“I LOVE the style of this artist,” my 12-year-old said while admiring some of the painting cards from the upcoming limited movement and order fulfillment game Concrete Canvas, available on crowdfunding right now.

I had to agree. The art, by real-life street artist Chris RWK, is fantastic, and this style carries into the playable character tokens, the subway tiles used to dictate each player’s movement, and the milk crate player boards used to store paint cans as players move their tokens around New York City in an attempt to tag more locations than their opponents.

Designer David Abelson’s game does a great job of capturing the look and feel of something straight out of Beat Street, or any of the other break-dancing, street jive 80s films I grew up on. Even video games like Jet Grind Radio (or Jet Set Radio, depending on where you grew up) feel like an influence here.

Then the game starts…when Concrete Canvas reveals itself to be the opposite of dynamic.

Up and Down

Concrete Canvas is an order fulfillment, area majority game for 2-4 players. Players will spend most of their turns moving one of their two character tokens through different parts of New York via subway tiles that are adjacent to…

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About five years ago, I had the chance to play a friend’s copy of the game Arkwright (originally published in 2015 by Spielworxx.) My buddy Jason was a huge fan and wanted to show off his copy to our strategy gaming group, so we got a three-player game rolling at my place. About four hours later, we came up for air to talk through our thoughts: mostly positive, a bit too long, a lifestyle game that really needed to be played often to be truly fulfilling.

My favorite game of all time—then, and now—is City of the Big Shoulders, now known as Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders. “City BS”, as it is known in my circles, is a special game for a lot of reasons. Its focus is on the city of Chicago, in a period where a somewhat shocking number of famous companies were born there: Oscar Mayer, Quaker Oats, Kraft, Florsheim Shoes, Schwinn, Swift & Co., and many more. It’s the only game I’ve ever played that successfully combined the stock manipulation mechanics of popular gaming systems (such as incremental capitalization of 18xx games) with a straightforward worker placement mechanic that drives the middle phases of each round. It’s also a knife fight, a game that has epic swings and great competition, in…

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Cities (2024, Devir) was a very late cut from my list of the top 10 games of 2024. I loved Cities, but competition was fierce that year. Cities was my second-favorite “long filler” of 2024, just after Tower Up, another city builder, and a game that was such an elegant and easy teach for gamers of all shades. (This is another reason why I think 2024 will eventually go down as one of the best years in tabletop…it was such a deep year for new releases.)

Had Cities hit the market in 2025, it would have been one of the top three or four games I played. But, that’s the difference, isn’t it? With thousands of games hitting every year, it’s a crapshoot trying to figure out the best time for a game to hit the market.

A box showed up on my doorstep recently…and when I opened it up, I was overjoyed to see that one of my most anticipated games of 2026 was inside. Cities USA is a standalone expansion to the Cities system, with 90% of the rules from the base game and a host of new city boards modeling major US city tourist destinations.

As a man who is pre-sold on the Cities system, I’ll save you some time: Cities USA is…

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One of my favorite things about reviewing games is finding titles where I begin to form opinions, only to pivot as I do additional plays of the same game.

That’s especially true when I hate a game after the first play.

All Aboard! (2025, Devir) is one such title. It’s a family-weight card game that accommodates 2-5 players. The rulebook is a bit too long, which I initially thought would be trouble for a game aimed at an eight-year-old and their family. I got a little worried when I got to the back of the rulebook, and found such a wide variety of card powers incorporated into the game. I knew, immediately, that the game needed but was missing one thing: a player aid. (Remember: EVERY GAME NEEDS A PLAYER AID.)

All Aboard! has many elements of a programming game. Using a hand of cards, players must place one of their animal cards onto a boat in the middle of the table. Each boat (one per player is laid out on the table) can hold three cards, with a weight limit that will be checked later. On the player’s first and third turn each round, they must play a card face-up to a boat if there is space. On their second turn, they play one of their cards…

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I recently had the chance to pull in a review copy of the Stonemaier title Origin Story, a game I first learned about during SPIEL Essen 2025. As a bonus, Stonemaier threw in a free copy of a small card game called Smitten 2, based on the game Smitten, a title I was not aware of. When Smitten 2 arrived, I broke it out and did a couple solo plays.

The setup is quick, and the goal is simple: using a small hand of cards, players must build two matching 3x3 grids of cards, with the win condition tied to placing 17 of the 18 cards in the deck. During setup, all cards are shuffled with one being left out, unseen…in solo, the player manipulates two hands and has to play each tableau off each other, using the card powers aligned with each card and its specific playable position in the grid. (The 5 card can only be played in the middle of each tableau, while the 1 card can only be played in the upper left corner, for example.)

Across those first two plays, I didn’t win, but some interesting choices were on offer. Each card’s placement rules make for a fun puzzle, and I came close…

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I didn’t know there was a market for players looking for a dinosaurus skirmish game rich with history…but then the team at Ion Game Design handed me a copy of Dino Dynasty, their 2025 release designed by Ion’s Chief Creative Officer, Jon Manker. About a year prior, Manker had led a small group of media members through a demo of the game, and the most striking part about that walkthrough was the stunning dino art from artist Johan Egerkrans.

The work of Egerkrans, the author/illustrator of the book Dinosaur Dynasties, is the real star and reason to give the game Dino Dynasty a look. The game is an impressively streamlined version of more complex skirmish games, especially compared to some of the more rules-dense wargames I cover here on the site.

