This is one very eye catching box cover! Ba-dum-tss! The game title is as literal as can be. You play a pack of wolves, and you compete with other wolf packs to be the dominant one on the map. You get to experience the life of a wolf, and all this is done using several clever mechanisms.  The map is divided into regions, and there are five terrain types. Those six

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is a spin off of the hugely successful Terraforming Mars. The background story is the same. You are mega corporations working on making Mars habitable. Three things need to be achieved. You need to create oceans. You need to increase the atmospheric temperature. You need to increase the oxygen level. Once all three are achieved, the game ends,

Thurn and Taxis by Karen and Andreas Seyfarth was the 2006 Spiel des Jahres winner. Andreas Seyfarth designed Puerto Rico (published in 2002). It was hugely popular and when it didn’t win the Spiel des Jahres many people were upset. Then a few years later Thurn and Taxis was released and won the SdJ. I have played it many years ago, and at the time didn’t find it interesting.

  Renature is a game from master duo Wolfgang Kramer (El Grande, Tikal, Take 5) and Michael Kiesling (Azul, Tikal, Linko). It is a mid-weight game about nature, animals and trees. It is a tile placement game, and the tiles are dominos, each half showing an animal. During game setup, every player gets his own pile of face-down tiles, and a starting hand of three tiles. You play

Pan Am is a 2020 game by Peter Lee and Prospero Hall. One thing I find interesting about Prospero Hall is they are a whole team of people designing games together. They have been involved in many games, including several big titles. I think they work on not only the game mechanisms, but also the whole product design.  The box cover of Pan Am certainly caught my eye

I should call this game Warlords of the Spring and Autumn, or something along these lines. This Reiner Knizia title was first released in 2005 in German, as Bankuberfall. An English edition was  released in 2007, and it was called Gravediggers. A Japanese edition Bank Robbers was released 15 years later, in 2022, and so was the Chinese edition 《乱炖春秋》, which I would

  The special sauce in Echoes of Time is how the cards you play usually only take effect in the future. Every player has a player board that is divided into five time slots. You have tiles on your player board representing the passing of time. When you play a card, it is usually placed on one of these tiles. All the tiles slide right at the start of every round. Cards come

Zombicide has been around for quite some time. I have never been a zombie fan, so I never got around to trying it until recently, when I played the second edition of the game. This is a cooperative game. Every player controls two characters. You try to survive in a zombie apocalypse. The game is scenario based, and every scenario has a different set of winning conditions.

  Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends is a 2013 game from Vlaada Chvatil. This guy is a genius. He made Through the Ages, Galaxy Trucker, Codenames, Mage Knight, Space Alert, and many more. Most of his games are very different from one another. Tash-Kalar too is very different form his other titles. He makes bold publishing decisions.  The basic premise is you

"Joraku" is a Japanese term which means advancing to the capital. In Japanese history, sometimes local warlords will lead their armies and move to the capital, claiming that they are there to protect the Emperor from evil forces. In truth, they want to take control of the Emperor and rule the nation. The game Joraku has an interesting combination of two popular game mechanisms - trick-taking

108 Outlaws is a game from Daryl Chow of Origame. It is based on the Chinese classic novel Water Margin. I have been designing games based on the four Chinese classics, including Water Margin, so I was certainly interested in seeing Daryl's take on the topic.  108 Outlaws is a tableau building game. All 108 characters of Water Margin are in the game. They are

This is a game I feel I shouldn't like, but I end up quite enjoying it. It's almost a heavy game, with lots of stuff to do. An island with many never-seen-before creatures has been discovered. Many scientists flock to it to discover new species and to collect them. During the game you will collect resources, discover creatures, and spend those resources to collect the creatures. You gain points

Having played Quartermaster General: East Front recently, Han and I moved on to play the South Front version. The South Front of World War 2 refers to the Mediterranean theatre. The game has a long map that stretches from Gibraltar in the south of Spain to Iraq in the Middle East. You have North Africa, Italy and the Balkans too. On the Axis side you have mainly the Pact (I think these are

Pioneer Days comes highly recommended by Buddhima. I have never heard of this game before. It never made any big splash when it was first released. Now this is a rare game. It is a solid design. It has an interesting balance of competition and collaboration, and combo development.  Every round, a number of dice equal to one more than the number of players are

Three Sisters is a traditional companion planting technique where corn, climbing beans and winter squash (e.g. pumpkins) are planted together, and each of them provides benefits to the other two. The game Three Sisters is a roll-and-write game about agriculture and farming. Everyone has his own player sheet. Dice are rolled every round to determine the possible actions. You

Railroad Tiles is from the same designer duo who also brought us Railroad Ink and Dragon Castle. A quick way to describe the game is advanced Carcassonne. This is a tile laying game, and you get to place meeples. But this is not a fair way to introduce the game at all. Say this to people who already like Carcassonne to hook them. This game has its own place and in many ways is

National Economy is a game from Japan. It is a worker placement card game. It is pretty compact. There are many elements which at first made me think - isn't this just like Agricola? As I played, I soon discovered it is more than that, and less than that at the same time. All in all, a different beast, despite several familiar concepts.  The game is played over 9 rounds. You start

This is a 2-player game about city building, where you compete for the same pool of resources to build your individual cities.  You each have your own player board, which is a 3x3 grid. On your turn, you place one of your four pawns on the common board, which is also a 3x3 grid. The common board has stacks of tiles. When you place a pawn, you claim the topmost tile, and you

This game is set in World War II and depicts the battle between Germany and the USSR. This is a two player game and the story starts with Germany initiating the invasion of the Soviet Union. Every few rounds both players will score points based on controlling key locations. If you outscore your opponent by 10 points, you win immediately. Otherwise, you win by having more points at the end of

Dewan in Malay means "hall", and the boardgame Dewan has nothing to do with any hall. It's just the name of the game world. But I'm stuck with thinking "what the hall" whenever I say the name of the game. Dewan is a clean civ game. I am tempted to call it 4X, but it doesn't have all four X's, just eXpand and a bit of eXploit. No eXplore or eXterminate. You start with a little settlement, and