The fine people at Blue Orange Games have done the Bell family well.

Kingdomino Origins? Check. The Next Station games? Check (London), then check-check (Paris). Paco’s Party might be the best game I’ve played from Blue Orange, and it’s a game that my now-10-year-old child still likes to revisit from time to time because they keep crushing everyone else in the house.

Link City is one of Blue Orange’s newest creations, and while it’s no Paco’s Party, my eight-year-old son and I enjoyed it. After a few rounds with just the two of us, there are certain things we agree on: Link City is best at two players, as a mind meld game to ensure we are in lockstep with our weird tastes in building new cities, and Link City makes for a fun creation on our table when the game’s six rounds are over.

That’s because I can watch him build out his own version of Link City while I cook dinner, turning the game into a fun table toy.

Dig in the Pile

Link City is a tile-laying, cooperative party game for 2-6 players that takes about 20 minutes. Players work together to build a city out of very simple double-sided tiles that show…

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I am not really sure, most of the time, what it is that draws me in and makes me want to get and play a new game. Sure, in my youth, the idea of someone suggesting a game and introducing it to me certainly was a factor. But now that I am seeking out games (both board and role-playing), it is the oddest things that grab my attention. Back in 2022, I was immediately hooked on the game Hidden Leaders when I saw this image online:

[caption id="attachment_306969" align="aligncenter" width="450"] Be honest: what is not to love about this guy?[/caption]

I mean, look at this guy! He is a confident and self assured individual. There are a few meanings for the word ‘queer’ but none of the definitions that fall outside of ‘gay’ seem to apply. As an ally, and someone with many friends and family in the LGBTQIA+ community, this is the sort of character I can get behind! I got a copy for me, and one for one of my old Navy buddies (who happens to be gay). I have never regretted this purchase, because beyond the wonderful artistic style of the game comes great game play as well.

Overview

Hidden Leaders is a card-driven board game where two…

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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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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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There’s something about stacking games. You can’t ignore them. They command your attention. Try walking by Rhino Hero: Super Battle without stopping to investigate. It’s impossible. Game go up? Tell me more.

Nekojima, from designers David Carmona and Karen Nguyen, certainly goes up. Turn after turn, you add to the power infrastructure of this cat island, placing pairs of wooden dowels connected by brightly-colored bits of rope onto the small circular board. Those dowels stack up and up and up, scaling heights that frankly don’t seem possible.

I am, I’ll confide in you, enthralled by these components. The dowels are a wonder. They stack so much higher than feels reasonable, given their weight and their size. I was so taken by the thought that clearly went into them—light enough to stack without threatening to collapse while simultaneously heavy enough to be sturdy—that I emailed Unfriendly Games to learn more.

They’re made of beech. Honestly, I was disappointed to get so little information. I wanted to learn everything about the development process. Why were other woods rejected? How many woods did they try? Did they look at non-wood materials? Did they experiment with different ropes?

Reader, I would watch a documentary.

Game Go Up

A turn is simple. You roll…

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Concept is a game that seems simple enough. You draw a card. On this card are nine items to choose from. Select one, then start giving clues until someone figures out what you are describing. You and that person get one point. Next turn. Once you have had 12 turns with a successful guess, the game is over.

The problem enters into the equation when you realize that your clues are limited to the images on the main game board.

[caption id="attachment_301978" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The board has many ideas pictured. But this is what you are limited to.[/caption]

There are 118 images on the board. Each time you put a token on this board, you are telling the players a little bit about the thing you want them to guess. But these images have to do a lot of heavy lifting! The game suggests meanings for each of them, but if you are going to get someone to guess the right thing, both they and you need to expand your thoughts and allow these things to be more than the obvious.

Here is an example of three cards within the game:

[caption id="attachment_301979" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The top (blue) section is easy; the middle…

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[caption id="attachment_301989" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Box Cover[/caption]

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Emperor's New Clothes is an art project that claims to be a game. It is not a game, it is a collection of blank, stark-white game pieces that could be used to create a game, I suppose. But that is not really the point. The point is the joke.

If you do not get the joke, then I highly recommend…

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Sequels and reboots don't always pan out, but sometimes they are necessary to right the wrongs of the past and move forward in a positive way. The original Mysterium remains one of my top deduction games, but Mysterium Park has, by and large, replaced it thanks to simplified mechanics and a better ending. Let's check out my review.

