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2025 in Board Games

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 11:00:00 GMT

I'd be very happy to keep going at this amount of time and plays.

And that came good for me. I am indeed happy. I played 267 games, slightly up from 254 last year, and 172 different games, also up from the 151 last year. All is well. There were less different players but I suspect that number is much affected by whether I record all the anonymous other players in mega games like 'Just 100' at Airecon where 100 people play a game intended for 6 (huge fun by the way!)

This is more or less a completely different list from last year. Harmonies and Kingdomino do feature at the bottom of both lists but one fell off the graphic for this year and the other fell off for last year.

I'm pleased with the fact that seven of the nine games pictured are ones that I own; last year it was four. I'm often shy of suggesting groups play my games so I think that's progress.

1. Galactic Cruise

I'm really pleased that the big game I backed on Kickstarter a couple of years back, and that arrived here in the spring has come in as the most played game of the year. It's an enormous box - I can just about carry it on my bike but not with any other games going along as well. It's a long heavy game, and I haven't tried to play it in an evening board game session yet reserving it for day long sessions when time is less of an issue.

I spent a long time thinking about how to teach it when it arrived - well, after I taught it badly the first time I played it - and that effort has definitely paid off. Most everyone I've played it with has seemed to enjoy it as well. I thought I had one player who hated it halfway through the game but it turned out he was just beating himself up for doing things suboptimally and he requested a second game at a later date so that was a relief.

=2. Ark Nova

This is a favourite of several players in my board game groups and as such it gets to the table often and I'm always happy to join in with it. If I didn't know so many people with copies of it already it's definitely one I'd buy for myself.

=2. Wyrmspan

I was given a copy of this for my birthday, at my request as I don't own any of the Wingspan games but always enjoy them. This is my favourite of them and one I'm always happy to play.

=2. Harmonies

This is a favourite filler game to start the afternoon with at one of my board game groups and the puzzle is fun enough that I don't turn down the chance to play it. I said in last year's roundup that it was likely to turn into an evergreen game, and that is definitely happening.

5. Calico

Another of my own games, picked up in August, I don't feel like I've played it that many times possibly because I've had more luck persuading family to play it than board gamers. I think it's a lovely puzzle. Another one where I had a player tell me they hated it whilst playing and I felt I was making people miserable but they went and bought their own copy after so I think I misinterpreted their "hate" and they just meant it was breaking their brain.

6. Dinner in Paris

Yet another game that I actually own, that's definitely the theme of this years top games! I should think about how to teach this one better, it's a pretty simple game but I seem to botch the explanation every time. The set up with a million little pieces is a bit of a pain and the game play is a bit random, but I like it for some mid-weight fun and other players have requested to play it again so that's good.

=7. Anno 1800

This is another game that I requested as a gift after playing someone else's copy, and another that I don't feel I've taught to other players particularly well. Definitely one I want to get to the table more this year as well.

=7. Flamecraft

Another gift, as requested. I've had a couple of five player games of this that have been a bit of a pain, it's definitely better at a lower player count with less down time and I've not been pushing it to the table too often as a result.

=7. Let's Go to Japan

Three of the four games I've played of this were two player games with the offspring. I'd like to play this more this year with more players but it's another I'm cautious about asking people to play. Some of that is that I don't like it when people don't enjoy what I bring. And that's silly since I don't mind at all when someone shares a game with me that I don't enjoy. But it's also nice to have a game that's good to pull out for just the two of us as well.

=7. Kingdomino

The only game that got missed off the graphic for space and alphabetical reasons was this which is definitely an evergreen filler game.

Looking Forward

Once again, I'd be very happy to do this amount of gaming this year! I'm really pleased with how many of my top played games are my own. I definitely don't want to buy a load of games this year but I will rotate a few out of my collection at the Airecon bring & buy sale in March and will inevitably acquire a few more!

My resolution for the year is probably to get better at teaching some of my own games, when I get it right it's great.

2025 in Books

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:00:00 GMT

This is a followup to last year's 2024 in Books post where I said

For 2025 I don't have any exciting goals, really I just want to keep reading at much the same pace, books are somehow much better when you get through them regularly. Reading something stretched over months is rarely a good experience.

That didn't really come to pass to be honest. Though the year started off much the same as the one before I had a huge reading slump in the summer and only slowly got back into books in the autumn. I got 33 books read in the end. I did give out plenty of five star ratings though; ten of them, which is the same 30% as last year so something was consistent at least!

The books I gave five stars to were

Ordinary Time by Cathy Rentzenbrink
The Home by Penelope Mortimer
Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
Notes on Surviving the Fire by Christine Murphy
Potholes and Pavements by Laura Laker
Air by John Boyne
The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
In This Sign by Joanne Greenberg
The Grand Scheme of Things by Warona Jay
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

It's always good to find great new-to-me authors so I'm happy that a full seven of those were authors I hadn't read before. Still only two non-fiction books getting five stars though, I think I'm probably stingier with the ratings for non-fiction than fiction, like I want the ratings to be more objective whereas I'm comfortable with my own subjective view of fiction.

Storygraph tells me that my most popular read of the year was The Fifth Season which makes sense considering it was a book I borrowed from the library and then found we already owned a copy of at home. The least popular was Knowing What We Know which is certainly more niche being a heavy bit of non-fiction but I'm pleased to have read it. Everything is Tuberculosis was the most highly rated of these books by other Storygraph users though so interesting non-fiction does get out of the niches sometimes.

For 2025 I, as ever, want to read consistently, and pick up more non-fiction but hopefully without picking up less fiction! I like and get a lot out of both of them. I've tried to get to the bottom of why I had such a slump in reading in the summer. There was a time consuming and unexpected work-related hurdle in the summer but I don't think that accounts for all of it. There's also the fact that I now have reading glasses (and less headaches) but they don't have sunlight reacting lenses like my everyday glasses do which stops me from reading outside as much which is something I enjoy. Perhaps I should get over my "how much?!" reaction to the price of glasses and get the ones that will actually make the rest of my life better!

Genre wise I don't think this shows any particularly significant changes from last year, just the ordering of the same categories going up and down a bit. Still not got science fiction back into the list though.

And this mostly shows off my summer reading slump but also that the year did get off to a good start and recovered a bit afterwards.

I'm not bothering with saving the mood map this year as I think I've decided it's not useful to me.

There are only three new books that I bought for myself in the list this year. I have a stack of book tokens and Waterstones' rewards to spend so that is likely to change! Though I do find I tend to put books on hold at the library these days where once I would have bought them. We aren't short on books on our shelves at home and getting rid of them to make space for more is always a bit traumatic. I think there are twenty-one library books there this year and only four ebooks. I've been attempting to get back into reading ebooks since it's nice to have something to read under the covers but I'm not really getting back to speed with them mostly because the BorrowBox app my local library irritates me in tens of small ways.

Coffeeneuring 2025

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 20:00:00 GMT

I enjoyed last year's Coffeeneuring challenge so I was definitely back in for the 2025 edition: Coffeeneuring Challenge 2025: You’re Only 15 Once – Chasing Mailboxes

The challenge is to ride your bike out for a coffee (other beverages are acceptable) seven times over a six week period in October and November, going to at least six different places and riding at least two miles round trip each time.

I got off to a slow start with first immovable (but nice!) commitments and then illness getting in the way of riding my bike. In the end it turned out that the first ride I took was the longest one though. I'd have liked to have managed more long rides but then I'd always like to have more time and good weather!

I sketched out a map of the first ride and then that turned into it's own whole thing. They were so much more fun to create than just sharing a route map. I enjoyed trying to find interesting stuff to put on the map. Hint: Ride 7 contains the best random fun thing I saw, though I think Ride 2 was the most interesting map.

