. Hincks recap this mystery book for you without spoiling any of the twists? You’re not quite sure, but he seems to have a few puzzling tricks up his sleeves.

Can you unlock all the audio clips before the SHhhh, We’re Reading Book Club meeting? What are these mysterious markups on the reference pages?? How can a set a blueprints that are correct be curious???

Answer all of these questions and more in… The Case of The Curiously Correct Blueprints!

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Dale Yu: Review of Architects of Amytis

Posted on May 29, 2025 by Dale Yu

Architects of Amytis

  • Designer: Jeremy Ducret and Romaric Galonnier
  • Publisher: La Boite de Jeu
  • Players: 2
  • Age: 10+
  • Time: 30 minutes
  • Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/43lhYUN
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

The King of Babylon wants to offer a marvelous present to his wife, Queen Amytis: The most beautiful city ever created. He asks two of the best Architects in the world to design the city, and only the very best one will be built. It’s now up to you to create the best design.

Les Architectes d’Amytis (“Architects of Amytis”) is a Tile placement game, containing some worker placement and even some “Tic Tac Toe” mechanisms. During your turn, you’ll have to select a tile among the available ones on the main board, and place one of your Architect Pawn on the corresponding pile.

Then, you’ll place the tile on your board wherever you want (on a free spot, or covering another tile to make your city grow higher). Each tile is colored (4 colors) and represents a building (6 different types). Each building type will score directly when you place the tile. And the colors will allow you to reproduce some of the King’s projects (a colored pattern inside your city) that will grant you points at the end of the game.


Furthermore, while placing your architects on the main board, if you manage to create a line, row or diagonal of 3, you’ll be granted a King’s favor: another type of score,triggered at the end of the game.  Buildings all have 2 types of scoring, so you can play different kind of games one after the other Which strategy will you choose to create the most marvelous city of the World? 

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