I lead employee engagement for a food & beverage manufacturer when I’m not here talking games. At a recent lunch event, I decided to bring some of the games from my personal collection to the office to spur some laughs while we did yet another round of bland lunch catering.

I put my copy of Just One (2018, Repos Production) at one table, then waited to see if anyone would engage with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see members of our HR department sit at the table, read the short list of instructions, and dive right in.

Within seconds, you could see the magic beginning to form. Players used the (admittedly terrible) dry erase markers to begin following the game’s simple rules, putting one player in the hot seat while all other players used their easel to come up with a clue that hopefully no other player wrote on their dry erase easel.

When the HR team members not currently in the hot seat showed their words to each other, the usual amounts of surprise, cursing, and accusatory gestures took place. Left with only a word or two to come up with the answer, it was great to see the active player struggle to come up with the right word…and when they did, it was high fives…

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King of Tokyo: Origins is a dice-chucking game that pits monster against monster in the age-old battle for Japan’s biggest city. The winner will either be the first person who reaches 20 points, or be the last monster standing.

Set Up

All players take a cut-out of a monster and sets it in the plastic stand. They then take the accompanying monster’s score tracker, setting the wheel in the upper left (Points) to zero and the wheel in the lower right (Health) to 10. 

[caption id="attachment_295759" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo: Origins[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_295760" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Mechamster and Cosmic Joe[/caption]

Set the board on the table in reach of all players—or don’t. The board only has a circle for the attacking monster to stand in. That’s all. Simply placing your monster in the middle of the table will have the same effect.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to purchase these to gain either a temporary or permanent bonus. Place three cards face-up and the remaining cards to the side.

[caption id="attachment_295762" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of cards[/caption]

Randomly choose a starting player and…

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Return to the beleaguered city of Tokyo—now with the addition of Tokyo Bay—as our monsters slug it out once again for domination and to claim victory. 

If you’re new to King of Tokyo, I went over the setup and gameplay in my recent review of King of Tokyo: Origins. (Known from here as KoT: O) That game comes with four monsters, each lacking in special abilities and rendering them disappointingly interchangeable. King of Tokyo: Monster Box (KoT: MB), a fully stand-alone game, solves that problem in a big way. 

Let’s start with some of the basics, though. 

[caption id="attachment_295770" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo Monster Box box[/caption]

KoT:MB comes with its own big deck of monster cards. 

[caption id="attachment_295771" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of the many Monster cards in the box[/caption]

From my games, these can be mixed in with the KoT:O cards if you want even more options.

KoT:MB also comes with two sets of dice, one in black & green and one in orange & black. The orange set was initially included in the King of Tokyo Halloween expansion. There is no difference between these sets of dice. If…

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sequitur (noun): the conclusion of an inference: consequence

Do you consider yourself a wordsmith, a connoisseur of lexicographical delights, a veritable exemplar of sesquipedalian predilection? If reading that sentence really gets your blood flowing, chances are you’ve played a few word games in your time and have relished those experiences. And, if reading that sentence fills you with dread, there’s a good chance that you’ve played a few word games in your time and have left those experiences feeling the exact opposite. Word games tend to reward those of us who are verbose while alienating those of us who just aren’t.

Games should be enjoyable. You should walk away from having played a game with friends feeling uplifted, filled with emotions of friendship and camaraderie, or, at the very least, enlightened. You should not walk away feeling belittled and stupid. All too frequently, at least one person walking away from having just played a word game walks away feeling the latter.

What if I told you that there was a word game that isn’t about the words? What if I told you there was a word game that doesn’t require you to be a walking dictionary? What if I told you that there was a word game where even the smallest words could lead you to victory? Well,…

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I would have told you that Decrypto had been out for way longer than five years. Like Just One, Decrypto arrived in 2018, out of the blue, and immediately established itself as a go-to word game. To think there was a year in which we received Decrypto and Just One. The heart quickens. We had no idea how good we had it.

To celebrate five years of success, Scorpion Masqué has released a 5th anniversary edition, spicing up the classic—board gaming has a short memory—with 440 new words. Does it change the game in any appreciable way? No, this is still very much the Decrypto people know and love. It does freshen things up a bit, though, for those who’ve put their copy of the original release through its paces.

