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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The Telepathic Rat Incident

Things were tense. The dreaded countdown clock was getting closer to doomsday. Several shady characters had been taking actions all over the space station that threatened to unleash chaos even earlier, in the form of deploying an antimatter device or unleashing the mysterious Project X. The Doctor was making a mad dash for the escape pods, and the Boarder wasn’t having it. Some players lamented the Doctor’s proximity to the escape. “Don’t worry, I’m going to blow him up with a missile,” threatened the Boarder.

Desperate to get out, the Doctor made a shrewd deal with the space station’s resident sentient AI. He would escape with a copy of the AI’s data on him, allowing the AI to spread to the far reaches of the universe. After all, that’s how the AI’s player scored the most points at the end of the game: having enough people escape the doomed space station with his data on board. But how could the rogue AI stop the Boarder from bombing the escape pod?

“Oh, I know! You can use the Telepathic Rat to force the Boarder to use his own gun to shoot himself in the face!”

There was a moment of brief silence as the table processed what was just said, and realized… yes, that could work!…

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Opening Credits

With spooky season just around the corner, the quest to find seasonally appropriate games moves to the forefront of my gaming sessions. Sure, you have the classics like Fury of Dracula, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and any flavor of Horrified, but I’ve always felt like I haven’t found that quintessential Halloween game that hits the table year after year.

That is…until now with Spooktacular.

Level 99 Games titles were never really on my radar in the past, with their bread and butter being anime-themed card games like Millennium Blades, BattleCON, and Pixel Tactics. But when I demoed Spooktacular at Gen Con 2025, my head immediately turned, and I felt a tad guilty for overlooking the fine folks there.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to track down a review copy, which proved difficult considering how quickly each printing sold out thanks to the unexpected success of what I feel will become a cult classic for years to come.

However, it wasn’t all frights, as I managed to snag a copy at this year’s Gen Con, and I absolutely could not wait to get all that movie monster glory to the table.

Monster Mayhem

Spooktacular is a highly asymmetric…

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If you asked me many moons ago whether the horror genre would be a good fit for a party game, my answer would have been a straight-up no. Sure, Murdery Mystery party games exist, but horror is on another level. Horror has a body count, and it ain’t no lead pipe in the library nonsense here. The corpses, more often than not, don't remain particularly intact.

Yet three years ago, I did take a look at the Scream board game by the now-defunct Funko Games. It was a surprisingly fun game that somehow made a real-time set-collecting card game with an app work. Not exactly the best game I'd ever played, but it was different, and more importantly, it was good enough to hit the table quite a few times at my local game meetups.

So when I heard about This Game is Killer (great name!), which could handle up to 10 players, lasted around 15 minutes, and used the Aliens franchise as its setting, curiosity got the better of me. And since I'm no cat, I wasn't too worried about where that curiosity might lead.

Wake From Cryosleep

The premise of the game is pretty simple: there is an alien on board causing problems, as aliens tend to do,…

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Sometimes you can tell where a company’s focus is in a given year.

Czech Games Edition (CGE) has a very, very large piece of chicken releasing later this year called Kingdom Come Deliverance, a $150 game so large it has 10 individual artists working on only the artwork for the 700+ cards in the box. Forget the fact that CGE’s lead designer, Vlaada Chvátil, and one of the world’s hottest designers, Tomáš Holek (SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, amongst many other now-published titles), are the co-designers on Kingdom Come Deliverance and there are are dozens of hours of content in that box. (I’m more shocked that a single game has TEN ARTISTS working on it!)

That means Drillers, CGE’s Gen Con release, is its other “big” release for 2026. It’s not nearly as ambitious as Kingdom Come Deliverance, but Drillers is as solid as its title is plain. Drillers is a deckbuilding game that plays in about 90 minutes even at its full player count, and it does excellent, limited work within its tidy playtime.

Dive In

Drillers accommodates 1-4 players, and is a very standard deckbuilding game. Players begin the game with a deck of nine cards—eight action cards and a “Damage” card, which essentially…

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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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We did it, folks. Humanity has invented—nay, perfected—time travel. They said it couldn’t be done. They were wrong. The scientists at publisher Plaid Hat Games figured it out. It’s less complicated than I’d have expected time travel to be, requiring only that you set up a copy of The Monolith and sit down. The technology also seems to be fairly limited in its applications, since The Monolith only has the ability to transport players back to the summer of 1993.

Picture it: Fireball Island is in the rearview mirror, the Euro revolution is but a faint glimmer on the horizon, and sweet sweet Ameritrash rules the roost. There’s wood panelling on the walls, left over from when your parents had the basement finished in ’86. Breathe in the aroma of freshly-toasted Bagel Bites, taste the corona of blue Squeezeit around your lips. Hear the faint sounds of “I’ve Been Thinking About You” and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s cover of “Passionate Kisses” waft in from a nearby radio. That’s The Monolith.

Everything about The Monolith as an object was seemingly designed to evoke a previous era, if not always the same one. The table presence is the maximalism of…

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Euphoria Essential Edition (2026, Stonemaier Games) is the updated version of 2013’s Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia, a game that I had heard about over the years but never played myself.

That’s not because the game isn’t easy to understand; featuring a rulebook with a linen finish and lots of clear ways to understand the game’s mechanics (both in multiplayer and for its automa rules), Euphoria Essential Edition is easy to parse. And, like other Stonemaier products, Euphoria Essential Edition is beautiful—save for dice that feature pips that are just a little too cute for their own good, everything about this production whoops the old production’s behind, based on pictures I have seen of the original version. The board layout, in particular, is a big change and I like the look of this newer edition.

But Euphoria Essential Edition suffers because it doesn’t appear to have aged well. Players are collectively running a society that seems to have some rough edges, and keeping workers unaware of their surroundings is a critical part of the gameplay. As play begins, each of the 1-6 players at the table has a worker pool of two, represented by dice that can be sent out into the world to gather resources, collect artifacts, and…

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The new game Revenant (2026, Mindclash Games) arrived about a month ago, and it took me a couple weeks to get the game to the table for my review plays. Between the ruleset (complex) and the playtime (substantial), tabling any game from Mindclash is typically a big endeavor.

Now that I’ve finished four plays—once at three players, twice at four players, then once solo—I have a lot of thoughts. For those on a time budget, I’ll say that Revenant is worth a look, particularly for fans of worker placement games where the options for players truly change over the course of the play experience. I’m also surprised to share how many factors of the Revenant experience align with other classic market manipulation games I love, from Acquire (or games that use an Acquire framework, such as Dawn of Ulos) to 18xx games to any games you know that feature hidden shares.

One thing that Revenant is NOT, though, is a Voidfall game. Let me explain.

Stellar Ventures

Revenant is a worker placement game for 1-4 players. The game is set in the Voidfall universe, so it uses some of the House factions from Voidfall as well as their matching illustrations to illuminate its world-building, and…

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