Man, I just love a civilization game. For a power-tripping megalomaniac like myself, there’s just nothing better than taking the helm of a conglomerate of violent individuals and making bad decisions.

Near: Echoes of Civilizations has a goofy name—you really have to do some mental gymnastics for it to make sense at all. But, there’s some real fun to be had here. All the hits are here: Technology! Combat! Resource management! Points!

Actually, part of what makes Near interesting is its commitment to synthesizing the heads-down-euro-bean-counter that constitutes a lot of its bone structure with a traditional build-stuff-kill-guys game. Unlike other civ games (for example, Civilization: A New Dawn, Mosaic, or Gentes) that have tried to incorporate concepts from euro-style mechanism-fests into their design framework, Near takes a holistic approach that makes it feel complete and cohesive, rather than a cobbled together bricolage.

A novel new mechanism: “cards”

At the beginning of Near, you get dealt a starting culture card (a personal endgame scoring condition), a wonder card (an in-game scoring condition), four regular cards from one of five colors, and a starting action bonus. Your wonder gives you a starting building, and in a very Terra Mystica-style start, you place some buildings out on the board and it’s…

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We’re in the middle of a war in our garden. It’s all based around the strawberries we have foolishly attempted to grow. Those strawberries are not making it into our bowls. Someone is getting to them first. We were almost convinced it was our regular visitor, Howard the Hedgehog. There isn’t much that Howard won’t scoff. Put a net over ‘em, you say? Yeah, we did that. Then, one super early morning (deeply unusual for me) I happened to squint out of the kitchen window, and what did I spy? Why, a particularly nimble squirrel, scoffing our strawberries. The little son of a nutcracker had torn and chewed a squirrel-sized hole in the netting, and was sharing his rewards with some happy starlings. I think I’ve had two of those strawberries. Two. Not exactly a festival. Not even enough for breakfast.

So let’s head to Nemi where we can enjoy a strawberry festival! (Scout’s honor, every word of that odd little tale is true.)

In Nemi: The Strawberry Festival, players immerse themselves in the charm of an Italian summer by drafting wild strawberries, baking mouthwatering desserts, and decorating the town with vibrant garlands. Designed by Valeria Cavasin and Edoardo Eibenstein, this 2–4 player game plays over 4 rounds, featuring…

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Aspens is a two-player game of arboreal expansion and domination. Each player is given a bag of trees. On a player’s turn, they will roll the game’s two dice to determine the limitations of their actions. One die controls how many trees each of the players receive from their bags, and the other controls in which direction they are able to expand their holdings. On their turn, a player may expand outwards (filling in more spaces with their own trees), bolster their current holdings (increasing their odds of receiving new trees when the dice are rolled), or some mixture of both. Their goal is to get as many of those trees onto the playing field as they can so that when final calculations are performed at the end of the game, they’ll occupy more real estate than their opponent and thereby win the game.

This, of course, is an oversimplification of the game (although, as you’ll soon see, not much of one). If you’re just interested in what I think about the game, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we talk about how to play Aspens.

Setup

First, assemble the game board. The board is divided into seven segments. When fully assembled, you’ll be left with a vaguely cross-shaped playing area composed…

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It’s rare that a published game feels organic, but I guess that makes sense. Most authored works, regardless of medium, do not feel organic. The closest most games come is “intuitive,” which is not the same thing. “Intuitive” as applied to game criticism is more about the rules making sense and flowing. You use it when you’re talking about something that’s easy to teach and easy to learn and easy to play, about games that just. make. sense. In order for something to be intuitive, it has to build on what has come before, on a shared cultural reference or two.

That is not the case with “organic,” a word which I cannot say I have ever wanted to apply to a board game before. Strap in, folks. We’re developing a new theory. “Organic” can be as free-form as it wants. That’s probably a key feature, right? I mean, who tells an heirloom tomato how to grow? Nobody, that’s who.

