For most of the last two years, I have had an article in my draft folder titled “I Think I Hate Games Where I Have to Read a Lot of Card Text.” It started years ago with a deckbuilding game where I had to lean over the board’s card market to read every card that hit the conveyor belt.

Understanding not only the card’s cost, but its abilities, was critical to success in that game, but it also meant I had to read a lot of card text before making any decisions.

2025’s The Hunt (designed by Renaud Crocombette, Remi Laumonier, and Antoine Pham-Minh) might have pushed me over the edge. That’s because the game is essentially a recipe fulfillment game with fugitive cards. The Hunt is set in the espionage theaters of post World War II Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, as players guide one of four unique agencies to chase Nazi war criminals down for capture. Taking 1-3 actions each turn, players will visit “investigation zones” to grab cards that match the requirements of the various criminals that must be hunted down during the game.

I typically enjoy games like this, and The Hunt does a great job of keeping the action speedy by forcing…

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“So, normal trick-taking rules, must follow, there’s a single trump. But THIS time,...”

Trick-taking games are becoming very difficult to review, because an ocean of new trick-takers get released every week. (If you had told me the “best” part of the tariff backlash is that more companies are producing more cheap-to-make card games with a trick-taking element, I might have retired from games right on the spot. I like trick-taking, but I don’t need it to survive.)

The hardest part of the trick-taking deluge is that you have to both learn each game as if it is new, and you have to try to leverage your years of playing other trick-taking games to account for how to win tricks, or avoid them, or win some to set up losing all the rest, etc. The first sentence of this article is uttered at almost every game night I host now, because I picked up about 20 different trick-taking games at Gen Con or through the mail!

Trickarus (originally released in 2024, but now published by Smirk & Dagger Games in the US) is a must-follow trick-taking game. There’s a trump suit. But THIS time, there is a mechanic where players have cards that have a day half, and a night…

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My man Andy Matthews wrote a review of the Mountain Goats base game a few months ago. After trying the base game on Board Game Arena, I mostly agree with his summary. Mountain Goats is a very simple dice chucker with just enough strategy to warrant your attention when it is your turn. You roll four dice, then use the pips on each six-sided die to move goats in your player color up one of six different mountain tracks to score points. Only one player can have a goat at the top of a mountain; when another player’s goat arrives, your goat moves to the bottom of that hill, and it might take a couple turns to crest again later.

The base game takes about 20 minutes to play. Mountain Goats: Legacy is the new version of the game, and it has ten chapters, a very family-friendly Storybook that is used to provide just enough flavor text to get players from one chapter to the next, a couple of main characters to follow through a story, and almost the exact same gameplay experience offered by the base game.

And, that’s the problem.

For this review, I completed six of the ten chapters; five with my nine-year-old son,…

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Stack Nabbit - Justin Bell

Stack Nabbit, another quick card game from the folks who gave us Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, is so light on theme and setting that there’s no backstory regarding what players are doing here at all. Drawing cards to determine which point cards you’ll keep, and which cards you might steal from a neighbor, comprises most of the rules here, as players try to bank as many cards as possible before the draw deck runs out.

What is Stack Nabbit? It’s not quite a push-your-luck game, although there is a hint of that when players try to draw a card that matches one of the cards already in their play area. And the rules around stealing only affect the players to one’s immediate left or right…so, in a three-player game, everyone can rob everyone else, but in a five-player game, you can’t do much at all against a player sitting across the table. The rules are simple enough to teach to a grandparent, and we did just that for two, quick back-to-back plays that totaled about 25 minutes. But even that grandparent, who won the second play, didn’t seem that interested in playing it again. Taco Cat Games has pushed out some of our favorite rules-light…

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Mini Rogue: The Council (2026, Nuts! Publishing) is a dream come true for rogue-like video game fans like me. Sometimes, I just want a quick-playing challenge to table by myself, and I now see why the Mini Rogue series (first released in 2016 as Mini Rogue: A Roguelike Microgame) is so popular with tabletop players who also love rogue-like video games.

I was recently musing about my love affair of rogue-like video games such as Dead Cells, Balatro, Brotato, and The Binding of Isaac in an article on BoardGameGeek. Around the same time, I cracked open my review copy of Mini Rogue: The Council and was instantly hooked. That’s because gameplay in Mini Rogue is so easy to parse.

Players take on the role of one of the four included adventurers: Rat Catcher, Plague Doc, Alchemist, and the Flagellant. A series of rooms (laid out as a 3x3 grid of room cards), an enemy hit point (HP) tracker, and a personal play area that tracks player HP, food, spells, gold, and experience points (XP) are all you need to get rolling.