Ride 1, 26th October

Elephant Neston | Coffee Shop, Bar and Pizza Place in Neston

🚲 43.91km

<details> <summary>original Mastodon post</summary> <blockquote class="mastodon-embed" data-embed-url="https://social.lol/@nocto/115441415820068972/embed" style="background: #FCF8FF; border-radius: 8px; border: 1px solid #C9C4DA; margin: 0; max-width: 540px; min-width: 270px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0;"> <a href="https://social.lol/@nocto/115441415820068972" target="_blank" style="align-items: center; color: #1C1A25; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; justify-content: center; letter-spacing: 0.25px; line-height: 20px; padding: 24px; text-decoration: none;"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 79 75"><path d="M63 45.3v-20c0-4.1-1-7.3-3.2-9.7-2.1-2.4-5-3.7-8.5-3.7-4.1 0-7.2 1.6-9.3 4.7l-2 3.3-2-3.3c-2-3.1-5.1-4.7-9.2-4.7-3.5 0-6.4 1.3-8.6 3.7-2.1 2.4-3.1 5.6-3.1 9.7v20h8V25.9c0-4.1 1.7-6.2 5.2-6.2 3.8 0 5.8 2.5 5.8 7.4V37.7H44V27.1c0-4.9 1.9-7.4 5.8-7.4 3.5 0 5.2 2.1 5.2 6.2V45.3h8ZM74.7 16.6c.6 6 .1 15.7.1 17.3 0 .5-.1 4.8-.1 5.3-.7 11.5-8 16-15.6 17.5-.1 0-.2 0-.3 0-4.9 1-10 1.2-14.9 1.4-1.2 0-2.4 0-3.6 0-4.8 0-9.7-.6-14.4-1.7-.1 0-.1 0-.1 0s-.1 0-.1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0c.1 1.6.4 3.1 1 4.5.6 1.7 2.9 5.7 11.4 5.7 5 0 9.9-.6 14.8-1.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1.1 0 .1 0 .1.1v5.6s0 .1-.1.1c0 0 0 0 0 .1-1.6 1.1-3.7 1.7-5.6 2.3-.8.3-1.6.5-2.4.7-7.5 1.7-15.4 1.3-22.7-1.2-6.8-2.4-13.8-8.2-15.5-15.2-.9-3.8-1.6-7.6-1.9-11.5-.6-5.8-.6-11.7-.8-17.5C3.9 24.5 4 20 4.9 16 6.7 7.9 14.1 2.2 22.3 1c1.4-.2 4.1-1 16.5-1h.1C51.4 0 56.7.8 58.1 1c8.4 1.2 15.5 7.5 16.6 15.6Z" fill="currentColor"/></svg> <div style="color: #787588; margin-top: 16px;">Post by @nocto@social.lol</div> <div style="font-weight: 500;">View on Mastodon</div> </a> </blockquote> </details>

Ride 2, 29th October

#mokichester | TikTok

🚲 12.81km total

<details> <summary>Original Mastodon post</summary> <blockquote class="mastodon-embed" data-embed-url="https://social.lol/@nocto/115457919916054169/embed" style="background: #FCF8FF; border-radius: 8px; border: 1px solid #C9C4DA; margin: 0; max-width: 540px; min-width: 270px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0;"> <a href="https://social.lol/@nocto/115457919916054169" target="_blank" style="align-items: center; color: #1C1A25; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; justify-content: center; letter-spacing: 0.25px; line-height: 20px; padding: 24px; text-decoration: none;"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 79 75"><path d="M63 45.3v-20c0-4.1-1-7.3-3.2-9.7-2.1-2.4-5-3.7-8.5-3.7-4.1 0-7.2 1.6-9.3 4.7l-2 3.3-2-3.3c-2-3.1-5.1-4.7-9.2-4.7-3.5 0-6.4 1.3-8.6 3.7-2.1 2.4-3.1 5.6-3.1 9.7v20h8V25.9c0-4.1 1.7-6.2 5.2-6.2 3.8 0 5.8 2.5 5.8 7.4V37.7H44V27.1c0-4.9 1.9-7.4 5.8-7.4 3.5 0 5.2 2.1 5.2 6.2V45.3h8ZM74.7 16.6c.6 6 .1 15.7.1 17.3 0 .5-.1 4.8-.1 5.3-.7 11.5-8 16-15.6 17.5-.1 0-.2 0-.3 0-4.9 1-10 1.2-14.9 1.4-1.2 0-2.4 0-3.6 0-4.8 0-9.7-.6-14.4-1.7-.1 0-.1 0-.1 0s-.1 0-.1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0c.1 1.6.4 3.1 1 4.5.6 1.7 2.9 5.7 11.4 5.7 5 0 9.9-.6 14.8-1.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1.1 0 .1 0 .1.1v5.6s0 .1-.1.1c0 0 0 0 0 .1-1.6 1.1-3.7 1.7-5.6 2.3-.8.3-1.6.5-2.4.7-7.5 1.7-15.4 1.3-22.7-1.2-6.8-2.4-13.8-8.2-15.5-15.2-.9-3.8-1.6-7.6-1.9-11.5-.6-5.8-.6-11.7-.8-17.5C3.9 24.5 4 20 4.9 16 6.7 7.9 14.1 2.2 22.3 1c1.4-.2 4.1-1 16.5-1h.1C51.4 0 56.7.8 58.1 1c8.4 1.2 15.5 7.5 16.6 15.6Z" fill="currentColor"/></svg> <div style="color: #787588; margin-top: 16px;">Post by @nocto@social.lol</div> <div style="font-weight: 500;">View on Mastodon</div> </a> </blockquote> </details>

Ride 3, 2nd November

Walter’s Coffee House – Higher Kinnerton

🚲 20.19km total

<details> <summary> Original Mastodon post</summary> <blockquote class="mastodon-embed" data-embed-url="https://social.lol/@nocto/115485980705291833/embed" style="background: #FCF8FF; border-radius: 8px; border: 1px solid #C9C4DA; margin: 0; max-width: 540px; min-width: 270px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0;"> <a href="https://social.lol/@nocto/115485980705291833" target="_blank" style="align-items: center; color: #1C1A25; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; justify-content: center; letter-spacing: 0.25px; line-height: 20px; padding: 24px; text-decoration: none;"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 79 75"><path d="M63 45.3v-20c0-4.1-1-7.3-3.2-9.7-2.1-2.4-5-3.7-8.5-3.7-4.1 0-7.2 1.6-9.3 4.7l-2 3.3-2-3.3c-2-3.1-5.1-4.7-9.2-4.7-3.5 0-6.4 1.3-8.6 3.7-2.1 2.4-3.1 5.6-3.1 9.7v20h8V25.9c0-4.1 1.7-6.2 5.2-6.2 3.8 0 5.8 2.5 5.8 7.4V37.7H44V27.1c0-4.9 1.9-7.4 5.8-7.4 3.5 0 5.2 2.1 5.2 6.2V45.3h8ZM74.7 16.6c.6 6 .1 15.7.1 17.3 0 .5-.1 4.8-.1 5.3-.7 11.5-8 16-15.6 17.5-.1 0-.2 0-.3 0-4.9 1-10 1.2-14.9 1.4-1.2 0-2.4 0-3.6 0-4.8 0-9.7-.6-14.4-1.7-.1 0-.1 0-.1 0s-.1 0-.1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0c.1 1.6.4 3.1 1 4.5.6 1.7 2.9 5.7 11.4 5.7 5 0 9.9-.6 14.8-1.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1.1 0 .1 0 .1.1v5.6s0 .1-.1.1c0 0 0 0 0 .1-1.6 1.1-3.7 1.7-5.6 2.3-.8.3-1.6.5-2.4.7-7.5 1.7-15.4 1.3-22.7-1.2-6.8-2.4-13.8-8.2-15.5-15.2-.9-3.8-1.6-7.6-1.9-11.5-.6-5.8-.6-11.7-.8-17.5C3.9 24.5 4 20 4.9 16 6.7 7.9 14.1 2.2 22.3 1c1.4-.2 4.1-1 16.5-1h.1C51.4 0 56.7.8 58.1 1c8.4 1.2 15.5 7.5 16.6 15.6Z" fill="currentColor"/></svg> <div style="color: #787588; margin-top: 16px;">Post by @nocto@social.lol</div> <div style="font-weight: 500;">View on Mastodon</div> </a> </blockquote> </details>

