Giant wooden bananas!

When you see a hand holding one of the bananas, you might think the size is exaggerated, but you’d be wrong. The bananas in Tasso Banana really are that big. Open up the box and you’re immediately struck by the size.

[caption id="attachment_309041" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The Tasso Banana box has a clever origami influence. It folds in on itself and is held closed by magnets![/caption]

These, my friends, are game pieces of substance.

In Tasso Banana your goal is to be the first to get rid of all your bananas by placing them out on the game board. Bananas on the same level can’t touch each other, the table, or one of the included banana leaves, or go outside the boundaries of the playing field (as defined by the game board). A stacked banana can only be stacked on two other bananas, and a banana which already has another banana on top of it can’t support any other bananas. With these rules you’ll wind up with a crazed jumble of gently curving fruit, some stacked on their sides, some arch side up, as if poured out of the…

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High Rise Penguins, from publisher Alley Cat Games, is the new English edition of Yura Yura Penguin, a nichely-beloved dexterity game from designer Yabuchi Ryoko. The idea is simple: Players take turns playing cards Uno-style onto an ever-growing iceberg condo. If you empty your hand, you win. If the condo falls on your turn, you lose. If the condo ever reaches the point of being completed—good luck with that—then everyone wins.

Each card forces the following player to do something. Maybe you have to add the next level to the apartment block, or draw cards, or place some ice crystals into the apartments. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get to help move one of the adorable little wooden penguin meeples into their new apartment. Those are the moments when the structure is most vulnerable, but the sense of peril is balanced out by the rush of endorphins that comes with touching one of the penguins. They are very cute.

Maybe a…

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Snooker has never made sense to me. On those rare occasions when an American has cause to observe snooker, it seems impenetrable. Some balls get pocketed, and stay that way. Others get pocketed, and a man with white velvet gloves puts them back on the table. It’s all very quiet and intentional and I haven’t the slightest idea as to what’s going on. Not that I ever read the rules.

Carrooka, handmade in England by carpenter Jack Furnival, is an attempt to bring snooker into the home, a marriage of billiards rules with the disk flicking of crokinole and carrom. It’s a beautifully realized idea. The level of craftsmanship is immediately impressive. If the price tag (around $220) causes you to catch your breath, just know that it is justified. One man made this massive thing, with evident care and attention, out of high-quality materials.

All of that is well and good, but means little if the game is not fun. Carrooka is excellent. My first few…

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During a recent trip to the beach, I brought a boatload of my Gen Con 2024 party and family game pickups to our rental property in the hopes that I could get some of them to the table.

Speed Colors (2017, currently published by Friendly Skeleton, the new name for Deep Water Games) was a game I was excited to play thanks to a quick demo with Beneeta Kaur, the marketing rep for Friendly Skeleton. Even during that 10-minute demo, I could tell Speed Colors would be a winner with my kids…and after three more plays at the beach (all at the max five-player count), I’m glad to say I was right.

Speed Colors has a very simple setup. Each player selects a white-and-black outlined card from the pool to color, then a player yells “go!” and everyone flips their card over to its colored side. Each picture has six colored areas (red, blue, yellow, orange, green, purple), so the goal is to memorize the correct locations of each color in each section of the card, then flip the card back to its non-colored side and color in all six sections as quickly as possible with the correct colors.

But, there is one other issue—there are only…

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Back in high school, countless lunch hours were spent huddling around our oblong tables with piles of playing cards as we repeatedly pounded the playing surface over and over again. Slapjack may be an early iteration of slapping card games, but it paved the way for a genre that gave us the magic of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. Now, other companies seek to emulate that game's success, with one of the latest being Cool Cool Cool, designed by Keith Baker and Jennifer Ellis of Twogether Studios.

Cool Cool Cool Overview

If you've played any slapping games in the past, you'll find plenty of familiarity with Cool Cool Cool. After evenly distributing the cards between all players, each person takes a turn flipping their top card over into the center of the table to form a communal pile, saying the name of the card in the process. If one of the active rules is triggered by this card, players try to be the first to slap the stack and collect all of the cards played in the round thus far.

The gimmick in this game, however, is that there are eight rules cards that will change the slapping conditions. For example, the base game plays with Pairs, Panini, and The Name of the Game. Pairs would mean that…

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A couple years ago, a friend brought the game Crash Octopus (2021, Itten) to the table as a throw-away filler ending to the night. Although one of my groups does push party and dexterity games to the table from time to time, it’s relatively infrequent.

I was game, so we gave Crash Octopus a shot…and I really liked the table presence while flicking toys around the table to both solve my personal win goals and to disrupt the plans of others. I enjoyed myself but didn’t consider adding it to my collection.

However, Crash Octopus remained on the brain for a while.

I had the chance to stroll the aisles of the French game convention Festival International des Jeux earlier this year, and during that stroll I stumbled upon a booth selling a French-language copy of Crash Octopus for about 15 euros. I remembered my earlier play and I had some space in my carry-on, so I plunked down the cash and printed out a copy of the English rules when I got back to the US.

After a few recent plays of Crash Octopus with my family, I have to say—I was wrong to wait on this one. It is perfect for game days with my kids and still appeals to adult gamers looking for a 20-minute…

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There’s something about stacking games. You can’t ignore them. They command your attention. Try walking by Rhino Hero: Super Battle without stopping to investigate. It’s impossible. Game go up? Tell me more.

Nekojima, from designers David Carmona and Karen Nguyen, certainly goes up. Turn after turn, you add to the power infrastructure of this cat island, placing pairs of wooden dowels connected by brightly-colored bits of rope onto the small circular board. Those dowels stack up and up and up, scaling heights that frankly don’t seem possible.

