Wholly Knizia

Dr. Reiner Knizia is a name synonymous with board games. Even if you haven’t heard of him, you’ve likely played one of his designs; according to Gemini, he has created more than 800 games. Whether it’s Ra, The Quest for El Dorado, Samurai, or Huang, he’s everywhere.    We even had a lovely sit-down with him recently to discuss his highly successful career.

Whale Riders excited me because it comes from a power duo: Knizia on design and Vincent Dutrait on art. Dutrait’s work has become increasingly easy to spot as I’ve gone deeper into the hobby, and here his contribution is excellent. The thematic art is rich, depicting Indigenous Arctic tribes using handsome whales and other massive sea creatures as mounts. But despite that pedigree, this is not one for the Knizia hall of fame.

Ice Race

In Whale Riders, players take two of five possible actions each turn, moving between ports, buying goods, and completing contracts for money and pearls. Play continues until all the pearls have been purchased from the home area, giving the game a race-like structure from start to finish.

Goods in the market are replenished as they are bought, but new tiles can introduce storms that…

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All Aboard!

Trains are a core pillar of the board gaming world. It'd be hard to find a gamer who hasn't played a train game of some sort, whether that's the gateway-friendly Ticket to Ride, a crunchy 18XX title, or the industrial majesty of Brass: Birmingham. It's one of the hobby's most enduring themes, equally at home in the classic era and the modern renaissance. Something about locomotives just clicks with gamers: the routes, the networks, the satisfying logic of getting from here to there.

Most train games revolve around route building, delivering cargo, or some variation of the two. The formula is well-worn, and for good reason. It works. But it's rare to see a "train" game genuinely spin the genre into something truly different. Usually, the chrome changes; the bones stay the same.

Enter Whistlewood Express, a two-player game that uses only cards and a single, handsome wooden locomotive. To my surprise, it plays more like hand management than a traditional train game, and it comes with a mysterious spiral notebook tucked in the box: the Freightmaster's Logbook. That notebook turns out to be more important than it first appears.

2P Train

The base game is played over a series of turns in which…

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For my money, 2025’s most underrated (and severely underreported) game was En Route, a “blank and write” game system from the team at CrowD. It landed on my top 10 games of 2025 and for a person who usually frowns at the chance to cover roll/flip/draw-and-write games, En Route was such a hit that one person literally bought a copy of it while playing the first few rounds of a review play.

Little did I know that CrowD plans to extend this system by using the same round structure and game mechanics on different maps based on interesting themes…so when I learned that the new game Innsmouth Travel Guide looked a whole heck of a lot like En Route (prompting my group to call this new title “En Route: Innsmouth”), I reached out to the team at CrowD to secure a review copy of this new expandalone title.

We’ll keep the proceedings here brief: buy this game, especially if you are a strategy gamer who wonders why blank-and-write games fall flat for you…this system is the solution.

“Is That a Monster?”

Innsmouth Travel Guide is a roll-and-write game for 1-4 players. Although it is a standalone product, Innsmouth Travel Guide uses most of the rules from the…

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I’m a big fan of Friedemann Friese.

From my very first play of Power Grid back in 2016, I knew there was just something about his games that were different from other designers. And so by the time Free Ride came out in the US, in 2022, I had already acquired many of his titles (Faiyum, Feierabend, Power Grid, Copycat, etc.). My team member Tom Franklin reviewed Free Ride last year, and now I’d like to follow up with my review of Free Ride USA.

🎶 “Come on and take a free ride”. ♬

[caption id="attachment_327807" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Yes the name of the game is Free Ride (Freie Fahrt) in German. What can I say. I got this when I was at Essen Spiel.[/caption]

“We gotta do better, it's time to begin” - Free Ride USA overview

Free Ride USA, like its sibling, is a “train game”, although 18XX players might take exception to that label. Players take turns performing two main actions: laying track and moving their engine across the country. As they progress from city to city, they may optionally pick up a route pair from the public display. This isn’t an “action” per se, but something they can do as part of moving their train…

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