I love Flamme Rouge. I’m not sure if the Finnish-born cycling simulator is my favorite racing game, but there’s a non-zero chance it is. The rules are straightforward, you are often presented with difficult choices, and you have to make educated guesses about what everyone else is going to do. Better still, the end is almost always a tight race between two or three players, which keeps everyone involved.

While, as I mentioned, the rules for Flamme Rouge are simple, the game is not without its challenges. You have two decks of cards that you have to manage in a slightly counter-intuitive manner, and you have to keep both of your cyclists straight in your head. Add drafting and exhaustion on top of that, and it can often prove to be too much for younger players.

Flamme Rouge BMX is for the younger among us, and it primarily serves them by reducing the scale. Instead of a wending and winding path, one lap around this circular track will do ya. Each player now manages a single cyclist, rather than a team. The cards have been turned into tokens,…

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Drachentreppe is simple. Three to six players select one of their three wizards to activate and roll the single custom die to determine movement up a gorgeously tactile spiral staircase. Results of one, two, or three grant movement up the steps and the choice to keep going. The other three sides end the turn with something special. The “wizard up” side allows the active wizard to jump ahead to share a space with the next highest wizard. The “wizard down” side triggers a clumsy fall to the bottom (unless “caught” by a friendly wizard). The dragon side prompts a visit from—you guessed it—the dragon, which is good and leaves the player with an egg. 

The simple, press-your-luck style is easy to understand and explain to adults and children alike. In practice, however, those simple rules reveal a host of inconsistencies and frustrations. 

The spiral staircase has a crowding rule that will make adults reach for a bottle of wine as the children giggle. If a third wizard lands on any one stair, the one who has been there the longest falls, uncontrollably and uninterrupted, to the bottom. That’s right, there is little use building a stable home base here, because eventually—and by eventually, I mean often—the foundation will be eviscerated by everyone’s favorite tablemate: blind misfortune! Even the Parcheesi…

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Beware! There are hungry monsters living under your bed, and they have an unquenchable appetite for your fear. Classic wisdom says that the only way to get rid of them is to overcome your fears and deny them that sustenance which they crave so badly. But, it turns out there’s another, faster way.

Modern day Monster Science has revealed a chink in the monster armor. Each monster, whether by evolution or intelligent design, is born with a fear of their own.  It turns out each of these creatures is afraid of a very specific type of toy and will flee at the very sight of it.

So, keep your nightstand well stocked because there may come a day (night, actually) where you’ll find yourself assailed on all sides by creepy crawlies and the only weapons you’ll have are your brains, your speed, and the toys that you have at hand. If you’re quick enough and smart enough, you just might emerge victorious and send those monsters fleeing to the closet where they belong.

Let the Monster Chase begin.

How It’s Played

Monster Chase, designed by Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders, Tokaido), is a memory game of monster chasing mayhem for 1 to 6 players aged four and up. The game is played out in two theaters. The first…

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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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As a board game reviewer, I frequently venture into the unexplored realms of tabletop gaming. While the masses hunt for the latest offerings from first-rate publishers, I find a unique excitement in unearthing games yet to grace store shelves or Kickstarter campaigns. Sometimes this leads to interesting gems, while others remind me why not every game is published.

Runner Tactics is a game where these two perceptions are engaged in endless combat. While its core concept is undeniably intriguing, certain aspects of its product design and gameplay raise questions about its readiness for the spotlight. Of course, for you to understand where I’m coming from, we need to delve into this game’s mechanisms.

In a few words, Runner Tactics is a strategic, grid-based, two-player programming game where the players will draft a team of three members for a 3 vs 3 match. Instead of abilities, each member has their own movement range and attack pattern. On the field itself, there are two lines, similar to a North American Football field. The objective is easy: Eliminate your opponent’s team or, at the end of any round, have more members on the other side of the line than your opponent.

Gridiron Hussle

Turns are as simple as the objective. You put a big wooden player shield in front of you and…

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Overview

From the rules:

“What’s going on in the jungle? For several days now, the peace and quiet of the tropics has been broken repeatedly by loud honking, squeaky tires and screeching brakes! The reason - a jungle taxi competition! The player who can pick up the most passengers by the end of the season will become the Tasmanian Taxi King!

You won’t want to pass up the opportunity to win this title. As a jungle taxi driver, you have to try to collect several animals and use route cards to create the longest possible route for your taxi. But you have to engage in exciting duels with your fellow players in order to collect route cards. The player who collects the most route cards and animals at the end wins the game.”

How To Play

A game of Taxi Wildlife is setup thusly:

The three decks of Route cards are shuffled and placed into facedown stacks according to their card back. One card is drawn from each stack and placed face up next to the stack from which it was drawn. Remove any Duel cards belonging to colors that are not being played. Then, the deck of Duel cards is shuffled and placed face down close by.…

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During a meeting with our friend Rawan from publisher Gigamic at SPIEL 2022, she showed me a mockup of a game coming soon now known as Featherweight Fiesta. It had the look of a dexterity game for families: take paper birds and try to balance them on a telephone line made of string, pulled across three wooden telephone poles that straddle the two halves of the box.

It was cute. I couldn’t tell how much game there was, but I liked the idea of being able to match order fulfillment cards with paper birds. If you knocked any birds off the wire by accident, other players were rewarded with items that provided points at the end of the game.

