The humidity clings to your skin as neon reflections shimmer across rain-slick streets. The city is strangely alive with quiet ambition and louder dreams. Towering skylines loom above bustling districts, each corner a promise of profit, each landmark a prize waiting to be claimed. Deals are struck with uneasy confidence, plans unfold behind knowing smiles, and every move carries the weight of opportunity. In this restless urban theatre, only the sharpest minds will rise above the crowd. Welcome to Singapore Showdown by Eugene Lim from Genie Games with art by Marcus Quek.

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Maybe it's my old age catching up with me, but I don't have time for 3-hour marathons unless it's something truly special, like Hegemony. A Familiar Find caught my eye with wonderful artwork and stellar graphic design, with the box promising a fun family experience in under an hour. So when Darrington Press offered a review copy, I said yes.

You play as a fantasy familiar gathering ingredients for an adventurer. The game is apparently set in a fictional campaign world from Critical Role, although my connection to that entire media empire is a glowing 404 error. The core mechanic has you claiming one of three available card piles per turn, with players seeding those piles from their hand to set themselves up for a future turn or nudge an opponent toward something they don't want. Not every card is a gift or even face up, making the game feel like a "pick your poison" for a good portion of the time.

Familiar Territory

Winning is as straightforward as the premise. You're collecting ingredients into sets, either 2 sets of 4 or 4 sets of 2, for example. There's also an instant win condition where collecting 3 Astral Essence cards ends the game in your favor. The flip side…

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About a month ago, I received a text out of the blue from a friend I hadn’t heard from in nearly two years:

“Have you played Dark Pact by Tom Lehmann? I’ve played it twice and I think it might be the greatest deck-builder.”

A grain of salt must accompany these words as they travel down your gullet. The sender of that text is an avid Lehmann-head. He loves Winter Court, a novel sentence in the English language. He is constantly trying to bust out New Frontiers at parties. He carries a complete set of Dice Realms at all times, just in case the mood strikes.

I get it. I will never play another game as much as I have already played Race for the Galaxy. It would be untrue to deny that Lehmann’s spell has won me over from time to time. I would not go so far as to call myself a disciple, though. I find most of Lehmann’s games too dry. They are mathematically precise in a way that suggests an awe-inspiring understanding of the numbers behind the fun, but they are often that at the expense of, well, the fun. It has never before occurred to me that Lehmann and Reiner Knizia can be thought of as opposite sides of the same…

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Crispy Core

I love Arkham Horror: The Card Game. It’s probably one of my “desert island” games, thanks to the sheer amount of content and replayability. The game has evolved into an entire franchise, aptly named the “Arkham Files,” expanding into video games, novellas, tabletop RPGs, and even comic books published by powerhouse Dark Horse Comics.

Last year, the game’s storyline concluded with a great calamity in The Sinking City campaign, leading into the “soft reset” in 2026 with Chapter 2. Not only does this create a fresh launching point for a new storyline, but it also gives new players an ideal place to jump in.

Fantasy Flight’s vision for Arkham Horror breaks down into a “legacy environment,” in which all existing and past content can be used alongside future content, and a “current environment.” The current environment has a smaller card pool, and future campaigns are structured around mechanics in that evolving meta, though what exactly that will look like, we’ll have to wait and see. Presumably, this is meant to reset deckbuilding to a more even playing field. With so much existing content, it’s easy to build an overpowered deck and breeze through what should be a challenging experience.

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From the rulebook:

“Welcome to Yellowstone Park, the home of many wild animals. Impressive geysers spray their hot fountains into the blue sky. The players go on a trip through the park, which is shown on the game board. Each player has a hand of animal cards with different colors and numbers. During the game the players try to put their cards down as skillfully as possible on the game board to avoid penalty points.”

Yellowstone Park is played on a 7x7 grid laid on top of an illustrated overhead view of the titular park. The rows are numbered from 1 to 7 in ascending order, starting from the lowest row and moving upwards. There is a score track running along the left side of the grid. Each player’s score marker begins at the number 5 spot on this track.

There is also a deck of 56 Animal cards. Each card is one of four colors (red, green, yellow, blue) and one of seven numbers (1 through 7). For each number, there are two copies of that number + color pair (two copies of green 1, for instance). Every card features a cartoonish image of an animal, but these illustrations are unimportant for the purposes of the gameplay.

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The Fox in the Forest predates the contemporary trick-taking craze by a few years. It was an early harbinger of what was to come, of the deluge with which we have subsequently been blessed, and it proved successful. Successful enough that now, almost a decade after its initial release, Joshua Buergel’s two-player trick-taking game is getting the Deluxe treatment.

For those who’ve never played, The Fox in the Forest distinguishes itself from the bulk of trick-takers in two ways. Way the first: all of the odd-numbered cards in this non-traditional deck have special powers that trigger when played. Normally, I try not to get bogged down in the weeds when reviewing a game, but I do think the powers here are illustrative: The 1 in each suit lets you lead the next trick even if you lose, the 3 lets you change the trump suit, the 5 lets you draw one of the cards that weren’t dealt that round before discarding any card from your hand, the 7 is worth a point for whoever wins it, the 9 is always considered a trump card, and the 11 forces your opponent’s highest card in the same suit.