When I say Playthings is organic, I mean that it feels like something a group of Victorian children would come up with whilst whittling away the unending hours of the day. It feels improvised, even as…

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I’ve been struggling to poke holes in the design of the new game Size Wise, designed by Scott Brady and published by GameHead. And, here’s what I have got:

The people who made those old Tootsie Roll ads from the 1970s should feel burned that artist Serge Seidlitz made an owl for Size Wise’s box and tokens that looks a heck of a lot like the one who knows how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. Like, everyone of a certain age who has seen the rulebook and the tokens has commented that the owl looks exactly like the one from those old commercials! (I haven’t reached out to GameHead for comment…but, they know. I KNOW they know.)

Size Wise is a party game for 3-8 players that plays in about 20 minutes. I tried Size Wise three times at different player counts: four, seven, and eight players.

Everyone loved it.

Across a series of turns, players collectively flip a card from a deck, with six different items on each card numbered from 1-6. The backs of the cards are also numbered from 1-6, so when a player flips a card, they then look at the top card of the draw deck to see which number the table is forced…

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The success of CMYK’s Hot Streak has had the intended effect. I know, because while I was at Gen Con 2026 I saw a few more betting-style party games than I had in recent years, with Underdog Games’ Dino Racer leading the way at this year’s show.

Taco Cat Games—the company formerly known as Dolphin Hat Games, before leaning into the company’s most popular title, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza—is swerving left in a world where everyone else is turning right. Here’s what I mean: Taco Cat Games has been making fast, fun card games for a decade, with titles like Moose Match Mayhem! and Gimme That! leading the way with games that feature zero board and dozens of cards, dice, pencils, and yelling. But with their new release, Go! Go! Go Kart, I had a somewhat shocking conversation with Taco Cat’s CEO, Dave Campbell.

“Yeah, it’s a board game,” he told me when he handed over a review copy. “Let me know what you think; we’re really excited about it.”

After a few plays at home—including a four-player game with my two kids and one of their friends, along with the standard plays with my kids and the wife—I’m ready to see why Dave is so excited. Go! Go! Go Kart mostly avoids…

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I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I have real questions, like this: does the new game Hacienda (based on the 2004 version of Hacienda by Wolfgang Kramer) want the leopard-looking creatures on offer here to be pumas, or jaguars?

I ask because the rulebook interchangeably uses the terms for both (they are pumas on the manual’s cover description, but jaguars on page four), and technology tells me that the two breeds of cool-looking cats are definitely different. Another theme note: Hacienda’s new theme is tied to building an eco-friendly tourist destination in the hills of Argentina. For the life of me, though, Hacienda feels like a game where I am simply placing clumps of animal tokens on a map to score adjacency bonuses and piles of cute-looking capybara packs.

Hacienda isn’t nearly as complicated as I’m making it out to be. In fact, like other Kramer games—the German legend has, as a lead or co-designer, gifted the world with titles ranging from El Grande to Tikal to Wandering Towers to my all-time favorite Kramer co-design, The Princes of Florence—Hacienda is extraordinarily simple to teach, and his work here with Daryl Andrews (Sagrada) is sleek, with a playtime that might last 30 minutes or less with lower player counts, 45 minutes with the…

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Sometimes you can tell where a company’s focus is in a given year.

Czech Games Edition (CGE) has a very, very large piece of chicken releasing later this year called Kingdom Come Deliverance, a $150 game so large it has 10 individual artists working on only the artwork for the 700+ cards in the box. Forget the fact that CGE’s lead designer, Vlaada Chvátil, and one of the world’s hottest designers, Tomáš Holek (SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, amongst many other now-published titles), are the co-designers on Kingdom Come Deliverance and there are are dozens of hours of content in that box. (I’m more shocked that a single game has TEN ARTISTS working on it!)

That means Drillers, CGE’s Gen Con release, is its other “big” release for 2026. It’s not nearly as ambitious as Kingdom Come Deliverance, but Drillers is as solid as its title is plain. Drillers is a deckbuilding game that plays in about 90 minutes even at its full player count, and it does excellent, limited work within its tidy playtime.

Dive In

Drillers accommodates 1-4 players, and is a very standard deckbuilding game. Players begin the game with a deck of nine cards—eight action cards and a “Damage” card, which essentially…

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Taking Tricks!

