It’s easy, I think, to take a game like Duel for Cardia for granted, especially if you spend as much time in the board game trenches as I do. Faouzi Boughida and Mathieu Rivero aren’t doing anything exceptional here, by which I mean they aren’t doing anything that stands out if you’re constantly deluged with new game designs. Duel for Cardia isn’t flashy, and it isn’t trying to break new ground. It’s easy to underestimate a game that’s simply doing the work. I think I made this comparison a few years ago, but I will come back to it: Duel for Cardia is the board game equivalent of a good studio picture from back when studios were content to make $35 million on a film with a budget of $10m.

By that I mean, it is competently designed, charming, successful, tense, and you could play it with just about anyone. Both players start with an identical deck of 16 cards, draw a hand of five, and simultaneously reveal one. You can think of this as a lane battler with up to 16 single-card lanes if you want; you wouldn’t be far off the mark. The player who reveals a higher-value card wins a Signet. The player who reveals a lower-value card gets to activate their card’s ability. This process…

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At this point, it feels impossible to write about The Old King’s Crown without grappling in some way with the sustained level of hype that it has produced over the last year. Pablo Clark’s ambitious entrée into the world of board games, this lane battler on steroids, has made a big splash. How big that splash is, exactly, is hard to measure, but the small board game café where I work gets a call about once every two-to-three weeks asking if we have The Old King’s Crown in stock. This is an ungainly mess of a game, an initially unwelcoming and overwhelming thing. Catan this is not. For The Old King’s Crown to break hobby containment would suggest a Blue Whale has just surfaced.

These are not, in full transparency, my favorite reviews to write. I prefer unexpected surprises to the heavily foreshadowed. If a game has too much momentum behind it when it reaches your door, your only choices are to be bowled over or to step aside and let it pass you by. I don’t want to get caught up in the current of excitement, nor am I interested in writing a reactionary takedown.

Fortunately, life conspired to keep me from playing my review copy of The Old King’s Crown for quite a bit longer than anticipated.…

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My wife and I are always desperate to find things to do during the ridiculously-long stretch over the holidays when the kids are out of school for the Christmas-to-New-Year’s period. Recently, that stretch lasted 17 days.

So, my wife often buys 2-3 activities—art projects, workbooks, LEGO installations, board games—to help pave the way in-between all the TV watching, tablet gaming, meals, and sleep. (Sadly, that is often all my kids do during that time if we are at home!) One of the activities she picked up this year was the cooperative legacy board game Ziggurat, published by one of our family’s favorite activity makers, the puzzle company Mindware.

At first, I rolled my eyes at this one. Do I not bring in enough board games for this family to play every year? But then I noticed the names on the box: Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock, two of the legends of the genre and the creators of the greatest legacy game of them all, Pandemic: Legacy Season 1. Then I flipped the box over and fell even harder in love with the concept—Ziggurat is a six-chapter legacy game and looked like a great time for the kids.

I was mostly right.

Stick Rule D Here After Completing Chapter…

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I’m a big fan of weird dueling games—Ortus Regni is one of my all timers—and if they allow for multiplayer silliness, all the better. Etherstone manages to be a complete product, thoughtful, novel, and at times, surprisingly clever. If nothing else, it gets props for not just being a blatant money-grab, instead offering a self-contained and compelling game that has a lot of depth.

The conceit

The lore of Etherstone is not that compelling, mainly because the art is so expressive that I don’t really end up caring much about whatever the story is. It’s evoking druids and biopunk—wild and crazy characters collecting various blobs of mana and using them to bring in more characters so you can battle shared threats, etc., etc.

Mechanically, at the beginning of the game you’ll select a leader card from two that you’re dealt randomly. This will give you a starting distribution of resources. From there, you’ll draft seven cards from a large deck. Once you’ve done both of these things, it’s time to duel.

Etherstone captures one of my favorite underutilized mechanisms in gaming—the point buy. Though it’s a standard card draft that you see in many games, the fact that you’re only getting seven cards to play the entire session with…

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Do You Like YROs?