Across four floors, players must navigate 2-3 “areas” per floor, with each area represented by the 3x3 grid. Starting in the upper left corner, players must first complete that corner room before moving orthogonally from room to…

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Czech Games Edition rolled the dice back in 2022 with the release of Deal with the Devil. It was the most shocking thing I played from a major publisher that year by a country mile. A strictly four-player-only, hidden role, app-driven board game from the people who gave us Codenames? It wasn’t just a departure…it was the biggest creative swing CGE has ever taken with a major release.

Deal with the Devil (and its fantastically twisted box cover art) was a big swing…but also, a big miss. You can find copies of the game online for less than $20 all the time now. The critical reception was a decidedly mixed bag. But I still stand behind CGE for that release, because I am so happy that CGE took the risk.

CGE could make a safe bet every year with their releases, but Deal with the Devil (and releases like their upcoming video game-to-board-game adaptation, Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game) prove that CGE are willing to take real chances with their biggest productions.

Courtroom: The Noir Trilogy is the newest release under the Mindclash Games’ “Play” line, the publisher’s lighter line of games that pushes a release directly to retail every fall. The previous Mindclash Play games include last fall’s Emberheart and their first release in…

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Wool Street - Justin Bell

This is hard to believe, but sometimes a game ends up being…well, too short. Enter Wool Street, a “Mini Card Game” from the folks at Hachette. Players buy and sell wool products in five different colors while trying to influence a market by trying to throw players off the scent of a single piece of hidden intel each player gets before the game begins. Which of the five colors will end the game being worth zero, or possibly even negative, points?

“I’m not sure there’s much game here,” one player in my review commented after we finished our roughly 10-minute play. And, look: the game’s rules are actually provided, in full, on the game’s BGG page, so this game is both mini (as promised on the side of the small box) and short. But I had the same complaint as my friend did: it never feels like anyone gets to make a meaningful choice in Wool Street and everyone knows at least one color worth avoiding as play moves along, so in our game, players constantly moved to sell some of their goods in a single color all game long, and when it became clear that yellow (in our game) was going to end play as the…

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Dogfight 1917 (2025, Arcane Wonders) has a lot going for it…as long as you play it as a free-for-all variant with a full complement of four players. There are cool biplane (and in the case of the Red Baron, a triplane!) miniatures, play time is speedy and mechanics are simple: fly at the other fighters to maneuver into the best positions to damage enemies just enough to make them run out of action cards, a deck which also serves as a player’s health meter.

20 action cards is all a player gets for the entire game to fly, maneuver in and out of harm’s way, and put bullets into the rear of a bad guy. Two of those 20 cards are single-use, meaning they are removed completely from the game after being played. (Those two cards are the same for each player’s deck, but other cards come with slight nuances that make each fighter’s deck unique.) With limited options to add cards back into each deck, a game of Dogfight 1917 might only last for 20-30 minutes.

Tactical tokens can be acquired through those single-use cards, via die roll bonuses on other action cards, or by finishing turns on certain spaces of the very small map representing the skies of World War I. You’ve got real-life pilots, ways to…

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You know you are on to something when your nine-year-old walks up to you, staring other activities he loves dead in the face, and says the following:

“Daddy, can we play Mind the Lines again?”

Didn’t want to grab the tablet. Had a chance to dive back into his room to do some afternoon reading. We had just finished building part of our LEGO Technic set—the orange Bugatti was almost done—and he considered doing some other LEGO building. But the boy turned all of those down to revisit Mind the Lines instead.

Apparently, the play we did the night before resonated.

That, in essence, is the review here. Across five plays, including three with my family, and across four different player counts (2, 3, 4, and 5 players), Mind the Lines was a winner across every play session.

Difficulty is the only question mark.

Non-Artists, Welcome

Mind the Lines is a four-round party game for 2-6 players that plays in about 20 minutes. Using a deck of cards with easy and hard challenge words, players are working together to get through the four rounds without hitting a word penalty threshold tied to the number of players, doubled when using more challenging words. That means in a four-player game, players…

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As activities go, I love the direction Chris Couch Games is taking with its initial batch of releases. The production looks exceptional and the bright, vivid colors of nearly every game I picked up from this publisher at Gen Con has the shelf appeal a game needs to stand out.

Garden Club (2026, designed by Kristen Mott and Andrew Stiles) is much better as a production than a game. Solid player boards that serve as a handsome storage area and turn tracker for each round. A rulebook that feels luxurious in the hands, from the linen finish to the easy read and the helpful game summary on the back cover. Carve-outs in the box for certain tokens and cards, and a decent amount of mini expansion content for players who want to dive deep.

As a game, Garden Club came back to Earth for my solo plays and my two-player game with my nine-year-old. Players plant and harvest on their turns, placing flower tiles on one of the 16 spaces of a shared centralized board, while making patterns that can be scored on project cards or manipulated using tool cards.

