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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