→ August 24, 2026
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Enchanted Ivy.

Packing a series of puzzles into its small box, Enchanted Ivy is easily one of the best pure solo games I’ve ever played. Coming from first-time designer Sarah Joshua, the game presents you with a seemingly simple challenge – build your tableau of ivy cards while placing guests on half of them in a way to maximize your scoring – that becomes increasingly difficult because of how well-designed those guests’ scoring methods are.

The gist of Enchanted Ivy is simple. Each ‘chapter’ presents you with a pattern of cards and a set of guests you’ll use in that game. On every turn, you’ll draw two cards, playing one with its door side and one with its ivy side (they’re called balconies and walls, but I don’t think those names are that intuitive), and will place one of the two guests in your hand on the door you just played. You’ll then draw a new guest from the bag and begin the next turn. You also begin the game with one bonus door that you can place on an ivy card at any point for 3 extra points, although it may end up costing you points on a nearby guest card. At game end, you must have played your cards in the pattern shown, and then you will score every guest according to their wishes.

That’s the whole game, although there are additional doors you can earn as you move through the campaign to get some extra powers. (I have only obtained the first one so far, and it’s quite useful). You can learn this game inside of five minutes, but playing it well enough to reach either the minimum victory score or the higher score for mastering the level is quite difficult, as the guests nearly all work against each other, and they tend not to appear from the bag when you need them, but whenever they feel like it. Jerks.

Each chapter also offers two additional bonus conditions that make winning it more difficult, but allow you to place stickers on a cardstock page of shelves; when you complete a shelf, which requires at least three stickers, you gain the associated bonus door. You don’t have to do those, but I wouldn’t want to pass up the additional abilities you get from those, and those stretch goals – see what I did there? – give chapters more replay value.

Enchanted Ivy’s design is extremely tight, in the best possible way. You have only a few options on each turn: which card to play ivy-side up, which of the two guests in your hand to use, and where to place the two cards within the pattern that chapter dictates. Once a card is placed, it’s there for the game, so you may get locked into a decision early in the game that costs you points – maybe a lot of points – later in the game. Some chapters have more ornate patterns, such as including gaps between cards, which make some guests happier and others quite irked. (Many of the guests are Garbo-esque, as they want to be let alone.) The first two chapters include scarecrows, inert guests who can help others score but are worth zero points on their own.

Because there’s so much randomness involved in the card and guest draws, you can play a chapter multiple times, to boost your score or just see how it goes with different sequences. The base game comes with eleven chapters, including the teaching game in the prologue, while there’s an expansion (which I haven’t played) already with three more chapters and some new guests. It’s going to take me plenty of plays to exhaust what’s here in the base game. My only quibble is that it’s a bit of a table hog for a solo game, at least if you want to have the guests’ scoring cards – which are beautifully rendered, but large – out on display while you build your tableau. Among purely solitaire games I’ve tried, Enchanted Ivy has only one rival for the top spot, Coffee Roaster, which has a better theme for me, while Enchanted Ivy is a more elegant design. So where’s the Wrigley Field tie-in? Enchanted Ivy is an A- game, and I’m not really sure if I could ever actually give a solitaire game a pure A anyway.

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→ August 20, 2026
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Crashed Out.

Crashed Out is a new $10 card-shedding game with a memory component as well as some hidden cards, playing very quickly and allowing for a little strategy because many of the cards in the deck either have immediate effects when discarded or allow you to ignore them if you collect enough. It’s a little similar to Cabo and the Silver series, but plays faster, and sits more on the bridge between a card game and a party game than those titles do.

The goal in Crashed Out is to have the lowest total value of your cards when the game ends, so most of the time you’ll be trying to replace high-valued cards or cards of unknown value with low-valued cards. The game ends when one player decides they’re good with their cards and says “Crash Out!” or when any player discards the single value-20 card in the deck.

You begin the game with six cards face-down in front of you in two rows of three. You can look at the first row before you, but just once. On each turn, you draw a card from the deck, and choose to discard it or to keep it and discard any other card from your tableau, in which case you reveal the discarded card. If the card you discard is a 6, 7, 8, or 9, you must take the action shown on the card: 6 lets you draw a card and put it face-down in front of an opponent, 7 and 8 allow you to peek at any card in front of any player (including you), and 9 lets you swap one of your cards with an opponent’s.

