Even the big-brained fans of titles such as High Frontier 4 All need a break from time to time.

Pax Viking Junior, a family-weight version of the title’s big brother, Pax Viking, hit shelves in 2024. An exploration game for players ages 6 and up, Pax Viking Junior distills most of the gameplay in Pax Viking into a very straightforward affair and focuses on something kids love: cats!

Over a series of turns, players move their longship token to different regions in order to make friends with other farm animals and household pets (and yes, even the rules describe this process as “taking over friends”). These friends include mountain goats, fish, horses and cows, each represented on animal tiles that are placed into empty regions during a player’s turn.

If a region does not have an animal tile, the region’s first visitor gets to add one to the map, giving that player control of the region and the animal token there as a friend. Future visitors can take over the region using a cute takeover mechanic by adding more kitten tokens from the active player’s supply, or dropping one of a player’s two “Big Cat” tokens into the region, which scares the kitten tokens of all other…

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It just so happens that I spent the last month of 2025 trying not one, but two different games from the designers of Zhanguo: The First Empire, Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini: Norsewind and Kingdom Crossing. I’ll keep my thoughts brief here…by saying that the designers’ other 2025 release, Kingdom Crossing, is the better game.

Norsewind (2025, Aporta Games) is a tableau builder for 1-4 players that plays in about 15-20 minutes per player. The most surprising thing about Norsewind—besides my burning desire to call this game Norsewood, not Norsewind—is that it seems to aim so firmly towards the middle of the pack.

Players draft cards in one of five suits, which are then placed into one of the four rows of their respective kingdoms. Some cards have Viking helmets—bad—and some have shields, which are good. At the end of the game, you want to build rows that have as many or more shields than helmets, in order for a row to score.

The one wrinkle Norsewind provides is the decision point when drafting a card. When a player adds a card to their tableau, they get income based on a single building type that appears in every other row of their kingdom. Plus, a single meeple can…

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