Overview

From the rules:

“What’s going on in the jungle? For several days now, the peace and quiet of the tropics has been broken repeatedly by loud honking, squeaky tires and screeching brakes! The reason - a jungle taxi competition! The player who can pick up the most passengers by the end of the season will become the Tasmanian Taxi King!

You won’t want to pass up the opportunity to win this title. As a jungle taxi driver, you have to try to collect several animals and use route cards to create the longest possible route for your taxi. But you have to engage in exciting duels with your fellow players in order to collect route cards. The player who collects the most route cards and animals at the end wins the game.”

How To Play

A game of Taxi Wildlife is setup thusly:

The three decks of Route cards are shuffled and placed into facedown stacks according to their card back. One card is drawn from each stack and placed face up next to the stack from which it was drawn. Remove any Duel cards belonging to colors that are not being played. Then, the deck of Duel cards is shuffled and placed face down close by.…

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During a meeting with our friend Rawan from publisher Gigamic at SPIEL 2022, she showed me a mockup of a game coming soon now known as Featherweight Fiesta. It had the look of a dexterity game for families: take paper birds and try to balance them on a telephone line made of string, pulled across three wooden telephone poles that straddle the two halves of the box.

It was cute. I couldn’t tell how much game there was, but I liked the idea of being able to match order fulfillment cards with paper birds. If you knocked any birds off the wire by accident, other players were rewarded with items that provided points at the end of the game.

When we met with Rawan at the SPIEL 2023 show, Featherweight Fiesta was complete—she handed me a copy. My two kids (ages seven and nine) joined me for a few runs at the game, an easy task since the game takes about 15 minutes to play.

As a game, it’s OK. As a toy, it’s much better. But that leaves its chances of staying in the collection a bit slim. My kids are just old enough to appreciate a fun toy, but after they played it twice and I played it one more time with my…

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From time to time, I find myself tempted to bemoan the size of HABA’s larger boxes. Space is at a premium. Rhino Hero: Super Battle could fit in a box half its size. “I’d own more HABA games if they were smaller,” I grumble to myself. “They just take up so much space. This,” I say, as I pick up Flotsam Float, “could be so much smaller.”

It’s in that moment, though, that the pieces tumble around in the box, and I experience a Pavlovian response. The sound of wooden pieces hitting against one another is the chaotic ambient noise of a nursery. HABA knows exactly what they’re doing when they make their bigger boxes so much larger than the components. HABA boxes sound like play™.

Orphans on a Raft

That is especially the case with Flotsam Float. To move that box around is to bear auditory witness to the collapse of an infinity array of Jenga towers. Why is that? It’s full of, well, flotsam and jetsam.

To set up the game, you populate the table with six islands, arranged in a pinwheel. Each island is surrounded by four cards, and those cards in turn…

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Quoridor exemplifies one of my favorite things about a good abstract game: you can teach it without saying a word. In fact, the rule booklet that comes with my Gigamic Games version is two pages long. One of those pages is simply drawings to illustrate the text and are really all you need to understand how the game is played.

While learning Quoridor might be easy, winning can be another thing.

Quoridor is played on a 9x9 grid of 81 raised squares. Surrounding these squares are grooves cut into the wooden board along their edges that isolate each square.

The two players begin by choosing a colored pawn and placing it on the square in the center of the line closest to them. Each player then takes ten of the plain, wooden rectangles that act as fences in the game.

[caption id="attachment_290551" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Quoridor set up and ready to play.[/caption]

Pawns move orthogonally, that is, forward or backward, right or left, from their starting position. Diagonal moves are not allowed (with one exception, covered later). The winner is the first player to get their pawn to any square on the farthest row—that is, the row closest to your opponent.

A few additional rules need to be mentioned here: as…

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Look, I’m an easy sell. I’m a sucker for novelty. Tell me you’ve got a legacy game for children, and I’m going to be curious. Legacy games generally cater to adults, which makes sense. They require paying attention to the same thing for an extended period of time. This is not a strength for which children are celebrated. More importantly, the stories are usually only suggested through fragments of information, rather than fleshed out like a storybook.

[caption id="attachment_288322" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The boat during setup.[/caption]

Along Came Pepe

Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy! aims to change all that. Over the course of twenty-five episodes, you follow the adventures of the good capt’n and his anthropomorphic crew, helping them track down seven magic treasures in their quest to stop the evil Captain Goldtooth.

The game itself is a straightforward sliding puzzle. Working together, players move the various crew members of the Melody to their stations. Passing Capt’n Pepe from player to player, the active player moves one crew member one space. That’s it. You keep going until all the crew members are where…

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When I was a kid, we had a clubhouse of sorts in our backyard. It was more the frame of a clubhouse. It lacked a real roof or finished walls, but it had a kid-sized dog door of sorts to crawl through. We played in it. Sometimes I wonder what our prospects might have been like had we utilized an animal labor force with union credentials to give it a zesty exterior. Thankfully, Ultimate Treehouse has come along to alleviate my wistful curiosities. 

After several plays, Ultimate Treehouse has warranted entirely disparate reviews for its roots, its leaves, and its branches.