If you discard a card and you have one or more matching cards in your tableau, you can discard those as well – and so can other players, even though it’s not their turn. If, however, you discard a card that doesn’t match, you take it back and draw another card, without looking at it, as a penalty.

The deck has cards valued from 0 through 12, 15, and the lone value-20 card. Cards 0 through 9 always count towards your total points at game-end. The cards valued 10 through 12 also count for their face values unless you have a set or three or more, in which case they all cancel each other out.

If a player is satisfied with their cards, they can call “Crash Out!” to end the game, after which each other player will get one more turn. The player who called the end takes the Shield card, so other players can’t give them new cards or swap cards out on those final turns. However, if someone discards the 20 card, whether or not they did so deliberately, the game ends immediately.

The result is a game that’s very fast-moving, offers a little bit of strategy, and gives you the social aspects of surprise moves, take-that tactics, and the occasional mistake. I’m not a party-game person in general because most party games are kind of dumb, especially ones that try to make you cringe, or that rely on inane questions. Crashed Out is a party-adjacent game that makes you think, as if someone took Scout or the aforementioned Cabo and reimagined them as highly social instead. It’s a grade B+ game for me, which is about as high as I’ll go on anything that bills itself as a party game.

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→ August 11, 2026
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Mythologies.

Mythologies is an upcoming game where players draft cards from four different domains to build out their tableaux, with a loose civ-building theme that ultimately comes down to its novel card-drafting mechanic. It’s a quick-playing game with some simultaneous actions, where players will only draft eight cards over the game’s four rounds, with a lot of the action happening on your 3×3 tableau, which can allow you to add, stack, or discard cards for points or currency. It’s a lot of game for its size, although in the end I found the point-salad aspects a little overwhelming.

Mythologies comes from two new designers, one of whom has a credit for a deckbuilding game I don’t know and the other has no other credits on BGG, and does do something I haven’t seen before in the card-drafting mechanism. Each player gets three tokens, two Yes and one No, to use during each round. There are four areas on the common board from which you can draft, and you’ll be randomly assigned one of those for this turn – you can only take a card from that area this time, cycling through all four during a single round. You secretly choose one token for this turn, and then everyone reveals whether they wish to take a card from their area or pass. You can only take two cards total per round, so you’ll have to pass twice no matter what.

At the end of the round, you take the two card you drafted and place them wherever you wish on your 3×3 board, taking the reward(s) shown on the left side of the card based on the rows in which you placed them. You can also gain rewards from finishing a row or a column, and then you can use any power written in the text on the bottom of the card, which often involves a secondary condition such as whether there are cards above or below it in the tableau or whether it’s stacked on other cards. These powers may call on you to even discard a card, or move cards around, or “crush” cards on your tableau by piling cards on top of it to gain points or gems.

Cards may have immediate one-time powers, ongoing powers, or end-game scoring effects. Some cards also require you to pay a cost first, usually in gem tokens; you can acquire gems by completing rows on your board, or through card effects (like crushing), and at game end your remaining gems are worth 1 point per 3 gems remaining. Starting in the second round, players may also draft Deity cards, which cost 4 gems and provide end-game scoring benefits. Rounds 3 and 4 also bring Trials, where you can gain victory points by meeting certain conditions on your tableau.

The game comes with eight decks of god cards, with four reversible board pieces, so you have many possible board setups, with some cards and decks easier to learn and use than others. Those card decks and the trial conditions change in each game because the board itself is modular, so the sentences that make up the trial conditions vary based on how you assemble it.

Mythologies is a perfectly solid game, a classic grade B under the old Paste system, a game that does what it intends and is internally consistent, with rules that work and a ton of replayability. I also wasn’t driven to get back to the game for more plays. Some games with combinations – where you play several things, whether cards or dice or something else, to make more powerful moves as you go along – make me want to play again and again, but this one didn’t have that. It may just be in the eye of the beholder.

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→ August 5, 2026
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Gen Con 2026 recap + Top 10 games.

