There are, broadly speaking, two types of traveler. There are those who plan meticulously, looking up every possible sight and highlight to determine how to squeeze the most juice out of the orange of their time, and those who are happy to amble through a trip with a vague idea of what they’d like to do and a willingness to roll with “it,” whatever “it” may be.

I’m torn on which group Hanami is for. Keymaster’s beautifully realized retheming of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai is set during a trip through Japan, as players compete to have the best itinerary. In terms of setting, it’s for the planners. In terms of gameplay, though, I think it might lean towards the rollers. Either way, I like the absurdity of tourists competing for the objectively best experience, as if such a thing existed. It’s silly. I also enjoy how this framing makes sense of Samurai’s scoring system, but we’ll get back to that.

Like most of Knizia’s masterpieces, Hanami has a simple turn structure. The goal of the game in mechanical terms is to collect the Celebration tokens that litter the board, the Sakura and…

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As activities go, I love the direction Chris Couch Games is taking with its initial batch of releases. The production looks exceptional and the bright, vivid colors of nearly every game I picked up from this publisher at Gen Con has the shelf appeal a game needs to stand out.

Garden Club (2026, designed by Kristen Mott and Andrew Stiles) is much better as a production than a game. Solid player boards that serve as a handsome storage area and turn tracker for each round. A rulebook that feels luxurious in the hands, from the linen finish to the easy read and the helpful game summary on the back cover. Carve-outs in the box for certain tokens and cards, and a decent amount of mini expansion content for players who want to dive deep.

As a game, Garden Club came back to Earth for my solo plays and my two-player game with my nine-year-old. Players plant and harvest on their turns, placing flower tiles on one of the 16 spaces of a shared centralized board, while making patterns that can be scored on project cards or manipulated using tool cards.

All of it feels very “Sunday afternoon.” By that, I mean that you should play Garden Club with a…

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One of my favorite things about the games released under Carla and Nick Kopp’s Weird Giraffe banner: the games are often legitimately weird.

Here’s what I mean. I was explaining the rules to my wife and nine-year-old for our first play of Effervescent (a Carla design currently on crowdfunding, set for release in 2027), and when I tried to explain the main concept of placing sea-based creature tiles in such a way that the tail of a newly-placed tile must touch the head of a previously-placed animal tile, my wife openly balked.

“So, like, this way?” She used a large whale tile as an example.

“Well, sort of,” I began. “Each tile has a head area, a distinct tail point…then, every other part of the tile is a ‘side.’”

“Seems kind of weird,” she said. And our first play went that way, as players took tiles in one of three sizes to create scoring patterns that would trigger with a mix of scoring sequences, tied to “Drift” cards and Harmony cards, the latter of which were established before the game as public milestones that are always available to score.

Turns are simple. Place a tile, and if a placed tile meets a Drift card scoring condition, a player puts…

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(Note that this tile set is for American mahjong, not Chinese mahjong. While the games are similar and share the same roots, the tile sets required to play each are slightly different.)

Editor: Please read to the bottom for a discount code on Monet's Garden Mahjong set.

The Mahjong Moment

Mahjong is a traditional game that’s having a modern moment. Like chess, it’s a game that has long had its followers but has never quite become part of the mainstream hobby scene. Now both games are experiencing renewed popularity.

In the tabletop world, we saw a big boom in gaming during and after Covid. The need for entertainment and escape, coupled with a need to engage in-person after being isolated drove renewed interest in modern board games. The same is true of role-playing games, chess, and, yes, mahjong.

Suddenly mahjong is everywhere. Social media is bursting with pictures and meetups. I don’t even live in a major city and I see flyers advertising mahjong classes, playgroups, and tournaments all over town. Hallmark even made a mahjong movie and matching Christmas ornament!

