When I picked up a pile of the new “Tiny Box” game series from Allplay at Gen Con 2024, I just assumed that at least one of these games would be weak. Underdeveloped, maybe. Not much meat on the bone. Certainly not replayable.

But with my plays of Panda Panda, I’m three for three on games that are at least decent, and in the case of both Rainbow and Panda Panda, games that not only landed with players in my groups, but were also enjoyed by my family, meaning they will reside in the game closet for at least a little while.

That’s because Panda Panda has just enough depth to make it worth the ten minutes it takes to teach, then play with a group of up to four players. Using a small deck of just 32 cards, players aim to make a winning set of cards by mixing their starting hand with cards drawn from the top of the deck as well as the discard piles of each opponent. But here’s the rub: unlike a game such as Gin, where a player has to end play with a hand of 10 cards that all fits into sets or runs, Panda Panda asks players to declare victory with a wide range of winning hand combinations, meaning…

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Sometimes, you need to table a game that is good, dumb fun. (And look—I might sound like a guy who has the mental capacity to play heavy pieces of chicken like Speakeasy, Nucleum and Railways of the Lost Atlas, but the reality is that this works only because I balance it with games like UNO.)

Any time a new Ravensburger game arrives at the house, my kids want to give it a spin. That’s because Ravensburger has generally been good to us—Villainous, Horrified, Piñata Blast, The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game, Dungeons, Dice & Danger, etc.—and the games are always easy to get to the table. So when I whipped out Oh My Pigeons! after dinner the other night, something magical happened:

The kids wanted to play it again as soon as the game was over.

Now, some of that is because Oh My Pigeons! is SO short. The first game was won in less than five minutes. But subsequent games didn’t take much longer, with our longest game taking about 12 minutes. That’s because Oh My Pigeons! is so easy to teach you can knock that part out in less than 60 seconds.

Each player has a…

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During my first play of The Gang (2024, KOSMOS) at Gen Con 2024, I had the chance to learn the game from the publisher. I was intrigued by the whole production: The Gang is a poker game, played cooperatively, where players use poker chips to hint at the quality of their hand. Using a theme so loose I laughed out loud when it was explained to me—fellow thieves are working together to rob a bank, and to succeed, they have to play poker cooperatively!!—The Gang gets a ton of mileage out of the Texas Hold ‘Em format of poker, a game that I didn’t think fit into a co-op format.

But I was wrong. Worse, I was wrong to assume that the people who published other great card games such as The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine suddenly didn’t know card games. That’s because The Crew is the single-most played card game that has hit my table over the last five years by a sizable margin. (And, I’m told the sequel is even better than the base game.)

All this means that even if you don’t play poker, you need to try The Gang. Its initial conceit makes for a fun time at the table, then it includes three additional modes of play to keep things…

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Do you like sci-fi themes in your tabletop experiences? If so, I think 2024 has been an exceptional year. Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon might end the year as the best Euro-style strategy game I got to the table. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was great as well, especially at lower player counts. Maybe you’ve heard of a little-known game called Arcs? Heck, as good as Arcs was, it didn’t excite me the way Andromeda’s Edge did.

In other years, any one of those games might end up being the year’s best game. I’m already stressed out as I think about which of the above-mentioned games is my favorite of the bunch.

You’ve probably heard the expression “it’s all about timing” and in the case of the new sci-fi themed strategy game From the Moon (2024, La Boite de Jeu), the timing for my plays could not have been much worse.

That’s not because From the Moon is bad. In fact, across my two review plays (I tried From the Moon with four players and once solo before realizing I didn’t need a third play to know where I landed), I knew just a few turns in that the game was a by-the-numbers worker placement game that had shades of area majority scoring…

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I have the great fortune of serving as a member of the tabletop media. As a result, about 95% of the games I cover are review copies forwarded by publishers. That helps keep personal spend at a minimum, which is vital for a person who reviews about 125 games a year.

However, I occasionally break my own rules when a game tickles my fancy. Llama Dice, the design duo composed of Israel Cendrero and Sheila Santos, is the main reason for me to break some of my own rules because they are the duo that gave us The Red Cathedral and The White Castle, two of my favorite games of the last five years.

When I learned that Llama Dice had a game hitting at SPIEL this year, I happily stood in line to pay 25 euros to grab a copy. That game is Flatiron (2024, Ludonova), a 1-2 player city-building game based on the duo’s personal travel to New York City touring some of the great architectural wonders there. The duo’s appreciation for these trips is detailed in the acknowledgements of Flatiron’s rulebook.

Soon after I returned to the US, I got Flatiron to the table for three plays: two solo, and one with my wife. Flatiron is far from the duo’s best work, but…

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Brotherwise Games provided a review copy of their new Super Mario Kart-style racing game, Dungeon Kart, so I was fired up to get this to the table. That’s because my eight-year-old son is a Super Mario Kart video game junkie. Dungeon Kart, set in the Boss Monster world of quick-playing card games from Brotherwise, looked like a perfect fit for him.

After completing a two-player set up for a father-son game night, we started and my son immediately showed concerns about the gameplay. He wanted to drive his kart as fast as possible, but the game only allows players to slowly ramp up their speed to keep drivers in check. In a two-player game, there were fewer chances to “bump” an opponent out of the way and—ideally—into a hazard or a wall to mess with their plans. (My son was really hoping to mess with my plans.)

