October 5, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Forage.

Forage is a new roll-and-write from Flatout Games’ internal design crew, the same folks who brought you Verdant, Point Salad (and sequels), and TEN, where players fill out three types of cards by selecting from a huge set of dice rolled on each of the game’s thirteen turns. As in most good roll-and-writes, you’re trying to chain bonuses and get extra plays, which exist in Forage but aren’t that easy to come by.

In Forage, players try to gain victory points by completing goal cards, spending time to use journey cards, and from bonuses on the cards they’re filling out from the dice rolls. Players will fill out Pantry, Gift, and Exploration cards, gaining bonuses for finishing the cards, and in the case of Pantry and Exploration cards for finishing parts of the cards – sometimes giving a victory point or two. Players also gain and spend time, using it for extra dice actions, extra icons, or to invoke a journey tile that gives a bonus action and/or points.

Each round starts with the roll of eight dice, seven normal ones and one special one that is special because the wood is dark like chocolate, and chocolate is special, especially when it’s dark. Whoever rolls the dice separates them by the symbols showing; if there are any groups of dice with the same symbol, they go to the left of the central foraging basket card, while unique dice go on the right, and the special one goes on the basket card itself. This grouping matters tremendously in how you play the game.

Dice on the left, in groups, can be used for the Pantry cards, which show rows of jars of three different colors, which I believe is always 16 jars per card to complete. Dice on the right can be used as an entire group – including the special die – for the Exploration cards, which show paths between these symbols and bonuses between the paths that you get when you mark off all the surrounding symbols. For the Gift cards, you can use any one group on the left, or use all the dice on the right, again adding the special die if you wish.

Time is the main currency within Forage, and, as in life, there is never enough of it. You start with two time units on your dry-erase card, and you gain a time from completing any card. You can fritter and waste your time in many offhand ways, such as spending two to take an additional dice action as described above, or spending one to add any icon you wish to the dice you selected. The big use of time here is on those journey tiles, which mark the passage of time through the game – you start with three revealed, then reveal one per round. The first ten of those will allow any player to pay a fixed amount of time, three to nine units, for an immediate benefit that may include victory points (9 time yields 12 VP, which I think is the most) and/or the ability to mark off various things on your cards. The last three give you some kind of instant benefit instead as you approach end game. There are also knowledge and experience symbols on your scoring crd that score 1 point apiece, or 5 for each pair (one of each, that is).

If it sounds a little point salady … I think that’s fair, as even after a few plays I still had to put the knowledge/experience part out of my mind to focus just on the cards in front of me. I love the way the dice work, so that you aren’t facing three equivalent choices among the cards, a mechanic that spills over into extra dice actions as well. Completing these cards is pretty hard, though, and that’s where I struggle with Forage: It is not an inherently complicated game, and you will always have something you can do, but either I’m really bad at this or chaining bonuses is quite difficult here, so my plays have been equal parts fun and frustrating.

I do think Forage is a good game, and I would probably like it more if I kept playing it and learned some better strategies to use early in the game. Right now, I feel like I haven’t fully grasped how to play it well, which isn’t usually how roll-and-writes go for me, for whatever that’s worth. It’s a grade B for me, but I admit I could be too low because my brain refuses to cooperate when playing.

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September 30, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Kronologic Cuzco 1450.

Kronologic: Cuzco 1450 (buy from Amazon · Miniature Market) is the second game in the Kronologic series of competitive logic-puzzle games that started with 2024’s Kronologic: Paris 1920, which I liked quite a bit other than worrying that the puzzles might be too easy for older/more experienced players. This second game comes with a new theme and 15 new mysteries to solve, coming in three “scenarios”, with the first two fairly straightforward while the third is kind of bananas.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Kronologic series, each case revolves around six characters moving around a map of six locations across six time periods, and you have to figure out something specific, such as (in the first five cases here) what one location was visited by only two characters in total, and when those characters were there at the same time. On your turn, you get one clue of your choosing, which you get by combining a location and a character or a location and a time period. All information in the game takes the form of character-time period-location; you can combine either of the first two with a location to get the missing bit.

The location cards have grids of symbols on the back, which you’re not allowed to look at directly; instead, you take the character or time period overlay and place it over the location card to get two clues. One clue is public, a number that tells you how many characters in that location at that time, or how many times that character went to that location, that you must read out loud. The second clue is private, and will tell you one time period when the character was in that location, or one character who was in that location at that time period.

