During my recent trip to TantrumCon, I ran into Jay Bernardo, the marketing manager with Bezier Games. We hit it off, and that led to a six-hour binge featuring games all night and lots of smack talk. (If you have not spent time with Jay, you need to get on that stat…the guy is hilarious.)

Jay also took the time to show me Sandbag, designer and Bezier CEO Ted Alspach’s latest game and what I think is his first trick-taking release. (Bezier has dabbled in trick takers before thanks to the release of the deluxe edition of Cat in the Box.) Jay was kind enough to provide a review copy after our first play, so I got the game in front of my Chicago game groups to see how the game played with other audiences.

During my first play of Sandbag, we got a single rule wrong, so correcting that did make a difference in successive plays. Still, I was surprised that this one was more of a curiosity than an outright hoot like the game’s rules seem to suggest. I don’t think that is a flaw, but the game does have a high rules overhead for such a simple concept and I wonder how this will play with broader audiences when it hits the market…

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Doing another series for Final Girl was a no-brainer. The first set of modules in this endlessly customizable survival horror game was a massive success, taking the world of solo board gaming by storm. Our own Justin Bell had nothing but glowing praise when he reviewed the Final Girl base set, and I’m no different.

But a second series brings with it risks. There’s the dreaded sophomore slump, buckling under the pressures of expectations. Could Final Girl add extensions to the house without creating cracks in the foundations?

The Root of All Evil

If you’re looking for a more exhaustive description of Final Girl, I’ll direct you to Justin’s review, but here’s the quick pitch: the entire series is premised around the horror trope of the Final Girl, a female protagonist who manages to survive everything and lead the baddie to their ultimate demise. The roots of the Final Girl can be traced at least as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but the trope wasn’t identified until the late 1980’s.

Final Girl the game puts you in…

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Logic & Lore is a game that I knew right from the beginning my wife would love. She is someone who can sit for hours working on sudoku puzzles. So when asked if I would like to delve into this little game, it was an enthusiastic yes!

This small-box game only has a few components. Each player has a set of 12 star cards with ranks from 1 through 9, plus three black holes. There are nine alignment cards, also ranked from 1 through 9. Beyond that, there is a pool of memory tokens (36) with various symbols on them, some meeples for each player (7 per player), and reference cards (3). In the basic game, called the Star Light version, the black holes and the meeples are not used.

Star Light

To set up the basic game, the alignment cards are placed between the players ranked in order from 1 through 9 with the moon-phases face-up. Each player shuffles their star cards and deals them out face-down so that each of their cards is associated with one of the alignment cards. Make sure that the reference cards are on the Star Light side and that the memory tokens are within reach. Randomly choose a player to go first, and you are ready to begin.

Side note: there is…

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I was alarmed by the text on the back of the game box for Tanuki (2024, Synapses Games): “Do you have what it takes to win in this no holds barred take that game?”

The front of the box features a cute, furry tanuki (raccoon dog, per the box) running away from other characters towards the viewer. I’m not sure what the cover image is trying to convey—should I run away from this game??—but I like a good take that game. However, I was afraid to see if this would work with my kids, particularly my son, who abhors competitive games where players can be robbed (see exhibit 147: Berried Treasure).

I opened my review copy and quickly read the rulesheet. In Tanuki, designed by Cole Smith, players begin the game with a face-up Gardener card and a face-up Samurai card in their Garden (play area). A second Gardener card is also in the Garden, face down, waiting for the game’s second half to open before being revealed by an event card buried in the draw deck.

The Gardener cards score bamboo (points) each turn they remain in a player’s Garden. Samurai protect all Gardener cards, an important distinction because Tanuki is all about stealing cards and…

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My first play of Mori was one of the least impressive gaming experiences of recent memory. Not for one moment did it work. All four of us were miserable. The rules were impermeable and the experience was entirely flat.

“I can’t believe I have to play this again,” I grumbled as I took the subway home.

So I Played It Again

The next night, I brought it out for a different group. “This is Mori. I played it last night, and it wasn’t particularly good, but if there’s a group that can find the beauty in a trick-taker, it’s this one.”

