Each of the last 3-4 years, it feels like there’s a tabletop designer or two who is simply everywhere for a few months. (We aren’t counting Reiner Knizia here, since he seems to release or re-release a game every 20 minutes or so. Aaaannnddd…while you were reading this intro, another Knizia design just hit crowdfunding.)

Last year, new games from Simone Luciani seemed to be everywhere–Rats of Wistar, Darwin’s Journey, Nucleum, Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods, and a couple others all hit at the same time. In 2022, you could make the case that Matthew Dunstan was the guy…between Next Station: London, Village Rails, My Shelfie, and The Guild of Merchant Explorers, it felt like I was reading about a new Dunstan game every month or two.

In 2024, I’m hard-pressed to think of another designer who is getting more love than Dani Garcia. Garcia is the designer of Barcelona and that was a big hit for Board & Dice in 2023. Now? I’ve played three Garcia designs in the last four weeks, including Windmill Valley, Daitoshi, and now Neko Syndicate, a “thinky filler” published by Combo Games.

If my first two Garcia experiences are any indication, it seems like the designer enjoys “point salad” scoring experiences wrapped in…

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2016 was a much different time for me. I was newly into my love of board games, Meeple Mountain was not even a year old, I’d never heard of Reiner Knizia, and the selection process I used for games was a mix of “did it look good on Tabletop” or “that cover looks really cool”. The latter criteria was what I used to decide on Kickstarting an unknown to me game called Circus Flohcati, by the aforementioned Reiner Knizia. I ended up selling it several years later, unplayed, because the game just never spoke out at me.

Fast forward to this past October when I received a box of games to review from our friends at 25th Century Games. Included were Tasso Banana, Sausage Sizzle, and Circus Flohcati. But this time I was ready: the good Dr. Knizia had become one of my favorite designers, my love of light card games had grown immensely, and it didn’t hurt that the cover and graphic design was still eye-popping!

Let me tell you about Circus Flohcati.

The Greatest Show On Earth a Dog’s Butt

Ahem! A quick reminder that Circus Flohcati is a game about literal fleas in a circus.

In gamer parlance Circus Flohcati is a “light press…

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Each time I have the chance to pick up a game from our partners at Horrible Guild, I get excited. The Italian publisher has given us countless hits over the years: Railroad Ink, Evergreen, Quicksand, The Great Split, and Dungeon Fighter, to name just a few. It’s a testament to their team that in a world where I gift most of my review copies to other players in my network, I still have three of the games listed above in my collection.

During our visit with the Horrible Guild team at SPIEL 2024, I picked up a review copy of Flower Fields, designed by Luca Bellini and Luca Borsa. Flower Fields is a simple tile-laying game that I played three times over three days—once each at different player counts: solo, two players, and three players. Using a mechanic familiar in many other games, players have a small board to hold tiles in a variety of colors, and must select new tiles from a market to place into their tableau to score points at the end of the game.

Flower Fields doesn’t do anything fancy. My eight-year-old son had the game down by the second round of our first game. It’s a little too easy for my tastes—I scored 103 points in my solo…

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Let’s call it a disconnect. Mechanically, Loco Momo is occasionally interesting. Thematically, Loco Momo makes no sense whatsoever. Animals find a camera in the woods. Knowing immediately what it is for, they devise a contest whereby the best photographer keeps the camera. They then proceed to—stay with me now—stack themselves in a grid where each animal somehow has a different colored background, adhering to specific and abstractly devised patterns, cooperating perfectly for each opponent’s desires to keep it a fair contest?

I guess that’s one possible story.

Occasionally

The central board features four groups of four tiles. The tiles show one of five possible animals with one of three hued backgrounds. Players select any one animal tile, move it according to its rule, and take all the animals in the landing group with a matching color background. After filling the gap with tiles from the bag, play continues.

Meanwhile, the player manages a 5x5 grid, filling tiles from left to right in the row of their choice as they go. Each row has a rule: all the same, all different, paired with the tile above, etc. The goal for each column is matching the background hue.

Because of the move & match mechanic, players acquire tiles at different rates,…

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I’ll play any game by the prolific designer Friedemann Friese, the man behind hits such as Power Grid, Fancy Feathers and Findorff. That’s because he is always trying to do something different, as opposed to rehashing some of the things that worked in past designs. I wouldn’t call him a maverick, but I would call him a guy who seems to have a flair for the dramatic, right down to the green hair he sports whenever I see him running around at conventions.

Friese’s latest design is a card game called Fishing (or Fischen, in German), published by his 2-F Spiele label. The best way I can describe Fishing is to call it a trick-taking game, with elements of deckbuilding baked into the design. Over the course of eight rounds, the player who scores the most points wins—earned with a simple metric of one point per card won at the end of each round.

There’s a lot more to it than that, some of which worked well, some of which did not. I tried this game twice with three players—using a different audience for each play—then once at five, with a group separate from the first two groups. Then, I took the extreme step of asking other peers in my space for their opinions of the game.…

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I love the cover image on the new Studio H game Ratjack. It’s a picture of, yep, a rat, but decked out in casino card dealer attire, in a dark and smoky environment, with details nailed right down to a slick-looking hat while the rat is dealing cards to a table of presumably other rats, sneakily reaching in from “offscreen” to take cards into their rat hands.