Each case starts out with a map showing you all characters’ locations in the first or sixth time period and some paths between locations that are blocked or are one-way. Characters can’t stay in the same location in consecutive time periods, so you know they must move and can try to deduce their locations in time periods before/after known locations. The goal is to get enough clues to deduce that case’s solution.

The first two scenarios here are familiar enough in format that anyone who’s done some logic puzzles should get the hang of the game fairly quickly. The third scenario is where it gets much harder: characters move in ‘dances,’ sequences of movements, and in the last few cases you don’t even know which character moves according to which dance. I mentioned my concern that the Paris box wasn’t hard enough. I do not have that concern with the Cuzco box. If the first ten cases aren’t hard enough, the last five really should fit the bill.

There is an expansion for the Paris game called Panic at the Opera & the Cursed Lovers, with 10 new cases, but I haven’t played it (it requires the original, which I no longer own) and it’s only available in a few places, like Noble Knight Games, while it’s out of stock at Miniature Market.

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September 24, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Canal Houses.

I’m a little bit of a sucker for games that have you building colorful houses. I don’t know why they speak to me so; they might just remind me of places I’ve traveled, including Italy and some places in the Caribbean. Walking in Burano is probably my favorite of these, and I just reviewed Tenby, which is a little more complex.

Canal Houses is the first English version of a Dutch game first published as Grachtenpand in 2024, asking players to build pastel-colored houses along a canal in Amsterdam. Houses all start with a shop on the ground floor, any number of window cards you’d like, and ideally a roof on top. You gain points from the shop and roof cards if their buildings meet the criteria shown on those cards, while the window cards have the four features – cards, birds, flags, and flowerpots – that appear in most of those criteria. The game ends when someone plays their fourth roof card, at which point you score all shops and roofs you fulfilled, take 1 point for every flowerpot, and then give 4 points to the player with the largest contiguous block of cards of the same color.

It’s also a card-drafting game, so you’ll start with a hand of three cards, drawing one from the deck of your choice, then playing any of the four cards you hold, after which you pass your entire hand to your left. You must build upward; each building must start with a shop, and then windows (you could build without one, but it would score nothing), and then the roof. Once you’ve placed a card, you can’t move it, and a building with a roof on it is permanently finished.

I don’t like the term ‘cozy’ in board games or mysteries, but if you know what that word means in this context, sure, Canal Houses has it. It’s light, very fast (you place cards simultaneously), and the only player interaction within the game is when you pass the cards. There’s a two-player variant that’s more directly competitive, skipping the card-drafting aspect, where you also can’t build a roof unless the building fulfills its requirements; I haven’t tried it, but I think I might prefer that with two players. (Mysteries can’t be “cozy.” Someone’s been murdered. Maybe multiple people. That’s not “cozy.” That’s just shit writing.)

I do think Canal Houses is a great family game – it’s very quick (15-20 minutes), and quick to learn or teach. It does have a ceiling, pun intended, because there are so few ways to score, and the window cards have plenty of those icons on them. It becomes just a medium challenge to fulfill your shop/roof criteria, unless someone is able to get their fourth roof down quickly to speed the end of the game. I love the packaging as well – it’s a small, narrow box that will barely take up any space on the shelves. It’s a solid grade B for me, a filler game I’ll gladly keep and throw in the bag on trips.

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September 2, 2026  ·  2 comments

Tenby.

Tenby is a seaside town in southwestern Wales, and is a popular destination for beachgoers and vacationers, with two beaches and a nearby island you can walk to at low tide. Known as Dinbych-y-pysgod (Small fort of the fish) in Welsh, it’s small – fewer than 5000 people live there – and extremely cute, with plenty of shops and restaurants to cater to the summer visitors. I went there with my wife and her cousins in 2022, walking along the beach and stopping by the Park Hotel (owned by some more of her cousins) for a drink.

Tenby is also a new board game, loosely set in the town in that it borrows some of the colors of the buildings along the Croft and the Norton, and has players creating streets that combine buildings with various seaside features and piers. It’s a delight to play, if a bit of a table hog and tricky to score, and even comes with its own soundtrack (also on Apple) made by the game’s designer and illustrator, Ben Talbott.

In Tenby, players draft cards to build out their streets, with each card carrying some kind of scoring condition based on cards adjacent to it, or within two cards, or in their entire street. The game lasts ten rounds, and in each round, the players place their tokens on numbered action cards, where a higher number gives more/better actions but drops you in turn order for the next round. Selected cards can go on an existing street at either end, or can form a new street. Some cards also have check marks indicating that they end the street on that side. After the tenth round, players score their private objective cards, with higher rewards for streets that are are ‘finished’ by end cards, and every card on every street. The highest score wins, as that’s usually how that works.