But the real question for me is the audience—while we had fun with our plays here, I can’t for the life of me figure out who the target audience is for the product.

This Biome Isn’t Big Enough for the Both of Us

Dino Dynasty is a very snappy “troops on a map” game for 1-6 players. The game’s incredible level of customization starts with the setup: there are more than 20 different playable dinosaur clans, 30 double-sided…

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Windmill Valley: Blooming Sails - Justin Bell

On my way out of my meetings with Board&Dice at last year’s SPIEL Essen 2025, our marketing contact asked if I wanted a copy of the new Windmill Valley expansion, Blooming Sails. I thought the base game was fine, certainly not at the top echelon of Board&Dice’s other, better, more combotastic Euros such as Tiletum, Nucleum, or even recent hits like Reef Project and Tianxia. Still, I love games, and one player from my review group really enjoyed Windmill Valley, so I agreed to bring a copy home.

The expansion addresses what most players I know agree to be the weak link in the base game’s design: the Foreign Trade action, where players would drop a tulip bulb to get two meager bonuses—maybe a tool, a point, maybe another tulip bulb—or take all the bulbs on a card to get a lot of bulbs at once. I’m not a Windmill Valley expert, but it was always the action I would cover with another action tile first because I used Foreign Trade so infrequently. The expansion blows that portion of the game up, using a new side board, new Crate bonuses, and a separate boat token used to…

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Canal Houses (2025, Gigamic) joins an almost unsustainably long list of quick card games where players must place a card into a tableau to build something. Maybe it’s a pipeline. Maybe it’s a community of cute animals. Maybe it’s a series of buildings in a race to place your 12th card before another player.

Canal Houses is based on the 2024 release Grachtenpand and builds on games released both before (The Red Cathedral) and after (Tenby) 2024, where players have to build buildings by laying cards representing bottom, middle, and roof levels to score points in a Dutch waterfront setting. Canal Houses accomplishes this by asking players to manage a hand of three cards, then adding a fourth from one of the available house component types (storefront, windows, roof) to then play one of those four cards into an ever-expanding tableau. After playing one of those four cards, each player has to pass their remaining three cards to the player on their left.

Each storefront and roof card has a scoring condition that is usually tied to features on the window cards. As long as the building meets that requirement, it will trigger points at the end of the game. One storefront might be worth four points, as long as a player can add at…

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If you do even a little digging into my review portfolio, you’ll see how much I respect the work of Simone Luciani. So, anything he touches is a game I will happily get to the table.

Echoes of Time (2025, Cranio Creations) is a co-design between Luciani and Roberto Pellei. It’s a very straightforward tableau builder that asks players to draw and play cards in a fashion similar to the IELLO game Ancient Knowledge from a couple years ago. Using the San Juan concept of paying for everything using only the other cards from hand, Echoes of Time is so straightforward that I only needed one pass of the rulebook before getting the game to the table.

Echoes of Time is the solution for players who like more punishing games with tricky scoring conditions (even the Luciani release MESOS seems to fit here) mixed with unclaimed tableau artifacts like the “Places of Power” from Res Arcana. If you’ve ever wondered “is there a more interactive, possibly mean version of Ancient Knowledge that plays in about 45 minutes?”, then run out and buy a copy of Echoes of Time right now.

That is, if you are comfortable with a healthy dose of unbalanced cards. Let me explain.

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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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For the most part, the team at Mighty Boards has never done me wrong.

After a middling experience with their recent release Red North, I didn’t rush their other SPIEL Essen 2025 release, Pinched!, to the table until recently. But after doing plays at three, four, and five-player counts, I’m excited to share that Pinched! was a blast. Save for my thoughts on how the game’s random card draw can affect scoring and notes on a specific player count, I highly recommend giving Pinched! a look.

“I’ll Take That”

Pinched! is a hand management and set collection game of bluffing and thievery for 2-5 players. Over a series of turns, each player (taking on the role of a thief in a gang of them) will serve as the Mastermind for a given turn. Using a hand of location cards, the Mastermind will select a heist location from amongst the 3-5 locations available in that game.

The Mastermind plays this card face-down into the center of the table, then each other thief will play a card from their own hand of location cards in the hopes of matching the location selected by the Mastermind. During the reveal, two things could happen. If the Mastermind picks a location that…

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I’ll admit it: my wife and I got a little too comfy.

After some of the best experiences in the one-shot, mystery gaming arena with the KOSMOS series Masters of Crime, I expected my fourth run to be another blowout. Masters of Crime: Vendetta, Masters of Crime: Rapture and Masters of Crime: Shadows are the height of the category; one of those titles was on my top 10 games of 2025, but all of them could have been, if I had just sprinkled the titles across the entire list.

What those games got right is why I recommend them to everyone I know. The scenarios are fantastic, you’re always placed in the shoes of the villains, not the cops, the puzzles are tough but fair, and the endings always made logistical sense after working through all the bread crumbs dropped during the investigation.

Masters of Crime: Incognito was the next game on my list. I created a draft for this review and had a 5.0/5.0 placeholder ready to go before I played the game. I was sure Incognito would be another banger; why wouldn’t I? My wife and I set up a date night for a Friday evening play. I made the cocktails; she grabbed our note-taking components, laid out the game, and read the…

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