I am, I’ll confide in you, enthralled by these components. The dowels are a wonder. They stack so much higher than feels reasonable, given their weight and their size. I was so taken by the thought that clearly went into them—light enough to stack without threatening to collapse while simultaneously heavy enough to be sturdy—that I emailed Unfriendly Games to learn more.

They’re made of beech. Honestly, I was disappointed to get so little information. I wanted to learn everything about the development process. Why were other woods rejected? How many woods did they try? Did they look at non-wood materials? Did they experiment with different ropes?

Reader, I would watch a documentary.

Game Go Up

A turn is simple. You roll…

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The scene is set thus: “A seafaring goat crew was navigating treacherous waters when their boat capsized! The ship broke apart, leaving wood strewn throughout the waves. To save the goats, players must build a raft from the wood. Each player fights to outsmart the others in a quest to get their goats on the raft. But watch out for the shark lurking in the waters...”

“Outsmart” is somewhat overstating the chaotic to-and-fro of rolling planks and leaping hooves, with the tiller steered as much by the 12-sided die as by player choices. And the obligatory shark in fact may rarely make an appearance.

Like a bagpiper in a submarine

The box is compact, easily portable in your handbag, and the contents fit snugly. The 28 goat pieces (six mamas and one baby, each in four colours) are pleasantly tactile, and stack in a cute way, the mamas carrying the babies across their backs, to protect them from ocean, shark and clan rivals alike. The mama-baby choice of language is perfectly legit, a) because the designer hails from the beautiful Southeastern United States, and b) because daddy goats can sometimes be a danger to kids (fun fact).

The gun-metal fin is fun and the mustard dodecahedron passes muster, but…

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In the hubbub of Airecon in March 2023 my attention was drawn by the convention centre spotlights glinting off large, polished spheres, lined up like sleeping warriors ready to be awoken. The background noise seemed to fade away as our focus narrowed on this curio and we sat down to play. ‘Come’ said the host, with a knowing calm that suggested he had been expecting us, ‘Sit. And listen.’ A few minutes was enough to etch this game into my memory – no mean feat amongst thousands of others that weekend. Adding to the mystery was the fact I could not seem to find the game for months after – I was starting to think it had all been a dream, when a contact handed me a parcel with the unmistakable clack of marbles within…

Do not use a canon to kill a mosquito

Senryaku’s box is efficiently packaged – a simple card sleeve just about covers the dignity of the game structure itself, which comprises the playing board with shallow wells in a 7 x 6 grid, plus the base. Each player lines up seven spheres, including a monarch (let’s be equal…

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Is perfection possible? Probably not. Regardless of the context, it seems the best you can hope for is to feel equipped to pursue perfection, aware that you’ll never attain it. It’s not for everyone. The better you get at anything, the more your skill improves, the more obvious smaller mistakes become. This is part of why I’m fascinated by Olympic athletes. You seek perfection and forever know that you could have done better. It must take a remarkably self-assured person.

The Seaweed Is Always Greener

Undersea Explorer is a charming, simple game. The cards, filled with wonderfully realized illustrations of fish, get spread out in the middle of the table. They’re meant to overlap, to obscure what lies in the deep. One player, it doesn’t matter who, rolls the four dice. Each is the same color as one of the four types of fish. Your goal is to collect as many of each fish as indicated by the corresponding die. Easier said than done. The fish come in various quantities and combinations. It’s rarely one fish per card.

Once the dice are rolled, it’s a free-for-all. With one…

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Lost Adventures has a nostalgic charm to it that reminds me of board games I enjoyed as a kid. I don’t get tickled that way often, especially by most contemporary designs. Like the big-on-luck, low on analysis games of yore, this game’s commitment to its own bit is noteworthy.

While I’m not much of an Indiana Jones guy, Lost Adventures ticks all the requisite boxes: a race against other unsavory adventurers to find clues to some esoteric mystery; an evil Nazi-adjacent organization that’s chasing you around a map; and, finally, a series of challenges that will test your moral character and greed. Here’s how it works:

Players move around a point-to-point map that cross-references locations with cards set around the perimeter of the board. Each card gives you pieces of information about the challenges you’ll face in the temple in the second half of the game. Also, each card has cubes assigned to it that represent how many “clue points” you need to take a peek at it. Each player starts with two cards in a tableau in front of them. The cards have red symbols and blue symbols. I’ll get to the former in a minute, but the latter gives you clue points when you search for clues. This is done with a fairly simple mechanism. If you…

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I am an unabashedly huge fanboy of everything Pandasaurus Games puts their name on. I love all the Dinosaur Island games, with Dinosaur Island Rawr ‘n Write being my favorite roll-and-write game of 2021. Wildstyle was one of the ten best games I played in 2022. Wild Space still hits the table and is one of my favorite light games of the last five years. Sea Salt & Paper is being distributed by Pandasaurus in the US and has maybe the best card art of the games I have reviewed for Meeple Mountain (my copy came from Bombyx at SPIEL last year).

Our team has enjoyed most of the Pandasaurus Games products we’ve gotten to cover, too. District Noir is apparently one of the best games of the year. Aurum isn’t far behind, and After Us also comes highly recommended. The Mind is a light filler classic, and The Loop went over well too.

As much fun as I’ve had with all these games, the consistent theme of Pandasaurus has always been quality production. The artwork has been spectacular, with maybe the loudest (in terms of color) boxes on my shelves; Pandasaurus typically makes covers that are the opposite of the beige, boring Eurofare I see in…

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