Ride 4, 6th November

high coffee bar | Chester, UK (@highcoffeebar) • Instagram photos and videos

🚲 11.58km total

<details> <summary>original Mastodon post</summary> <blockquote class="mastodon-embed" data-embed-url="https://social.lol/@nocto/115507388641534210/embed" style="background: #FCF8FF; border-radius: 8px; border: 1px solid #C9C4DA; margin: 0; max-width: 540px; min-width: 270px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0;"> <a href="https://social.lol/@nocto/115507388641534210" target="_blank" style="align-items: center; color: #1C1A25; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; justify-content: center; letter-spacing: 0.25px; line-height: 20px; padding: 24px; text-decoration: none;"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 79 75"><path d="M63 45.3v-20c0-4.1-1-7.3-3.2-9.7-2.1-2.4-5-3.7-8.5-3.7-4.1 0-7.2 1.6-9.3 4.7l-2 3.3-2-3.3c-2-3.1-5.1-4.7-9.2-4.7-3.5 0-6.4 1.3-8.6 3.7-2.1 2.4-3.1 5.6-3.1 9.7v20h8V25.9c0-4.1 1.7-6.2 5.2-6.2 3.8 0 5.8 2.5 5.8 7.4V37.7H44V27.1c0-4.9 1.9-7.4 5.8-7.4 3.5 0 5.2 2.1 5.2 6.2V45.3h8ZM74.7 16.6c.6 6 .1 15.7.1 17.3 0 .5-.1 4.8-.1 5.3-.7 11.5-8 16-15.6 17.5-.1 0-.2 0-.3 0-4.9 1-10 1.2-14.9 1.4-1.2 0-2.4 0-3.6 0-4.8 0-9.7-.6-14.4-1.7-.1 0-.1 0-.1 0s-.1 0-.1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0c.1 1.6.4 3.1 1 4.5.6 1.7 2.9 5.7 11.4 5.7 5 0 9.9-.6 14.8-1.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1.1 0 .1 0 .1.1v5.6s0 .1-.1.1c0 0 0 0 0 .1-1.6 1.1-3.7 1.7-5.6 2.3-.8.3-1.6.5-2.4.7-7.5 1.7-15.4 1.3-22.7-1.2-6.8-2.4-13.8-8.2-15.5-15.2-.9-3.8-1.6-7.6-1.9-11.5-.6-5.8-.6-11.7-.8-17.5C3.9 24.5 4 20 4.9 16 6.7 7.9 14.1 2.2 22.3 1c1.4-.2 4.1-1 16.5-1h.1C51.4 0 56.7.8 58.1 1c8.4 1.2 15.5 7.5 16.6 15.6Z" fill="currentColor"/></svg> <div style="color: #787588; margin-top: 16px;">Post by @nocto@social.lol</div> <div style="font-weight: 500;">View on Mastodon</div> </a> </blockquote> </details>

Ride 5, 13th November

<details><summary>original Mastodon post</summary> <blockquote class="mastodon-embed" data-embed-url="https://social.lol/@nocto/115548721091086546/embed" style="background: #FCF8FF; border-radius: 8px; border: 1px solid #C9C4DA; margin: 0; max-width: 540px; min-width: 270px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0;"> <a href="https://social.lol/@nocto/115548721091086546" target="_blank" style="align-items: center; color: #1C1A25; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; justify-content: center; letter-spacing: 0.25px; line-height: 20px; padding: 24px; text-decoration: none;"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 79 75"><path d="M63 45.3v-20c0-4.1-1-7.3-3.2-9.7-2.1-2.4-5-3.7-8.5-3.7-4.1 0-7.2 1.6-9.3 4.7l-2 3.3-2-3.3c-2-3.1-5.1-4.7-9.2-4.7-3.5 0-6.4 1.3-8.6 3.7-2.1 2.4-3.1 5.6-3.1 9.7v20h8V25.9c0-4.1 1.7-6.2 5.2-6.2 3.8 0 5.8 2.5 5.8 7.4V37.7H44V27.1c0-4.9 1.9-7.4 5.8-7.4 3.5 0 5.2 2.1 5.2 6.2V45.3h8ZM74.7 16.6c.6 6 .1 15.7.1 17.3 0 .5-.1 4.8-.1 5.3-.7 11.5-8 16-15.6 17.5-.1 0-.2 0-.3 0-4.9 1-10 1.2-14.9 1.4-1.2 0-2.4 0-3.6 0-4.8 0-9.7-.6-14.4-1.7-.1 0-.1 0-.1 0s-.1 0-.1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0c.1 1.6.4 3.1 1 4.5.6 1.7 2.9 5.7 11.4 5.7 5 0 9.9-.6 14.8-1.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1.1 0 .1 0 .1.1v5.6s0 .1-.1.1c0 0 0 0 0 .1-1.6 1.1-3.7 1.7-5.6 2.3-.8.3-1.6.5-2.4.7-7.5 1.7-15.4 1.3-22.7-1.2-6.8-2.4-13.8-8.2-15.5-15.2-.9-3.8-1.6-7.6-1.9-11.5-.6-5.8-.6-11.7-.8-17.5C3.9 24.5 4 20 4.9 16 6.7 7.9 14.1 2.2 22.3 1c1.4-.2 4.1-1 16.5-1h.1C51.4 0 56.7.8 58.1 1c8.4 1.2 15.5 7.5 16.6 15.6Z" fill="currentColor"/></svg> <div style="color: #787588; margin-top: 16px;">Post by @nocto@social.lol</div> <div style="font-weight: 500;">View on Mastodon</div> </a> </blockquote> </details>

Ride 6, 16th November

Meadow Lea Farm Coffee Shop | Mickle Trafford
🚲 23.40km

<details><summary>original Mastodon post</summary> <blockquote class="mastodon-embed" data-embed-url="https://social.lol/@nocto/115565736629767745/embed" style="background: #FCF8FF; border-radius: 8px; border: 1px solid #C9C4DA; margin: 0; max-width: 540px; min-width: 270px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0;"> <a href="https://social.lol/@nocto/115565736629767745" target="_blank" style="align-items: center; color: #1C1A25; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; justify-content: center; letter-spacing: 0.25px; line-height: 20px; padding: 24px; text-decoration: none;"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 79 75"><path d="M63 45.3v-20c0-4.1-1-7.3-3.2-9.7-2.1-2.4-5-3.7-8.5-3.7-4.1 0-7.2 1.6-9.3 4.7l-2 3.3-2-3.3c-2-3.1-5.1-4.7-9.2-4.7-3.5 0-6.4 1.3-8.6 3.7-2.1 2.4-3.1 5.6-3.1 9.7v20h8V25.9c0-4.1 1.7-6.2 5.2-6.2 3.8 0 5.8 2.5 5.8 7.4V37.7H44V27.1c0-4.9 1.9-7.4 5.8-7.4 3.5 0 5.2 2.1 5.2 6.2V45.3h8ZM74.7 16.6c.6 6 .1 15.7.1 17.3 0 .5-.1 4.8-.1 5.3-.7 11.5-8 16-15.6 17.5-.1 0-.2 0-.3 0-4.9 1-10 1.2-14.9 1.4-1.2 0-2.4 0-3.6 0-4.8 0-9.7-.6-14.4-1.7-.1 0-.1 0-.1 0s-.1 0-.1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0c.1 1.6.4 3.1 1 4.5.6 1.7 2.9 5.7 11.4 5.7 5 0 9.9-.6 14.8-1.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1.1 0 .1 0 .1.1v5.6s0 .1-.1.1c0 0 0 0 0 .1-1.6 1.1-3.7 1.7-5.6 2.3-.8.3-1.6.5-2.4.7-7.5 1.7-15.4 1.3-22.7-1.2-6.8-2.4-13.8-8.2-15.5-15.2-.9-3.8-1.6-7.6-1.9-11.5-.6-5.8-.6-11.7-.8-17.5C3.9 24.5 4 20 4.9 16 6.7 7.9 14.1 2.2 22.3 1c1.4-.2 4.1-1 16.5-1h.1C51.4 0 56.7.8 58.1 1c8.4 1.2 15.5 7.5 16.6 15.6Z" fill="currentColor"/></svg> <div style="color: #787588; margin-top: 16px;">Post by @nocto@social.lol</div> <div style="font-weight: 500;">View on Mastodon</div> </a> </blockquote> </details>