This was my tenth Gen Con, and in some ways it was the best, although I think that’s more about the people at this point and a little less about the games I saw and played. That said, I did see a lot of great new games, and had a hard time paring my “top games of the con” list to ten, but almost everything that I even considered for the list was on the shorter side, with the exception of Railway Boom (the last cut). It was a little bittersweet, as it was also the first Gen Con where I wasn’t there representing Paste/AV Club, although I am very grateful that publishers continued to open their metaphorical doors to me even as a solo act.

Gen Con, for the uninitiated, is the largest board game convention in the Americas, attracting over 74,000 attendees to Indianapolis and over 800 vendors. It’s held over four days in late July or early August, with a very unfortunate habit of landing on or just before the trade deadline. It’s the main place and time for publishers in this market to release new games, with a lot of ancillary activities like author signings, artist booths, and even some celebrity sightings (apparently Felicia Day and Mychal Threets were there).

Some big picture thoughts first: here were three big themes I noticed at this year’s Gen Con:

  • Shorter is better. The vast majority of games I saw offered playing times of 45 minutes or less. Games are smaller, shorter, and many of them are $30 or less, some as little as $9-10 for a full game. I saw lighter or family-level versions of Wingspan, Distilled, and Azul. There were still a decent number of heavy games there for sale or previewed for an upcoming Kickstarter, as well as at least one (Ada’s Dream) that only had a deluxe Kickstarter version available for sale, but I am not bringing home anything with a playing time over 45 minutes, and that’s not by my design.

  • What’s old is new again. Bringing out-of-print games back, as is or in new skins, has been a trend for a few years, but it was as prominent as ever this year. Tigris & Euphrates, Schadenfreude, Scoville, Camp Grizzly, North American Railways, Las Vegas, and Hacienda are just some of the as-is reissues; Hanami (Samurai), Wild Magic (Vampire), Six Sojourns (Eight-Minute Empire), Gold Country (Spectaculum), and Skyward Republic (Skyward) are some of the old games made new again.

  • The forest is overpopulated with critters. We do not need any more games with adorable woodland creatures. Please. I’m begging you.

If you haven’t seen my Gen Con wrap-ups before, here’s how it all works. I use BoardGameGeek’s invaluable preview and create a list of games/publishers I want to see, and work my way through the exhibit hall each day, talking to publishers and demoing or playing everything I can. I take notes, which gets a comment maybe 30-40% of the time (usually good, people respect the pen and paper method), and then dump everything into this recap each year. I rank the ten best games I saw, and then I run through everything else, sorted by publishers, and those are listed alphabetically.

Here are my top ten new games of Gen Con 2026:

1. Drillers (Czech Games): I’m pretty sure this one sold out before Saturday, for good reason. Drillers is a midweight game where you send your mechs into an abandoned mine to collect ore and other valuables, opening up new levels by spending some of your resources, but avoiding going too far down to where you won’t have the fuel to get back up. You do all of this via hand management, building your deck to get additional powers so you can go deeper into the mine later in the game. I’ve read comparisons to CGE’s Lost Ruins of Arnak; there are some structural similarities, but Drillers is simpler mechanically and tighter thematically. (That’s not meant as a knock on Arnak, which I also enjoy.)

2. The Glasgow Train Robbery (Salt & Pepper): This is is a cooperative heist game for two players, with no talking allowed, as the players try to pull off a mission on The Great Train Robbery of 1963 (which had 15 participants, not 2). You each have different skills and must go through all of the steps from planning the heist to executing it, finishing all five plan cards before the train reaches its destination. The art is very stylish and the game play appears to be tight.

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→ June 26, 2026
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Ichor.

Ichor is the latest iteration of a Reiner Knizia game that dates back to 1993 and has been published under the names Tiku, when it was just an abstract game of moving pieces; and Battle for Olympus, which introduced some of the unique powers that you find in Ichor. This game, produced by Bitewing as part of their series of medium-box games that are heavier on the strategy, refines the powers from the preceding versions, while adding another board and several new characters you can use so that you can play the game differently every time. (You can buy Ichor at Amazon or Noble Knight.)

Ichor has two possible boards, a 6×6 board and a 7×7 one; the game is the same on either board, but the larger board gives each player another character and more stones. The goal of the game is to be the first player to place their last stone, or to put your opponent in a position where they lack any legal moves. You begin the game with your characters on the second row in from you – as in, the back row is empty – in random order.

