In the fall of 2023 I stumbled across a lightweight card game called Vegetable Stock, originally from the publisher Taiwan Boardgame Design. This is a “market manipulation” game in which players choose cards for their personal “portfolio” and leave cards which may affect the value of said portfolios. Since my love of light card games is well known, but my love of clever puns less so, I immediately ordered a copy and had it shipped from Taiwan. It turns out the game is a delight, and fits perfectly into that light filler game category that I so adore. Now imagine my delight when Arcane Wonders licensed Vegetable Stock for release in North America and handed me a review copy at last year’s Essen SPIEL.

Vegetable Stock is soup-er!

How’d They Get All that Flavor into Vegetable Stock?

A quick note on setup: shuffle the 45 vegetable cards and place the deck in the middle of the table, dealing 1 card per player face up, with 1 additional card. So in a 4 player game you’d deal 5 cards face up. Take the 5 price cards and lay them out, then shuffle the 5 market cards and place them on top of the price cards in descending order: the…

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Thingstead falls into that strangest category of board games: I don’t have any interest in playing it, I don’t think it’s particularly good, and I’d also believe entirely anyone who said it’s a masterpiece. Scott Almes’s two-player area-control game is doing just enough new and different things that, though I think it works about as well as a hang glider fashioned from Swiss cheese, I could see it being exactly what certain people are looking for.

The area control works across two dimensions. Each turn, you play a card, either to exert pull on one of the four Clans, or to add influence to one of the seven viking Elders around the central ring. Both options net you points come the end of the game, but you may have other motives at any particular time. The Clans also give you either temporary or permanent access to various powers, depending on which Clan card sits at the top of that particular Clan deck. The Elders, meanwhile, serve as the game’s tempo control. If enough influence is placed on enough Elders, the game comes to an end.

You…

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Given the mind-boggling number of games designed by Dr. Reiner Knizia (sitting at 765 on BGG, as of this writing) it’s no wonder so many consider the German mathematician to be the Board Game GOAT. For the past 40+ years, he’s been creating innovative and accessible games, but what’s always impressed me has been the staying power of some of his earliest titles. The man is no stranger to auction and bidding games, with classics like High Society and Ra to his credit. However, there is a reason that Modern Art, in particular, has been consistently reprinted since  it was originally released back in 1992.

I got 5 on it

In Modern Art, each player is a curator of a world-famous museum, buying and selling paintings by 5 different artists, using 5 different auction rules, until the 5th painting from a single artist is revealed and the round ends. Value is assessed based on the popularity of each artist and money is paid out for every painting purchased that round. Four rounds of this and the museum with the most money wins. Buy low, sell high, and try to grab the best deals. Simple enough, right? Well, this is very much a case of a game with an…

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I previously reviewed Ancient Knowledge, a solid tableau building card game designed by Rémi Mathieu and published by IELLO, back in 2023. My review group enjoyed the game, although not exactly as written—the base game badly overstayed its welcome, so we found more magic in a house rule that shortened the game from 14 cards in a player’s “Past” to just 10. That brought the game time down from about 30 minutes per player to 15-20 minutes per player, with three-player games wrapping up in about an hour.

And given the near-complete lack of player interaction, that’s where Ancient Knowledge needed to live. With any tableau-building game featuring a boatload of cards (see: Terraforming Mars, Ark Nova, Clank!, etc.), all I need out of an expansion to a game like Ancient Knowledge is quite simple: more cards. Ideally, you sprinkle a new game mechanic, a mini-game board off to the side that expands my options on a turn, or maybe a new game mode if the designers are feeling fancy.

Ancient Knowledge: Heritage arrived on my doorstep, ready to answer some of my needs. I don’t think this expansion has quite enough new/interesting cards for me—between Builder cards and Technology cards, the new additions grow the base game’s decks by 25%—but it does introduce…

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Regardless of first impressions, however, players will undoubtedly remark in the endgame about the impact of the explosion and the need to be more attentive next time. 

1920 Wall Street (hereafter referred to as 1920) is a card-driven stock trading game. Players travel around a rondel, purchasing cards, changing market values, collecting shares, and exerting themselves to determine the effect of the final explosion, after which total money rules the day. In many ways it’s exactly what a stock game ought to be, with a dash of disruptive historical flavor. 

The end

Two anticipations govern the decision-making in 1920.…

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A Game From the 1900s?

My kids like to joke that I’m so old I’m from the 1900s (which definitely makes me feel ancient). And while Jalape-NO! is also from the 1900s, it’s only just barely—being released in 1998 by the legendary game design duo of Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling.

Overview

Jalape-NO! is a must follow trick-taking game in which players attempt to have the lowest score over a number of rounds. Depending on player count, there will be between 4 and 6 suits, which have card numbers ranging from…

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Fighting games is one of the most interesting video game genres out there. While the core concept is borderline primal, as the end goal of every fighting game is to beat your opponent’s health to zero, it has earned the reputation of being hard as hell. It’s not a surprise, considering that you need to be absolutely precise with your fighter’s movements, attack execution, and memorizing combos. To even play at a mediocre level, commitment is necessary, and the genre is simply not meant for casual players. Getting beaten by a more experienced player in fighting games often feels oppressive, like someone licking the icing off your cupcake and forcing you to eat it.

Yomi’s intentions are to bring the fighting game spirit into colored cardboard form. No more worries about inputting weird movements with buttons and joysticks. The physical barrier ceases to exist here, and the only bit of fighting game remaining here is the mental aspect. The word “Yomi” derives from the concept of reading one’s mind. At higher levels of competitive fighting games, attacks and movements are too quick to react to, so you must perform your actions through premeditation. In other words, making decisions based on what you think your opponent will do.