If you are at all familiar with the ebb and flow of trick-taking games, you can imagine well the sorts of shenanigans…

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I can sense the future. I sense that Soothsayers is going to be one of my favourite new-to-me games in 2026. I had not heard of the game prior to playing it. The theme and the art are a little quirky. The backstory is mumbo jumbo to me. However the gameplay completely took me by surprise. I would say there is nothing particularly ground breaking, yet the whole package just works amazingly

When I say spoiler-free, I mean up to the point when you start your first game. That means by then you will have opened the first mission box and you will see what's inside. If that's fine by you, come join me to take a look at what's in Regicide Legacy, the legacy game version of the amazing cooperative card game Regicide from Badgers from Mars, New Zealand. I'm a big fan of Regicide 

I struggled with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Trick-Taking Game. For all the inventiveness on display, as passionate a love letter to trick-taking as it was, Bryan Bornmueller’s commercial triumph left me cold. Too often, I said, that cooperative card game would leave players in the lurch, handing them combinations of characters and cards that were not winnable. Unlike its close cousin The Crew, something like half the hands in TLotR:TFotR-TTG proved unwinnable from the jump, save for an act of providence. I don’t want cooperative games to be easy, but I do want continuous losing to feel like a skill issue rather than RNG.

That’s the long and the short of it, anyway. And for what it’s worth, my criticisms of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - Trick-Taking Game are almost exactly the same as my criticisms of the first game. Critical decisions are made without crucial information. A lot of hands are dead from the jump and there’s nothing you can do about it. A few of the chapters here even sharpen my criticisms. It would be easy to get bogged down in an even more negative review, to dig into all the ways in which I continue to think Bornmueller’s game doesn’t work.

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You Know the Name

Flip 7 took the world by storm in 2023, touting itself as the “World’s Greatest Card Game.” It backed up that claim in 2024, taking home a slew of awards, including Origins Best Party Game, Golden Geek Best Party Game, and even a nomination for the 2025 Spiel des Jahres award.

It’s also gaining recognition outside the gaming bubble. I recently had an interaction with coworkers in my office who wanted to play Uno, and I asked if they’d heard of Flip 7. To my surprise, more than one of them said yes with immediate excitement. Whether you love it or hate it, Flip 7 is almost a household name now.

It’s only natural that a game in this format would spawn variations to keep the cash coming. Last year, we saw the Dr. Seuss’s Grinch variant, and I have an inside scoop that more reskins are on the way.

Following on the heels of the Uno: No Mercy madness from a few years back, Flip 7 now has its own “mean” version, packed with ruthless cards and more stabbing. But how does it hold up against the original? Let’s flip the next card and find out.

 

Same Flips, New Cards

…

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In the midst of Suzannah Herbert’s tremendous documentary Natchez, religious fundamentalists stage a Westboro Baptist–style protest outside an LGBTQI+ event. They stand there with their signs, decrying sin and the fate of the wayward souls inside. One man reads scripture into a megaphone, citing chapter and verse to support his belief that the drag queens emceeing will go to hell.

For some reason, it struck me in that moment as particularly absurd that this man was citing documents written over 2,000 years ago to explain his beliefs now. Well, “to explain” is wrong, and I even think “to justify” wouldn’t quite get across what I felt. I believe in and understand the power of citing the Bible as a collection of parables to relay lessons, questions, universal experiences. This man was not doing that. He was quoting the best-selling book of all time as edict. Those dusty old words were why he is presently required to believe that gay people will go to hell.

To that man, and those around him, the text of the faith is the faith. It is the destination, rather than the compass. To him, the scripture can neither change nor can it be changed. It is unyielding, unsparing, unimpeachable. Some words written down over two millennia ago are to be followed to the letter…

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Wizards of the Grimoire is a two-player head-to-head battle game. You are wizards and you deal damage to each other by casting spells. To win the game, you need to reduce your opponent's health points to zero. This structure is pretty common. However the way you pick spells to use and manage mana needed to cast them is interesting. The game certainly offers something new.  There is

Operation Barclay is one of the most inspired marriages of setting and mechanic that I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. How did designer Maurice Suckling get the idea to pair the story of Operation Barclay, the Allied plan to feed the Axis false information about an upcoming Mediterranean invasion, with poker and a shell game? It’s such a remarkable idea, such a perfect idea. Most game designers would sacrifice body parts in exchange for an idea this good.

While the real Operation Barclay was about convincing the Axis that the Allies would invade Greece when they were in fact planning to invade Sicily, Operation Barclay the game gives us a bit more ambiguity than that. There are five possible areas of attack, stretching from Morocco-to-France and Egypt-to-Turkey. The Allied player places wooden Intelligence tokens into each of them. One lane, whichever the Allied player decides to make the Primary Offensive Sector, gets four positive Intelligence tokens and one negative. The Secondary Offensive Sector gets three of the first and two of the second, and the other three Sectors, red herrings all, get two and three.