There are four main card types in Tenby, as well as life jacket tokens which you can spend for extra actions, and your ability to draft those cards from the market depends on the action(s) on the action card you choose in the Day phase. Buildings are the lowest-valued cards, scoring only for the cards immediately adjacent to them. Piers score for the cards within two in either direction. Landmarks – they may be called monuments, same thing – score for the entire street. If you select an action card that gives you a Pier action, you can take a Pier card or a Building card but not a Landmark card – you can go down in value, but never up. There are also Resident cards that provide secret objectives; you’ll start the game with one, choosing from two drawn from the deck, and can add more as the game goes on with a Resident action.

Some action cards award the player one or more life jacket tokens, which they can use at any time. Spending one token lets the player draw another card into the market in any one row. Spending two lets the player select a Building card, or move a card already in their tableau, including placing it in the middle of an existing street. Three tokens yield a Pier card, and four tokens get the player a Landmark or a Resident card. The tokens are worthless at the end of the game, so there’s really no reason to hold on to them, and that one-token action to add a card to the market row of your choice is extremely useful later in the game when you might be looking for something specific and/or you find a row depleted by other players before your turn.

Most of the scoring in Tenby revolves around features found on the various cards, such as shutters, flowerboxes, birds, post-boxes, streetlights, happy little clouds, and so on. Some of these are small, and can be a little hard to distinguish. I’ve also read comments online from color-blind players who struggled with the scoring cards that relate to building colors. Those design questions aside, the various scoring opportunities are plentiful, so you’re rarely going to look to the market and come up empty unless you’re the last player to select.

The copious scoring opportunities do make the end of the game somewhat tedious; you’ll probably be scoring two dozen or more cards after ten rounds, some of which require you to examine every single card on a street. Pen and paper or a scoring app would help, of course, and the game comes with neither. Tenby also requires a lot of space for each player; your streets can be ten-plus cards long, and you’ll probably have 3-4 streets by the end of the game. With four people playing at a reasonably-sized picnic table, we still started to run into each other.

Tenby comes in a smallish box and has very clever packaging within it – there are four tiny boxes within it that fig snugly into the inner frame, and three of those boxes have symbols on the side showing you which card decks they should hold for optimal storage. The fourth holds the life jackets and player tokens. The art is appealing and different from almost any other game I can think of; there’s a Walking in Burano vibe because of the setting and similarly-colored buildings, but the art styles are completely different. It’s also a quick teach; the one rule that other players have found tricky is that adjacent cards have to match along the edges, which is hard to explain without showing the cards but does restrict your options for legal plays.

I’m a big fan of Tenby even beyond the Welsh connection; it’s an A- for me, one of the best new games I’ve played in 2026 . It’s a great family game that uses some familiar mechanics of pattern-building and action-selection, and a four-player game will take about an hour, maybe less once everyone knows the game. You can buy it directly from Mighty Boards, at Miniature Market (currently out of stock), or at Amazon.

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August 31, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Mountain Goats.

Mountain Goats is a small-box game from Allplay that recently got two new editions – a tiny-box version for $9 called, appropriately enough, Tiny Mountain Goats, as well as an upcoming legacy game called Mountain Goats Legacy where you play a campaign but don’t destroy any components. I’ll get to that legacy game in a few weeks, but I’ve never actually reviewed the original game, which is one of Allplay’s best titles in that square-box line. (It’s also on Board Game Arena and Yucata last I checked.)

Mountain Goats is a simple game of dice-rolling that creates some strategy around the inherent randomness of the format. Players roll four dice and divide them into two sets however they wish, using the results to move their goats up six mountains numbered 5 through 10. If your roll contains two or more dice showing just one pip, you keep one of those and re-roll any others.

Once your goat reaches the top of any mountain (they vary a little in height), you take a point card from that pile matching the mountain’s value – so the top of the value-10 mountain is worth 10 points. If a player gets a card from all six mountains, they take a bonus card, starting at 15 points and declining from there. Play continues until all four bonus cards are claimed or three of the six mountains’ point cards are exhausted.

If your goat advances to the top of a mountain, and there’s already another player’s goat there, you knock it off, all the way to the bottom of that mountain’s column of cards. The 5 and 6 mountains’ columns are four cards high, the 7 and 8 are three cards, and the 9 and 10 are two cards. There are also more point cards for the lower-valued mountains. That setup produces some strategic considerations around how to split your dice and move your goats – you might choose a lower-point outcome to knock an opponent’s goat down a mountain, or try to target a specific mountain to get its last card or maybe get that sixth one for the bonus.

