Things in Rings is a 2-6+ player party game that stretches your mind by connecting the dots in a Venn diagram. The objective is to shed your hand of five “Things” cards before other players, all at the discretion of the “knower.” The Venn diagram is comprised of three categories: Word, Context, and Attribute. One player takes on the role of the “knower,” drawing a set of three cards that match each of the categories. Only the knower knows all and judges accordingly!

Gameplay and Design

Category cards vary in difficulty, marked with 1-3 stars (three being the most difficult). The knower seeds the rings by placing up to three “Things” cards in any of the spaces within the Venn diagram, which include both individual and overlapping category spaces. There is also a “None” space for cards that don’t fit any of the categories, which can be just as insightful for players! These seeded cards act as breadcrumbs, guiding players as they attempt to connect the dots.

Each player places one card from their hand into the space where they think it fits in the big picture. The knower decides if the card correctly fits based on their exclusive knowledge of the categories. If the card is incorrect, the…

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Like many successful deckbuilder games, Star Trek Captain's Chair adapts proven game mechanics – in this case, from Imperium's civilization-building system – and reimagines them through a new thematic lens. While Imperium explores broad themes of the rise and fall of empires, Captain's Chair distills the same core systems into a streamlined duel peppered with all things Star Trek.

And the word “streamline” carries a lot here. Star Trek Captain's Chair may be more approachable than Imperium, but it remains a deeply intricate asymmetrical game. This isn’t a mere clone of Ascension or Dominion. Each card is a holodeck of possibilities, with some of them presenting up to five different options. You also need to master an extensive vocabulary of keywords while comprehending a battalion of icons and card traits.

Furthermore, Captain’s Chair is a good representation of asymmetrical here. You pick a Captain, such as everyone’s favorite, Picard, and you get their deck. Almost every single card in your Captain’s deck is unique, with little crossover to any other deck. There are also two additional decks to consider. When your main deck empties, you add the top card of the Reserve deck into your main deck. Once the Reserve Deck is depleted, the Development deck becomes available, offering powerful cards that require resources to acquire.

Captain's Log

Just…

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Monopoly is one of those games that no longer needs an introduction. It is a fair bet that if you are reading this, you were familiar with the game by the time you exited elementary school. Scrabble is not quite as ubiquitous, but it is close. These games are not at all similar. Monopoly is a real estate trading game of cutthroat business transactions intermixed with an exorbitant amount of pure luck, while Scrabble is a game where you are trying to make the most valuable words (crossword style) with the random selection of letters you have and the bonus spaces scattered over the game board. So how do you mix the two?

[caption id="attachment_310351" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A lot being said on the cover of this game. Not much is realized in the game itself.[/caption]

The Mashup

For purposes of this review, I am going to take a Back in the Day approach: I am going to assume that you have at least a cursory knowledge of Monopoly and Scrabble. What I will be describing below is how this game differs as it blends the two games.

The Monopoly Half

In my opinion, Monopoly is not a great game. It is not horrible, by any means, it…

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At Gen Con 2024, the new game Landmarks seemed to pop up in the text chain with my gaming groups more than almost every other game during the weekend. The publisher of Landmarks, Floodgate Games (makers of hits such as Sagrada, Décorum, and Skyrockets), had a big party to kick off Gen Con with a special sale on Landmarks, and demo tables featuring the game were full constantly during the show.

The Floodgate team gave me the impression that Landmarks stood as the single biggest item Floodgate has ever distributed at a convention, in terms of unit sales.

So, we can start there: no matter what I think about the game, Landmarks made a major splash. I did a demo then got the game to the table during a recent family beach trip, and for the audiences I forced to the table (mostly a mix of casual gamers, ranging from ages 9 to 79), Landmarks is a good fit as a Codenames-adjacent word association experience that plays in about 20 minutes depending on player count.

The big takeaway from my five plays during beach week? Landmarks is a lot of fun with my family—as long as I don’t bring too many players!

Treasure Hunt

Landmarks…

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Don’t tell my erudite friends but skirmish games, in particular, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, got me back into board gaming (even though I find the entirety of the modern Star Wars franchise unbearably boring). I love pushing miniatures around on a grid of some kind and making them shoot each other.

Now, I do love Star Trek, the show about people solving problems with talking, and I’m happy to say that if you’re looking for a highly approachable two-player skirmish game, Star Trek: Away Missions fits the bill. While the way you win can feel slightly disjointed as a game, it often ends up feeling more in the spirit of a Star Trek set piece, where a character has to perform some jargon-filled objective while dodging phaser fire.

Yellow Alert

Away Missions has you selecting your team from amongst Romulans, Klingons, Borg, and Federation factions. For this review, I had access to the starter kits for each. As I understand it, you can get other collections of minis which add characters you can swap in, more cards to build your decks with, and additional options for objectives.

You have a deck of Support Cards, and a deck of Mission Cards. The former contain various pieces of equipment that you…

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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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Nothing out there explores this theme quite like the worldwide sensation The Walking Dead (TWD). For the most part, the world of TWD follows a single group of Survivors, led by Rick Grimes, as they try to find their way in a world that’s hardly recognizable. And, while it initially seems the thing to fear is the titular walking dead, they soon discover that the real terror is other people.

TWD first arrived on the scene as a comic book in 2003. Written by Robert Kirkman, the series’ themes and rabid fan base eventually attracted the attention of the AMC television network who turned it into one of the most popular shows in the history of television. It ran for a total of eleven seasons over a period of twelve years and has spawned a number of spinoff series. While the core television show, and the comic books, have come to an end, it’s clear that The Walking Dead isn’t going anywhere.