It takes a round or two to get used to Decrypto’s structure, and it’s difficult to describe in absence of the game in front of you. What I’m trying to tell you is, what I describe may not sound fun. I assure you, it is.

The players are divided into two teams, each of which has four secret words that everyone on the team can see. Each round, one player on each team (the “Encryptor”) has a secret three digit code that they need their teammates to guess.…

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I am one of many who have come to know the story of George Méliès through the pencil drawings of Brian Selznick. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a magnificently illustrated story of belonging and purpose that surrounds the trials and triumphs of the French filmmaker. You can bet it’s a compelling story if it rouses Martin Scorcese to create a three-hour family masterpiece—Hugo sits firmly as my third favorite movie of all time.

Before I knew about the 19xx series of titles from Looping Games, I had marked 1902 Méliès as my most anticipated release at 2023’s SPIEL in Essen. Given my relationship with the subject matter, I never hesitated in wanting to join Méliès here in creating his best known film, A Trip to the Moon. When four games from the series arrived at my door, I set the others aside and opened 1902 like a kid on Christmas. Anticipation always pays off, right?

Imagine my horror when I realized the board wasn’t in the box. I was ready to fire off an email when I thought it best to open the rest of the boxes to see if anything else was lost in the shuffle. Much like my rulebook laugh with 1987 Channel Tunnel, I…

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One of the many advantages of getting intellectual property for your board game is leveraging the audience to look at your project. For example, developing games based on well-known franchises like Marvel or Game of Thrones allows you to tap into those brands' existing fanbases. Fans of the IP are likely to take an interest in a related game, even if just to check it out briefly via marketing materials or initial coverage.

Which leads to my confusion about today’s game, The Last Kingdom. Based on an obscure Netflix show, it only made a blip on my radar due to some YouTube hype around it, calling it a “hidden gem” or “game of the year.” After checking them out and realizing that this is an area control drafting game where you can switch allegiances, I had to see this one to the end.

The Last Kingdom throws you a position of power of the political kind. You are a figure of importance during a time when the Saxons and Danes are having a series of cultural exchanges on the battlefield. Like any other board game, your power in this world is measured through victory points.

Based on that description, one can easily assume that this is a Risk-style or “dudes on a map” board game, and they would be…

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I picked up a copy of Virtual Revolution (2023, Studio H) during Gen Con 2023, but this one sat on the shelf for a bit. Despite the cool cover and the fact that publisher Studio H has never done me wrong, buzz was quiet on this game so I worked through my SPIEL haul during most of the fall season.

In December, I got Virtual Revolution to the table. I first decided to investigate the source material. The game Virtual Revolution is based on a 2016 film titled 2047 Virtual Revolution. Thanks to Amazon Prime, I spent 90 minutes watching the film to get ready for the game.

The movie was…OK. The best part of the movie is the premise: in the near future, almost everyone is living out their life in a virtual world featuring “Verses” where people play out their fantasies serving as in-game avatars in medieval and sci-fi environments. So many people are living in Second Life-style worlds that the streets of “Neo Paris” are essentially dead. When the movie’s lead character, an agent named Nash (Canadian stuntman Mike Dopud), walks the streets, it looks like Neo Paris is completely deserted…because everyone is essentially playing video games.

The film’s references to so many other works are straightforward. Nash has the look and feel…

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I don’t enjoy failure, but I’ve come to believe that the best party games are the ones that constantly force you to fail. Just One is hard. Codenames can be crushingly difficult. In That’s Not a Hat!, failure is inevitable. Wavelength, Pan T’es Mort, Concept, I could go on. The specter of disaster looms. It often pummels you. Why do we play these, exactly?

I Know You Want It

Add to this fine tradition Broad Lines, a new cooperative party game from designer Piero Modolo and publisher Cranio Creations. Broad Lines seems to draw obvious inspiration from Just One, but instead of a word game, it applies the same general structure to Pictionary.

The active player, whomever that may be, draws a card and picks a number, which corresponds to a word. The goal of the group, it may not surprise you, is to get the active player to guess this word. The first player takes a square transparency and a dry erase marker, and draws one of two things: either a single curved line, or two straight lines. Once they’re done, the transparency gets placed on the provided easel, and the active player gets two guesses.

