→ September 2, 2026
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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
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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
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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
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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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