Maybe it's my old age catching up with me, but I don't have time for 3-hour marathons unless it's something truly special, like Hegemony. A Familiar Find caught my eye with wonderful artwork and stellar graphic design, with the box promising a fun family experience in under an hour. So when Darrington Press offered a review copy, I said yes.

You play as a fantasy familiar gathering ingredients for an adventurer. The game is apparently set in a fictional campaign world from Critical Role, although my connection to that entire media empire is a glowing 404 error. The core mechanic has you claiming one of three available card piles per turn, with players seeding those piles from their hand to set themselves up for a future turn or nudge an opponent toward something they don't want. Not every card is a gift or even face up, making the game feel like a "pick your poison" for a good portion of the time.

Familiar Territory

Winning is as straightforward as the premise. You're collecting ingredients into sets, either 2 sets of 4 or 4 sets of 2, for example. There's also an instant win condition where collecting 3 Astral Essence cards ends the game in your favor. The flip side…

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REM Racers. A name I didn't expect to hear again. Around this time last year, I reviewed the REM Racers board game, and as the name suggests, it's a racing game, a futuristic one at that. The box art is high-fidelity, the components are fantastic, and all of it would lead you to believe I'm about to gush. Instead, this was one of the least enjoyable gaming experiences I've had in a long, long time. I'm trying to be professional here.

So when they announced a card game version, I was a bit taken aback. From what I understand, the original wasn't well-received, and that usually doesn't earn you a spin-off. Then again, card games are cheap, and this one promises a runtime of roughly 20 minutes. Is it an improvement? Is it a good game? Am I going to stop asking questions? Yes.

They Did It Again

The title's a bit of a spoiler: it's a race. Everyone picks a pilot with a unique ability, and the goal is to finish first. But since there's no board or physical race track, the whole thing plays out pretty abstractly. Player positions are tracked by lining up everyone's car card in a row, first place to last. The track is represented by the "curve deck," a series of cards…

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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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