[caption id="attachment_294488" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Can you guess the word?[/caption]

Assuming they’re wrong, play continues…

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Welcome (Back) to Arrakis

I wrote a glowing review of the original Dune: Imperium earlier this year. To say that I was enamored with it would be an understatement. The game has risen in the ranks to claim its spot among my top board games of all time, and I jump at the chance to introduce new players to it. I even snagged the new digital version on Steam and have already sunk about 20 hours into the challenges and weekly scenario modes there. This is all coming from someone who isn’t that taken by the world of the original Frank Herbert novels and has seen the Denis Villeneuve film a grand total of once.

At Gen Con this year, Dire Wolf Digital announced a “standalone spinoff” for the game titled Dune: Imperium - Uprising. Initially, much of the conversation around the new game was slightly confusing for the gaming community because it wasn’t clear how this would work with the existing Dune: Imperium properties. The publisher quickly clarified that both expansions for the base game can also work with this new spinoff game and that cards from the base game can be mixed and matched. It is an example of making the waters a bit too muddy for my liking. It’s a sequel and a spinoff, but…

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“Wait, you have NOT played Disney Villainous?”

A surprising number of interactions over the last few years at a game night here or an event at a gaming cafe there have ended with this statement, as if I’ve been living in a board game cave for the last five years. (A cave without Disney Villainous, apparently.)

And, I get it…Disney Villainous (2018, Ravensburger) is popular for a reason. The concept is brilliant—players take on the roles of the evil characters from a number of Disney’s classic films, taking actions to complete a unique win condition while other players get the chance to play “Fate” cards from an opponent’s personal Fate deck, messing with their plans. The best part: each villain’s Fate deck is made up of heroes and items from that villain’s movie, such as Robin Hood for the Prince John Fate deck.

The game is considered a classic, and it’s doing well enough in sales to have spawned a boatload of expansions. But the original isn’t perfect—the main issue I always heard from other players is that it’s a game that takes a little too long to play.

Ravensburger has tweaked some of the original format for a new title, Disney Villainous: Introduction to Evil. It’s only available at Target, and like other Target exclusives such as…

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From the chilling screams of my last horror board game review of Scream to reviewing yet another board game based on a horror property franchise on its deathbed! Fate has led me down a dark and unexpected path today, and we are delving into the heart-pounding world of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where terror awaits at every corner if you are playing the Trespassers. For that one player sitting on the Sawyer family throne, they might have some new ingredients for the evening family BBQ if things go their way.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Slaughterhouse is a One-versus-All experience armed with five different scenarios which all take place on the same farmhouse board. These scenarios are goals that the Trespassers will need to accomplish before they can escape. It can be something simple, like finding some car parts and gas, or something more complex, like taking photos of the place or gathering evidence. Meanwhile, the Sawyer family’s goal is to relentlessly pursue the Trespassers and slaughter them.

[caption id="attachment_284185" align="alignnone" width="800"] The Sawyer Family loves Grandpa[/caption]

Plenty of Pig’s Blood Here

The Trespassers themselves don’t have any special abilities or asymmetrical powers. The only difference between them is their starting personal item, which can break a rule or two. Trespassers always…

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“I am Adam, Prince of Eternia, Defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull…and this is Cringer.” 

I can’t tell you how many Saturday mornings (and, eventually, syndicated afternoons) began with that line. I also can’t tell you how many dollars my parents must have spent outfitting my childhood with everything the He-Man marketing machine could churn out. Ah, there’s nothing like the smell of cartoons developed specifically as 22-minute advertisements—two glorious 65-episode seasons that, despite the lackluster animation, somehow survived years of airtime.

How fitting, then, to have Adam, Prince of Eternia, introduce Masters of the Universe: Clash for Eternia with nearly the same sentence. The nostalgia kick that began before I tore the shrink only continued as I took my first peek into the rulebook.

Masters of the Universe (MotU from here on out) is a tactical one-versus-all skirmish game from Michael Shinall, Leo Almeida, and the publishing team at CMON. Players take up their favorite heroes and baddies from the beloved 80s cartoon universe to engage a series of standalone Scenarios.

Regardless of my affinity for the deep dive into trademarked waters, it is the Power System—the mechanisms that form the backbone of the game experience—that really shines with MotU. Mark my words, this is not the last you’ll hear of the Power System. I can all…

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