Totally Human, from designer Kasper Lapp and publisher Bitewing Games, is a bit of an odd one. The idea draws from the same well as A Fake Artist Goes to New York and The Chameleon, social deduction games that use a secondary activity to make people try to blend in or suss one another out. A Fake Artist has everyone add one line to a shared drawing, but the faker doesn’t know what the drawing is. The Chameleon uses a word game to similar effect. The first smart choice for both was the decision to center their games around activities that are already fun on their own. People love collaborative drawings and word association. For its central activity, Totally Human employs everyone’s favorite style of exam, the multiple choice question.

At the beginning of the game, which lasts a breezy 10-20 minutes at most, everyone is dealt three cards. For most players, these cards will be irrelevant. They only matter to you if you receive one or more of the cards that designate you as an alien. Once everyone has had a moment to look at their cards, the first of three multiple choice questions is revealed to the table. The questions themselves are benign, broad, uninteresting in the way that these sorts of games’s questions often are: “What…

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In the wide world of board game themes and gameplay, ‘Alchemy’ feels like one of the most commonly represented. This might just be my own bias though, as it turns out I have quite a few alchemy focused games in my own collection. From the widely popular Flamecraft to the hit bagbuilder Quacks to marble mayhem favorite Potion Explosion and more, I’d somehow become an accidental alchemy aficionado.

Maybe that’s why when Meeple Mountain was provided with a review copy of Grimbrew from Lucky Omen Studios, I quickly (maybe subconsciously) volunteered to provide a review for it.

Even though Grimbrew thematically has a lot in common with other alchemy themed games, it also separates itself in some unique and interesting ways.

Collect & Brew

As you might have expected, in Grimbrew, two to five players compete to collect the most points by gathering ingredients and brewing potions. Turns are as simple as the premise of the game.

On a player’s turn, they can:

• Take an ingredient from a shared market
• Brew a potion
• Rekindle flames

Active flames are required in order for players to brew potions and refresh the market (more on this in a moment). When taking the ‘rekindle flames’ action, players flip two of their five flame tokens from inactive to active,…

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For most of the last two years, I have had an article in my draft folder titled “I Think I Hate Games Where I Have to Read a Lot of Card Text.” It started years ago with a deckbuilding game where I had to lean over the board’s card market to read every card that hit the conveyor belt.

Understanding not only the card’s cost, but its abilities, was critical to success in that game, but it also meant I had to read a lot of card text before making any decisions.

2025’s The Hunt (designed by Renaud Crocombette, Remi Laumonier, and Antoine Pham-Minh) might have pushed me over the edge. That’s because the game is essentially a recipe fulfillment game with fugitive cards. The Hunt is set in the espionage theaters of post World War II Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, as players guide one of four unique agencies to chase Nazi war criminals down for capture. Taking 1-3 actions each turn, players will visit “investigation zones” to grab cards that match the requirements of the various criminals that must be hunted down during the game.

I typically enjoy games like this, and The Hunt does a great job of keeping the action speedy by forcing…

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Scales of Fate is a strange beast, an uneasy marriage of strategy, bluffing, and deduction. It gets points for originality, ambition, and aesthetic, but I’m not sold on the whole. It’s like eating a cake in which you can taste the eggs separate from the flower and the sugar. Worse than that, none of the elements feel fully baked.

Each player is secretly assigned two Demigods out of a pool of nine. Your goal, over the course of the game, is to manipulate their Renown through clever use of the Quest and Action tiles on the board. You’re also trying to suss out your opponent’s two assignees, but we’ll come back to that.

Scales of Fate is hard to explain without a visual of the board, so let's get that out of the way:

The big X-shaped pieces are Quest Tiles. The smaller in-betweeny pieces are Action Tiles. Those golden pieces you see to the lower right of the photo are Servants. I usually shy away from foisting this kind of nomenclature on my readers, but here it’s necessary. As we begin this journey together, remember that everything in the…

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Gen Con 2026 must have been the convention of "alien on the loose" games, because I seemed to be playing them constantly. In fact, in one night we went from This Game Is Killer: Alien on Board to This Game Is Killer: Frozen Horror to Not Alone: Remastered Edition. While the latter is a slightly different flavor, the asymmetry of the Not Alone: Remastered Edition puts one player in the driver's seat of the alien threat while the others try to outlive, outlast, and outsmart them.

Not Alone: Remastered Edition: Hide and Seek

Having never played the original Not Alone, my thoughts are solely based on my experiences with this improved version. In Not Alone: Remastered Edition, the players have evacuated their ship, landing on a mysterious planet called Artemia where it quickly becomes apparent that they are…not alone. Insert DiCaprio meme here. They become the Hunted in a race for survival against one of the other players who assumes the role of the Creature, whose goal is to stymie their efforts.

[caption id="attachment_333875" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Hunted players receive a character card with a unique Skill[/caption]

The main tracker board is set up in the center of the playing area, with the Hunted's Rescue counter on one end and…

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Michael Hardacre’s Rattlesnake, a two-player card game about a gun fight in the wicky-wicky-wild Wild West, is a fabulous marriage of setting and mechanisms. This thing is lean, mean, and jumpy. More sting than a scorpion and more bite than a…well, you know. It is tense enough that the components list should include brow sweat. And it’s so small! For form factor, this no-frills set of cards—with a gun token for flavor—is my favorite thing to come along since High Tide. There’s nothing quite like a big game in a small box.

The goal of the game is simple enough: kill your opponent. Well, I shouldn’t say “kill.” Pokémon has taught us that death isn’t always the end result of [checks notes] running out of health. Strictly speaking, your goal is to hit your opponent four times. Death is not the dictated outcome. Maybe all those hits grazed you. Maybe they missed organs. Maybe your opponent rushes you off to a hospital, where the gangrene can do its slow, ante-antibacterial work. I’m not a historian.

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Gods' Will showed up in my social media feed, comparing itself to Resistance: Avalon like a new kid on the first day of school telling everyone he used to be popular somewhere else. I have heard this pitch. I have reviewed this pitch twice, from Witch Hunt and Human Punishment, two games that made the same promises and delivered the same disappointing results. So when Gods' Will came knocking with the same marketing aura, I had to open the door with at least one eyebrow raised. Maybe I’m just addicted to disappointment, who knows.

After half a dozen plays, I can say with a bit of confidence that Gods' Will is doing more right than wrong here. More importantly, it earns it by fixing the real problems with its predecessors rather than just the ones that look good in a Kickstarter pitch.

A Skeptic Walks Into a Kickstarter

Like 90% of social deduction games that have ever existed, there are two teams: Light and Dark. There is also a loner faction, a third party whose goals shift depending on player count and whose presence ensures that the ride from start to finish won’t ever be a smooth one. Every player is a God with a public special ability…

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