Ride 7, 23rd November

Black Sheep Coffee - Serving the Finest Specialty Grade Coffee
🚲 15.27km

<details><summary>original Mastodon post</summary> <blockquote class="mastodon-embed" data-embed-url="https://social.lol/@nocto/115594504787339589/embed" style="background: #FCF8FF; border-radius: 8px; border: 1px solid #C9C4DA; margin: 0; max-width: 540px; min-width: 270px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0;"> <a href="https://social.lol/@nocto/115594504787339589" target="_blank" style="align-items: center; color: #1C1A25; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; justify-content: center; letter-spacing: 0.25px; line-height: 20px; padding: 24px; text-decoration: none;"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 79 75"><path d="M63 45.3v-20c0-4.1-1-7.3-3.2-9.7-2.1-2.4-5-3.7-8.5-3.7-4.1 0-7.2 1.6-9.3 4.7l-2 3.3-2-3.3c-2-3.1-5.1-4.7-9.2-4.7-3.5 0-6.4 1.3-8.6 3.7-2.1 2.4-3.1 5.6-3.1 9.7v20h8V25.9c0-4.1 1.7-6.2 5.2-6.2 3.8 0 5.8 2.5 5.8 7.4V37.7H44V27.1c0-4.9 1.9-7.4 5.8-7.4 3.5 0 5.2 2.1 5.2 6.2V45.3h8ZM74.7 16.6c.6 6 .1 15.7.1 17.3 0 .5-.1 4.8-.1 5.3-.7 11.5-8 16-15.6 17.5-.1 0-.2 0-.3 0-4.9 1-10 1.2-14.9 1.4-1.2 0-2.4 0-3.6 0-4.8 0-9.7-.6-14.4-1.7-.1 0-.1 0-.1 0s-.1 0-.1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 0 0c.1 1.6.4 3.1 1 4.5.6 1.7 2.9 5.7 11.4 5.7 5 0 9.9-.6 14.8-1.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1 0 0 .1 0 .1 0 .1.1 0 .1 0 .1.1v5.6s0 .1-.1.1c0 0 0 0 0 .1-1.6 1.1-3.7 1.7-5.6 2.3-.8.3-1.6.5-2.4.7-7.5 1.7-15.4 1.3-22.7-1.2-6.8-2.4-13.8-8.2-15.5-15.2-.9-3.8-1.6-7.6-1.9-11.5-.6-5.8-.6-11.7-.8-17.5C3.9 24.5 4 20 4.9 16 6.7 7.9 14.1 2.2 22.3 1c1.4-.2 4.1-1 16.5-1h.1C51.4 0 56.7.8 58.1 1c8.4 1.2 15.5 7.5 16.6 15.6Z" fill="currentColor"/></svg> <div style="color: #787588; margin-top: 16px;">Post by @nocto@social.lol</div> <div style="font-weight: 500;">View on Mastodon</div> </a> </blockquote> </details>

Conclusion

Six lattes, and one ride that began with a home brewed cappuccino and took in a chai latte.
Seven different coffee shops, five of which I'd never visited before, and only one repeat stop from last year.
All "drink in" drinks. There were six ceramic cups and one glass. All washable! Actually add another washable cup for the one coffee I had a home.
More croissants than got illustrated, I can't quite remember the count (also not trying too hard to remember).
I managed to stay dry on all these rides (though very much not on others in the same time period). There's been no snow this year, I've just been dodging rain.
I have bought a new pair of thick winter gloves since last year, much warmer than the old ones. And I found my good summer gloves before one of these rides. Still haven't found the old summer gloves though.
141.3km of riding, up from 126.8km last year. I'm surprised by that, I thought I was missing out on long rides this year but last year I was ill in the middle of the coffeeneuring season (and this year the illness fell at the beginning).

Civolution & Sanctuary

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 09:00:00 GMT

Nine more new-to-me games that do a good job of spanning the massive space between sublime and ridiculous, plus a bonus small card game because I can't even find it in the BoardGameGeek directory of every board game ever. Sanctuary was certainly my favourite even though I forgot to take a photo of my zoo. I was surprised that I enjoyed Civolution so much but I definitely did.

Civolution

I've not quite been avoiding this game. I don't usually shy away from heavier board games, but I've heard it described several times as having 30-something distinct actions, and it has looked about as exciting as a spreadsheet when I've seen it on the table, so I haven't exactly jumped at the chance to play it. Turning up late to a game session I had a choice of this or another civilization themed game and ended up trying it out. And then I remembered that I love spreadsheets, of course I do, and it doesn't actually look that grey and grid like once you are playing.

The theme is that you are some kind of sci-fi deity creating the perfect civilization and your player board is kind of your computer console to do so. You roll dice and can then use pairs of them to carry out different actions. You are creating tribes on a shared map in the centre of the table where you can explore and find locations or resources, or you can stay put and build monuments and farms to feed the people. Perhaps you'll build boats, but there's a weather mechanic so the boats might get taken out by a tsunami as happened in one round of our game. There's a ton of different things going on and it is definitely a bit of an overwhelming rules teach but it quickly starts to make sense as you see how the elements roll together.

You're not entirely at the mercy of the dice rolls. There are various ways you can use your dice to get things to mitigate later bad rolls but of course these take up actions that you'd rather use to do things directly. In fact it occurs to me now that it has some similarities with the system in Castles of Burgundy by the same designer - it definitely has more going on than Castles does but it's not that off the scale to compare them. The main thing that makes it more complicated is the presence of numerous decks of cards. I've found these really hard to find synergy with. It is definitely a game that rewards adapting to what you have rather than sticking too closely to a plan. I ended up really liking it though, and jumped on a chance to play it again just a few days later.

Sanctuary

This is tagged as an "Ark Nova" game. Ark Nova's a big game about building a big zoo and I thought this was going to be a much simplified edition of it. And whilst it's definitely been simplified they haven't dumbed it down. And it also kind of feels like the same kind of game whilst being a different kind of a game. In other words I think it's a really well done design. The only thing I think they might have missed is that it's still probably not a family weight game that you could happily introduce to non-board gamers. I wouldn't be surprised if another "Ark Nova" game appears in the future to capture that market.

The action mechanism is much simplified and doesn't really restrict you very much and there's no money to deal with. It's mostly a puzzle of taking the right hexagon tiles from the display and then placing them down on your board to score the most points. There are still conservation projects to support for getting certain numbers of the right kinds of animals or continents represented in your zoo. It is a lot simpler than Ark Nova but actually felt more of a puzzle at times. I basically ignored the conservation points and concentrated on maximising the points the tiles in my zoo were scoring and ended up winning the game but that might just be beginner's luck.

One I'm hoping to have plenty of chances to play again in the future. I totally forgot to take a picture of my zoo before I tore it down which was a pity because I was really attached to it!

Black Forest

This has a gorgeous understated box but inside it's exactly what you expect from a standard Uwe Rosenberg game. There aren't any polyominoes actually but you're still trying to fit squares and rectangles onto your map. But mostly it's the return of the weird circle of resources from Glass Road. Any time you get enough resources together - sand, water, charcoal (there might have been another) - obviously you have plans for what you are going to do with these - but if you get one of each the wheel clunks around and you lose your resources and you've made some glass! And whilst glass is useful you might have wanted the other stuff, and maybe that only happened because someone handed you some free water. It's fun and frustrating. And there's a second dial that uses the same trick to create provisions from various foodstuffs. I only really figured out what was going on with these wheels after I finished playing though.

During the game I was wandering around a central map between a number of villages dealing with various tradespeople to buy or sell resources, or picking up pigs or cattle to bring back to my bit of the forest, or... I've forgotten what most of the actions were about now to be honest.

It was a fun game, and I'd happily play again but I felt I missed the theme in among the mechanics really.

Cooper Island

I love games where you get to stack tiles on top of each other and build three dimensional landscapes. In this game I did really well at building high, solving the puzzle of getting the right tiles in the right places to be able to do that, and the higher you build then the more resources the land gives to you each round. Unfortunately I didn't also build up a system that turned those resources into points!

Each player's island is connected to the others around the edge of the board and you have ships that sail round picking up bonuses, and eventually you sail off to go around your neighbour's islands and pick up bonuses from them too. I found that this meant that it was difficult to see your own player board very well though. I'm probably making excuses for being terrible at the game... it was a reasonable game and I wouldn't object to playing it again.

Chronicles of Crime

We've played several detective board games at home over the years. The Sherlock Holmes cases were fun and had great newspapers and other components but we never finished them. Detective was interesting and had more game to it but we never finished it. I picked this up for a fiver in the bring and buy at AireCon in March thinking we could try it out but it took us until November to get to it.

This is a game linked to an app. The app leads you through the crime that's taken place and lets you view the crime scene on your phone to look for clues. You then find the cards in the game that match the clues you want to examine and scan the QR code on the card to get information. You also scan cards to move between locations or talk to your contacts about your finds. It was a bit clunky and a bit interesting at the same time.

You could happily play it solo, we played together over a drink and mostly eschewed the game board because it didn't fit on our coffee table very well. In many ways it felt like it could have been just an app with no physical game box really, though we probably wouldn't have played it together like that. I think we both enjoyed it, we didn't figure out all of the mystery and weren't really sure if we should have spent more time investigating. We got bonus points for answering quickly but our answers were incomplete.

We'll probably play some more! I don't think I'd recommend the game at full price but for the price I paid I'm quite happy.

Modern Art

A game about trying to sell different artworks to your opponents and trying to end up with the most money. Whichever artist's work sells the most ends up being worth the most, but will you have overpaid for it? A lot of this is just mathematical, which I'm fine with, but there's also a psychological element of figuring out why your opponents are selling the works they are since they have a hand of other cards to play. And there's also the fact that not all the auctions for the artworks work the same way - some are open bidding, others are first come first served, or sealed bids for example - that breaks the mathematical hold a little.