All of it feels very “Sunday afternoon.” By that, I mean that you should play Garden Club with a…

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Man, I love doing demo plays of games at shows. I love them because I get to play with random strangers to take in differing opinions on games I’m about to review.

Warp 99 is a new card game from Bezier, a publisher quickly becoming a major distributor of card games in the US. Over the last three years, Bezier has brought so many titles to the market that I had to go to their website to remember them all: Xylotar, Cat in the Box, Seers Catalog, Sandbag, and the best of the bunch, Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition.

A couple of those are now at the top of my all-time favorite trick-taking games, so now I will table anything from Bezier to see if they’ve struck gold. Warp 99 has its moments, and when the player count stays low, there’s something here. In the wrong hands, Warp 99’s biggest issue is its playtime; 30 minutes is too long for a game that is a simple race to get to 99 points before other players.

Warp Speed?

Warp 99 is a hand management game for 2-4 players. While it is not a traditional shedding game, Warp 99 is a game about emptying your hand, then…

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Here’s the fun thing about tabletop criticism: you can’t blame a game for doing the things that its designers say it is trying to do.

Here’s what I mean. If you read the BGG Designer Diary from the people behind Timespan—the newest title from Alion by Dr. Ø, the people who gave us last year’s Euro strategy title Recall—you know that Timespan is both a peaceful, simultaneous play-driven civilization game, and not a new game from the folks at Stonemaier.

That cuts a few things off at the knees. If I read a single review of Timespan that starts with “I can’t believe how little interaction there is in Timespan”, I will immediately write that person off. The back of the box literally references the following words: “peaceful”, “simultaneous”, “short.” There’s a solo mode…in a civ game.

Again: Timespan is a civ game with a solo mode. That should tell you where we are at…and, if you like the idea of a civ game where everyone in multiplayer is playing at the same time, and the game can be knocked out in less than 90 minutes (all seven of my plays clocked under that timeframe), do I have a game for you!

Uh, What Now?

Timespan is…

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Gosh, poker is hot right now. It’s not animal characters hot, and it’s not trick-taking games hot, but it’s still pretty hot.

It’s so hot, that it is hot as hell…and, Hell of a Deal (2026, Smirk & Dagger Games) was so hot that it was the rare Gen Con title that sold out not once, but twice during the same show.

Poker-themed board games? The Gang was on my top ten list of 2024, and it is still in the rotation during my Wednesday night game action with friends in Chicago. When I need a taste of solo or two-player co-op, Ace of Spades still lands. I could play Balatro on my Xbox if I really want, and at a game night a couple weeks ago, that same Wednesday group decided to just straight up play Texas Hold ‘Em with real money, not just the facade of poker chips standing in for cash.

As I strolled the expo hall at this year’s show, Smirk & Dagger’s Gen Con booth was packed throughout the show. I spoke with Smirk & Dagger’s owner, Curt Covert, late in the show and he was able to throw a review copy of Hell of a Deal my way. After doing a four-player demo, I got to work with plays…

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One of my big things as a reviewer is actually not tied to total play count, although I try to get three, maybe four plays in with a game before I pass judgment on a game’s quality.

The thing I prioritize more than anything else: getting as many plays in with the same game at different player counts. If a game says that it accommodates 2-4 players, I try my best to play at two, three, and four players. (If a game says it plays 1-4 players, I try my best to get in plays at all four counts, but a game typically plays almost the same way at one player as it does with two, since the solo usually mimics a two-player experience.)

Encyclopedia of Monsters is a new family memory game for 2-4 players. Designed by a pool of the same people who designed my game of the year pick for 2024—Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game—I had Encyclopedia of Monsters on my radar as soon as the team at publisher Scorpion Masqué showed me a mockup at SPIEL Essen last fall.

Encyclopedia of Monsters is a fully resettable campaign memory game, spread across five volumes (here known as continents) and three chapters (countries) per volume. That means you have 15 short games included in…

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After doing two plays of the 2025 family-weight card title Mooki Island (one play with my 12-year-old, then a play with my 9-year-old), I’m very sure of one thing: the artwork is the main reason for checking out the title.

That’s because the game itself is barely a game at all. The box hints at this as well, given that it believes it is “perfect for ages 4-10”; now that I’ve done plays, I absolutely recommend Mooki Island for a four- or five-year old child to play with an adult.

Here’s the entire game: a deck of 36 double-sided tarot cards is shuffled and split in half, creating two draw piles. There are five suits of Mookies (Sun, Moon, Fossil, Leaf, and Seashell), and there are also seven spiders in the deck. There are also five “legendary” mookies in the deck, one per suit, for the 72 total options spread across the deck.