I have wanted to take a shot at Ratjack ever since I met with our Studio H marketing contact back at Festival International des Jeux in February 2024. (It helped that our contact went big and dressed like the dealer pictured on the cover of the box.) The tease was enough for me—”Blackjack, with a twist”—and after I picked up a copy of the game months later at SPIEL 2024, I got Ratjack to the table.

Ratjack, designed by Mathieu Can and Maxime Mercier, is a 2-4 player card game. To put a twist on that earlier tease: Ratjack is Take That Blackjack, with half the deck of normal Blackjack, a 25-value target instead of 21, and enough math to make your head spin.

The math alone will make some potential players run for the hills. I get it. For the players still here, what’s left is an interesting decision…

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XOK, pronounced “shock,” is a two-player abstract game from recently acquired Helvetiq imprint Steffen Spiele. The Steffen Spiele logo is a thing of joy. There is no surer indicator of a game’s qualities than that little three-by-three grid. Whatever the particulars of the game, it’s going to be made of wood, it’s going to be abstract, it’s going to be for two players, and it’s going to have straightforward rules.

That is all certainly true of XOK, in which you and your opponent attempt to build an uninterrupted school of ten fish on a surprisingly tiny board. Seriously, every time I set XOK up, I am struck anew by the petite play space. It must have something to do with how substantial the box feels. Thanks to its black coloring, this travel-friendly box seems larger than it actually is, so that little blue cloth mat, covered in hexagons, isn’t what I expect. Neither, to be fair, are the adorable fish. The sharks, beefy hexagons with slots cut out to represent their mouths, are a bit hexagonal to be evocative to many, but they’re a dead ringer for Whale Sharks if you ask me.

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I love dice games. There’s just something about the feel of grabbing a handful of dice and chucking them across the table. Sure you’ve got to deal with lady luck, but that’s okay for the right game. And 2012’s press your luck dice game Sausage Sizzle, a game from Inka and Markus Brand re-released this year by 25th Century Games, might just be one of those games. Note that in Australia, a “sausage sizzle” is a community barbecue focused on sausages. You learn something new every day, right?

Light on theme, but heavy on fun, Sausage Sizzle has players rolling dice in order to score points for each of 6 Australian animals (echidnas, snakes, crocodiles, kangaroos, quokkas, and platypus).

The game plays out over 6 rounds, which correspond to the number of animals. Each round you’ll be scoring one animal, indicated by the 6 animal scoring tokens that each player has in front of them. On your turn roll all eight dice (4 with numbers 2-5 and a sausage, and 4 with animals), and keep at least 1. After you’ve set aside all 8 dice, you score. But what, dear reader, are you scoring for?

Sausage Sizzle scoring is all about multipliers. You’ll multiply the value of the…

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Have you ever been walking through the woods, enjoying nature, when you hear a weird rustle in the leaves? Or perhaps it’s a branch in the canopy above you making a sudden noise. Or maybe it’s just a general feeling that something is there, just off the path, watching you from the underbrush. Whether its intentions are good or bad are entirely unknown. All you know is that you are not as alone as you thought you were.

If you’ve ever had this experience before, chances are you were just mere feet away from a pixie. In the game of Pixies, players take on the roles of…

Well, who knows really? The story above is something I created out of whole cloth. Aside from the delightful images of weird little creatures created out of natural objects (think Little Big Planet meets Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and you’ll have an idea of the aesthetic), there’s not a lot of theme or story to go around. At its heart, Pixies is a pure abstract. Albeit, it’s an abstract with some ridiculously cute artwork.

Overview

In Pixies, the players will take turns drafting cards out of a lineup and then placing them into their tableaus following some…

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Here’s the great thing about games from Keymaster, the publisher who has given us the PARKS games, Caper: Europe, and the upcoming trick-taking game Fuego: you always know a Keymaster game is going to be an exceptional production.

The most recent example of this is their new worker placement game Harvest, designed by Trey Chambers and based on the game of the same name (also designed by Chambers) from 2017 published by the now-defunct Tasty Minstrel Games. I never played the original, but I’m sure of this much: the artwork, the components, and the linen finish on the rulebook of the 2024 version of Harvest is a LOT nicer than the original.

Another sign that Harvest has gotten the Keymaster treatment: the unnecessarily luxurious teach video featuring star content creator Paula Deming. For a game that can be played by two players in less than 30 minutes, the Harvest teach video—well produced, often laugh-out-loud funny, and “hokey”, in the words of one of my review crew members—is somehow 22 minutes long. It’s a show, man! I taught this game live in less than 10 minutes, so I’m not sure how else to explain why the teach video was so long save for the fact that Keymaster cares so much about the look and feel of…

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A few weeks ago, a few friends of mine needed a game recommendation. They had about 40-50 minutes to kill. One of them was in the mood for something heavier, or at least something with really satisfying decisions. Another wanted something interactive. The other three wanted something without too many rules. Though I wasn’t playing, I had a requirement too: given that they had 40-50 minutes, it had to be quick to teach.

As luck should have it, the answer was close at hand: Through the Desert, finally back in print after far too long. Full of satisfying trade-offs, deeply interactive, and taking less than five minutes to teach to a table full of comfortable gamers, the second greatest of Reiner Knizia’s tile-laying masterpieces was the cure for what ailed us.

Through the Desert couldn’t be much simpler. First, players take turns adding their Leader camels, one by one, to any valid space on the board. Those placements feel arbitrary the first couple of times you play, but every camel you place for the rest of the game will have to form caravans by branching off of your matching leader. You quickly learn that those five placements are the most impactful decisions you’ll make.

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