I'm not a fan of most auction games but this had enough structure that I enjoyed it, and I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been playing with people who seemed determined that "all modern art is rubbish" which sweeping generalisation annoyed me but I couldn't be bothered to argue with.

Sounds Fishy

This is a party game, for pretty much any number of players I think. One player has a card with a question on it. All the other players can see the correct answer. All the other players have to then answer the question, with one player giving the correct answer and others giving made up answers. Then the asking player has to determine which players are lying, scoring points for each liar they correctly identify, stopping anytime before they get it wrong. I think that was about it. It was silly, the questions are mostly celebrity themed, I actually knew the correct answer to one of them but not the one I asked. I'm a terrible liar and sometimes just can't think fast enough to make plausible but wrong stuff up on the spot, but there were enough players that I quite enjoyed it.

Bites

I should have taken a photo of this as it had lovely components. Wooden ants making their way across a trail of chunky cardboard food to reach a big ant hill. As the ants eat the various foods the trail gets straighter just like a real ant trail. The players take the food and score points at the end based on matching the food taken to the position the ants end up in on the hill. Some of the components had different rules for each game which would vary it between plays. Light and fun.

Giant Beaver, Tiny Ass

BoardGameGeek doesn't even have a box image for this! It's an adult themed party trick taking game in which the suits are entirely innocent animals such as beaver, ass, cock etc and the suits are adjectives such as smelly, hairy and giant. Yeah. And you know what, it's a long way from the worst trick taking game I've ever played and it was very silly. Obviously not one for the easily offended!

Cappuccino

I'll include a bonus tenth game remark here since this one isn't even in the BoardGameGeek database as far as I can tell.

This was a Japanese push your luck card game. Each player draws a card and adds it to the cup of coffee they are making on the table in front of them. The cards depict either coffee, milk or chocolate with a value and they have two different ways up with different values and ingredients on them. To make a scoring coffee you need to have the values of the ingredients add up to ten but the points you are scoring for it are detailed on the other end of the card. If you make certain combinations of milk, coffee and chocolate which are detailed as various coffee drinks then you can score extra points. But if you go over the ten value then you've bust. I liked the idea of the game but the scoring felt a bit wonky with some of the drink scoring values being so high that they were effectively game winners.

Emberleaf & Tea Garden

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Thankfully my rate of picking up new game plays slowed a little at the end of August and through September. I've been consciously choosing to play something I already know I enjoy rather than picking the shiny new thing, and that's been good too. Apparently only the first two games here were interesting enough that I photographed them 🤷‍♀️ . That feels a little unfair but also, yes, I think that's just how it is. They were definitely my favourites of the group here and most of the rest were just me going along with what other people wanted to play.

Emberleaf

A friend who runs one of the board game groups I attend backed this on Kickstarter, but it never gets to the table at the group because he is always busy teaching games. I must have looked at it longingly one too many times as he invited me over to play a game of it with him and his wife one evening. Anything with woodland creatures and stacks of unique cards would have to try pretty hard for me to dislike it but thankfully I enjoyed it just as much as I thought I might do.

You have a playmat with eight spaces for cards and on most turns you play one card down and do the action it says on it, and the strength of that action may depend on the other cards previously placed down. But then there are also turns where you slide your cards across the playmat and some of them have actions that fire when you do that; and other cards have actions that fire when they drop off your playmat entirely. So you have at least three different things that you want your cards to do and you're trying to get everything in the right place to make the most of them.

But that's not all. There's also a board with woodland clearings where you are trying to build homes for animals, and remove the dangerous areas from the wood. And you're trying to get the resources to build the buildings you want and get them in the configuration you want, with the animals you want. There's a lot of different ways that things can go together but it didn't feel overwhelming after the first couple of rounds of play.

I jumped at the chance to play it again a couple of weeks later. Slightly annoyingly we messed up a rule in that second play that skewed the game and slowed it down a bit too, but I still enjoyed it and hope to play it many more times. The game comes with different decks of cards so in the second game I played I had a completely different set of cards to start with than in the first game. There's a bit of a deckbuilding aspect to it as well though the number of cards that you can add to your hand is a bit minimal - we thought we'd misread the rules to start with - but you just have to be selective with what's good to add to your deck and it doesn't feel like a buy/play/shuffle deckbuilder at all.

Tea Garden

This was a game I'd been wanting to get and had on my wishlist but the release date kept being pushed back and I lost track of it. The first I knew of it being released was when it appeared on a table in front of me at a gaming session, which was rather nice!

This is also a bit of a deckbuilder, probably more so than Emberleaf, but also has a number of things going on. The game goes through five rounds and you have three turns on each (with the possibility of buying a bonus fourth action). You start with a supply of green tea leaves and can plant tea gardens which will harvest you more, perhaps better, green tea each round. You can sell your tea to passing caravans for bonuses and points, this was mostly what I did in my first game. Better strategies seemed to involve going to tea university and earning bonuses there; or pleasing the emperor and gaining bonuses from him too. There's also a boat that sails along the river and earns stuff too.

It's a gentle game that looks lovely on the table, but I think there's probably quite a lot of strategy here in buying the right cards at the right time and playing them make the most of the bonuses.

Moon Colony: Bloodbath

It looks like deckbuilding is the theme of the month! This is another twist on deckbuilding from the creator of Dominion, the original deckbuilding game. In this one the twist is that the deck is built by all the players together and every card is turned over in turn resulting in good things happening to one player if they've added the right cards to the deck, or bad things happening to every player if bad cards have been added to the deck. It's a game of building up a colony on the moon, and, as you might expect from the title, it all going wrong. It's quick and silly and made a good end of the session game when you don't want to think too much.

Doomlings

Another game about the end of the world. Though actually it starts with the birth of life. The size of your hand is your "gene pool" and you play cards from it to evolve a lifeform, variously stealing from and wrecking the other life forms around the table as you evolve. I was drawn in by the shiny rainbow coloured box and I wasn't disappointed. It's easy to understand and quite silly.

Five Tribes

A long way from a new game but I've never played this before, and have been vaguely intimidated by the abstract look of the grid of tiles full of meeples, despite the fact that it's published by Days of Wonder who generally veer towards family weight games. I got thrown in at the deep end with two expansions included in my first game and came a distant third to two experienced players who tied the game, but didn't feel that was too bad really! The gameplay is that you pick up a group of meeples from one tile and walk them across the board dropping one of them off at each tile until at the last tile you do an action strengthened by how many meeples of the same colour as the last one you dropped off are on that tile. Then you remove those coloured meeples from the game, perhaps keeping them for scoring purposes. Each colour has a different action. It's very much a game where whatever you do is leaving an opening for your opponent so a lot of the time you're trying to pick the least worst move, taking points for yourself whilst trying to leave as few as possible behind. I'm glad to have played it and would be happy to play again but it's definitely not top of my list.

Bali

A fairly short card game about shrines and making offerings to gods, which we realised after playing it is basically a stocks and shares game where you need there to be cards in play of certain types in order for those to score highly but you also need to keep those cards in order to be able to score them. I liked the mechanics better with the Bali theming than I would have done if it had been straight stocks and shares though.

Favor of the Pharaoh

I'd say that this is basically an expansion of Yahtzee to a full game except that during this game I realised that not everyone grew up playing Yahtzee! One of the players had no idea what we were talking about when we went straight into talking about full houses and four of a kinds. One of the things I like about board games is that a lot of mechanics are shared between games and when they are put together in different ways they make for different experiences. Novel mechanics are always fun but there's nothing wrong with a lot of the old ones. And I enjoy dice rolling as long as the odds can be manipulated and the stakes aren't too high. This seemed to get a bit over complicated towards the end but I think that was probably more that we were having to explain everything very carefully to the new player rather than using experienced player shorthand. A learning experience for me in a different way than I expected.

Roll for the Galaxy

I thought I'd played this before, but it turned out that it was sibling game Race for the Galaxy that I'd played before, that one was cards and this one is dice, as well as tiles. I think this is probably the simpler game but coming at it thinking it was something else meant I got more confused than I should have done (actually this is the younger sibling of the two games, I thought it was the other way about). It certainly didn't feel any simpler and it's a bit weird that you roll your dice and then secretly assign them to different actions. I don't cheat, I don't think most board gamers cheat, I don't see the point in playing if you're going to cheat, but the opportunity to manipulate your dice behind your screen kept coming into my head all the same! I didn't and wouldn't! The game might grow on me with future plays, and I wouldn't turn it down but I felt like I preferred Race anyway.