When we met with Rawan at the SPIEL 2023 show, Featherweight Fiesta was complete—she handed me a copy. My two kids (ages seven and nine) joined me for a few runs at the game, an easy task since the game takes about 15 minutes to play.

As a game, it’s OK. As a toy, it’s much better. But that leaves its chances of staying in the collection a bit slim. My kids are just old enough to appreciate a fun toy, but after they played it twice and I played it one more time with my…

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From time to time, I find myself tempted to bemoan the size of HABA’s larger boxes. Space is at a premium. Rhino Hero: Super Battle could fit in a box half its size. “I’d own more HABA games if they were smaller,” I grumble to myself. “They just take up so much space. This,” I say, as I pick up Flotsam Float, “could be so much smaller.”

It’s in that moment, though, that the pieces tumble around in the box, and I experience a Pavlovian response. The sound of wooden pieces hitting against one another is the chaotic ambient noise of a nursery. HABA knows exactly what they’re doing when they make their bigger boxes so much larger than the components. HABA boxes sound like play™.

Orphans on a Raft

That is especially the case with Flotsam Float. To move that box around is to bear auditory witness to the collapse of an infinity array of Jenga towers. Why is that? It’s full of, well, flotsam and jetsam.

To set up the game, you populate the table with six islands, arranged in a pinwheel. Each island is surrounded by four cards, and those cards in turn…

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Quoridor exemplifies one of my favorite things about a good abstract game: you can teach it without saying a word. In fact, the rule booklet that comes with my Gigamic Games version is two pages long. One of those pages is simply drawings to illustrate the text and are really all you need to understand how the game is played.

While learning Quoridor might be easy, winning can be another thing.

Quoridor is played on a 9x9 grid of 81 raised squares. Surrounding these squares are grooves cut into the wooden board along their edges that isolate each square.

The two players begin by choosing a colored pawn and placing it on the square in the center of the line closest to them. Each player then takes ten of the plain, wooden rectangles that act as fences in the game.

[caption id="attachment_290551" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Quoridor set up and ready to play.[/caption]

Pawns move orthogonally, that is, forward or backward, right or left, from their starting position. Diagonal moves are not allowed (with one exception, covered later). The winner is the first player to get their pawn to any square on the farthest row—that is, the row closest to your opponent.

A few additional rules need to be mentioned here: as…

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Look, I’m an easy sell. I’m a sucker for novelty. Tell me you’ve got a legacy game for children, and I’m going to be curious. Legacy games generally cater to adults, which makes sense. They require paying attention to the same thing for an extended period of time. This is not a strength for which children are celebrated. More importantly, the stories are usually only suggested through fragments of information, rather than fleshed out like a storybook.

[caption id="attachment_288322" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The boat during setup.[/caption]

Along Came Pepe

Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy! aims to change all that. Over the course of twenty-five episodes, you follow the adventures of the good capt’n and his anthropomorphic crew, helping them track down seven magic treasures in their quest to stop the evil Captain Goldtooth.

The game itself is a straightforward sliding puzzle. Working together, players move the various crew members of the Melody to their stations. Passing Capt’n Pepe from player to player, the active player moves one crew member one space. That’s it. You keep going until all the crew members are where…

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When I was a kid, we had a clubhouse of sorts in our backyard. It was more the frame of a clubhouse. It lacked a real roof or finished walls, but it had a kid-sized dog door of sorts to crawl through. We played in it. Sometimes I wonder what our prospects might have been like had we utilized an animal labor force with union credentials to give it a zesty exterior. Thankfully, Ultimate Treehouse has come along to alleviate my wistful curiosities. 

After several plays, Ultimate Treehouse has warranted entirely disparate reviews for its roots, its leaves, and its branches.

The roots

Fat Brain Toy Co., the publisher of Ultimate Treehouse, lays out an admirable agenda in the rulebook before getting to the setup. As a company, their aim is to teach tabletop gaming to families. They defend the hobby as a hobby, they toss out a section of applicable “Gaming Lingo,” and they teach the mechanisms—not to mention the fact that there are such things as mechanisms—by name. The font is large, the tone is encouraging. The whole presentation is a hand extended to folks who have never played a modern board game. 

I love it. 

The setup is conversational and presented, more or less, through speech…

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Last year, while browsing through a random shop in scenic Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the quest for something, anything, to keep my four year old occupied during the vacation downtime, my wife and I discovered something we hadn’t expected to find out in the wild, and certainly not in such a random place.

We found a copy of My First Carcassonne.

She looked at me. I looked at her. Without even exchanging a single word, we both knew that this was it. We’d found the holy grail. But the question remained: would it perform its function? Would he be entertained? And, more importantly, would we? There was only one way to find out.

Overview

Designed by Marco Teubner (whose game Safranito was an official recommendation for the Spiel des Jahres in 2011), My First Carcassonne takes its namesake and distills it down into a very child-friendly format. Gone are the abbeys, cities, and fields. Gone are the opportunities to block your opponents from finishing their structures. In fact, gone is the aspect of playing out workers and retrieving them after scoring features. My First Carcassonne is not a victory point competition. It’s a race to the finish.

Setup

The setup for My First Carcassonne is incredibly easy. Each player…

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