There was a moment late in my first game of the medium-weight strategy game Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock where I pretty much landed on my final thoughts about the game.

I had just taken a turn that felt pretty dope. That turn began when I took the Construction action, and spent four resources to construct the second-to-last piece of the month dial on the big clock at the center of the board. That netted me eight points, for the gold, two wood, and paint I had spent to build it. Then I placed one of my workers on the clock, and thanks to adjacency rules, scored four more points. Then I got a bonus based on the position of that completed space on an outer wheel that surrounds the clock, a track that lists bonuses on what is known as the Painter track.

That bonus gave me a free apostle. These apostle tiles are earned and placed in one of two storage slots on each player’s personal board. As a free action, I took that new apostle and placed it in a column on my personal, 12-space apostle board. It was the third apostle in one of the columns, which earned me another bonus: an Assistant tile, which went into the newly vacated storage space where that apostle…

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D.V.C., as wonderful and consistent and quirky a publisher as you’ll find, largely does its own design work. With the exception of 2020’s Rosetta: The Forgotten Language, all of D.V.C.’s games up till now have been credited to house designer Jasper Beatrix. In a just world, Jasper would be unable to walk down the street without being mobbed by fans, but there are two barriers to that: we certainly don’t live in a just world, and Jasper Beatrix doesn’t exist.

Not corporeally, anyway. Good ol’ J.B. is a pseudonym for a loose collective, a merry anarchic band of creatives who work together to make these wonderful games. They’re so prolific, and release games of such high quality, that the announcement of Pacts and the realization that it was not designed by Jasper Beatrix, was quite the surprise. This area-control game for two is the work of Ben Brin, a single corporeal designer.

Well. I assume.

I Pick I Pick You Choose

Pacts is an exemplar of I Split, You Choose, a mechanism whose promise is often let down by…

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There’s quite a bit about Castle Nightingale to catch the attention of the discerning gamer. That box, with its palette of dark blue and warm orange, stands out on a shelf. As you get closer, the colors organize into three mangy cat ninjas and a game red panda samurai, all charmingly rendered by Vincent Dutrait. That one cat making eye contact more or less dares you not to be interested. As you pick up the box, which you inevitably will, you might notice the “B. Cathala” listed alongside co-designers Eliette and Jérémy Fraile. Only then might you notice the logo in the lower left corner.

You don’t often get to say, “Sand Castle Games has a new game out.” Prior to Castle Nightingale, you’d have said it twice. There was the 2019 release of Res Arcana, and the 2022 release of First Empires. Three games in eight or so years—I’m including production work on Res—is a slow, considered pace. And to think that people used to marvel at Days of Wonder’s approach of only one title a year.

Even if they only have a 50% hit rate, Sand Castle’s pace suggests that they only release the games they really want to release. It’s clear from their production choices that they pour all of their attention into each…

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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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Even the big-brained fans of titles such as High Frontier 4 All need a break from time to time.

Pax Viking Junior, a family-weight version of the title’s big brother, Pax Viking, hit shelves in 2024. An exploration game for players ages 6 and up, Pax Viking Junior distills most of the gameplay in Pax Viking into a very straightforward affair and focuses on something kids love: cats!

Over a series of turns, players move their longship token to different regions in order to make friends with other farm animals and household pets (and yes, even the rules describe this process as “taking over friends”). These friends include mountain goats, fish, horses and cows, each represented on animal tiles that are placed into empty regions during a player’s turn.

If a region does not have an animal tile, the region’s first visitor gets to add one to the map, giving that player control of the region and the animal token there as a friend. Future visitors can take over the region using a cute takeover mechanic by adding more kitten tokens from the active player’s supply, or dropping one of a player’s two “Big Cat” tokens into the region, which scares the kitten tokens of all other…

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It just so happens that I spent the last month of 2025 trying not one, but two different games from the designers of Zhanguo: The First Empire, Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini: Norsewind and Kingdom Crossing. I’ll keep my thoughts brief here…by saying that the designers’ other 2025 release, Kingdom Crossing, is the better game.

Norsewind (2025, Aporta Games) is a tableau builder for 1-4 players that plays in about 15-20 minutes per player. The most surprising thing about Norsewind—besides my burning desire to call this game Norsewood, not Norsewind—is that it seems to aim so firmly towards the middle of the pack.

Players draft cards in one of five suits, which are then placed into one of the four rows of their respective kingdoms. Some cards have Viking helmets—bad—and some have shields, which are good. At the end of the game, you want to build rows that have as many or more shields than helmets, in order for a row to score.

The one wrinkle Norsewind provides is the decision point when drafting a card. When a player adds a card to their tableau, they get income based on a single building type that appears in every other row of their kingdom. Plus, a single meeple can…

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