It’s rare that a published game feels organic, but I guess that makes sense. Most authored works, regardless of medium, do not feel organic. The closest most games come is “intuitive,” which is not the same thing. “Intuitive” as applied to game criticism is more about the rules making sense and flowing. You use it when you’re talking about something that’s easy to teach and easy to learn and easy to play, about games that just. make. sense. In order for something to be intuitive, it has to build on what has come before, on a shared cultural reference or two.

That is not the case with “organic,” a word which I cannot say I have ever wanted to apply to a board game before. Strap in, folks. We’re developing a new theory. “Organic” can be as free-form as it wants. That’s probably a key feature, right? I mean, who tells an heirloom tomato how to grow? Nobody, that’s who.

When I say Playthings is organic, I mean that it feels like something a group of Victorian children would come up with whilst whittling away the unending hours of the day. It feels improvised, even as…

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The new Rush Hour puzzle entry, Rush Hour Duel, arrived at my doorstep recently. I know that, because I got a confirmation by e-mail that a package had just arrived. A couple hours later, I came up from my office cave in the basement to find that the game had not only arrived, but had already been opened and played three times by my wife and 12-year-old.

Yes, friends…Rush Hour Duel was reviewed before I could even open the box myself. This has never happened before, across more than 500 review copies received since I arrived here at Meeple Mountain.

“Dad, we got a new Rush Hour Duel game, and it’s great! I beat Mom three times,” said the 12-year-old when I came upstairs.

“Well, that is a review sample that came from the publisher.”

“Really? OK. Still, it’s great, I’m glad you picked it up.” Then they ran upstairs to slip into another evening activity.

I looked around, shocked, as if someone had just made off with my wallet. Those guys got Rush Hour Duel to the table before I could, I thought. What kind of respect is that?

For the uninitiated, Rush Hour is a game series from the Ravensburger toy puzzle arm known as ThinkFun. If you have kids and regularly visit your local Target, there’s…

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Out of Sorts is now the second memory game I’ve played in the last few years that isn’t really a memory game at all. Like Wilmot’s Warehouse, which uses the façade of memorization to trick players into collaborating on a story, the memorization in Out of Sorts is a distraction, a means to an end rather than the end itself. Do you want to spend twenty or thirty minutes memorizing the order of numerous abstract symbols? No, of course you don’t. That sounds awful. Do you want to spend twenty or thirty minutes in passionate debate with your friends about how a set of abstract symbols relate to one another based on three arbitrary criteria, to argue about whether and why that set of squiggles with a line through it feels more like a Reptile than it does Travel? Of course you do. That sounds joyous, and it is.

Out of Sorts is a cooperative game in which players work together to organize an alien’s library. The lot of you have been abducted for the purpose by this seafoam green monstrosity, who sits in a chair reading while you do all the work. The alien starts out not paying much attention to you…

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