Magical Athlete

The box has a helpful picture on the back of a hand rolling a die. So if you've never seen a die rolled this is the game for you. I jest, and the game is clearly tongue in cheek channelling all the roll and move games you ever played as a kid (though I guess not everyone did). There's a massive stack of playing pieces in the game and you draft them based on their abilities - or as I was given first choice in the first round of drafting, you just pick the giant baby because it's the biggest piece in the game and therefore must be the best. Then you play three rounds of roll and move racing! There is slightly more to it as each piece has a special ability, most of which affect other pieces as well, and of course to stay on the retro theme the board has various go back three spaces and similar spots on it. It was very silly and reasonably entertaining at it's maximum six player count, the interactions between the different player abilities would change it up next time it was played but it was definitely a game I could happily never play again.

New Games from ACNW (Mostly)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:00:00 GMT

I got a ton more new games played at ACNW, the smaller version of AireCon that happens in the NorthWest. I didn't take a photo of the halls this con used this year, we'd been bumped out of the previous halls by a Titanic exhibition, but this was a bonus as the new halls were full of natural light and really nice to play in. There's 12 new to me games featured in this post, 10 of them were played at ACNW and I bought two of them to bring home.

Let's Go To Japan

We picked this out of the board game library on the first afternoon of ACNW and it was a hit straight away. You draft cards to plan a trip to Japan trying to schedule activities on the right days to get the right bonuses; all the cards will give you points but ending the day on an activity that suits what you've been doing gives you bonus points. There are two decks of cards representing Tokyo and Kyoto and each time you travel between them you need a train ticket which lose you points if you buy them at the last minute but train travel can gain you points and energy if you have acquired luxury train tickets in advance. The art work is lovely and the flavour text is worth reading. I like the mechanic where if you don't want to play a card in your hand to your trip itinerary you can discard it and take a card face down and "go for a walk" which only reveals the activity you might partake in as you go through your trip at the end of the game.

Really nice game and it worked very well at two players where some other drafting games can feel limited. We played it three times over the weekend, the last play being with the copy I bought to take home.

SETI

One of the two games here that wasn't played at ACNW. This has been one of the hot new games for a while now but I hadn't felt a lot of pull towards playing it. I hadn't exactly been avoiding it but each time I've had a chance to play it there's been another option to play that I've preferred the look of or I haven't felt up to learning this. I didn't really feel like learning a chunky new game on the night I did learn it but I'm glad I did as I really liked it.

You are launching probes into space from Earth and seeking out traces of extra-terrestrial life whilst exploring the solar system. There is a lot going on but it all fell into place reasonably quickly and I settled on a strategy of trying to achieve missions and reach all the planets, not worrying too much about the aliens. I managed a pretty decent second place score against two players who had played before and was quite happy with that. The alien races you encounter are two picked randomly from a set of five (I think) so each game will have a different feel. I liked that the cards contain no duplicates, some are very similar but they are all different. The solar system rotating as you move around is lovely, you need to plan your path to Jupiter carefully so that you don't run into the asteroids! Having learnt the game I'd be very happy to play it again.

Calico

This game is a few years old now but I've never played it. I met up with a friend at ACNW who had played it and described it as "really calming but super stressful" and as she taught it to us we found out why. And it's just the kind of game I like. You are selecting tiles to make a pretty patchwork quilt. How calming! There are six different colours of patches in six different patterns. And you have three patches on your board at the beginning which give you some goals to score points at the end of the game depending on the combination of colours and/or patterns around them. And this is where it gets stressful! Meet the goal with the right combo of either colours or patterns and you get a certain number of points but meet the goal with the right combo of both colours and patterns and you get more points! On top of this you get buttons (ie more points) for putting three tiles of the same colour together, and there are cats who will come and sleep on your quilt (ie more points) if the patterns you make meet their approval. This was the second (and last) game that I bought to take home!

Critter Kitchen

This was a very successful Kickstarter game from earlier in the year; I hadn't realised it was by the same people as Flamecraft which I played at ACNW last year and eventually acquired as a Christmas present. I didn't like it quite as much as Flamecraft at first play possibly because it just took us a long time to get the hang of some fairly simple rules. You are collecting ingredients to make meals, sending your three chefs out shopping to a set of stores. Then at the end of the game you make a seven course meal of all the ingredients for a special critter with certain preferences that you may or may not have figured out in the course of the shopping. I don't feel it was great as a two player game as there didn't seem to be enough choice of ingredients or enough variety in the way the stores worked. I'd happily try it again with more players though.

Pueblo

We picked this out of the library having been intruiged by it when we saw other people playing it. Each player has some coloured blocks and some white blocks, these pair together to make a cube but are an awkward shape alone. You place them one at a time and a chieftain eagle slowly parades around the edge of the board and he doesn't want to see any coloured blocks. It looks great and it was a nice puzzle but the scoring mechanism felt a bit awkward.

Moorland

We picked this out for an easy end of night game and then messed up the rules and made it much harder than it should have been. Nice enough game really and I like the idea of seeds dispersing along waterways but the artwork felt a bit dull and the theme didn't really come through. Nothing really wrong with it but I wouldn't pick it out to play again.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

We played the two player competitive version of this last year, enjoyed it, bought the video game, enjoyed that, and thought we'd try the cooperative version this year. Much the same but with a box full of achievements to unlock during a completely replayable campaign. We decided we preferred the duel version perhaps because we got a terrible score at this!

Jokkmokk: The Winter Market

Whereas the brightly coloured artwork made this game fun to play even though the mechanics were rather basic and there wasn't a lot of game to it really. You march around a market picking up cards. The player with the meeple in last place gets to move, similarly to Tokaido, this means that if you jump ahead to pick up a card you really want then your opponents can leisurely stroll and suck up all the cards you've skipped. In practice none of the cards were that much better than others and we mostly strolled around in order. There were a lot of different sets of cards in the box though and we played with the beginner set which was probably a mistake. There's probably a better game in there when random more complicated cards are selected but we didn't see that.

Tower Up

I wanted to try this just because it looks so good on the table. You build up skyscrapers of different colours placing your coloured roofs down to score points for them, but also scoring points for distributing your building evenly between the four shades of skyscraper. And then points for meeting various objectives such as building in all districts of the city. There was a nice two player board that worked well. An enjoyable game that was shorter and simpler than I expected it to be; I'd be happy to play again at a higher player count too.

Coffee Rush

I'd played this one recently online on Board Game Arena and enjoyed it well enough. I arrived at ACNW on Saturday morning and found the friend I was meeting had done the same and had already bought the game before I arrived. The components are delightful which doesn't come across in the online version. You play as baristas moving about a board collecting ingredients such as tiny plastic coffee beans, drops of milk and slabs of chocolate and then drop them into doll's tea party sized coffee cups to fulfil your customer's orders. It's really pleasant to handle the tokens and make the tiny drinks, though you do have to spill them onto the table in order to prove you've put the right ingredients in your customer's caramel iced latte. I like the mechanism whereby your orders get more urgent each turn but when you fulfil an order it's the other player who get more orders in. So if you get your workflow right it's the other players who get overwhelmed. And the game ends when someone is too overwhelmed and five of their orders have expired. It was also nice to have a game where the winning score was 8 and not a lot of arithmetic was needed to find the winner. Not that I mind arithmetic but it makes a change.

In the Footsteps of Marie Curie

In the Footsteps of Darwin was a big hit with a couple of people I know including the friend I met at ACNW, it's a fairly simple game of moving a ship around and collecting animal tiles to score points. Quite short and just complicated enough that it doesn't bore me. This is another in the same series with completely different mechanics and it also runs quite short and I didn't think it was too complicated. I quite liked it but the people I was playing with were less impressed. It has the same kind of cube tower as Amerigo - you throw cubes in the top and not all of them may come out of the bottom. You can then choose to take a selection of cubes which represent pitchblende, uranium and radium and swap them in various ways to perform experiments and get bonuses, or use them to buy cards which also give you bonuses. And the winning score was 9 so it was another low arithmetic game. I'd happily play it again, I think there's more strategy in it than we saw on our first play.