On a turn, a player takes one of the two face-up cards, looks at both sides, then decides how to place it into their single personal scoring pile. If a spider is drawn and played, it must be played on an…

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The team at Board gave us the chance to cover their initial push late last year, and now that the platform is pushing out a new game every month, it’s been much easier to get my kids to join me at the table to check out the new wares. (If you’ve never heard of Board or need a quick overview of its features, check out our product review of the Board electronic device.)

Now that Board is fully up and running, new games are coming to market every month. We asked the Board team if we could continue covering new content, and they have been kind enough to oblige. Luckily, I have two children (ages 12 and 9) who loved the initial batch of games and are constantly looking for new ways to engage with the platform.

Once a quarter, I’ll offer thoughts on the newest batch of releases—both community-designed games as well as centralized releases from the Board development team, using a review style similar to our regular Quick Peaks coverage. Enjoy! (All images here were provided by the Board marketing team.)

The Heist

After spending almost two months playing Board regularly on our living room table over the previous holiday season, the lack of new…

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There’s a level of chaos that appears when a player’s turn is up in the new word-association party game Mind Sweeper (2026, Floodgate).

You see, players are staring at a table that has like 50 small cardboard tokens scattered here and there, from easy visuals (like one of those Egyptian-style pyramids, or a sword, or an apple) to some that are a bit opaque, like a single exclamation point. The active player is dealt a card with six words, and separately a number token forcing the player to illustrate a specific word (using those tokens) over the next 60 seconds.

Get your team to guess what the word is, and you score the card. Players can shout anything as soon as the timer starts, adding to the chaos. If they don’t get the word in those 60 seconds, the active player flips the word card in view of all players, then the team gets 60 more seconds to guess which of the six words was the original answer.

Across 10 word cards, you’re looking at a 15-20 minute experience, in a cooperative, high-score challenge that pushes players to get as many of the 10 words right as they can.

The keys here is twofold. Each card’s clue words are…

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Surplus of Sloths (2026, Weird Giraffe Games) isn’t bad.

It’s a card drafting game where players try to build a hand of ascending card runs across five different suits of sloths. A market wipe mechanic pushes one leftover market card into a “surplus net” after each round, and players can view and gauge whether it is worth trying to score a suit at the end of the game.

I just gave you 75% of the rules, and designer Charlie McCarron (Skyrockets, the Kites riff I quite enjoyed) has given us a game so quick that my 12-year-old and I played it twice within a 15-minute stretch. Even winning one of those two games didn’t impress the 12-year-old, who shrugged their shoulders before admitting that the game was “only OK” before heading off to their room.

You’re right; that’s not an endorsement. My review crew joined me for a four-player game the following day, and the winner of that game also shrugged their shoulders and landed in the same rating range I landed on for this review.

Surplus of Sloths isn’t bad because its scoring mechanic is interesting. In an ideal world, you want to build up a run of three, four, maybe even five low cards of…

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One of my favorite things about the games released under Carla and Nick Kopp’s Weird Giraffe banner: the games are often legitimately weird.

Here’s what I mean. I was explaining the rules to my wife and nine-year-old for our first play of Effervescent (a Carla design currently on crowdfunding, set for release in 2027), and when I tried to explain the main concept of placing sea-based creature tiles in such a way that the tail of a newly-placed tile must touch the head of a previously-placed animal tile, my wife openly balked.

“So, like, this way?” She used a large whale tile as an example.

“Well, sort of,” I began. “Each tile has a head area, a distinct tail point…then, every other part of the tile is a ‘side.’”

“Seems kind of weird,” she said. And our first play went that way, as players took tiles in one of three sizes to create scoring patterns that would trigger with a mix of scoring sequences, tied to “Drift” cards and Harmony cards, the latter of which were established before the game as public milestones that are always available to score.

Turns are simple. Place a tile, and if a placed tile meets a Drift card scoring condition, a player puts…

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Let’s give credit where credit is due. If you are going to release a game in the late summer of 2026 and want to ride a wave of free marketing, you can do a LOT worse than theming your new game around anything tied to The Odyssey, Homer, The Iliad, and all things Odysseus.

So, while it is possible that Gigamic’s new, light strategy title Odysseus was always intended to be a game about the lead character from the recent Christopher Nolan / Matt Damon blockbuster film The Odyssey, let’s just agree to give everyone involved in this game’s design a round of applause for timing the release and the theme to the Universal film’s massive global box office!

Odysseus, the game, is a very quick romp through the 15 trials Odysseus (the character, also known as Ulysses, depending on your preference between the Greek and the Latin version) survived on his quest to return to Ithaca. In fact, the game is so quick that we only get 11 turns to whisk through the entire affair, and turns are so fast you might break through a game of Odysseus in 15-20 minutes!

Turns are simple. The board is a replica of Ulysses’ vessel, with spaces for 12 cards. On…

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