From low effort tie-ins such as TWD Monopoly and TWD Jenga to more nuanced efforts such as TWD: Something to Fear, it…

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I know that not everyone loves dice chuckers, but there’s something satisfying about grabbing a handful of dice and rolling them across the table. Particularly when those dice influence the actions of 500 foot tall monsters duking it out in a major metropolitan area; like in 2011’s King of Tokyo. The series has had a slew of releases over the years: from “monster packs” (promo cards featuring new monsters), to brand new titles like King of New York, and even a reimagining of the original in 2024’s King of Tokyo: Origins. But the game has been largely the same since the original was released: 2-6 players going head to head trying to come out on top. But now with the release of King of Monster Island, the series has gone coop, with players all trying to defeat a fire monster born from the depths of a volcano on an island in the middle of the Pacific.

Way to set the stage!

King of Monster Island Overview

The first thing you’ll notice when sitting down to play is the enormous volcano in the center of the player board. Cleverly assembled from cardboard and plastic, this is not only the centerpiece of the game, but also acts as a…

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The connection between board game design and intellectual properties is frequently superficial. The typical approach for such games is to create a generic board game system that can accommodate a variety of themes and then gradually introduce rules to give the illusion of capturing the essence of those IPs. It is uncommon to encounter a game where the IP takes point, and the game designer is trying their utmost to ensure that the rules serve the franchise effectively.

Fortunately, The Thing Boardgame is on the other side of this situation. This is one of the few games where every line of rule makes sense in context while still offering a plateful of systems that one would expect in a well-designed cooperative game. But before I chirp about my praises and concerns, you should probably get to know the game first.

The Thing Boardgame is based on the 1982 film of the same name by John Carpenter. The film, proudly sitting on the horror sci-fi throne, is about a shape-shifting alien life form that can spread like a virus and takes place in a research station in Antarctica. At the start of the game, one of the players starts out as an infected Alien player.

Now, if this sounds like a social deduction game, you are one-third correct. Social deduction…

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I lead employee engagement for a food & beverage manufacturer when I’m not here talking games. At a recent lunch event, I decided to bring some of the games from my personal collection to the office to spur some laughs while we did yet another round of bland lunch catering.

I put my copy of Just One (2018, Repos Production) at one table, then waited to see if anyone would engage with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see members of our HR department sit at the table, read the short list of instructions, and dive right in.

Within seconds, you could see the magic beginning to form. Players used the (admittedly terrible) dry erase markers to begin following the game’s simple rules, putting one player in the hot seat while all other players used their easel to come up with a clue that hopefully no other player wrote on their dry erase easel.

When the HR team members not currently in the hot seat showed their words to each other, the usual amounts of surprise, cursing, and accusatory gestures took place. Left with only a word or two to come up with the answer, it was great to see the active player struggle to come up with the right word…and when they did, it was high fives…

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King of Tokyo: Origins is a dice-chucking game that pits monster against monster in the age-old battle for Japan’s biggest city. The winner will either be the first person who reaches 20 points, or be the last monster standing.

Set Up

All players take a cut-out of a monster and sets it in the plastic stand. They then take the accompanying monster’s score tracker, setting the wheel in the upper left (Points) to zero and the wheel in the lower right (Health) to 10. 

[caption id="attachment_295759" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo: Origins[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_295760" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Mechamster and Cosmic Joe[/caption]

Set the board on the table in reach of all players—or don’t. The board only has a circle for the attacking monster to stand in. That’s all. Simply placing your monster in the middle of the table will have the same effect.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to purchase these to gain either a temporary or permanent bonus. Place three cards face-up and the remaining cards to the side.

[caption id="attachment_295762" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of cards[/caption]

Randomly choose a starting player and…

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Return to the beleaguered city of Tokyo—now with the addition of Tokyo Bay—as our monsters slug it out once again for domination and to claim victory. 

If you’re new to King of Tokyo, I went over the setup and gameplay in my recent review of King of Tokyo: Origins. (Known from here as KoT: O) That game comes with four monsters, each lacking in special abilities and rendering them disappointingly interchangeable. King of Tokyo: Monster Box (KoT: MB), a fully stand-alone game, solves that problem in a big way. 

Let’s start with some of the basics, though. 

[caption id="attachment_295770" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo Monster Box box[/caption]

KoT:MB comes with its own big deck of monster cards. 

[caption id="attachment_295771" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of the many Monster cards in the box[/caption]

From my games, these can be mixed in with the KoT:O cards if you want even more options.

KoT:MB also comes with two sets of dice, one in black & green and one in orange & black. The orange set was initially included in the King of Tokyo Halloween expansion. There is no difference between these sets of dice. If…

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sequitur (noun): the conclusion of an inference: consequence

Do you consider yourself a wordsmith, a connoisseur of lexicographical delights, a veritable exemplar of sesquipedalian predilection? If reading that sentence really gets your blood flowing, chances are you’ve played a few word games in your time and have relished those experiences. And, if reading that sentence fills you with dread, there’s a good chance that you’ve played a few word games in your time and have left those experiences feeling the exact opposite. Word games tend to reward those of us who are verbose while alienating those of us who just aren’t.

Games should be enjoyable. You should walk away from having played a game with friends feeling uplifted, filled with emotions of friendship and camaraderie, or, at the very least, enlightened. You should not walk away feeling belittled and stupid. All too frequently, at least one person walking away from having just played a word game walks away feeling the latter.

What if I told you that there was a word game that isn’t about the words? What if I told you there was a word game that doesn’t require you to be a walking dictionary? What if I told you that there was a word game where even the smallest words could lead you to victory? Well,…

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