Abducktion

This was the second game in this post that wasn't from ACNW. It was a regular Sunday gaming session and I could not resist the opportunity to try out a game with a shedload of tiny plastic ducks! You pick the ducks out of a giant silicone UFO of ducks, a very tactile experience, and arrange them randomly in your stream. Then you use your hand of three cards to rearrange your ducks - or perhaps rearrange your opponents ducks - and attempt to make the patterns of ducks shown on a central display of cards. It's a pretty simple game and I have to say it was mostly enjoyable for the components. "Rearrange and match the patterns" is definitely the kind of game that I enjoy but it felt a little lacking. Also whilst the shiny foil ducks on the cards looked lovely it was a bit hard to distinguish the different foil colours across the table leading to players thinking they had made a pattern and then realising that there should have been multiple colours of ducks involved.

Amazonia and Peaks

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:00:00 GMT

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.

Amerigo to Silver & Gold

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 19:00:00 GMT

Lots of new games seemed to roll in quickly during June and July this year. Amerigo and Shackleton Base were very different games but were my favourites of the heavier new games I played here. Team 3 was a not very gamey game really but it was great fun to play!

Amerigo

Why does Castles of Burgundy get all the love, all the reprints and the deluxe editions? I mean, it's fine and there's not much wrong with it apart from the monotonous colour palettes they keep using for it but this game from the same designer Stefan Feld was much more my thing. You are getting your boat to islands, then placing polyominoes on those islands, whilst avoiding pirates and probably another couple of things that I've forgotten about. But the big thing is that there's a tower into which you feed cubes and out of which random cubes then fall which sets up the randomness of which actions you can choose. It reminded me a little of Rolling Heights in that rather than plumping for the usual dice roll it's a different sort of randomness that you have to work with on the fly. Really fun and I'd happily play it again. It looks like it's being remade in a slightly different format and renamed Manila. I'll be looking out for it.

Shackleton Base

I like games where it feels like there are entirely too many things going on to start with and they slowly fall into place whilst I play. Then I need another game to actually figure out a strategy. This was very much a 'what on earth is going on' game. Except it wasn't on earth, it was on the moon. Each round you draft a selection of red, yellow or blue astronauts who all have different powers and then you put them to work. Putting them to work away from the map seems to build your engine faster but they need to be put to work on the map to have a chance of scoring you end game points. But only if they are placed such that you have the most bits of moon base on the diagonal where they are. It's really clever and very much something where you need to do everything but just can't. There were three corporations in play which each brought different mechanics to the game and there were more in the box so the game can be varied each time you play, that's always good for replayability. And I would very much like to replay this!

Tungaru

A dice placement game that was okay. I mostly liked it, apart from I hate having a handful of dice and not getting to roll them. I took the first player marker in the first round and then kept it for most of the game so that I was the one who got to roll the dice and everyone else had to set their dice to the same values as mine. I get that it's a 'limit the randomness' device, and I don't think the game would be better if you all got to roll, but there's other ways you could do this than making me hold dice I can't roll. Tungaru is the largest island of what is now Kiribati, under colonisation this was the Gilbert Islands, because of course the British had to colonise it. Happily there is no sign of colonisation in the game, the characters all look indigenous and the 'settle' action involves leaving one of your three meeples on an island so they can perform actions there after your boat sails away. I think I played the deluxe edition and the pieces were very nice, each player had different shaped islanders and icons. And plastic boats are always a win with me because they invoke the spirit of 'Don't Miss the Boat', a staple game of my childhood (not sure I'd recommend it today!). So lots of nice things about the game, but nothing special enough to make me want to play it again really.

Knarr

This was introduced to me as "Splendor++" but I'm not really sure I agree. I didn't feel like I could plan ahead like I could in Splendor. I can see where the comparison comes from: you play stuff to the table that then allows you to buy different cards from the market. But it felt very different to me. Those bought cards all give you a bonus thing and a permanent effect that you can channel each turn if you have the right resources to do so. It was maybe a half hour game with five of us playing so it didn't outstay it's welcome but it didn't feel like anything special.

Power Plants

Each turn sees a player place one of several types of hexagon-ish tiles to a central display, and then they can manipulate wizards based on the powers of the tile they placed, or the ones they placed adjacent to. Quite fun and the components were lovely to handle.

Quest

Social deduction games are not my thing. This was no different, it was played at a party and I was happy to join in. I still don't really get why people enjoy these though really!

Team 3

Played at the same party as Quest but way more my thing! Polyominoes are always a win with me even when they are in a party dexterity game. Well, it's not exactly a dexterity game. There are three players on a team. One can see a pattern to make with the blocks on the card, but they can't speak. Another player can handle the blocks but must shut their eyes. The player in the middle must interpret the gestures of the first player and translate them into words for the sightless player to use to build the pattern. I think we started playing it as a race between two teams of three but it quickly just became a challenge for its own sake with everyone wanting a turn at the different roles and the different levels of pattern difficulty. Despite the fact that you could probably challenge whether it should be described as a game or not when played like that we all had great fun with it.

Mindbug

I didn't see this game at it's best. It's a two player combat card game with each turn seeing a player summon a creature to the table or attack with one they've already summoned. In the brief play I had I couldn't see anything much, other than the speed of the game, to differentiate it from Magic: The Gathering or any of it's close relatives. The game was over quickly since I'd missed what my opponent's creature's keyword meant and wasn't able to fight it at all. The trick of the game is that you have two chances per game to steal your opponent's creatures when they are played and that's obviously what I should have done here. It's the kind of game where you'd instantly play a second really but I was just having a quick demo between other games and there wasn't time. Inconclusive at to whether I liked it really, but leaning towards the 'I can't be bothered, just hand me an Magic deck'.

Silver & Gold

A quick and easy flip and write. Flip a card, look at the polyomino shape and mark that shape on one of the treasure island cards in front of you. Not dissimilar to Cartographers in many ways, but whilst I love Cartographers this fell a bit flat with me. Some of that is down to the fact that whilst it is a simpler game I was playing it with people who weren't understanding it so it was difficult to just relax into the simple puzzle. I felt like for the effort I was taking to explain the game to people I'd rather have just got them straight into Cartographers.

River Valley Glassworks beats Flip 7

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 18:00:00 GMT

These are my first impressions of all the new-to-me games I played between mid April and early June. River Valley Glassworks is easily my favourite, and Flip 7, which seems to be one of the hot games of the moment, can have my least favourite award; the bonus tenth game Hol's Der Geier was a far better quick card game.

Power Grid

A classic modern board game that I'd never played. I expected it to feel a bit clunky and dated but it was actually very tightly held together and I enjoyed it. I want to play again as I definitely didn't really understand how the winner was chosen until we actually reached the end of the game. And the end of the game suddenly appeared when I wasn't quite ready for it. You are building a network of towns across Germany, and buying power stations in an auction format to power them, then you also need to buy fuel for the power stations so the towns can actually receive power for which you receive cash. Then you go round again buying more power stations and adding more towns to your network.

The beer mats are obscuring parts of the board as in a four player game we didn't need the whole board. This was one thing that made it feel dated, a newer game would probably provide different maps for different player counts, and the components in general felt cheap. The cash was proper paper monopoly style money! I have got so used to deluxe upgraded game components that I've forgotten that cardboard coins were once fancy! Apart from our beer mat obscured board the components didn't get in the way of the game though so I have no complaints.

Vicious Gardens

This one is a pretty ordinary card game of 'planting' sets of cards to allow you to use other helper cards to win big cards that are worth points. I like the way that the cards you need to be able to read across the table are actually huge cards that you can read across the table, but mostly the game was forgettable and felt very generic.

Photograph

I have a history of not being impressed by small card games but this was lovely and different to the run of the mill. This is a game that rewards advance planning. You only get one chance to rearrange your hand in one very specific way each turn. You're trying to play cards to the table in order and it's really hard to do! Very much a game that I want to play again now I understand it!

Flip 7

I've played the Board Game Arena online version of this game and enjoyed it well enough. A few minutes of fairly mindless push your luck card flipping with a bit of watching the odds. You flip one card at a time from the deck trying to score as highly as you can without drawing a matching pair of cards. The deck is stacked with high value cards, less low value cards, a few cards that change the way the game plays. I expected it to be fun in person but actually it felt remarkably boring to play. The "Second Chance" cards that let players flip without fear seem overpowered. It bills itself as "The Greatest Card Game of All Time" on the box. I'm not sure how much irony the marketing department included in that statement but it made me just want to go back to playing Pontoon to be honest.

Zooloretto

I could have sworn I'd played this game before but I must have confused it with something else as this was definitely the first time I'd played it. Pretty simple mechanics where you either place a tile drawn from a bag into one of the groups of tiles in the centre of the table, or you choose one set of tiles to add to your zoo. The trick is to take things at the right time so you don't end up being forced to take things you don't want, as there is limited space in your own zoo. There are more kinds of animals than you can house and duplicate attractions that you don't want. Easy going family style game, entertaining enough for the end of a game evening with tired brains without being boring.

