Mission: Red Planet - Andrew Lynch

The trick with Mission Red Planet, an area control game that comfortably sits 4-6 players and takes about 60-90 minutes, is to not take it too seriously. The good news there is that the game helps with that. You can’t take any of this too seriously. This isn’t El Grande. There’s no illusion of grand strategy. Mission Red Planet is a goofy, swingy, occasionally violent area control game in which a little too much is left up to chance. On the bright side, that makes it zippy. Nobody gets too bogged down in their decisions. The downside is that you can’t get particularly invested in your decisions either.

I like the minis, and I like the art. The docks for the space ships are both delightful and practical, the ideal combination. If I have a group of 6 who need to scratch an area control itch, I’m more than happy to bring Mission Red Planet back out onto the table. But that doesn’t happen too often.

Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★☆☆ - Wouldn’t suggest it, but would happily play it

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

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I’m a big fan of Friedemann Friese.

From my very first play of Power Grid back in 2016, I knew there was just something about his games that were different from other designers. And so by the time Free Ride came out in the US, in 2022, I had already acquired many of his titles (Faiyum, Feierabend, Power Grid, Copycat, etc.). My team member Tom Franklin reviewed Free Ride last year, and now I’d like to follow up with my review of Free Ride USA.

🎶 “Come on and take a free ride”. ♬

[caption id="attachment_327807" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Yes the name of the game is Free Ride (Freie Fahrt) in German. What can I say. I got this when I was at Essen Spiel.[/caption]

“We gotta do better, it's time to begin” - Free Ride USA overview

Free Ride USA, like its sibling, is a “train game”, although 18XX players might take exception to that label. Players take turns performing two main actions: laying track and moving their engine across the country. As they progress from city to city, they may optionally pick up a route pair from the public display. This isn’t an “action” per se, but something they can do as part of moving their train…

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While our Diamond Climber Awards are on hiatus, we still want to make sure we, as a team, talk about our favorite games of 2025. These are the games that stand out, stand up, and won’t stand aside. Maybe it’s a light card game, or maybe it’s an hours-long space odyssey, the games on this list are our collective favorites that we played in 2025. Please join our team as we celebrate the best that board gaming has to offer.

Tom Franklin

Ingenius 3D

Thanks to my friend W. Eric Martin. I borrowed his copy of Ingenious 3D at the end of 2024 and forced it on all of my gaming friends in January 2025, from North Carolina to Maryland.

If you’ve played Reiner Knizia’s original Ingenious, you know how good the game is. Now, condense the board into a much smaller hexagonal shape and allow players to randomize the colors in the corners. The pieces are thicker, with a bar on the underside, across your pieces two hexes. This means you can only play on top of two adjoining pieces, and not completely cover a single piece.

Play starts on the first level of the board, but you can place a tile atop two other tiles at any…

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I was first introduced to the design sensibilities of Pete McPherson after playing Tiny Towns, a pattern-matching game about building structures for woodland creatures. Because I enjoyed Tiny Towns so much I also reviewed his game Wormholes (a route building and resource collection game set in outer space), and Fit to Print (a realtime tile laying game in which you’re building the front page of a small town newspaper). We’ve also interviewed Pete twice (Feb 2019 and Jan 2022).

So when Pickpocket Games told me about an upcoming Pete McPherson title called Lodge, I reached out and requested a review copy without any knowledge of the game other than the cover (which is gorgeous). And now that I’ve played it several times, I realize that it fits right into Pete’s catalog like it was born there.

Take a walk in the snow with me to the front door of Lodge.

“With luck, it might even snow for us.”

In Lodge, players run competing ski lodges, set high in the mountains. Over the course of the game, players add rooms and amenities to their lodges, then entice guests to stay in those rooms. Ah, but the guests are picky, and as guests do, have their…

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Allplay’s small box line has gotten lots of love from the Meeple Mountain team. Dandelions, Big Top, Mori, Things in Rings, Waddle, and most recently Ruins, and Oddland. They’re a high-value, low-cost way to game in style. And I do mean style. While they might use simple components, the quality is top-notch; and Mountain Goats is no exception.

Join me on the mountaintop with Mountain Goats.

Being at the top is marvelous!

Mountain Goats is a dice and set collection game with a simple premise. Roll 4 dice, then group them into any configuration you like. The total value of all the pips in each group allows you to move one of your goats up the slopes of one of six different mountain ranges. A group with a value of 5 allows you to move forward on the “5” range, while a group with a value of 10 allows you to move forward on the “10” range. When you make it to the top of one of the stacks, you’ll take a chip with that stack's value on it. The 5 stack gets you 5 points; the 10 stack earns you 10 points.

Simple so far, right?

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Yogi - Justin Bell

I picked up a pile of party games from our friends at Gigamic at SPIEL Essen 2025. One of those was Yogi, a new release with 60 cards, a simple set of rules, and an interesting note: the rules indicate that the cards are waterproof.

Why should that matter? Yogi is a ridiculous time at the table that asks players to simply draw a card and follow all the rules on that card. That might mean ongoing rules for the rest of the game, like “each time you draw a card, sing the words printed on that card” or “compliment another player at the table before you take your next turn.” Many more are physical, like holding your elbow above your shoulders while tucking a card underneath your chin before drawing a card, but only with a certain hand.

If a player can’t keep up, they immediately lose the game, and remaining players keep going until only one remains. Is Yogi a game? I think so, but it’s a game that is a little hard to monitor, judge, rule, etc. because the conditions stack in crazy ways. When my son won our first family game, even he wasn’t sure if he should have been named the winner. “I…

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