Mori is a bit of an odd bird, welding about as much onto a “simple” trick-taker as I think the genre can withstand. We start in familiar territory. There are four suits, each with cards from 0-10. It’s a must-follow game. The highest card in the led suit wins, unless someone has managed to play a trump card.

This brings us to the first wrinkle: the trump suit depends on the led suit. Each suit corresponds to a season, and each season is trumped by the season that comes next. Winter always loses to Spring, which always loses to Summer, and so on.

The winner adds all the cards from the trick to their score pile, then takes…

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I love old paintings and illustrations of fruit, like the kind you find in botany textbooks from the  late 1800s. The attention to detail is astonishing, the gradations of shade and form, the imperfections. The card art for Pies drew me right in, lovingly rendered in an identical style. I found myself falling into the cards as I rifled through them. These cards build a world with a distinct pastoral feel, a book spine covered in dust.

Then I came to the dog, and the pie tokens with Pi carved into them, and I started to worry. They didn’t feel aesthetically consistent. I found myself thinking about the old writing maxim, “You don’t put a hat on a hat.”

Pies is allegedly a trick-taking game, and it’s marketed as such, but that is categorically incorrect. There are no suits, there is no pressure to follow, there are no trumps. It shows none of the defining characteristics of the genre. This is an auction game, themed around gathering fruits and recipes to turn into pies.

Each player, one at a time, puts a card from their hand into the middle of the table. Then, from highest card to lowest, each gets to pick any one…

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I love an archival project. Publisher Eagle-Gryphon Games went through the notes of legendary designer Sid Sackson, creator of Acquire and Can’t Stop amongst others, and selected four of what he considered his best unpublished games. The results are here, in the two volumes of The Sackson Legacy Collection, which combine those four unpublished games with new printings of two Sackson obscurities.

There is no publisher I would rather have do a project like this. Eagle-Gryphon’s production is always exemplary, luxuriant without being fussy. With Eagle-Gryphon’s typical thick box stock and vibrant colors, these are games that would look good on a bookshelf. I suspect that’s exactly what the team had in mind. All they’re missing, as far as I’m concerned, is a spine number.

I love a spine number.

Blue

The blue volume includes three previously unpublished titles: I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game, Banana Blitz, and Scope.

I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game is a negotiation game inspired by Sackson’s own I’m the Boss!. Players take turns rolling dice, attempting to move to the top of various Expertise tracks while jockeying to negotiate different deals. Any time a player earns enough stars to be the Boss, they…

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Sail is a two-player cooperative trick-taking game, a family of design I haven’t seen since 2020’s fair-to-middling The Fox in the Forest Duet. The goal is simple, in theory: get your ship from one end of the board to the other by playing cards that combine well with your partner's. All the while, you have to avoid taking damage from the monstrous kraken, who wants nothing more than to see your magnificent vessel rendered a wreck on the ocean floor.

The mechanism for steering your ship is must-follow trick-taking. At the beginning of each round, once cards are dealt out, each player passes a card to the other. Each card bears an action icon. Pair well the cards you and your partner play, and you’ll get a beneficial action. The possible action combinations are spelled out on the provided player guides, and while they’re quick to pick up, I won’t break them all down here. It’s good to pair helms, which move the boat one space forward diagonally, listing in the direction of the player who took the trick. It’s also critical to pair cannons with kraken tentacles, since that removes potentially damaging cards from the deck.

The kraken…

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Trick-taking is the flavor of the moment in board gaming, there’s no question about it. In part, I am sure, because of the ease of publishing a deck of cards, trick-taking has exploded in the last year and a half, with what seems to be a never-ending torrent of titles coming out every day. For some, that’s a problem. Me, I can’t get enough.

Before we dive into what makes trick-taking games so wonderful, I should make sure everybody knows what we’re talking about here. I’m going to lift from my own work, borrowing the What We Talk About When We Talk About Trick-Taking section from my review of Cat in the Box.

[caption id="attachment_296261" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Pick your poison. (Note: Poison is not a trick-taking game.)[/caption]

What We, etc.