On your turn, you take any of your characters and move it as far in any orthogonal direction as you wish, stopping if you run into any other character (yours or your opponent’s). You then place one of your stones on every place your character passed through, including the starting space. If any of those spaces contained an opponent’s token, they take it back and you replace it with one of your own.

Instead of taking a regular move, however, you may use any character’s one-time power. Those range from breaking the movement rules, like allowing diagonal movement or pushing another character or jumping, to more substantial changes that might end with one or more characters removed from the game. Thus the real strategic heart of Ichor is deciding when and how to use those powers to maximum advantage.

The base game comes with 8 characters for each side, one gods and one monsters, all drawn from Greek mythology. (I didn’t find the theme to be that connected to the game play or the specific powers of most of the characters, but it’s a Knizia game, so it’s not like I expected otherwise.) There’s an expansion that comes with some versions of the game – my review copy didn’t have it – that adds four characters for each side, along with Gates that you place on the board and that are activated when a character passes horizontally through it. Even with just 8 characters per side, you have 28 possible rosters for each player on the smaller board, and they can be in any order, so you can see how every single game will probably be unique.

Ichor is solid enough, but a bit fiddly with six (or seven) character powers to grapple with. It’s very chess-adjacent; chess pieces have their own powers as well, of course, but they’re permanent, and while they’re not exactly intuitive (stares in knight), they are mostly easy enough to remember, and have the benefit of hundreds of years of precedence. With Ichor, there will be a lot of looking at the reference card for your side to remember what’s at your disposal. I do love the idea of each character having that single use, so that activating it feels momentous, and you will often wonder if you should have waited for another opportunity.

I reviewed Iliad, a new two-player game from Knizia that was also published by Bitewing, in January for AV Club, and it’s the superior game across the board – pun intended. It’s tighter, mostly symmetrical, and evokes some of Knizia’s best, including Samurai, while Ichor seems more like a good idea at the core that has some bells and whistles added to make the game more interesting. I would play Ichor if you asked, but I’m asking you to play Iliad (Amazon, Noble Knight) over this one.

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→ June 19, 2026
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First Giants.

First Giants is a rethemed version of the 2015 game Elysium, which had a pretty good theme of its own but ultimately didn’t work because the game ended before you could get anything interesting going. (I reviewed it for Paste/AV Club.) This new game is a streamlined Elysium that focuses just on the set-collecting aspects, ditching the card-drafting mechanic of the original, so that the game is faster but a little more random.

In First Giants, you’re trying to collect sets of fossil cards in five colors, numbered 1 through 3, each of which has an immediate or an ongoing power on it. There are four ‘depots’ or dig sites from which you select cards, with two cards at each site; once you’ve gone to a particular dig site, you can’t go there again until you recall all of your markers (you have four, but can recall them at any time). When you take a card, you use its immediate power if it has one, then check the cards still in your active area to see if any of them have a power that applies to give you points, amber, or the ability to transfer a card.

When you recall your markers, you choose for each one whether to take one amber token or to pay the numerical value on a card to move it to your collections. Once it’s in a collection, its power goes away, but you don’t score any cards that aren’t in collections. You can create collections of 1-2-3 in any single color, or three cards of the same value in different colors. There are news tokens that you claim when you have the largest set of each type, and if you’re the first to get a set of three in any type, you get that bonus permanently, worth 3 or 5 points at game-end. (Board Game Arena’s implementation of the game has additional news tokens that give bonuses for transferring cards of specific colors all in the same turn, such as two oranges and a blue.)

The game ends once the last set bonus token is taken, which scales to the number of players, at which point you add up the points you earned during the game from card powers, the points from set tokens you obtained (2 points for 2 cards in a set, 3 if you got all 3), and points from your news tokens. This variable end condition means the game can drag on a bit if all players try to load up on points by not transferring cards to collections against the modest incentive to do so first for those news tokens.

Anyway, I never loved Elysium because it seemed like the game ended too quickly; you’d plan something, get it started, and then boom, the game was over. First Giants doesn’t have that problem at all; you can keep your cards active for long enough to get some benefit from them, and then shuffle them over to collections while replacing them with new cards that give you further benefits. It feels like you’ve always got something cooking. My issue with First Giants is that there’s nothing novel here: it is a workmanlike game, breaking no new ground, perfectly playable but not one I’m yearning to play again. I also still prefer the Elysium theme, as fossils/dinosaurs are kind of overdone. But I’m still going against the consensus here and saying First Giants is a slight improvement on the original, and definitely a more accessible game than Elysium is.

