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Under the Leaves – Making Every Tile Count
If you’ve ever stopped to look a little closer at a garden, you’ll know there’s far more going on than flowers and grass. Under the Leaves takes that idea and…
Keep readingParks & Potions – Every Potion Counts
Alchemy in board games usually involves wizards, ancient laboratories, and a suspicious amount of bubbling liquid. Parks & Potions takes a friendlier approach. Here, we’re park rangers using botanical alchemy…
Keep readingQuagmire – More Than Just Hopping Frogs
A pond full of frogs probably doesn’t sound like the setting for a game that makes you stop and think. That was certainly our first impression. Quagmire looks cheerful, colourful…
Keep readingTatsumi – More Puzzle Than Dragon
The islands of Tatsumi have fallen out of balance. Elemental rifts have appeared across the land, and the people are relying on their guardian dragons, known as Tatsu, to put…
Keep readingGingham – The Sweetest Things Rarely Stay Yours
A picnic blanket has been abandoned with cookies, cupcakes, pies, cherries, and other sweets still sitting on it. For us, that would probably raise a few questions. For the ants…
Keep readingStag – Raising Beetles and Deciding Who to Trust
Beetles spend most of their early lives hidden underground, which sounds fairly peaceful. In Stag, their lives involve careful feeding, competition for space, evolutionary traits, and eventually a public disagreement…
Keep readingThe Phantom of the Opera – Following the Score Instead of the Tricks
The Phantom of the Opera takes Gaston Leroux’s story and turns it into a two-player trick-taking game. One player becomes the Phantom, trying to finish a composition for Christine. The…
Keep readingCrops – Farming With One Eye on the Moon
In Crops, you have twelve turns to build a field of vegetables in a 3 by 4 grid. You place crop cards, connect matching family symbols, add goals to individual…
Keep readingCapsule Collector – What’s Hiding Inside?
Bright capsules are lined up behind the glass, and somewhere inside them might be the toy you’re hoping for. Or, let’s be honest, it might be another rubber duck. You…
Keep readingKuroshio – Route Building on the Open Ocean
The Kuroshio Current carries warm water north through the western Pacific, along Taiwan and Japan. It attracts large schools of fish, followed by bigger predators, whales and fishing boats hoping…
Keep readingCountryside – Four Workers and Too Many Farm Plans
A small patch of land slowly turns into a proper countryside. A field appears, then a garden, perhaps a barn, and before long there are fruit trees, animals, crops, and…
Keep readingDurchmarsch – Or Why Stopping Is Harder Than Rolling
Durchmarsch is a small dice game about moving along a row of numbers, one step at a time, while constantly asking yourself one simple question: do I stop now, or…
Keep readingOctobuns – Baking Orders With Eight Arms and Nine Spaces
The harbour is busy, the customers are hungry, and somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, an octopus is trying to run a bakery. That already sounds like a…
Keep readingFaust vs Mephisto – A Tricky Deal With the Devil
Faust makes a deal with Mephistopheles. Wealth, honour, pleasure, knowledge, all the good stuff. In return, he puts his soul on the table, which feels like a questionable way to…
Keep readingCarnuta – A Druidic Potion Puzzle With Sun and Moon Runes
Deep in the forest of Carnuta, a group of druids comes together for their yearly ritual. Not to hug trees, although I’m not judging, but to brew potions and decide…
Keep reading2 PineApples – Count the Fruit Before It Changes
A pine, an apple, and a pineapple walk into a card game. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that is more or less what 2 PineApples…
Keep readingWondrous Creatures: Winterfall – A Season of Change
The island of Starbeak was first discovered when explorers followed a strange bird with a glowing beak through the sea mist. On the other side, they found a mysterious island…
Keep readingMoon Colony Bloodbath – Build an Engine, Then Watch It Break
Humanity has finally made it. We have permanent settlements on the Moon, rockets are arriving with supplies, colonists are ready for a fresh start, and robots are standing by to…
Keep readingLas Vegas – The Biggest Payout Isn’t Always the Best
Welcome to Las Vegas, where everyone is chasing the biggest payouts, but the casino that looks the most attractive isn’t always the one you want to visit. One well-placed die…
Keep readingToys – The Teddy Bear Has Had Enough
When the lights go out and the house finally goes quiet, the toys wake up. At least, that’s the idea behind Toys. On one side you have the old guard.…
Keep readingBombastic – Three in a Row, If You Dare
Every tile in Bombastic is a question mark. Somewhere in the grid are the symbols you’re looking for. Somewhere else is a bomb that’s waiting for somebody to make a…
Keep readingPinkuins – Keeping the Band Together
A group of penguins is about to play the biggest concert of their lives. The audience is ready, the instruments are waiting, and somehow you’ve ended up as the stage…
Keep readingEntropy – Building Solar Systems and Evolving Life
What if humanity didn’t just understand entropy, but actually learned how to control it? That’s the idea behind Entropy. In the game, players take on the role of apprentice scientists…
Keep readingNippon: Genro – Add Political Influence to Your Zaibatsu
We’ve loved Nippon for a long time. Back when the original game released in 2015, it quickly became one of our favourite economic eurogames. It was simply a game where…
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