Some readers may know that I wasn’t into trick-taking games at all a couple of years back. Since then, though, trick-taking has become the trend for small-box games, and somewhere along the way I developed a love for them. Whether or not I’m actually good at them is a different story.

The downside is that the seemingly endless wave of releases has started to oversaturate the genre, making it rarer to find one that brings something unique to the table. But when games like Rowdy Partners, Tricky Kids, and Rebel Princess offer something different, my head turns.

I had a chance to demo Crits & Tricks at Gen Con this year, and at first glance, I thought it was an RPG card game. Laid out in front of me were full sets of dice, from d4s to d20s and everything in between. Move over to the cards, and they stand out with fantasy artwork featuring bards, barbarians, and other adventuring types.

Wait a minute, these cards don’t have any values? Are you sure this is a trick-taking game?

Just wait and see.

Dice & Quests

Crits & Tricks plays over three rounds, and whoever collects the most loot wins. The deck is made up of different hero classes, such as wizards and rogues, that…

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Gen Con 2026 must have been the convention of "alien on the loose" games, because I seemed to be playing them constantly. In fact, in one night we went from This Game Is Killer: Alien on Board to This Game Is Killer: Frozen Horror to Not Alone: Remastered Edition. While the latter is a slightly different flavor, the asymmetry of the Not Alone: Remastered Edition puts one player in the driver's seat of the alien threat while the others try to outlive, outlast, and outsmart them.

Not Alone: Remastered Edition: Hide and Seek

Having never played the original Not Alone, my thoughts are solely based on my experiences with this improved version. In Not Alone: Remastered Edition, the players have evacuated their ship, landing on a mysterious planet called Artemia where it quickly becomes apparent that they are…not alone. Insert DiCaprio meme here. They become the Hunted in a race for survival against one of the other players who assumes the role of the Creature, whose goal is to stymie their efforts.

[caption id="attachment_333875" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Hunted players receive a character card with a unique Skill[/caption]

The main tracker board is set up in the center of the playing area, with the Hunted's Rescue counter on one end and…

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I’ve had a tough tabletop gaming year. More and more, it seems like bad games—truly awful tabletop experiences—are seeking me out, not the other way around.

Computer Junkyard is a new game from a new publisher, Dream Egg Games. Designers Allan Pincus and Jared Pincus have created a title that is supposed to be about building a computer from spare parts bought at a local junkyard…or, maybe from stolen parts instead. It’s a simple race game with no other win conditions: the first player to build a computer out of the parts needed to make a working device wins.

Here was the first sign of trouble: the solo/single player game. To learn the game, I did a play using the single player rules at the back of the rulebook. The goal? Time yourself and build a working computer using the requirements shown on the player aid—your mainframe needs things like a power source, a CD-ROM drive, a monitor, etc.—and a certain number of components unique to the software, like a certain number of RAM and HDD components added through a databus on your computer’s chassis, a board where you can lock puzzle pieces together for your rig.

In solo, this is how things work: draw tiles out of a bag until you find everything you need to complete the…

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When I first got into hobby gaming, Sushi Go was a hot new release, and it became a quick favorite. In the subsequent decade and change, I and millions of others have spent hours planning the perfect sushi plate. The game for which Philip Walker-Harding will be remembered is an easy game to love, especially for individuals to whom the frontiers of modern gaming are all but unknown. Sushi Go is just hooky enough to get people in, but simple enough that they can chat, smack-talk, and perform. Though I and many other hobbyists feel that we have moved beyond that game, it remains a dominant commercial force for a reason.

Be honest with me, my fellow hobbyists; don’t you miss it? Don’t you find yourself wishing you could get that same early buzz back, to revisit the times when something as simple as Sushi Go could set your brain alight? I do. I loved loving Sushi Go. I loved having that quick and reliable source of dopamine.

Personal Demons, from designer Judson Cowan of Deep Regrets fame, won’t quite take you back to those days, but it’ll get you close. The frictionless drafting of Sushi Go and its numerous imitators has been swapped out for something a little grittier, something gnarlier. Or maybe that’s just the illustrations?

