For the most part, the team at Mighty Boards has never done me wrong.

After a middling experience with their recent release Red North, I didn’t rush their other SPIEL Essen 2025 release, Pinched!, to the table until recently. But after doing plays at three, four, and five-player counts, I’m excited to share that Pinched! was a blast. Save for my thoughts on how the game’s random card draw can affect scoring and notes on a specific player count, I highly recommend giving Pinched! a look.

“I’ll Take That”

Pinched! is a hand management and set collection game of bluffing and thievery for 2-5 players. Over a series of turns, each player (taking on the role of a thief in a gang of them) will serve as the Mastermind for a given turn. Using a hand of location cards, the Mastermind will select a heist location from amongst the 3-5 locations available in that game.

The Mastermind plays this card face-down into the center of the table, then each other thief will play a card from their own hand of location cards in the hopes of matching the location selected by the Mastermind. During the reveal, two things could happen. If the Mastermind picks a location that…

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I’ll admit it: my wife and I got a little too comfy.

After some of the best experiences in the one-shot, mystery gaming arena with the KOSMOS series Masters of Crime, I expected my fourth run to be another blowout. Masters of Crime: Vendetta, Masters of Crime: Rapture and Masters of Crime: Shadows are the height of the category; one of those titles was on my top 10 games of 2025, but all of them could have been, if I had just sprinkled the titles across the entire list.

What those games got right is why I recommend them to everyone I know. The scenarios are fantastic, you’re always placed in the shoes of the villains, not the cops, the puzzles are tough but fair, and the endings always made logistical sense after working through all the bread crumbs dropped during the investigation.

Masters of Crime: Incognito was the next game on my list. I created a draft for this review and had a 5.0/5.0 placeholder ready to go before I played the game. I was sure Incognito would be another banger; why wouldn’t I? My wife and I set up a date night for a Friday evening play. I made the cocktails; she grabbed our note-taking components, laid out the game, and read the…

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