Mysterium Park Overview

In Mysterium Park, players assume the roles of Psychics who are investigating the tragic disappearance of the former director of a mysterious funfair, while one player takes on the guise of the Ghost of the late director. Over the course of three rounds, the Ghost guides the Psychics to identify the innocent bystanders and potential scenes of the crime while whittling these down to determine the culprit. If the Psychics and Ghost are on the same page, the director will finally have peace.

It's no easy feat, however, as the Ghost can only communicate through the use of Vision cards. These cards are fanciful, filled with abstract imagery and compositions that are reminiscent of a fever dream. They are miraculously expected to give these cards to the Psychics to guide them towards specific cards in the tableau. And, somehow, it works!

This is a cooperative game in…

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I have a special place in my heart for the Unsolved Case Files series of one-shot, partially app-driven, crime-solving mystery productions distributed by Goliath Games. I’ve solved the murders of Jamie Banks and Harmony Ashcroft. Avery and Zoey Gardner needed my help, so I helped solve that crime, too. I took a detour to help resolve the mystery of a missing bunny rabbit at a local school in the case of Honey the Bunny.

My crime-fighting skills were needed once again by the fine people of a fictional location not far from a place you’ve probably heard of, so I tapped the shoulders of my wife and my 10-year-old to help solve the brutal murder of…Jane Doe. Yes—THAT Jane Doe. The one who doesn’t have a name. She had a bright future until it was all dashed away when she was burned to a crisp in an apparent murder/arson situation more than 20 years ago.

Unsolved Case Files: Jane Doe offers a twist to the normal series elements we’ve come across over the previous four games in the series. (UCF: Jane Doe was actually released in 2020, so while this is my fifth game, Jane Doe was released a bit earlier than some of the other ones I’ve covered.)

Yes, the local police force has…

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On my second play of the new party game Mind Map (2024, Funnyfox and Sorry We Are French), two of the three players sitting at the table voted to stop.

We had just finished the second round…of a 15-minute game.

One player at the table, a game designer with multiple published credits to his name, really struggled because he knows how challenging it is to even get a game to the market. “This one’s tough, because I don’t want to be negative…but this just isn’t any fun. We can finish it if you want, but there’s a lot of flaws here.”

If you can believe this, the first group I showed this too, my Monday night review crew, thought Mind Map was even worse.

Mind Map is a word association game for 4-7 individual players, which can scale up to 8-14 players if using the team variant. I don’t get 8+ gamers together more than a couple times a year, so I did two four-player games of Mind Map for this review. Even if I wanted to do more plays, I couldn’t, because the two groups that tried it won’t try it again.

The problems with Mind Map begin with the rulebook. Mind Map is a party…

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During a recent game night at my place, we played a lot of my old-time party favorites, such as UNO and Just One. But before we got too far down the road, I made sure to break out Wavelength (2019, CMYK), my favorite party game of all time.

Wavelength is the game in the wildly colorful box you might have seen at a friend’s house, your local Target, or maybe through the game’s app, which is a standalone product that can be found in the App Store or Google Play. First, two teams are split as evenly as possible. On a turn, one player from the active team is named the Psychic for that round and has to select a scale from a card in the draw deck. Scales could be spectrums as simple as Hot/Cold, or something more challenging, like Better as a Book/Better as a Movie. There are dozens of double-sided cards included in the box, each with two terms used to define a spectrum of ideas.

The Psychic’s job is to give their team a clue that aligns with a randomly-spun result on a wheel showing points. The Psychic spins the wheel, looks at the result, shuts a cover that hides the result, then comes up with a clue that will hopefully give…

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I can remember several days in my personal history with Apples to Apples, such as the first time I played it and discovered that party games do not have to feel devoid of intellectual stimulation; the first time someone had some serious unintended innuendo come about with a play of a card. There was the time one of my best friends made a ten minute argument as to why Michael Jackson was the trump card in this game (i.e., he fits any nearly any adjective that can be played, and he fits them better than just about any other card could). But the one that I remember most was the day Apples to Apples started to wane in my game group’s rotation. More on that last date later; for now, let’s talk about what makes Apples to Apples tick.

The Game

Apples to Apples is, quite honestly, as simple as a game can get.

Players are dealt seven ‘red’ apple cards which have nouns printed on them (i.e., a person, place, thing, or event).

[caption id="attachment_296781" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A noun is a person, place, or thing.[/caption]

Players rotate being the judge, who will draw one ‘green’ apple card which has an adjective printed on it (i.e., a characteristic of a person,…

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