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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So let me introduce you to Knitting Circle.

Knitting Circle Overview

In Knitting Circle, your goal is to earn the most points by creating completed clothing: combining garment cards, yarn tiles, and scoring buttons into a finished product. But it’s not as easy as it might sound. Make sure your garment meets one of the approved patterns or else you’ll earn the dreaded “ugly sweater” pin and lose points at the end of the game. Mix in the Advanced Request cards and your eyes will be seeing rainbows for hours after you finish each game.

Let’s briefly touch on setup, and then jump straight to the gameplay. Just be aware that each…

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Dominic Crapuchettes, the co-designer of Evolution, Evolution: Climate, and one of the designers of the Evolution-adjacent Oceans, had a list of design issues with the successful series. Most of them, he found, weren’t fixable. They were inherent to the system. The only solution was to start over. So that’s what he did.

The result is Nature, a game that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Evolution. This is explicitly Evolution 2.0, an attempt to make the game leaner, meaner, and more flexible. The central idea of gameplay remains the same: create and evolve species that are better at eating than anyone else.

First things first, you receive a new species. Isn’t it cute? They always start both physically small and numerically insignificant: a size of 1 and a population to match. This is your blank canvas. You use the cards in your hand to increase size, population, or add traits. Traits are the heart of the game, but they’re better explained after you have a sense of play, so I’ll circle back.

Once everyone has chosen how to evolve their species, it’s time for a road test. Each player, in turn, activates a…

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Cozy.

It’s an up-and-coming literary term these days; used to describe a softer sort of book: fantasies, mysteries, etc. where the stakes are relatively low, and readers are given plenty of reasons to fall in love with the characters and their lives. Some of my favorites are Becky Chambers’ sci-fi novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes, and Mia P. Manansala’s Tita Rosie’s Kitchen mystery series. But in the past few years, board games have been picking up this flag and proudly waving it. With titles like Calico (a game about making quilts for cats), The Whatnot Cabinet (collecting trinkets and arranging them), Flamecraft (artisan dragon helpers in a small village), and now River Valley Glassworks (a game about collecting river glass).

You might know that I’m a big fan of other games from this team: including French Quarter, and Three Sisters. I was so interested in River Valley Glassworks that I backed it on Kickstarter. This game is aimed squarely at games like Azul, but should resonate with gamers of all ages and experience levels. So let me tell you why I love it.

River Valley Glassworks Overview

In River Valley Glassworks players are collecting…

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Pencil erasers. You know the sort, the molded 3D variety that were never intended to erase. They were more like elementary school status symbols, beacons of personality that wagged in the air as you filled in bubbles with your Ticonderoga No. 2. Truth be told, they were a bit of a nuisance for how they threw your pencil out of balance, but they looked so cool.

Finally, someone has made a game with erasers as player markers—minus the hole necessary to properly top a pencil. It was the artwork that first drew me in as I listed Kyoto No Neko among my most anticipated list for GenCon 2024. Even as I tore into the shrink to check out the illustrations, though, I had to pause to admire the kitties made of the stuff of erasers. Endearing, they are.

In fact, everything about Kyoto No Neko has a charming look. The square board is flanked on all sides by stair-stepped player-specific territories to create a unique overall shape. The finished grid is an overhead map of the city: rooftops, terraces, and roadways for kitty travel. Cute little kitty paw tokens are scattered about, face-down and waiting to be discovered.

Feline It Out

The whole of the game is a series of skill checks. Every token requires one of several…

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Over the years with Everdell, I’ve gone through phases. I’ve run through the expansions, ranking every Everdell experience along the way. I’ve played with my kids regardless of age, introducing even the youngest through My Lil’ Everdell. I’ve played with friends—I’ve even played Everdell digitally. I’ve explored strategies for my favorite tabletop world and I’ve followed that world to new edges of the map with the release of Farshore.

Most recently, I’ve settled into two-player outings with my elder daughter. She has an enthusiasm for Everdell that rivals mine and I cherish the chance to play together. I was immediately intrigued, then, when I found the announcement for Everdell Duo. I think it’s safe to say most players most enjoy Everdell as a duel. Sprawling table presence and ballooning downtime tend to keep the smaller, tighter experience appealing. The upcoming campaign is obviously hoping to scratch a developed itch and maybe rake in the folks on the fringes of the Meadow.

With the rise of two-player versions, it seems everyone is out to streamline and redefine stellar gaming experiences. What changes have James and Clarissa Wilson brought to this newest iteration of my favorite game? Are they refreshing? Worthwhile? I surprised myself a little with my answers.

Remarkably familiar

Everdell Duo will strike all…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In my Focused on Feld series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2010’s It Happens.., his 12th game. For the sake of giving autocorrect a break, from this point on, I will be referring to the name of this game without the weird ellipses in the title.

It Happens was Stefan Feld’s fourth game to be published under the Queen Games banner, and it was the last of his games published by them in their small box form factor—the other two being Roma, his first game, and Arena: Roma II, his sixth, which was released just a year earlier. You read that right. Within the span of a single year, from the publication of Arena: Roma II to the publication of It Happens, Stefan Feld had published seven different games.

Here’s another interesting fact: if you thought something along the lines of “This game’s title sounds awfully close…

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A couple years ago, a friend brought the game Crash Octopus (2021, Itten) to the table as a throw-away filler ending to the night. Although one of my groups does push party and dexterity games to the table from time to time, it’s relatively infrequent.

I was game, so we gave Crash Octopus a shot…and I really liked the table presence while flicking toys around the table to both solve my personal win goals and to disrupt the plans of others. I enjoyed myself but didn’t consider adding it to my collection.

However, Crash Octopus remained on the brain for a while.

I had the chance to stroll the aisles of the French game convention Festival International des Jeux earlier this year, and during that stroll I stumbled upon a booth selling a French-language copy of Crash Octopus for about 15 euros. I remembered my earlier play and I had some space in my carry-on, so I plunked down the cash and printed out a copy of the English rules when I got back to the US.

After a few recent plays of Crash Octopus with my family, I have to say—I was wrong to wait on this one. It is perfect for game days with my kids and still appeals to adult gamers looking for a 20-minute…

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The triquetra is a triangular figure composed of three interlaced arcs. It’s a symbol that’s been used for thousands of years primarily as a decorative element, but sometimes in a more symbolic fashion, its triple knots infused with some sort of meaning or purpose. Its origins are unknown, but its usage began to become popular around the 4th century B.C.*

In the game of Triqueta, players will be competing against their opponents to create, and draft, rows of differently illustrated animal tokens in an effort to end the game with no more than exactly three of each. As the prefix tri- in the title implies, in the game of Triqueta, three is the magic number. If you end the game with fewer than three of a specific type of animal token, you’ll earn a few points, but not as many as you’d earn if you had three. And, going over three results in a penalty. At the end of the fourth round, the player who has earned the most points wins.

Of course, this is an oversimplification. If you’d like to learn a bit more about the specifics of the gameplay, read on. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section.

* The rule book acknowledges that the terms triqueta and triquetra are interchangeable.

Of Towers,…

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