Yomi 2 is obviously a sequel to Yomi, Sirlin Games’ first entry…

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I’d like to take a moment to address the uncomfortable prosody of the title. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is, at the very least, guilty of dropping a “The,” is it not? There’s something about the way “Trick-Taking Game” is thrown in there, with a lack of propriety that brings nothing to mind so much as the words “Cheese Product,” that feels off. The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game feels better.

I’m Not Stalling, You’re Stalling

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a cooperative card game, very much in the same spirit as The Crew. Designer Bryan Bornmueller seems to have drawn particular inspiration from the second installment, Mission Deep Sea, which has a wider variety of mission types than The Quest for Planet Nine. Each chapter of Fellowship provides the players with a variety of characters to choose from, each of whom has a specific victory condition that must be met in order for the team to succeed.

In Chapter 1, for example, the players are presented with a choice of Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Pippin. Frodo needs to win a specified number of Ring cards, one…

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Publisher Shadowborne Games burst onto the scene in 2022 with their debut hit Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. The sheer enormity of Oathsworn is impressive to say the least, from both a first-time publisher and first-time head designer Jamie Jolly, although the staff is composed of some industry veterans in both the board game and screenwriting industries,  Behemoth in both size and scope, this game comes complete with optional high-quality miniatures, terrain, and even an ‘armory’ of various weapons that can be physically equipped to the character miniatures via a removable push-fit system. Want your hero to swashbuckle two swords at a time? Just pop out their current arms and replace them with the new blades you picked up last session. The armory system and larger-than-life terrain, while completely superfluous, adds to the experience in a fun way. It’s a “they didn’t have to do that” kind of sentiment that you’ll end up seeing throughout the entirety of the game.

[caption id="attachment_310504" align="alignnone" width="1500"] To flail or chop? Decisions, decisions.[/caption]

Into the Woods

Oathsworn is a large campaign game that effectively boils down to two phases: exploration and combat. In a given ‘chapter,’ the formula is the same. Players start with a narrative-driven exploration, making choices throughout, until finally reaching a…

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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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Not So Neighborly is a 2-4 player party game that lets players live out the fantasy of terrorizing their neighbors over petty grievances—like putting the garbage bins too close to the driveway. The goal is simple: play cards to score 10 points while dodging dog poop, casual arson, and general pettiness. On each turn, a player either plays or draws a card, and then passes the turn to the next player.

The Cards and Gameplay

Scoring cards represent various neighborhood buildings, each worth 1-3 points. Along the way, players might draw mundane action cards, which allow them to skip an opponent’s turn, steal cards, or force discards. Then, there are the attack cards, the real chaos-makers. If you don’t enjoy “take-that” mechanics or prefer not to alienate your family before the next holiday gathering, I suggest you stop reading now and pick up Machi Koro instead. It’s likely to provide a far more enjoyable experience.

Attack cards are instant turmoil, designed to raze a neighbor’s carefully built plans. Imagine: just as a player envisions a serene neighborhood, they smell smoke—because their house is on fire. Or perhaps they wake up to find someone (or something) has left an unpleasant surprise on their porch, negating the ongoing power of…

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Slay the Spire is a rogue-like deck-building video game that burst onto the scene in 2019 to great acclaim. Initially launched on Steam, it was an instant critical darling that soon expanded to both console and mobile platforms. While it wasn’t the first deck-building rogue-like game—Dream Quest and Hand of Fate come to mind—it still stands as the pinnacle of the genre that it helped to take mainstream, spawning many imitators but no true challengers to the throne. I’ve personally sunk at least 500 hours across multiple platforms, enthralled by its difficult but addictive gameplay. 

When I heard that a board game version of Slay the Spire was being made, I was a little surprised. Not surprised that people were cashing in on the popularity of a mega-hit and the growing board game hobby. I was surprised because Slay the Spire already feels like a board game in digital form. It has a pretty standard deck-building format. Start with a 10-card deck of basic cards, draw five cards, take actions, repeat and reshuffle as necessary. Throughout the course of the game, you’ll be adding cards to the deck, perhaps removing some of the weaker starting cards, trying to optimize that card deck engine to engineer powerful turns that hopefully translate to winning.

Granted, Slay the Spire super-sizes the format…

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Christmas Tree is one of those games that I had no idea existed. My friend, Steve, knows that my wife is a Christmas fanatic (e.g., she watches Hallmark-style Christmas movies year-round, parts of our house are decorated with Christmas lights that never come down, etc.). So a few years back, a bunch of people in my social group were doing a Secret Santa when he stumbled onto this game. He had drawn my wife’s name, so this was a no-brainer. My wife fell in love with this beautiful drafting game.

[caption id="attachment_309900" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A beautiful box that begs to be played during the holidays![/caption]

Game Play

Christmas Tree is a fairly straight-forward drafting game. Each player starts with a player board in the shape of a tree with 21 spaces allotted for decorations. Along the edges are halves of lights (bulbs, in the game’s vernacular) which can be used in scoring later. Players are also given three cards that show Linzer cookies, and three four goal cards (with snowflakes on the back) that they keep secret.

[caption id="attachment_309901" align="aligncenter" width="600"] There are 21 spaces to decorate, seven pieces per round.[/caption]

Next, the decorations deck is created. The deck has glass ornaments in…

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