When it comes to modern board gaming, there is no denying the impact that The Settlers of Catan (now just Catan)has had on the hobby, bringing the ideology of modern game design to players around the world in a format that’s approachable, digestible, and easy to learn. While not a perfect game by any means, it’s a game that’s launched an empire. And now, that empire is going portable.

Now, this isn’t Catan’s first foray into portability. 1996 saw the introduction of Catan: the Card Game, a small box, two-player version of the game. In 2002, the Catan: Portable Edition was released, a tiny plastic version of the base game. Then, in 2010, Rivals for Catan was released, another small box, two-player game based in the Catan universe. Each of these has its issues. Aside from the fact that the two-player games are only for two players, once the games are in progress, they turn into sprawling behemoths that take up almost as much (if not more) space than the board game they’re replacing. As for the Portable Edition, when I say it’s tiny, I’m not mincing words. The cards are miniature versions of the already small cards from the regular game. The plastic road pieces are about as long as the average thumbnail is wide.

When I…

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Alliterations with F

There's a short list of board game designers whose names alone will make me flip over a box. Joseph Z. Chen and Randy Flynn are firmly on it, largely on the strength of Fantastic Factories. It's that rare engine-builder I can hand to absolute beginners and watch them fall in love with, striking a perfect balance between easy-to-learn rules and deep strategic crunch.

So when their names turned up on a game called Frenzy Falls, I was curious before I'd read a single rule. A card game about waterfalls, about pools filling up past where they're supposed to? Sure, why not. I've been talked into stranger premises than that.

[caption id="attachment_332196" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] Photo from USAopoly[/caption]

Slip-n-Slide

Published by The Op, Frenzy Falls seats two to six players around a row of Pools, each one anchored by a Score card showing a water value and a point value. On your turn, you slide a card face-down into whichever Pool you like, trying to control exactly when it tips over. Once a Pool's water total reaches ten, it spills. Whoever's stacked the most influence icons there takes the Score card, and whoever's holding the most points when the cards run out wins the game.

What you can't account…

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Canvas - K. David Ladage

My colleague, Bob Pazehoski, wrote a review of Canvas back at the start of 2023. His assessment was that the game was midline: not bad, not great, just sort of there (3 stars). My friend Steve came up over a weekend and introduced it to my wife and I. We both thought it was gorgeous, fun, and engaging. If you want a good overview of the mechanics, please read Mr. Pazehoski’s review. But check it out for yourself! 

The table presence of the updated board from one of the expansions is amazing (sorry, this was Steve’s copy and I do not know which expansion did what to this game). The added depth of the Signature Style cards (also added in an expansion) is amazing, while not increasing the game’s difficulty. And the mechanics of creating the perfect painting are exquisite.

In the games we played, all of us would spend time reminding ourselves that the paint swatches at the bottom of each card were the game element, not the beautiful painting elements. I had to force myself to put in a piece of art which scored more points, but which did not meet my own aesthetics a couple of times. In the end, all of my paintings,…

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Yeah…we’re back on track.

After a so-so run with Masters of Crime: Incognito—the fourth game in the KOSMOS one-shot mystery game series—I waited a few months before attacking the fifth game, Masters of Crime: Mosquito. My wife and I carved out a Friday night, grabbed a laptop, and sent the kids off to bed early. Would Masters of Crime continue a downward trend with Mosquito, or would the road to recovery be lined with gold?

I’m happy to report—so, so happy to report—that Masters of Crime: Mosquito sits comfortably alongside the other three exceptional MoC titles, Vendetta, Rapture, and Shadows. And, like Shadows, Mosquito has an ace up its sleeve, by serving as both a murder mystery AND an adventure game by extending into two solid halves that features plenty of puzzles in a wide range of difficulties alongside a story that riffs on many great films of the last 30-40 years.

KOSMOS now sells all five of these titles as a five-pack. While Incognito is a bump in the road, it’s still worth buying all five of these titles at once if you are new to the series. Masters of Crime is the best one-shot cooperative mystery series on the market.

I’ll share a few thoughts below in this spoiler-free review.

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Hidden movement games occupy a strange corner of the tabletop world. Compared to juggernauts like deckbuilding, worker placement, and engine building, the genre feels like it has been locked in the crypt, occasionally rattling the door to remind everyone it still exists.