You’ve probably played a trick-taking game at some point. Spades. Hearts. Whist. Contract Bridge. Oh Hell. Tarot during that semester abroad in Paris. If you haven’t, the fundamental idea is pretty simple. I’ll walk you through a hand, focusing on some key vocabulary that will make it easier to explain games on this list.

Josh leads the trick, which means he plays the first card. Let’s say…

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There are no happy endings in Viking sagas. Oh sure, someone lives, but usually not the one you had hoped, and they’re bound to be miserable. Regardless of the outcome, though, sagas are rippin’ good times defined by endless and often widening bouts of deeds and consequences.

Knarr is an engines-building card-game from designer Thomas Dupont and publisher Pandasaurus Games. It is the longship of card games—swift and highly effective. The action escalates and the game sails off into the sunset in 15-30 minutes.

Calculating like Signy

Play a card into one engine, or weaken that engine to build another. These are the choices in every turn of Knarr. Players build a cascading tableau of stunning viking cards arranged by color. When a new card is added to its stack, it provides every boon depicted in the stack—points, reputation, bracelets, and/or helmets. By the time there are four or *gasp* five cards in waiting, the resource engine sings like a tagelharpa.

Undercutting the joy of the engine, however, is the knowledge that those cards are fated for the discard pile, viking brethren spent as currency in the name of exploration. The exploration cards stack near the player’s longship board as part of another engine—one which features three ribbons triggered…

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I’m not a tableau guy. I’m not anti-tableau by any means—Race for the Galaxy is one of my favorite games. They’re not a genre I seek out, though. My distaste is mild enough that the realization only came to me recently, after a game of 51st State. My friend Nathan said, “Tableau builders aren’t my thing, but if I were to play one, this is the one I’d play,” and I realized the same was true for me.

It explains a lot. Wingspan? Nah. Everdell? Eh. Terraforming Mars? Best for all involved that I don’t. I think my distaste comes from the fact that I prefer my games streamlined, and running calculus around a bevy of unique cards turn after turn is not streamlined. There’s also some (irrational) part of me that has come to regard an appetite for combos as one of board gaming’s baser instincts, and I’m suspicious of anything that appeals to it.

Look, nobody’s perfect.

This is not meant to yuck your yum. If anything, these realizations have made me more understanding of the popularity of the above-mentioned games. It also has me trying to figure out why I like 51st State so very much.

[caption id="attachment_296089" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

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Back in 2020 I swooned over Village Green, a delightfully constricting game of card placement and fluid scoring designed by Peer Sylvester and published by Osprey Games. 

Fast forward to 2023 and Osprey are back with Village Rails, designed by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert. It’s a sequel, of sorts. Like its sibling, Village Rails provides players with the puzzley experience of creating a grid of symbol-splattered cards with scoring cards around the edge, all wrapped up in a tidy and tiny package.

It’s good: compelling, compact and cranium-caressing. Worthy of the ‘Village’ name. And yet the experience it provides is markedly different and whilst I like it quite a bit, there is no swoon.

All aboard

The goal of Village Rails is points, tracked on gorgeous scoring dials shaped like old-fashioned train tickets. They’re a delightful highlight of an excellent production.

On each of your turns you take a ‘tracks’ card and add it to your expanding 3 x 4 grid. These cards have two train tracks traversing them, with a track entering or leaving each of the card’s sides. By the end of the game you have…

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More really is more. Like, a LOT more.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Challengers! Beach Cup (2023, 1 More Time Games) is not a sequel to 2022’s Challengers!, a game that for many people was the best party game they played two years ago. The game was nominated for a number of awards, and won the As D’or award (the “Initiated” category) in 2023 from the French games convention Festival International des Jeux.

Challengers! Beach Cup is a standaquel, or a sequalone, or an expandalone, depending on your point of view—a standalone sequel to the original game, which requires none of the components from the core game and is played almost identically to the first game.

As such, I’m not covering much about the rules here…for that, please take a look at my previous review of the base game. I’m here to tell you which version of the game you should own, although if you happen to have lots of 16-player game nights, you should just go ahead and pick up both games!!

Here’s What’s New

The first change is a minor one, but I absolutely love it. Between rounds, there are sometimes choices to pick new cards from a lower-powered deck or a…

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