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→ June 5, 2026
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Waddle.

I did not know that a group of penguins is called a waddle until I encountered the small-box board game Waddle, published by Allplay, last year at Gen Con. It’s one of the best games Allplay has produced, playing 2 to 5 but best with at least 3, and is great value at $19. (It’s $24 on amazon for some reason, but $19 direct from Allplay, or $26 for the base game and the three-in-one expansions.)

In Waddle, you’ll place your penguins on the white ice hexes on the modular board adjacent to the blue water hexes, which form fishing ponds of varying sizes. You only score points in two ways in Waddle, which is something of a relief: you score for every waddle of penguins you create, and you score for having the most or sometimes second- or third-most penguins around a pond with at least one fish (scoring icon) on it. So there’s some pattern-building and some classic area control, with very quick turns.

On your turn you either can place one of your penguin tokens, most of which show one penguin but two of which show a pair of penguins, or ‘scout ahead,’ passing your turn to move up in the turn order for the next pond. Once you’ve build the modular board, you find the pond with the white number 1 on it, and players begin placing penguins on open white hexes around it, going in turn order. Play moves to the pond with next number once all hexes around the current one are filled with penguins.

If you would rather jump ahead in turn order for the next pond, you can scout ahead, taking your marble off the current turn order track and moving it to the next track, either at the bottom or behind any players who’ve already scouted ahead. If you are the last player with a marble on the current track, however, you must place penguins on all open white hexes around the current pond before play can continue. (Single penguin tokens are considered unlimited, so you can’t run out.)

There are twenty pond tiles with numbers on them, and play progresses through them in ascending order, although you may skip some because there are no open hexes adjacent to them by the time you get there. Once you’ve finished pond 20, all white spaces should have penguins on them, and you begin the scoring. Your waddle is worth anywhere from 1 point for a single penguin all by its lonesome to 36 points for a waddle of 8 or more penguins; there’s a table on each player aid card, but for the math-inclined among you, the number of points for a waddle of size N is the sum of all integers from 1 through N. Double penguin tokens count as 2 penguins for both scoring methods.

Then you check each pond with yellow points icons and look at all white hexes surrounding the entire pond. The player with the most penguins around it gets the number of points shown on the highest icon in the pond. If there are multiple fish/scoring icons, then the player with the second-most penguins gets the second-highest points total, and so on, until you’ve either scored all of the fish or each player has scored once. All ties are ‘friendly,’ so ties players get the full amount shown.

There are a couple of rules tweaks for playing with two players, but that player count kind of obviates the scout-ahead mechanic, and I don’t think Waddle is nearly as good without at least three. It sings at four or five, though, as there’s a ton of competition and you can often find a move that helps you and blocks someone else, and with turns this quick you can play with five and never get bored. Allplay promises a one-minute teach and that’s about right – I think I described every single rule in this review, and you don’t need all of those details to get started.

I’ve played nine of the games in Allplay’s Small Box Big Game series, with one more on my Shelf of Shame (9 Lives), and I’d put this near the top. It might be second, behind Sail; I think Sequoia is a real sleeper, but I’m one of its bigger fans, I think. I would even put Waddle over Mountain Goats, which is good but I think has a limited ceiling. It’s a keeper for me, and the best game Allplay put out in 2025.

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→ June 2, 2026
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Qomet.

Qomet is the latest game in Gigamic’s line of well-produced abstract strategy games that have made-up titles starting with Q, dating back to the 1991 game Quarto. Qomet’s all-wood components are indeed impressive, but the game itself is a little too light and doesn’t have enough room for any deep strategy, instead coming down to which player makes a mistake first.

In Qomet, each player is trying to create a square on the board with four of their seven stones. A square of any size counts as long as the paths between the corners are connected by the carved grooves on the board – you can make a square that is 45 degrees off from those grooves, but it won’t count. On your turn, you can place a stone on any open space on the board, or move one of your played stones one space along a groove. If there’s another stone in that direction and nothing beyond it, you can push that stone one space at the same time as you move your own. A second stone beyond that one would prevent you from moving in that direction at all. You may push a stone off the edge of the board as well, using any of the eight spaces around the perimeter, giving that stone back to its player to re-use on a later turn. Play continues until one player makes a square or one player has no legal moves.