Nuns on the Run is a perfect example of that. Originally released in 2010, the game flipped the typical hidden movement structure on its head. Instead of many players hunting one, a single player searches for several invisible ones. Throw in a genuinely charming religious theme that somehow manages to poke fun without punching down, and you have something worth paying attention to.

The Lord’s Work This is Not

Our story starts with life in the abbey not going quite as planned. Most players are novice nuns who have very clearly not yet grasped what life in the cloth actually demands of them. Locked away somewhere in the abbey is a relic of their former life: a love letter, a bottle of booze, a box of cookies. The goal is simple: sneak out of bed, grab the key, retrieve their precious contraband, and make it back before anyone notices they are gone.

Standing between the novices and their contraband are the two nun pieces, both controlled by…

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Ever since I slept on Bestiary of Sigillum: Collector’s Edition a couple years ago, I decided that CrowD Games should be closer to the top of my list of favorite publishers. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time with their catalog over the last two years, playing through every single game the team at CrowD would send my way.

With very limited exceptions, CrowD has always delivered the goods…and with the recent fulfillment of the medium weight strategy title Nippon: Zaibatsu (based on the 2015 game Nippon), I’m ready to shout it to the masses: people should be following CrowD’s every move.

About a year ago (around the time that the original Zaibatsu campaign went up on crowdfunding platforms), I began playing Nippon on Board Game Arena, mainly to see if this was the kind of game I wanted to back when the campaign for Nippon: Zaibatsu went live. I liked what I saw out of the 2015 original, enough to put down some money for a copy of Zaibatsu.

Then, life punched me in the gut. I was laid off from my full-time job, and I shut down any talk of backing not only this game, but buying any board games for a few…

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Nippon: Zaibatsu—2026’s updated version of the 2015 original, Nippon—is so hot in my gaming circles that I had the chance to play the base game three times over the course of a week, and it seemed like the game was popping up at game nights all over Chicago for the first couple months after it hit the market.

After drafting my initial review of the game, I learned that the game’s first expansion, Nippon: Genro, is hitting crowdfunding in late June of this year. A couple prototypes were floating around the US, so I reached out to CrowD Games to see if I could grab a pre-production copy to play for about a week, and I’m excited to share that CrowD obliged.

Nippon: Zaibatsu is a relatively easy game to learn, but it is a very difficult game to play well. By that, I mean that the game’s high volume of timing decisions make for a tricky gaming affair, and I’m surprised how often I had a plan to get all my ducks in a row during each play only to have an opponent snipe end-game turn order, or mid-game area control elements, or the perfect worker color for my consolidation plans just before I could.

Nippon: Zaibatsu may come across as a cutthroat area majority experience. Moving…

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From the rulesheet: “A curse has cast a shadow over the valley, causing the inhabitants to run from the villages and the animals to flee their nests. From the top of a ridge, a mysterious creature named Buh has noticed the desolation and decided to bring the light back. As they stroll through the valley, Buh uses their magic to seek out and restore the light. As darkness recedes, wildlife and the village’s inhabitants begin to return and revel in the sun’s life-giving warmth once again.”

Light Seeker is a two-player strategy game composed of 9 wooden cubes and a single meeple, called the ‘Buh meeple’ (which sort of resembles a cartoon badger). Each wooden cube has a number of dark sides, bright sides, and a couple of half-bright/half-dark sides. At the start of the game, the cubes are arranged into a 3x3 grid, dark sides up. The Buh meeple is placed atop the centermost cube.

On a player’s turn, they will be performing two actions from a list of two possible action types. The same action can be repeated if the player wishes. The two possible actions are ‘slide cube’ or ‘tilt cube’. Sliding involves moving a cube from its current spot to an orthogonally adjacent location without…

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Buy Trinket Trove from Amazon

When compared to big box games, it can be easy for avid gamers to overlook games that come in a small box. Fewer components, a thinner rulebook, and smaller table presence often leads to a lighter game, which can be seen as a negative by gamers who have large collections consisting of heavier games.

Thankfully, more and more small box games are offering increasingly varied, complex, and strategic experiences that are making them more appealing to gamers that traditionally look past them.