With all of this interest comes a flood of products designed to capture every possible dollar. Mats, racks, lamps, tile sets, tables, carrying bags and more are all…

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One of the great things about being part of a regular game group is being exposed to titles you might have never seen before—because your friends also love games, and no two gamers have quite the same combination of tastes. Variety is one of my defining characteristics when it comes to playing games: I’d much rather play 6 games once, than 1 game six times. So when my friend Chas said “we’re going to play Bridges of Shangri-La”, a game I’d never heard of, I enthusiastically agreed.

Bridges of Shangri-La is an area control game from 2003. Set in the forbidding Himalayas, the goal is to earn the most points by training up masters in 7 different disciplines, then have those masters send their students to neighboring villages to “spread enlightenment”. Of course this is a friendly way of saying you’re going to beat the pants off them…except in Nepalese.

Did I mention that Bridges of Shangri-La is a bit…cut-throat? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

How to play Bridges of Shangri-La

The Bridges of Shangri-La board features 13 villages in the peaks of Nepal, each connected to several other villages by tendril thin bridges. Each player begins the game with 7 tokens, in 7 different disciplines. The goal is…

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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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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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Growing Your Garden

In Perennial, your job is to grow the best prairie garden using tools and tiles. It's a tile-placement game with set collection, drafting, pattern building, and end game bonuses tied to how well you've placed your tiles. Are you thinking you've seen this before? Maybe in Cottage Garden, or Pergola? 

You haven't. 

Oh, sure. The game starts in a standard fashion: Each player is given a Garden Board on which to place tiles, and a Workshop Board to store resources. The Garden Board is seeded with boulders which act as obstacles that you must build around, and actual seeds which can give you benefits later in the game. A greenhouse polyomino is placed in the middle as an anchor point for your first tile placement (and it acts as another obstacle). A square Central Drafting Board is randomly filled with Flower Tiles and Animal Tiles. Four Tool Cards are placed around the edges of the square. The Pond/Feature cards are shuffled and placed near the board, and the top one is turned over to reveal the first tile. Each player is given four Pond/Feature polyomino tiles that must be placed, one per round according to the card drawn from the deck. 

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I’ve spent much of my time with Gazebo, publisher Bitewing Games’s update of Reiner Knizia’s cult release Qin, appreciating the humble domino. Why is it so good? Is it the heft? Unexpectedly heavy tiny objects are disarming, after all. There’s the abnormally smooth texture and the rounded corners, the clack—not a click, but a clack—every time you put one down on a hard surface. Maybe it’s a shared cultural memory of the nearly 1,000 years we’ve been playing with them. 

Whatever the reason(s), dominoes are enchanting. They’re one of the few objects that suggest and immediately invite play of all sorts for people of all ages. The youngest children know to construct with them. A love of dominoes seems to be hardwired into us from the jump.

While Gazebo is one of the thinkier applications of dominoes I’ve ever come across, the magic is still very much there. Rather than two sets of pips, these dominoes—or regular-degular cardboard tiles if you don’t opt for the upgraded components—show two squares of color. Players take turns placing one tile down on the cloth board with the goal of creating groups of the same color. Well, that’s not entirely true.

The goal isn’t to…

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Human memory is a funny thing.

Every time I sit down to play Gingham, the latest collaboration between designer Robert Hovakimyan and publisher Bitewing Games, the song “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” rises like a leviathan from the depths of my memory. “If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure for a big surprise,” I sing as I lay out the checkerboard picnic blanket and organize the ants. “If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise,” as I set out the sweet treats across the map and set my score counter to 0.

My only exposure to “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” a popular children’s song in the U.K., was a 1986 VHS tape documenting a live concert on Boston Commons by the musical duo Rosenshontz. I have not seen, let alone thought about, that VHS tape in over three decades. Nevertheless, here we are. Again, and again, and again.

But what of Gingham? We can’t speak of obscure regional concert films forever, though I could probably pitch that to Pitchfork as a series. What about Gingham indeed. It’s a bit of a funny game to describe. I would call it an abstract game centered around route-building with a clever sort of auction system for figuring out turn order. The BGG entry suggests the publisher more…

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