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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A great game does not require much to be great. I don’t mean they’re easy to design; designing and publishing a great game is basically impossible. What I mean to say is, they don’t require much in the way of rules, or components. CMYK seems to have made the idea a great game does not require much their mission statement. Again and again, the publisher of The Fuzzies, Wavelength, and Lacuna dips into a well that’s light on rules and heavy on experience. Their best games take the most direct route possible, boiling down the idea of a modern board game until you’re left with nothing but the simple syrup.

Consider Wilmot’s Warehouse, their newest release, which has rules so simple that I could teach them to you from scratch in less than a minute. Ricky Haggett, Richard Hogg, and David King have designed a memory game, which I didn’t realize we as a culture still made, and a cooperative one at that. Players take turns adding a total of 35 tiles facedown to a grid, with the ultimate goal of memorizing where all of those tiles are. That’s easier than you might think.

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The cooperative games that I come back to time and again are consistently those with heavy communication restrictions. When done right, encumbrance leads to moments of discovery, as the players discover the sorts of creativity that only exist in the presence of narrow parameters. Much as Japanese poets find remarkable beauty in seventeen syllables, so the arc of an entire round of The Crew can be indicated with a single card. Restrictions breed innovation, exploration, and discovery. Without walls to bind us in, we have nothing to push against.

The restrictions placed on you by Ritual, a cooperative game from designer Tomás Tarragón and publisher Strohmann Games, are near-total. It is meant to be played in complete silence. Your only means of communicating is indirect, implied in the action you choose to perform each turn.

Each player begins the game with four random gems and a card. The cards show some combination of gems: five in a single color, three each in two different colors, or two each in three different colors. In order to progress through the round, players have to help one another collect their sets by making smart use of the actions available: Take a gem from your left; Pass a gem to anyone else; Place a gem on the placard that indicates you would like…

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If you’ve followed any of my family-weight review content over the last three years, you know my general rules regarding these products: if my kids keep asking to play the games, it’s going to get a high score.

Here’s the surprise with Wandering Towers (2022, Capstone Games): the adults who tried it loved it even more than the kids did.

When Wandering Towers arrived, my seven-year-old son wanted to try it out. Wizards on the cover, some animals running around? That was enough to bust it out. We learned the rules, then played a two-player competitive game. That went well, so we did a two-player co-op game.

Then he asked to play it again the next day and joined my review crew for a five-player game. He came in second place, then he asked to play it again the following night.

But the reviews were even stronger with the three adults in that five-player game. Two of them said they loved it, with one immediately looking online to price out a purchase. (We’ll come back to this.)

Wandering Towers has a simple concept: get your small pool of wizard meeples into Ravenskeep, a tower represented by an open-faced black tower receptacle on one of the 16 spaces of…

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Sushi. Drafting. Set Collection. I’m a simple man, and it doesn't take much to get my attention.

Attention doesn’t immediately mean praise or endorsement, but it does mean I am going to give it a shot, and it’s hard to say no to a game with a presentation this sleek. While sushi-themed games are hardly new these days, especially since I just reviewed Wasabi not too long ago, not many of them use a wooden board or a conveyor belt system. Also, this is probably the first sushi game that uses plates as game pieces, and stackable ones at that. This might sound like complete fluff, but surprisingly, it actually has a gameplay purpose.

Before I dive into the gameplay, there's a story behind this cardboard sushi competition. You and your friends are at an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant, and you want the best evening ever. This friendly battle is measured in victory points earned by eating a variety of sushi, collecting color-coded plate sets, ordering side dishes, and tipping staff.

Fortunately, the mundane backstory ends there because the game’s entire presentation is truly on its own level. The wooden game board serves not only as a place for players' pawns to eat sushi, but also as a dynamic conveyor belt for the sushi plates themselves. At the start…

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“It’s like Memory, combined with scribbled pictures. Wanna try it?”

This was my intro to the kids to get them to try That’s Not a Hat (2023, Ravensburger) after a long week of car travel for spring break. My daughter will generally try anything, but games that feature pictures usually make her jump, so she was on board.

My son was a slightly tougher sell. “Is it cooperative?” he asked.

“No. We’ll each have a couple of cards in front of us, but the goal is to try and remember what everyone has in front of them. If you don’t, you’ll take on ‘penalty points’ and the person who has the most penalty points triggers the end of the game.”

My son turned skeptical. “I’ll play if it’s quick.” (Apparently, he had a hot date with the LEGO set perched nearby.)

That’s Not a Hat is, in fact, quick—10-20 minutes in most cases with three or four players. Longer than that, and then you have a different question to answer: is this a gift worth giving?

Bluff, Then Re-Gift

That’s Not a Hat is a bluffing game laced with elements of the game Memory for 3-8 players. To begin play, each player has a single card in front…

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Imagine with me the gravity of sitting down to a table for an exercise in social engineering. There are six spheres of children in need of companionship, and you’ve been given the task of bringing them together. Because this is a competitive endeavor, you must accomplish the task before everyone else. However, you’ll have to start by finding them all.

Of course, these are no ordinary children. They are children of the trees, Kinoko. Translated to English? They’re mushrooms. Goofy looking mushrooms. Wait a minute, is that mushroom holding a basketball? What sort of game is this?!

Kinoko is a tiny box game from Helvetiq and the mind of Tim Rogasch in which players attempt to bring families of mushrooms together based on their common interests. Let’s find out what can be done with 24 cards, a few dice, and almost as many linguistic variations of the rulebook as there are scoring tokens.

