Amazonia and Peaks
1 August 2025
New games have been flying at me fast this summer, I’ve played nine more new ones in just the last couple of weeks! This is very much a post saying that long complicated games are mostly great (Amazonia! Peaks!) and short silly filler games are not my thing (Hot Streak! Barbecubes!) which is not exactly a mind-blowing conclusion. The order of this list is roughly the play time of each game with the longer ones first, and that’s not far off the order I’d say I liked them in.
Life of the Amazonia
Oh my this was lovely! If you like Cascadia, a game where you make up a landscape of hex tiles and move animals in making patterns to score you points, and you also like heavier games then you’ll probably like Life of the Amazonia, a game where you make up a landscape of hex tiles and move animals in making patterns to score you points. The gameplay here is a lot more complicated than Cascadia and the game is a lot longer but it’s very much the same feel whilst also being different. You build up a bag of tokens that are basically four different currencies and each turn you draw five tokens which you can spend on actions like adding trees or animals to your landscape. It’s basically a deckbuilder with a bag instead of a deck and it works very nicely, though, as ever, an upgrade to the cardboard discs would help with mixing the tokens in the bag. The animals are nice wooden pieces and their abilities can change each game (which is also reminiscent of Cascadia) so I think there would be a lot of variety to the games. Your discard pile of tokens go into a cardboard boat which you then pour back into your bag which is one of those entirely unnecessary but very nice touches. Definitely a game I’d be happy to play over and over.
Peaks
A shiny new arrival that I backed on Kickstarter, and then apparently forgot to photograph whilst I was playing it. Oops. I went for the deluxe edition with wooden markers and don’t regret it. In my first play of it I stumbled over the rules a little and it ran on a little longer than I expected. I think it would speed up with familiarity though. The game involves climbing mountains around the world and trying to place the most flags down on the board. Each turn you choose to rest (mostly regaining energy), prepare (mostly gaining mountain cards for future climbs) or climb. Climbing is the heart of the game and the most complicated action.
When climbing you choose one of two sets of rewards offered by the mountain card and then assemble a party with enough experience, energy and equipment to successfully climb. Assembling a party involves choosing not only which of your available companion cards to use on the climb but also persuading your fellow players to accompany you. If they join your climb they will get the set of mountain rewards that you didn’t choose and also gain climbing experience, but they’ll use their energy up that they might have been saving for their own climbs as leader. This mechanism of needing to cooperate and having things to do on other people’s turns attracted me to the game (as well as the pretty mountain artwork) and I think it works pretty well. I was concerned that there would be a lot of negotiation to slow the game down and the procedure for committing to a climb seemed a bit unfocussed in the rulebook but it worked well enough. Most of the time people could quickly see that they didn’t have enough energy or equipment to join a climb and any negotiation was short. My other concern was that competitive players just wouldn’t tag along on other players climbs but that wasn’t a problem either.
Unfair
I expected this to be fun and it was. A game of playing cards in order to build a theme park. The name comes from the fact that the game is very big on being unfair to you, other players can screw you over and there are some general events like safety inspections that affect all players and get worse as the game goes on. Apparently they’ve made a “Funfair” version that takes all the nastiness out. I’ll stick with this one which was hilarious and silly. I got picked on because the other players thought I was doing well, and then I’d misread a card and my park went badly downhill in the last round so I was nowhere near winning in the end. I like this kind of card game and would happily play again. The game smushed together a deck of cards for each player to make a theme combo that would vary with each play. I think the decks we used were Dinosaurs, Ninjas, Oceans and B-Movies. I was particularly proud of my Dive-in Theatre where you were surrounded by Sea Lions.
The Fox Experiment
I really thought I’d like this game where you breed foxes into domesticity by rolling dice to determine the genetics of the baby foxes who then get shared around the table to become the next generation of parent foxes. Repeat for five or so rounds until you have created friendlier foxes. There’s wipe clean boards, a bit of not totally wonky science, a nice animal theme. But somehow it didn’t quite gel together for me. Perhaps it just needs another play to figure it out.
Panda Spin
Yet another trick taking game but they are making so many trick taking games lately that they are eventually lucking into some formats that I quite like. The mechanic in this one was that losing a trick let you turn your cards upside down which changed their values and made them mostly stronger. Didn’t hate it but would happily never play again all the same.
Fuse
A real time cooperative game of trying to roll dice to match the ones on your cards. There’s one die rolled per player each turn and each player needs to quickly choose one they need and if anyone can’t take a die and place it on one of their cards then there’s a chance that everyone has to remove a die from their cards. You’re trying to get through a certain number of cards in ten minutes and it’s manic with the rolling and choosing getting ever faster. We played three times in a row until we notched up a win against the standard difficulty of the game. Fun but again something I’m happy to have played and wouldn’t seek out to play again.
Wandering Towers
You have three meeples that you are trying to get to the black tower. On your turn you can either move a meeple or move a tower depending on what cards you have in hand. The thing is that when you move towers you can move one or several sections of a tower at a time and can end up covering up meeples and hiding them inside the towers. In fact there’s a mechanism to encourage you to hide other people’s meeples. But all you have to do really is keep track of your own three meeples. So that’s easy? Hmmm, I completely lost track obviously. It was a quick moving game and I enjoyed it despite my total lack of short term working memory! I think our game was improved by the game owner having acquired some 3D printed towers to replace the cardboard in the original game.
Hot Streak
There are four chunky plastic mascots in a race, each player bets on the outcome of the race. You have very minimal input into the outcome of the race. One of the other players commented that it felt like Colt Express but with even less control over the outcome. There’s really not much to it. A fun way to spend 15 minutes but I wouldn’t waste any more than that on it!
Barbecubes
I’m not a big fan of dexterity games as I’m even worse at them than memory games. This involves picking up tiny burgers and sausages with tiny tweezers and placing them on an ever more crowded barbecue grill. I got knocked out very early as the cards I was given insisted I place items with my non-dominant hand which I find just about impossible. I guess it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome as the grill is very small but really not the sort of thing that I enjoy.
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