By the time our first game wrapped up, he crossed the finish line first and won the game. Despite an obvious opportunity to share his potential love of the game—because, as we all know, winner’s bias is real—I could tell he was not interested in a second play.

“What did you think, buddy?” I offered, as he began to bolt upstairs to play with his army toys.

“It was OK. It’s…

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“Daddy? Is this a math game?”

My son recently helped me rip open a box of new games from our partners at Blue Orange, including the new game Scatter Brain. The package was interesting—a pink snow globe-style head on a small tin can that looked like it held a small treasure trove of cards. My son then read the side of the container:

“Scatter Brain–The Quick-Thinking Match & Grab Counting Game.”

Yep, sounds like a math game to me!

Scatter Brain attempts to carry on the great tradition of other real-time snatch/slap/grab games at our house such as Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, Gimme That!, Galaxy Trucker, and to a certain degree, co-op games like Quicksand. Somebody scatters 10 cards on the table, featuring numbers that range from 3-18. Then someone rolls the four pink dice before people scramble to grab any cards that match either a single die face or a total based on any number of rolled dice.

For example, let’s say there’s an 11 on the table. If three of the rolled dice showed a six, four, and one, that equals the card’s total, so it’s a legal grab. Any cards grabbed illegally cause the person who touched those cards to miss…

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“So…what did you think?”

Along with three members of my review crew, we had just wrapped up our first four-player game of Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity (2024, published by PYTHAGORAS and distributed in the US by Mayfair Games). There was a very long pause before anyone answered my question. I always ask other players for their opinion first before launching into my thoughts.

The opinions ranged wildly. One player loved it, another was still processing the rules load even at the end of our game, for reasons that we’ll come to during a discussion about the game’s scoring elements. The guy who won this first play was most conflicted of all. Winner’s bias is real, we all agreed, so he was in the best position to say whether he loved it or not.

“I really like this one,” he started. “There’s a lot to process with the rules, but ultimately I focused on the area control elements, and that worked out. I just don’t know how often I could see myself getting this to the table.”

This review of Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity has proven to be the toughest review I have written this year, in terms of determining a final score. For almost every element of the game that I liked, there are…

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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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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 loved last year’s car combat dice-chucking game, Thunder Road: Vendetta, published by Restoration Games. I loved it so much that it ended up being my #4 game of last year.

I backed the “Maximum Chrome” edition of Thunder Road: Vendetta because when you only back one, maybe two games a year, you want to make it something really special. As a result, I dropped a lot of cash to make my dreams come true. I wanted all the fixins, in part because I wanted the extra vehicles that spice up gameplay—I’m a Mad Max movie junkie and I needed to own The Big Rig and the Final Five expansion. Who wouldn’t want to play with a vehicle that looks suspiciously like the truck from The Road Warrior?

I’ve played with all the extras in Maximum Chrome (save for German Engineering, which “Eurofies” the dice-driven action into a more predictable, less chaotic form that screams “not for me”), and I never felt that the base game had any holes. If anything, I want a way to shorten the playtime with a higher player count, as this was the base game’s only weakness.

Tabletop game expansions are a way of life, right? When I learned that Thunder Road: Vendetta–Carnival of Chaos (the fifth expansion to the base game)…

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Flip 7 - Andy Matthews

I love it when a game "hides" the premise in plain sight, like Flip 7 from The Op. It's a lightweight (and I do mean light) press your luck game that has you flipping over cards from a shared deck and deciding "do I stay or do I go?". Number cards earn you points, action cards do special things, and if you ever "Flip 7" cards you earn a sweet 15 point bonus and end the round. But if you flip over a number card that you already have in front of you, then it's a bust for you.

You'll earn points based on the numbers on the cards; their values ranging from 0-15. With the exception of the 0, each card is worth its face value and there are that many cards in the deck: three 3 cards, ten 10 cards, etc. But there's also a handful of action cards which can be both angel and demon (depending on who's receiving them). The Second Chance card lets you skip a "bust", the "Freeze" card helps you stop a runaway leader, and the "Flip Three" card forces a player to flip over three cards even if they might bust!

I played with 3 players and it hummed along…

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“...and the playtime clocks in at about three, maybe four hours.”

I snapped out of my dream-like state as I listened to the overview of Guilty: Houston 2015 (2024, IELLO) while standing with other media members at the IELLO presentation at SPIEL 2023. One look at the box and the format—a one-shot, cooperative card-driven murder mystery game which can be fully reset and aligns with many of the games I have reviewed over the last four years—and I was pre-sold on IELLO’s approach.

But, “three, maybe four hours?”

That timing felt too long. Most of the game series I have covered for Meeple Mountain that fit the one-shot/escape room/mystery games, such as Suspects, Cold Case, Unsolved Case Files, Alibi: 3 Intricate Mysteries, echoes, and so many other properties, play in anywhere from an hour to maybe two hours in duration. Guilty: Houston 2015 was threatening to double that.

I immediately thought about how to sell this to my fellow lead investigator at home—my wife—given that the game would definitely be a Friday night date activity that we couldn’t start until 9 PM, after the kids go to bed.

Ultimately, she stepped up to the plate because she knows that you, dear reader, need to know if Guilty: Houston 2015 is a trip worth…

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