There are 8,000 types of mushrooms in the world

The cards of Kinoko come in six varieties: Athletes (Red), Musicians (Orange), Artisans (Yellow), Scientists (Green), Public Servants (Blue), and Artists (Purple). Their occupations couldn’t matter less in terms of gameplay, but my goodness do they keep the game bubbly. Each color has a set of numbers, one through three. Players receive one of each number,…

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Kolossal Games (Reload) is heading to Kickstarter this month with a campaign-style cooperative deduction game titled Almost Innocent. In many ways, this preview is unlike anything you’ll ever see—including what you’ll find in the retail version of the game. Allow me to explain. 

Legacy and campaign-style games that depend in any way upon story face a distinct challenge in this early preview stage because of potential spoilers. Kolossal has attempted to dig up this roadblock by issuing a prologue to media outlets. This preview covers three scenarios that exist independent of the game that will hit retail next year, so nothing you see here will spoil your experience. 

Instead, the scenarios in the prologue offer a peek into the progression of game mechanics in a way that entices without laying all the cards on the table, so to speak. 

For the prologue, players take up the role of pub-dwellers who find themselves trapped inside when the owner learns that someone inside has been harassing the town and causing trouble. In order to escape, each player must deduce a story capable of buying passage to the ground above suspicion—proving themselves almost innocent. Success comes only if everyone at the table solves their individual conundrum. 

Scenario #1

Almost Innocent takes place in a central book that serves as the…

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Right now, the Bell household is knee-deep in the world of Harry Potter.

My wife loved the Potter books. Now that my daughter is reading-age, she has pounded her way through all seven of the books herself. We took her to Universal Studios in Orlando last fall and she had to be physically ripped from the park by the end of our vacation there. Every time we go somewhere that has Harry Potter toys, Harry Potter LEGOs, Harry Potter clothes, Harry Potter school supplies—you name it; she wants it all.

It should be no surprise, then, that a board game featuring wizards trying to get to a wizarding school before a ghost catches the players would be a massive hit in our house.

Enter Wizardry to the Power of Three (2016, Pegasus Spiele), a game that casually borrows from the world of Hogwarts then adds the element of the game Memory to the proceedings. With flavor text like “to…see the flying brooms…they heard the grown-ups talk about”, referring to “wizard students”, I don’t think anyone is confused about where we are.

And that works. Games borrow liberally from other worlds all the time, and for a light, 15-minute affair, Wizardry to the Power of Three (Wizardry for short) landed well with the family.

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I ran into Nora Meiners from Gamewright while strolling the exhibition hall at GAMA Expo. After she sold me on giving Sushi Roll a spin at Gen Con last year, she had nice things to say about some of our other Gamewright reviews, such as Happy City.

“Have you played Sleeping Queens? It’s a classic.”

I hadn’t even heard of Sleeping Queens, a 2005 release from Gamewright that got re-released a few years ago for its 15th anniversary. I was traveling later that day but the Sleeping Queens box was pocket-sized, so I slipped it into my carry-on and wished Nora well.

Now that I’ve played it a few times, I have to admit: Sleeping Queens is a fantastic light card game that fits on any game table and gets quality family fun into a 10-to-15-minute package.

Why have I not heard of this game before now?

Play Kings, Get Queens, Win Game

Those are essentially all of the rules to a game of Sleeping Queens.

Combining a mix of math, Memory, and some light combat with cards that play offense or defense, Sleeping Queens plays 2-5 players and can squeeze between almost any game you are going to be playing on game night.

The…

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I can picture it as clear as morning: walking with my family through a stunning Japanese garden, surrounded by the sensory delights of flowers, trees, and docile critters. Somehow, the air is hazy, casting a dreamlike hue across my field of vision. Then, the entirely expected happens as the tranquility is shattered by reality. 

“I bet I can make a bigger leaf pile than you!”

     “Oh yeah? Well I have more acorns!” 

“I’ll let you go through this pile of leaves for an acorn!” 

     “Hey! You can’t move that pile once you set it down!” 

Just about any activity can become a game with a few stated restrictions, a well-designed objective or two, and a playful attitude. The question in the end is whether the backyard shenanigans were just a strange moment or whether they can be whittled down into an experience that begs future visits. 

Momiji, a card game collaboration from Deer Games and Japanime Games, takes this playful backyard approach into that dreamy Japanese garden and asks what happens if peaceful leaf collection suddenly grows a competitive backbone? What if acorns become the fiat currency of the garden? Can the enjoyment of nature withstand such frivolity for a span of thirty minutes? Would folks come back for more? 

You may not yet know Dario Massarenti, one of…

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Welcome to Whitehall

The year is 1888. The place: Whitehall, in the east end of London.

A killer is on the loose, leaving a trail of dead bodies behind him. He surfaces only to strike, then disappears back into the shadows. Investigators are on his trail, working through clues to capture the murderer before he can claim his fourth victim.

Whitehall Mystery is a one-versus-many game of hidden movements and social deduction. One player takes the role of Jack the Ripper, while up to three other players play as Investigators with London’s Metropolitan Police Service, working together to track Jack down.

Whether playing as Jack or as an Investigator, the game will carry you through up to four phases of a single, macabre night. If Jack is able to reach all four of his murder sites, he wins the game. If the Investigators capture or surround him, or if Jack fails to reach a victim in time, they win.

Setting up the Game

Whitehall Mystery is played on a square board that depicts a street map of the east end of London in 1888. Buildings and streets are illustrated in sepia tones, while The River Thames and St. John’s Park Lake are shown in muted blues, giving the board an old-world feel.

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