The extent of the strategic elements in Qomet is trying to set up a situation where your opponent has to choose between two options, either of which works for you, so that no matter what they do, you can either get the square on your next turn or set up an inevitable win from there. It seems like control of the center is helpful, although the board’s concentric squares allow you to win without placing anything in the nine central spaces, assuming your opponent hasn’t won by filling those up. In my few plays, the plays after the first few felt very reactive, without enough pieces or options to build up towards something. It’s also easy to fail to see a square in progress, but that may decline with more plays as you get used to the board and the rules.

The components here are all wood and extremely high quality. That wooden board is surprisingly heavy and polished to the smoothness of plastic, and the game should be able to withstand years of play. I assume that’s why the game retails for $40, but for a game I didn’t love and that you could easily replicate at home with some coins and a print-and-play board, I couldn’t justify purchasing it at that price, even though I respect the decision to go for high-end components. Qawale is a better strategy game in the same line and comes in a mini version for $25 that’s more reasonable and also takes up less space on the shelf. I’d give Qomet a 5.5 on the old Paste grading scale, with some regrets given how much effort Gigamic put into its production.

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→ May 27, 2026
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Yokohama Duel.

Yokohama is a medium-heavy economic worker placement game that incorporates some engine-building, route-building, and set collection mechanics, along with a board that’s quite a table hog. It’s a great game, but it’s heavy enough that I don’t own it, not even the beautiful new edition brought out by Synapses Games in 2024. (I should note that it’s also the rare game set in Japan that is designed by someone from Japan, Hisashi Hayashi.)

Synapses followed this with a new edition of the two-player game Yokohama Duel, and while I’m in the minority on this, I prefer this two-player version. It strips down the game to the best parts, reducing the complexity, producing a game that plays reasonably quickly but still gives you most of the satisfaction of building something from the original game.

In Yokohama Duel, you’re both merchants in that Japanese city as the opening of the port has led to an economic boom. You’ll collect materials to fulfill orders for yen and trade goods and other rewards, and use the gains to upgrade your power (worker) cards, gain favor at the church, add technology cards, and finish off those trade goods for more points. The game lasts just four rounds, with sixteen total turns per player in the entire game.

Each player starts with the same four power cards, with powers 1 through 4, and will play them to any of the ten action spaces on the board, two of which (new orders and technology) are unlimited while the others are blocked once one worker card is on them. Four of those action spaces get you the game’s resources of silk, tea, fish, and copper. The bank gets you yen. The Chinatown card lets you trade goods for yen and sometimes yen for goods. Customs lets you take trade goods you’ve acquired and flip them over to their finished sides for more victory points at game-end (1 point per unflipped good, 4 per flipped). The church lets you take cards worth victory points and sometimes immediate rewards.

On your turn, you place the lowest-power card still in your hand on an available space and then take the associated action. What you get is a function of the total power of your worker, which is equal to the number on the card, plus any +1 or +2 power cards you play (you can play just one per worker), plus one more for a shop and one more for a trading post if you’ve built either on that site. You then check the little table and take the reward, which can be nothing if you don’t have enough power. You may then build a shop on that site for 1 yen and a trading house for 4-7 yen, as long as you don’t have one of that type already on the site.

You also have free actions available on every turn, which include fulfilling order cards in your hand by paying the resources shown and taking the reward; and collecting and using foreign agent cards. You get a foreign agent when you fulfill your third order card, buy your third tech card, get your second church card, or flip your second trade good. There are only seven foreign agent cards, however, there’s a competitive aspect here as someone will get four and the other three. Foreign agent cards have power 3 and can be played as a bonus worker, giving you a turn within a turn. They can even be modified by a +1 or +2 card, and they can visit a site that’s already occupied by a power card.

When you play with power 5 or more, you can claim a power bonus card, gaining up to three rewards if you play with a total power of 7. It doesn’t make your regular action stronger, but it’s usually worth aiming for once you have some shops out on the board.