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I recently had the chance to pull in a review copy of the Stonemaier title Origin Story, a game I first learned about during SPIEL Essen 2025. As a bonus, Stonemaier threw in a free copy of a small card game called Smitten 2, based on the game Smitten, a title I was not aware of. When Smitten 2 arrived, I broke it out and did a couple solo plays.

The setup is quick, and the goal is simple: using a small hand of cards, players must build two matching 3x3 grids of cards, with the win condition tied to placing 17 of the 18 cards in the deck. During setup, all cards are shuffled with one being left out, unseen…in solo, the player manipulates two hands and has to play each tableau off each other, using the card powers aligned with each card and its specific playable position in the grid. (The 5 card can only be played in the middle of each tableau, while the 1 card can only be played in the upper left corner, for example.)

Across those first two plays, I didn’t win, but some interesting choices were on offer. Each card’s placement rules make for a fun puzzle, and I came close…

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Muster: Raise the Banners, from designer Spencer Lloyd Thomas and with vibrant art from Pedro R. M. Andreo, is a quick little two-player lane battler. Each turn, you play a single card to its matching lane, or discard a card onto one of the central spaces, then draw a card. The catch is that the cards have to be played in ascending order. If I play the mighty green six early in the game, I can’t play any more cards to green.

This may sound familiar to some of you. It certainly did to me. Muster draws a whole heap of inspiration from Reiner Knizia’s 1999 masterpiece Lost Cities, one of the greatest two-player games ever published. I don’t knock Muster for that, and you shouldn’t either. It adds some flair of its own, like the two-sided wild cards that can be played in conjunction with other cards, and the Rainbow cards, which can be discarded to any center slot to open up that particular lane to cards of any color.

This is a great idea. It means that you never quite know when a lane is done. I…

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HWC Coffee is a Malaysian specialty coffee chain. They made a card game which was given away for free if you bought coffee (and other stuff) worth more than a certain amount within a single transaction. It is encouraging to see this. I would love to have my game designs used in such projects. Zus Coffee had something like this just last year, a Sembang Raya card game. Something that promotes

Wonder Boy, Hercules

I’m a fan of mythology in general. There’s a childlike wonder that comes from reading stories of epic heroism, self-sacrifice, memorable characters wrapped up in the hero’s journey formula. I remember when Disney’s Hercules came out in 1997, I was engrossed in the mania of toys, picture books, and even the promotional plates in partnership with McDonald’s (yes, back then McDonald’s had tableware!).

Fast forward to today, and while I don’t have kids of my own, the inner kid is always drawn to mythological stories. Though the actual story of Hercules and the 12 Labors is vastly different from the children’s cartoon, complete with graphic violence and other adult themes.

I was excited to link up with Mathue Ryann from Envy Born games last year, both over our mutual Friendsgiving of bourbon and board games, and at PAX U, where Hercules and the 12 Labors debuted. This title, with all the gold foiling and pizzazz, follows a format of grinding through a deck of cards in the similar vein of Kinfire Delve, One Deck Dungeon, and Witchcraft!

 

On a nice Sunday afternoon, I find myself playing solo games with a cuppa tea, and this…

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Layeth the Smackdown

Synthezoid Smackdown is the latest scenario pack building on the hero-vs-hero gameplay introduced in the Civil War big box expansion of the larger Marvel Champions: The Card Game system. Aside from having a name that could double as a WWE pay-per-view, it pushes the Superhuman Registration Act schism forward by pitting players against two “villains”: She-Hulk and Vision. They’re on opposite sides of the Civil War divide, and each comes with a customizable scenario plus eight new modular encounters you can mix into the larger Civil War ecosystem. More cards are also added for the PvP (Player vs. Player) mode which Civil War introduced.

Lore

During the Civil War storyline, She-Hulk (Jennifer Walters) and Vision (Jonas) were not spotlight characters in the conflict, but both occupied interesting spaces adjacent to it.

As a lawyer, Jennifer’s support of the Superhuman Registration Act was a natural extension of her faith in due process and the legal system, even if that system often lives in gray areas. Most notably, she represented Speedball in court following the Stamford Disaster, the event that led to the creation of the Registration Act. She was also hired by her father-in-law, J. Jonah Jameson, to sue Peter Parker for fraud after he unmasked himself.…

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In Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, young Quentin Coldwater and his classmates are transformed into geese as part of a graduation trial. The description of their journey from New England, all the way to the South Pole makes for good reading. But it also helps remind us of the effort that geese make in their instinctive need to fly thousands of miles, through perilous landscapes, only to turn around and do the trip in reverse just months later.

But we’re talking about board games right?

In the tableau building card game Flockers, from Mark Swanson, players take the part of a flock of geese making a similar journey, albeit one which takes just 30-45 minutes instead of months.

Geese is the Word

Gorgeous graphics and amazing components aside, Flockers is a racing game; the goal is to be the first to travel across 10 landscape cards arranged in a central tableau, called the flight path. These cards consist of one or more terrain types (mountain, forest, field, and lake). Some cards have only one terrain, while others can have all four terrain types.

In order to do this, players play flock cards from their hand into a traditional V formation. The first card is the lead goose, while  subsequent…

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