River Valley Glassworks

Oh, I loved this! Another one that has relatively simple game play and goes by pretty quickly but that didn't make it simple to play. You take various glass tiles from the river where you are restricted by the shape of the pieces, trying to get the colours into the right places on your own board to score points. I've forgotten most of the specifics of how both those things happen but remember how beautiful the game is with a constantly changing stream of glass-like pieces in the river on the table. Definitely on my must play again list. Gentle but thinky.

Pandemic Hot Zone - North America

I've played plenty of base game Pandemic and numerous spin offs over the years but had never played this one. It's like the city themed Ticket to Ride games in that they take an hour or two's game play and squish it into a fifteen minute experience. And somehow they don't lose the essence of the game in this condensation. In this game everything got out of control, then we just about got it under control and then we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Given just a couple more turns we'd have saved the world. Very much the same as the full game so I think that's a success.

Mille Fiori

Another glass themed game with pretty pieces (see also River Valley Glassworks). I'm a total sucker for these, I'm just glad other people buy them so I don't have to. Though really this could have been a lot fancier but it was fancy enough really. Cards are drafted around the table that then allow you to play your pieces onto the board into different areas that give you different amounts of points for how you place them. It sounds very generic when I put it like that, and in many ways it is. But it was nice enough. I'd happily play this again though I probably wouldn't buy my own copy.

X Nimmt

I'm terrible at 6 Nimmt, a game where you try and get rid of your cards by playing the right number at the right time so that you never play the 6th card into one of the lines on the table. This is 6 Nimmt on some kind of psychedelic drugs. The lines are shorter - only 3, 4 or 5 cards can be placed in a row. And unlike 6 Nimmt the cards keep getting recycled so there's a closed economy of card numbers in use. Knowing what cards other players have had take ought to help you but it sure as hell didn't help me. This takes a decent filler game you can teach anyone to play in two minutes and bends it so that your brain melts. I'm not really sure I enjoyed it that much as a result.

Hol's Der Geier

Bonus tenth game that didn't make it onto the picture because I couldn't remember the title or find it in the BoardGameGeek database at the time I played it. I eventually recalled that the game's owner had told me the English title was 'Beat the Buzzard', and then tracked it down listed under the title 'What The Heck?'. As far as I can see the German title translates literally as 'Get the Vulture', but it's a phrase meaning 'to hell with you'. It's a very simple card game. Each player has a deck of cards numbered 1 to 15 and uses one each turn to secretly bid to get a card randomly selected with values between -5 and 10. Highest bid wins the positive cards, lowest bid wins the negative cards. If two players bid the same then their bids are cancelled out, which is when you'll exclaim 'to hell with you!'. A lot more entertaining than you'd think, and far preferable to Flip 7 in my opinion.

Burano to Unconcious Mind

Fri, 02 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

These are my first impressions of all the new-to-me games I played between mid March and mid April. Encyclopedia and Nucleum are the ones I'd most like to play again. I certainly wouldn't turn down Nusfjord or Unconcious Mind either.

Burano

I picked this up in the bring & buy at AireCon, attracted by the huge supply of large wooden cubes that you use to make 3D buildings on the board. That bit of the game is really nice! The other components are a bit rubbish though. There are some tiny worker tokens that we found very hard to pick up from the boards. These tokens have male faces on one side and female on the other, and you're supposed to send the men off fishing and the women to work in the lace workshops. Except that's entirely unnecessary fiddliness and it's easier to ignore it even if you don't have a problem with that kind of gender segregation. I mean, I get that it's probably historically accurate, but little cubes or meeples would have worked better for the pieces anyway.

There are a shed load of different mechanics and ways to score points here. Lace making seemed a lot harder to get big points for than fishing which was a pity because I liked the polyomino puzzle of placing people in the workshops. I did miss a rule where you gain privileges when you place a cube on the 2nd or 3rd level of a house that would have helped though.

On the whole I quite liked some of the game, didn't like other bits - especially the unnecessarily fiddly components - and will probably put it back in a bring & buy sale without playing it again. It's a pity because the 3D building element is great!

DroPolter

A mad game where you hold five different items in your hand and try to drop the ones on the revealed card to the table before anyone else does. Oh, and your reward for winning the round is that you get to hold a tiny bell in your hand as well and the first to collect five of these tiny bells in their hand, in addition to the five normal items, wins. Dexterity games are fun but I'm never any good at them and this was no different to usual.

Encyclopedia

A game about collecting sets of animal cards, researching the animals on them, and then publishing your findings. Which is very much the same theme as In The Footsteps of Darwin. This is a very different game though. Here each player rolls a handful of dice each turn and these become your workers for the round, except you can pick dice that any player has rolled so you have a good choice at the start of the round. If you pick someone else's die then they get a bonus for that. I, and my opponent who was also new to the game, both underestimated the amount of points available for the collections of published cards at the end of the game, and the player who had played before stormed to victory having looked well behind us at that point. Definitely a game that I'd like to play again.

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre;

I think the overlong nonsense name is the least of this game's sins. It's also an overlong nonsense game. I didn't hate it, it was quite fun for a while. You have a handful of cards and pick a beginning, a middle and an end card to make a spell with, if the three sections match up then there is usually a benefit to that. But it felt like we'd seen all the jokes after half an hour and there was still loads more game to get through.

Nucleum

After being taught the rules for this game I felt like I had been handed a bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces with absolutely no clue as to what the picture on the box was. I'm happy to do an actual mystery jigsaw puzzle but I needed more info here. This is a game of building in cities across the board and then powering the buildings up by transporting power supplies, coal or nucleum, over rails you've also built, to the buildings. I misunderstood a few things about the scoring. One of those games where it makes more sense when you've finished but you still need to read the rulebook again to check things out. I liked the fact that we all had slightly different sets of tiles and abilities to unlock. I'd happily play it again with hopefully a bit more idea as to what to do!

Nusfjord

Uwe Rosenberg's games are often up my street and this was no different. I managed to misunderstand an icon on a card and overpay for fishing boats but I still came in as joint winner so that was quite nice. The theme was entirely forgettable, I mostly built up a fleet of boats but there were also buildings that helped you score. I got a building in the first round that rewarded you for not building and then I concentrated on the fishing side of the game and that seemed to work. Happy to have played it, would play again but not really bothered if I don't!

Parade

This is a card game with a pasted on Alice in Wonderland theme. I liked it. The mechanism is that you try to avoid taking cards from the parade by playing high value cards that mean you have less chance of taking cards, but low value cards are worth less points. Short and fun.

Town 77

Basically a game of multiplayer sudoku. Each player starts with four tiles in hand, each has a different colour and building shape. Your opponents can see your tile colours but not shape. You play the tiles to the table such that each of the 7 rows and columns conforms to sudoku rules, not matching the shape or colour within a row or column. At the end of your turn you can decide to permanently discard a tile and reduce your hand size. It took us a while to understand how this worked exactly but when it clicked it was a good mechanic. You are trying to be the last player able to play but also to have the least tiles in hand when you can't place a tile. So reducing your hand size makes you more likely to have less tiles in hand when you are blocked, but also gives you less choice meaning other players might be able to carry on beyond you. It's the kind of logic puzzle I really enjoy and a nice quick filler game.

Unconscious Mind

This is a shiny sparkly game with some lovely components where you play as assistant to Freud trying to cure the nightmares of your various patients. But it's basically a game of moving various parts around in an engine to have the right kind of resources on hand at the right time. I quite enjoyed it. I like the use of acetate overlay cards (like those in Mystic Vale) to add the nightmares onto the patients. It's one of those games that could be themed any way though, you end up talking about having a big red token and a medium green one, and a bit better connection to the theme would have improved the gameplay. It was pretty fun to play all the same.

Pit

A bonus that's not on the image. Apparently this game dates from 1903. It's a very simple, but also completely mad, game that's based on stock trading. Ten matching cards are shuffled into the deck for every player playing. Then each player tries simultaeously to assemble a hand of ten matching cards. You do this by selecting a number of cards that match and asking another player to blindly swap the same number of their cards for yours. In no more than a couple of minutes someone manages to assemble a matching hand and rings the bell to stop the game. We played half a dozen, maybe more, rounds of it with a varying selection of five to eight players at the end of a long day of playing mostly heavy games and it was a good fun finish and whilst it's not exactly a good bedtime game it certainly woke me up enough to drive home safely!