On most turns, you’re going to try to split your dice in a way that moves two goats one space each or one goat two spaces. However, as the game progresses, you might choose a split that only lets you move one goat one space, forfeiting the chance for a second move, because it does more damage to an opponent or because it gets you a card you need more.

Games move very quickly at any player count because turns are so fast – roll dice, split, move. You can’t plan in advance per se, but you’ll probably have some idea of what you’d like to do in certain scenarios, and which values you need for those bonus cards. And it’s easy for younger players to play along because the math is so simple; I think it’s a great game for working on basic math facts, at least for adding numbers up to 6.

For some reason, I didn’t own Mountain Goats in any form until Gen Con of this year, despite owning at least a half-dozen other Allplay square-box titles, including Sequoia (another dice-roller), Big Top, and Waddle. I got a review copy of Mountain Goats Legacy, while I picked up a copy of Tiny Mountain Goats, which is exactly the same game as the original but in their smallest format. It’s one of those games I’ll always throw in the bag when we’re traveling and might meet up with other families – I brought it on our recent beach trip and it was a hit with the other family’s kids. (Plus I could argue I was helping them retain their math skills on summer vacation.) It’s a solid grade B game for me, but also one I’ll recommend more than a lot of higher-ranked games because it is so accessible to even non-gamers.

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August 26, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Operation Barclay.

Operation Barclay the board game is indeed based on Operation Barclay the military con, where Allied forces concocted an elaborate deception to fool the Axis powers into thinking their attack on southern Europe would come through the Balkans, rather than through Sicily. (If you’ve heard of Operation Mincemeat, it was part of Operation Barclay.) This two-player asymmetrical game has the players playing as Allies and Axis – not Axis & Allies, that’s an entirely different game that takes about ten years to play – where the Axis (Abwehr) player has a limited number of rounds to guess where the Allied (LCS) player’s attack will be, as well as where their backup location is. (As I write this, the game is on sale for $10 at 25th Century, 75% off the regular price.)

Each of the five theaters on the map of Europe gets five face-down evidence tokens, placed by the Allied player, which come in red or green. The Allied player’s primary area for attack gets four green tokens and one red; their secondary area gets three green tokens and two red; the other three areas get two green tokens and three red apiece.

The game play in Operation Barclay revolves around a sort of modified poker; the players will draw up hands of five cards, playing three cards face up, then playing two face down, with a betting phase in between that allows you to bet that your opponent will have the better hand. At the end of each round, the players divide up the available evidence tokens for that round, based on who has the stronger hand, who has more symbols on their cards, and who bet correctly on which player would end up with the stronger hand.

The Axis player then gets to flip over as many tokens on the map as they have collected evidence tokens in that round. Once they’ve flipped enough tokens to identify the two areas where the Allied player has planned an attack, they win the game; if they fail to do so after six rounds (months), the Allied player wins the game.

Not to bury the lede too much, but I couldn’t get there with Operation Barclay. There are some good ideas in the game, especially the deduction part around the evidence tokens, but I don’t think the poker aspect works, especially since there’s going to be a huge luck component there, and I’m already kind of over poker as a game mechanic anyway. I also think the game is a little unbalanced towards the Allied player, but that could be just a matter of needing more plays.

The deck does have some features that make this more than a poker derivative. Many cards have special powers that might let you draw two cards and keep one, or shuffle the three cards on top of the discard pile called the double-cross deck; some of these cards have number values, while others don’t, meaning they can’t help you form a better poker hand. Some cards have multiple values on them, so you can decide which one to use when you reveal your entire hand. (This also makes it possible to get five of a kind.) There are suits matching the various theaters, so you can still get a straight flush, although the game doesn’t appear to count a flush as anything. And some cards can only be played in the first phase, when you play three cards face-down, while others can only be played in the second phase, when you play your last two cards face-up.

There’s a decent idea here in the logic-puzzle mechanic for the Axis player to figure out where the Allies will attack. I think in the end I wish designer Maurice Suckling, who is mostly known for wargames, had done something other than use this poker-adjacent mechanic to determine how the Axis player gets to reveal tokens, not just because it’s incongruous with the theme, but because it doesn’t make the game that fun to play. I love deduction in games, and I wish Operation Barclay had more of it and less Axis Hold ‘Em.

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August 24, 2026  ·  No comments yet

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  ·  No comments yet

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  ·  No comments yet

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  ·  3 comments

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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