The roots

Fat Brain Toy Co., the publisher of Ultimate Treehouse, lays out an admirable agenda in the rulebook before getting to the setup. As a company, their aim is to teach tabletop gaming to families. They defend the hobby as a hobby, they toss out a section of applicable “Gaming Lingo,” and they teach the mechanisms—not to mention the fact that there are such things as mechanisms—by name. The font is large, the tone is encouraging. The whole presentation is a hand extended to folks who have never played a modern board game. 

I love it. 

The setup is conversational and presented, more or less, through speech…

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Last year, while browsing through a random shop in scenic Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the quest for something, anything, to keep my four year old occupied during the vacation downtime, my wife and I discovered something we hadn’t expected to find out in the wild, and certainly not in such a random place.

We found a copy of My First Carcassonne.

She looked at me. I looked at her. Without even exchanging a single word, we both knew that this was it. We’d found the holy grail. But the question remained: would it perform its function? Would he be entertained? And, more importantly, would we? There was only one way to find out.

Overview

Designed by Marco Teubner (whose game Safranito was an official recommendation for the Spiel des Jahres in 2011), My First Carcassonne takes its namesake and distills it down into a very child-friendly format. Gone are the abbeys, cities, and fields. Gone are the opportunities to block your opponents from finishing their structures. In fact, gone is the aspect of playing out workers and retrieving them after scoring features. My First Carcassonne is not a victory point competition. It’s a race to the finish.

Setup

The setup for My First Carcassonne is incredibly easy. Each player…

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This is Not A Game

Since we are a board gaming family, it has been on my mind that my kids should learn some classic fundamental games that have withstood the test of time. I wanted to teach critical thinking skills and strategies in game play, and there came a point in my parenting journey that I decided to teach my kids to play chess. But how? It does not stand out as bright and colorful. What is the point in moving the pieces around like so?

If you have kids, you know that theme is everything. You could make kids try really difficult things by putting their favorite character on a box. But how do you get children's buy-in to a "theme-less" abstract strategy game? You reel them in by building up their affection for the chess pieces. You weave a story together that is silly and cute and sometimes ridiculous so that the kids play with the game pieces, very much like they would play with their make-believe toys. That is what Story Time Chess has set out to do with a lot of success.

This is not my first attempt at trying to teach my kids chess. I have an older child who learnt how to…

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I would imagine, to a game designer, each of life’s moments presents an opportunity. They simply must for a game like Paku Paku to exist. How else does a disheveled pile of dollhouse dishes end in shouting panda-themed madness? 

Panda, fill thine belly!

Each of the five wooden dice in Paku Paku contains some combination of green smiling pandas, red dish icons, and/or the numbers one and two. At the outset, these dice are passed out one at a time until they are all out. With up to eight players, some may begin empty-handed. In the center of the table are twenty four plain white Barbie dishes (plates, bowls, and cups), a handful of penalty markers, and a Table board. 

One…two…three…Paku Paku! Simultaneously, players begin rolling the dice in front of them. When a number comes up, they roll again. When a smiling panda comes up, that die is passed left. When a red dish comes up, a single dish must be added to the stack in the center of the table board before rolling again. If at any time a player is rolling more than the allotted limit of dice (which changes, depending on the player count) or if they knock over the stack of dishes, someone yells Paku, Stop! The offending player then rolls the dice in…

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The Ravensburger game Labyrinth first hit shelves in 1986. Yes, the classic family shape-shifting maze game is nearly 40 years old.

But, guess what is just one year older? The Nintendo video game classic Super Mario Bros., featuring all of the classic characters you remember: Mario, Princess Peach, Bowser, and all of those crafty bad guys. Even though I was a SEGA kid growing up, it was hard to deny the magic of the Super Mario games; they were the best platforming games out there.

In anticipation of the Illumination Films release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Ravensburger has reskinned the original Labyrinth to feature all of the video game’s characters. Super Mario Labyrinth is the exact same game as the original, in terms of gameplay.

Our team hadn’t previously covered the original 1986 game so we thought it was a good time to find out: does the gameplay of Labyrinth hold up?

Watch Out, Wario!

Labyrinth’s concept is easy to teach. A 7x7-tile grid makes up the game’s board, representing straightaways, L-shapes, and intersections of a nefarious-looking dungeon. Three arrows on each of the board’s four sides indicate the place where tiles can be pushed off the board. Each…

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The Evil Magician Zirroz has a predilection for precious gems and a penchant for not paying.

One night, while all but a few of the kingdom’s denizens are slumbering in their beds, Zirroz wraps the castle in an enchantment and begins floating the crown jewels one by one through the castle gates in an effort to pilfer them. If he isn’t stopped, he’ll bankrupt the kingdom, leaving its citizens broke and defenseless.

Fortunately for them, a small band of plucky upstarts stayed up past their bedtime. When they shirked their sacktime, none of them expected to be heroes, but here they are. Seeing what the Evil Magician is doing, they feel compelled to step in and do something about it. So, hiding themselves in the bushes, they begin plucking the precious bijous out of the air and replacing them with colored stones.

Maybe Zirroz won’t notice. Hopefully.

Overview

In Midnight Castle one to four players take on the roles of the heroic townspeople trying to save as many jewels as possible. As the game opens, a line of floating gems has already made it out of the castle, so the players are put into the position of having to play catch up. Every player begins with a small collection of stones and they use these to move to the…

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