Trinket Trove, a ‘thinky’ bidding, set collection, and drafting game for 2-6 players from Rocco Privatera, Paul Solomon, and publisher Gamehead, makes a strong argument for the ‘small box, big game’ crowd.

Bidding For Your Burrow

In Trinket Trove, players collect various trinkets across 13 types, attempting to collect sets of different types to add to their character’s ‘burrow’ and earn points before the end of the game. Trinkets are collected and sets are built through the bidding and drafting process that makes up the core loop of the game.

Each round, players bid on available lots (groups of one or more trinkets), following the bidding order of the previous round (in the first round of the game, it’s randomized) to determine…

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I picked up a review copy of the medium-weight, engine-building title Tundra, designed by Luc Rémond and David Simiand. Rémond is best known for one of the most popular two-player-only designs of the last 10 years, Sky Team. That, alone, made Tundra an instant “yes” when I had the chance to grab a copy during my visit with the Hobby World team at SPIEL Essen last year.

Tundra gives it to you straight. Over the course of four rounds, players take on the roles of estate managers in the fantasy world of Tundra, using workers and towers to gather resources to score the most points. Tundra, the game, begins every round with each player using the same set of die results across four dice—rolled by that round’s first player—before players use one die per turn to activate a space on one of their four action boards, known as “Order” boards.

These Order boards are not unique across the player pool, so each board does the same thing for each individual player…at least, when play begins. The tasks are very vanilla—gather one or more of the game’s three resources (firewood, peat, and rock), build towers and workers, move around a grid-based map of tiles that offer more chances for more resource gathering, or upgrade the Order boards to…

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Full disclosure: I know nothing about the world of velodrome racing (aka indoor cycling); other than they ride bicycles, really fast, at angles that would make a mountain goat sweat. But the brightly colored artwork for Spokes, the new release from Radical 8 Games, drew me in. And while you might not be able to judge the game by its cover, you can guarantee that it will get my attention.

I don’t know anything more about the sport after several plays of Spokes, but I can tell you that I had a lot of fun. Let me tell you about it!

The track is calling. Are you ready?

In Spokes, 1-6 players speed around an oval track, trying to be the first to complete 3 laps. You accomplish this by moving along routes, composed of colored bars (spokes), initially placed randomly on the track. Move as far as you can on a single color, before ending your turn.

Each player has a personal board that guides and restricts your movement for a turn. On your turn, you move the spoke marker cube on your player board one, two, or three places clockwise.

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Buy My Shelfie from Amazon.com

While I consider myself an avid board gamer, I also feel like that label is a bit of a conundrum. I prefer medium-weight (based on BoardGameGeek’s complexity rating scale) games, but my collection primarily consists of light to medium light-weight games. Many of those in my collection fall into the party category with simple player actions, and minimal scoring complexity.

This odd contrast between preference and reality stems from the groups that I typically game with, as they prefer lighter experiences. Unintentionally, this has led me to being somewhat of a gateway game connoisseur.

My Shelfie checks a few important boxes for what makes a great gateway game: connection to a well-known classic game, easy-to-understand mechanics, and a relatively short playtime. The big question is, does the rest of the game hold up, or does it teeter off the shelf and fall apart?

A Classic Connection

In My Shelfie, players compete to earn the most points by filling their ‘bookshelf’ with ‘items’. Each player's bookshelf is a vertically displayed grid that holds up to 30 items. After seeing the bookshelf setup, some players will already see the connection to the well-known classic game Connect Four. While the bookshelf holds square items instead of…

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Hisashi Hayashi is the designer of a quick new card game called Circadia. I was initially interested because Hayashi has done some great work for the Bell household, namely in the form of Yokohama and Railway Boom, the latter of which was on my list of the top 10 games of 2025.

As you may know, lots of publishers are pushing out new card games, for the reasons one might expect: this is a much cheaper way to get a game to market, and it could satisfy the needs of many types of players in an environment where players are apparently spending less on their games.

Enter Circadia. There’s a theme loosely tied to Dreaming Paths, Spirit Creatures, and becoming the “Keeper of the Eternal Cycle” for the person lucky enough to win the game.

The reality is that Circadia is much, much simpler than even the loose framework. Setup only takes three steps. Players manage a hand of cards (never more than eight), trying to build up sets of cards across three types of Spirit Creatures: bear, axolotl, and goose.