Off the bat, the title of the game is, to me, funny. YRO…as in Euro? Why yes, yes it is. But it’s not a euro…? Also, yes.

I stumbled upon YRO at Origins in 2025. Though I’m a casual anime fan (stuff like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, DanDaDan, and Cowboy Bebop), I’m not really drawn to anime-style aesthetics outside the medium. But my interest came from the promise of a fun, quick tableau builder—and if you follow my writing, you’ll know that mechanic is one of my absolute favorites.

Designer Masato Uesugi has a bit of a following from previous titles like Paper Tales and Welcome to the Dungeon (and even a small Oink Games box: Durian). I’m always praising designs that come from Asia because they often bring a different approach to gaming—and as an Asian myself, it’s great to see that kind of representation getting a warm reception.

[caption id="attachment_327608" align="aligncenter" width="894"] Photo from Play to Z Games[/caption]

The 3x3 Road to 40

YRO is played over turns until one player has completed their 3x3 tableau or scored 40 victory points or more. Gameplay is relatively simple and straightforward, and it’s conveniently printed on everyone’s player board, which also includes a tracker for Magic and Technology.

…

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Five years ago, I reviewed the original Fantasy Realms with its expansion The Cursed Hoard. It was during my early years of committing to review writing, and if I'm going to be metaphorical for a moment, that feels like waking up and my feet just touching the ground compared to where I am today, two hundred reviews later.

What I wasn't expecting, besides still writing reviews, was Fantasy Realms becoming a staple of the WizKids line. The original version performed well enough to spawn Marvel: Remix, Star Trek: Missions, and even a deluxe remake of the original. Each version has its own spin, for better or for worse, and the new Greek Legends feels more like a refinement of the original than something wildly experimental.

The Pantheon Expands

The core gameplay loop of Fantasy Realms: Greek Legends hasn't changed much from the original. You still start with seven cards in your hand and draw from either a common deck or the discard pile. After drawing, you must discard one card from your hand face up. When ten cards accumulate in the discard pile, the game concludes and scoring begins.

The idea here is that each card scores differently and combos often interact with one another. The…

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For my money, 2025’s most underrated (and severely underreported) game was En Route, a “blank and write” game system from the team at CrowD. It landed on my top 10 games of 2025 and for a person who usually frowns at the chance to cover roll/flip/draw-and-write games, En Route was such a hit that one person literally bought a copy of it while playing the first few rounds of a review play.

Little did I know that CrowD plans to extend this system by using the same round structure and game mechanics on different maps based on interesting themes…so when I learned that the new game Innsmouth Travel Guide looked a whole heck of a lot like En Route (prompting my group to call this new title “En Route: Innsmouth”), I reached out to the team at CrowD to secure a review copy of this new expandalone title.

We’ll keep the proceedings here brief: buy this game, especially if you are a strategy gamer who wonders why blank-and-write games fall flat for you…this system is the solution.

“Is That a Monster?”

Innsmouth Travel Guide is a roll-and-write game for 1-4 players. Although it is a standalone product, Innsmouth Travel Guide uses most of the rules from the…

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12 Rivers (2025, Good Games Publishing) had a look to it that screamed “fun-looking production, probably not a great game.” A couple of friends who tried the game at Gen Con 2025 thought 12 Rivers was OK, but even I had to admit that I was shocked to learn that the game sold out well before the end of the show. The game’s table presence was handsome, but I was not exactly rushing to grab myself a copy.

Reading the game’s overlong rulebook didn’t help sell 12 Rivers either. I thought it would be interesting, but after doing my standard two-player walkthrough to ensure I had the rules down, I got the game in front of my review crew with expectations managed appropriately.

Then, I discovered a game that was MUCH more interesting than I initially credited. 12 Rivers is great, but it’s great because you can poke your neighbor by stealing their marbles and laugh your behind off about it later. If you are looking for a fun, accessible way to steal stuff from everyone around you, get yourself a copy of 12 Rivers right now!

“And, I’ll Take That One, Too!”

12 Rivers is a set collection game for 2-4 players. It plays in about an…

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