…

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The new Rush Hour puzzle entry, Rush Hour Duel, arrived at my doorstep recently. I know that, because I got a confirmation by e-mail that a package had just arrived. A couple hours later, I came up from my office cave in the basement to find that the game had not only arrived, but had already been opened and played three times by my wife and 12-year-old.

Yes, friends…Rush Hour Duel was reviewed before I could even open the box myself. This has never happened before, across more than 500 review copies received since I arrived here at Meeple Mountain.

“Dad, we got a new Rush Hour Duel game, and it’s great! I beat Mom three times,” said the 12-year-old when I came upstairs.

“Well, that is a review sample that came from the publisher.”

“Really? OK. Still, it’s great, I’m glad you picked it up.” Then they ran upstairs to slip into another evening activity.

I looked around, shocked, as if someone had just made off with my wallet. Those guys got Rush Hour Duel to the table before I could, I thought. What kind of respect is that?

For the uninitiated, Rush Hour is a game series from the Ravensburger toy puzzle arm known as ThinkFun. If you have kids and regularly visit your local Target, there’s…

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Revenant  - Thomas Wells

I’m a big fan of euros with a little bit of investment/stock game flair. Revenant seemed like a slam dunk. A Battlestar Galactica-esque (TV show, not board game) flotilla of ships flying through space, trying to survive whilst arguing ideology? Boom! Shared board space that is growing and shrinking as you play? Awesome! Tons of interesting and oblique powers? Yeah!

Each subsequent play of Revenant got me less excited to try again. I was teaching the game each time, and while the core systems are well-designed, the sheer volume of iconography and rules grit that gets granularly layered over each game system results in a near-impenetrable miasma of choices. Just during setup you have to parse icons on 8 different cards and determine how they’ll interact with your choices. On top of this, as the game goes on, player engines become more and more elaborate, and even at 3 players, turns can really drag. I just got tired of pulling the thing out to teach it. My running theory of Mindclash Games’s output is that they take a simple concept and layer so much procedural busywork over top that it gives the impression of complexity, rather than actually requiring complex thinking. Most of the decisions in the game…

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I didn’t quite know what to expect when I sat down with Gruntz, a small-box game for two from designer Carter Scott and publisher Allplay. I generally try to go into games as blind as possible so my expectations don’t affect my response, but I had gotten the idea somewhere that Gruntz would be a spiritual cousin to Warhammer 40k or Kill Team rather than in the lineage of chess. I was ready for something messier, muckier. Gruntz, it turns out, is dazzlingly clear and transparent.

You and your opponent take turns moving units and adding units, in that order, with the goal of controlling the three indicated spaces in the middle of the board. Controlling two at the end of your turn nets you a point. Controlling all three, should you be able to manage it, nets you two. In a brisk race to three points, either is a significant gain.

Units come in a variety of shapes and sizes, each with different capabilities. In order to capture those center spaces, you have to use your Gruntz and your Captain, humble units that can only move one space at a time and are defenseless in the face of enemy attacks. The vehicles, Tanks and Trucks and two types of airplanes, present a veritable rainbow of options.

The bulk…

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Cooperative games where the players can't discuss strategy aren't anything new, but they only work if everyone figuratively signs the social contract to make it work. In Shape it, published by Randolph, players move cardboard shapes around the table in hopes of everybody seeing the same artistic vision. Without speaking about the look you're going for, this can be a Herculean feat. But does it shape up to be a game worth bringing to the table? Let's find out.

Shape It: Taking Shape

In Shape it, players move seven abstract shapes to communicate a concept listed on one of the Word cards laid out on the table. The trick is that all the words could be correct; it's a matter of unified consensus among the group. If everybody can collectively earn 5 cards for guessing the same Word card before flipping the third Life/Failure token, they win!

To set up the game, players arrange 7 shapes in a circle in the center of the playing area. Starting with the green deck, 5 Word cards are drawn and laid out to form the starting Word pool from which inspiration will be drawn.