Once each player has played all four of their power cards, the round ends. Refresh the technology cards, retrieve all of your workers, and then, if you wish, upgrade one of your four workers by paying the cost in yen. You flip that worker card to the other side, with 1 more power, for the remainder of the game.

After four rounds, with each player getting two rounds as the start player, the game ends and you add up your points. There are eleven ways to get points, including what you get for leftover yen and resources. You get the points from your order cards, church cards, any tech cards that give rewards, shops (1 point each), trading houses (5 points each), flipped goods, and unflipped goods. The player with the most completed orders gets 6 points. The player with the most total production on their tech cards gets 6 points. That’s it.

It’s not Yokohama, especially since it dispenses with that game’s mechanic of needing to trace a path for your workers through the city, which I respect but also found more frustrating than fun. Yet this two-player game keeps the spirit of the original, and has plenty of direct competition between the two players – the sites for power cards, the foreign agents, even the trading posts, which are limited to just one per card. You may not be constantly vying for the same things, but you will run into each other plenty. It’s just not that big of a city. This is also about half the cost of Yokohama and comes in a much smaller box. If, like me, your most common player count is 2, this is the better choice. I also love the new art, which is attractive and also very bright and easy to look at for the 30-40 minutes it’ll take to play a full game.

I’m a big fan – if I were still doing grades, as I did at Paste, this would have been an 8.5. You can get Yokohama Duel on Amazon but right now it’s about $10-12 cheaper on specialty sites, so probably still less even with shipping.

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→ May 18, 2026
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dnup.

dnup is – or will be shortly, as the game comes out in the U.S. on May 29th – the latest game from SCOUT designer Kei Kajino, and once again we have a card-shedding game of two-valued cards, which have a top and bottom value but can’t be flipped once they’re in your hand. It’s not quite as good a game as SCOUT, but it’s a more clever design, and I’ve found it quite addictive because of how much you thought each move requires.

In dnup, the deck has cards valued 1 through 10, with differing values top and bottom and no connection between them. That is, a 7 card could have any second value on the other side. Players will try to play sets of same-valued cards to the table, but must beat the value of any sets of the same size already in play. So if there is a set of 2 cards on the table on your turn, you can only play another set of 2 if the value is higher than that of the cards already out there. If your played set lasts all the way around the table until your turn comes up again, you get to discard it and play something else. If someone else beats your set, however, you must take those cards back into your hand and rotate them so their values flip.

On your turn, you can play any number of cards from your hand to form a set in front of you, as long as it’s a legal play by beating any set of the same quantity already on the table. You can also take a single card from your hand and add it to someone else’s set, as long as you aren’t creating an illegal set: If there’s a set three 7s and a set of two 4s, you can’t add a 4 to the latter because it would create a set of three 4s that doesn’t beat the set of 7s. If someone later beats that set, you don’t get your card back – the set’s ‘owner’ does. Or you can rotate your entire hand at once and play nothing.

This all means that you will often want to play cards to the table with the hope that someone will top them, returning them to your hand rotated so that you can end up with a more powerful set (or two, or three) to play on future turns. Every time you get to play, you have to consider whether you can play a set in the hopes of shedding those cards permanently, or should play something to top someone else (such as to prevent them from going out too soon), or should play cards to try to get them rotated.

The round ends when two players go out: The first player to do so gets two letters, and the second gets one. The game ends when any player has reached all four letters of “dnup,” regardless of how they got there. This means the number of rounds is limited by the player count – I believe a game can only last as many rounds as there are players.

That’s the real genius of this design: Your decision set is limited, but there are enough factors going into each decision that it feels very tense, and you also can only partly plan for each move because the previous player’s decision can change everything, including putting cards back in your hand you didn’t expect to have.

dnup says it plays 2 to 5, but it is clearly better with more; with three players, your odds of having another player beat your card/set are too low, and it reduces that essential conflict that makes this such a fun, clever game. There are rules for two players where each player plays to two ‘zones’, simulating a table of four players, but I haven’t tried it and the variant seems to take much of the fun out of the game. Some games are just meant for more players – SCOUT is one, dnup is another. I’m a huge fan of dnup, in case you couldn’t tell, even though it took me a lot of plays online to grasp some basic strategy and find that balance between shedding cards and setting up my hand.

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