Sets are played from hand based on the value of the cards, so a player who wants to play twos can play any card with…

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From time to time, I use my meetings with publishers at conventions to intentionally pick up older games from their catalog. I usually need them for the new tabletop release doldrums of spring. That’s because publishers hit all of us hard with new titles in “Convention Season”, which for my money starts at Gen Con, peaks at SPIEL Essen, and stays warm through PAX Unplugged. (Shows like UK Games Expo and the Tokyo Game Market have new releases, but the noise level is a bit more muted.)

At last year’s Gen Con, I picked up a couple games from the team at CrowD, including City of the Great Machine, released in 2023. I had heard good things about it, and I liked the idea of its “one versus many” gameplay. Spring has arrived, and I pushed City of the Great Machine to the table for a couple plays.

My Spidey Sense was on point. City of the Great Machine—at least, its multiplayer version—rocks. (Solo is another story, which we’ll get to.)

Steampunk, Anyone?

City of the Great Machine, depending on player choices and headcount, is a hand management, hidden movement game for 1-4 players. It can be played solo, cooperatively with up to three players, or competitively with…

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Vibrant, Historic, Rhythmic, Soulful, Crumbling.

With its colonial mansions and mid-century modern buildings suffering from decades of neglect, Havana needs someone with the skill and cunning to collect the right materials and rebuild the structures that make the town the cultural, vibrant city it once was.

To win, you’ll need to collect the right materials to claim building cards that add up to a sliding total based on player count. With limited access to your cards/actions, this is not going to be an easy job.

Let’s get La Habana to the table to see what I mean.

Getting Ready to Rebuild

Start by separating the three types of cards, placing each in its own pile. Put the bag of bricks within easy reach of all players.

Shuffle the Building cards and lay out, side-by-side, two rows of six cards.

Give each player 1 peso coin, 1 grey brick, and a deck of 13 cards with the color backing of their choice. Place the Central Display card on the table and seed it with 3 pesos and three random bricks drawn from the bag.

[caption id="attachment_331165" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The four different bricks and the dark gray rubble, Pesos, and yellow…

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Whistle Mountain (2020, Bezier Games) looks like it should be the direct sequel, or maybe the spiritual successor, to Whistle Stop, an earlier release that focused on a Euro-style train game complete with powers, shares, goods delivery, and a race to go west as quickly as possible.

Whistle Mountain is not that, at all. Designed by the same person who designed Whistle Stop, Scott Caputo, as well as designer Luke Laurie (Andromeda’s Edge, Cryo), Whistle Mountain is a somewhat themeless tile placement game with triggering effects that align with a worker placement mechanic, as players compete for the most points by placing…wait for it…hot air balloons on a map full of scaffolding tiles while trying to evacuate construction workers from both a barracks location and a whirlpool.

Honestly, I don’t get the theme behind this one at all. Luckily, the gameplay is so good that you won’t bother to realize that saving the lives of your construction workers is the main trigger for the endgame!

Total Recall

Whistle Mountain is a tile-laying, worker placement, Euro-style adventure game for 2-4 players that runs about two hours at the highest player counts.

Whistle Mountain takes place in a future state “years…since your successful foray across the great America…

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I’m not quite sure what to make of the new game Rebuilding Chicago, the second game in a series from the team at WizKids that began with the 2023 release Rebuilding Seattle. Like the first game (which I have not played), Rebuilding Chicago puts players in the shoes of local officials tasked with rebuilding a major city after a tragic event—here, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Except…well, it’s not really about that at all. Rebuilding Chicago is a three-round tile-laying affair that takes place in three specific years: 1893, 1933, and 2016. I get the first two, since those are tied to the two World Fairs hosted by the city and they are widely celebrated as years when Chicago celebrated itself for rebuilding large parts of the city’s infrastructure. But 2016? That’s when the Chicago Riverwalk opened.

The Riverwalk is a blast. I’m just not sure I would call it a major rebuilding event across the city’s previous 125 years.

I’ve lived in Chicago since 2012, in a suburb just west of the city limits. When I first saw the round structure for Rebuilding Chicago, I kind of laughed. I wasn’t sure what the designer of the game, Quinn Brander, was going for with the Chicago framing. (Brander…

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