Every round, players may move a single shape. Pieces can be placed on top of other pieces or rotated around, but pieces that are underneath other pieces are…

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Shards of Creation is a great idea. I haven’t read any Brandon Sanderson, and my understanding of his magic system can be charitably described as patchwork—“There are…metals?”—but from what little I do know a trick-taking game in which each suit corresponds to a shard—don’t ask—is spot-on. That’s a wide-open design space that invites exploration and could result in some great ideas. It really could.

Shards of Creation is a trick-taking game with set collection tendencies. This immediately sets the game up for an uphill climb in my experience. There are eight suits in the box, five of which are randomly chosen for each game, and the winner of each trick selects one card to add to their scoring tableau. You score points for complete sets of the five suits and for numerous copies of the same suit.

The trump suit changes across each of the game’s three rounds, and each trump suit brings with it a corresponding rule. Autonomy cannot be led if you have any other choice. Cultivation allows players to draw extra cards at the start of the round before discarding back down to a normal hand size. Dominion forces the winner of each trick to score the highest rank. Many of the cards in each suit have their own powers as well. Some get…

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Welcome Demons is the latest game from designer Daniel Newman, who has a wide variety of titles under his belt. Some of you may also be familiar with his publishing company, New Mill Industries (NMI), which specializes in small and limited print runs of unusual card games. In the last couple of years, he and NMI have focused almost exclusively on shedding and trick-taking games. It is in that genre that he has created his two best-known designs, Gachapon Trick and the exquisite Mori.

I always think of NMI releases—and, by extension, Newman’s more recent designs—as equal parts game and formal experiment. The games don’t always work, but you’re unlikely to forget them. They’re always trying something. NMI’s catalogue of li’l weirdos runs deep, and with the release of Welcome Demons, it grows deeper still.

Oni Oni Oxen Free

Japanese mythology is full of stories concerning oni, these hulking demons that often live in caves and like to terrorize unfortunate people. You know ‘em. If I asked you to picture a typical Japanese demon, the picture that’d most likely pop in your mind is an oni. Most of the time, they’re evil. But the onsen town of Noboribetsu has…

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I don’t feel entirely ready to talk about Suppose. I’ve played it the appropriate number of times (three or four), with different numbers of people (three or four), but I can’t seem to form an opinion of it. I’d spend more time with the game, but deadlines are what they are and here we stand on the precipice of a review in which the reviewer is uncertain. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Suppose, published in the U.S. by New Mill Industries, is a trick-taking game designed by Akinori Hagiwara. It is part of that strange subset of trick-taking games called may-follow, in which following the led suit is entirely optional. Here, that’s born out of necessity; you don’t know what most of your cards are.

During setup, each player is dealt a hand of cards. There is now careful—nay, meticulous—work to be done. First, if this is your first time playing, you have to gawk at H.B. Tyson’s gorgeous art. These wonderful surrealist concoctions have yet to go without comment in any of the games I’ve played. Once you’re done with the gawking, no rush, arrange the cards by suit, with the suits in whatever order you want. Within each suit, arrange the cards from highest to lowest.

There are a few games that incorporate these steps, minus the…

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Green Goblin Crashes the Party

When AMG first announced their foray into the world of board games with the Alliances line as a spinoff from Marvel: Crisis Protocol, I was… skeptical. After all, could they really take a game I love like MCP and spin it off into a team-based co-op experience? Could they capture what makes MCP work? I was dubious. While it’s not a perfect experience, I was completely pleasantly surprised by just how fun the game turned out to be. It’s just an absolute blast.

The quick idea is that each Alliances game brings together a team of four heroes, all with varying superpowers, to take down an iconic villain and their army of goons. Here, we get both Spider-Men (Peter Parker and Miles Morales) along with Black Cat and Ghost-Spider, teaming up to take down the Green Goblin. Together, they’ll fight him across three different chapters (two objective-based chapters and a final boss fight), each lasting roughly 90 minutes each. 

Getting started is simple - each player picks the character they want to be and picks a level 1 upgrade, and then you’re off. It’s worth noting that if you’re a solo player, this game is very easily playable in solo mode with you controlling all four characters, though I can’t speak to that experience…

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