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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There’s something about the cover for At the Office, a new release from designer Reiner Knizia and Polish publisher Trefl, that’s deeply evocative. Artist Michał Ambrzykowski perfectly captures the essence of an anonymous mug from a workplace break room. Look at the cover for more than a moment, and you realize that mug is inside a coffee dispenser. I can hear the sound the machine makes when you press the button to brew and dispense the coffee. I can smell it. I’m there, in my khakis, spacing out while I wait for the process to finish.

When you open the box, you find the standard accoutrement for a roll & write. There’s a manual, of course, four pencils, five dice, and a pad of double-sided player sheets. Each side shows the same pyramid of office employees. They appear to have coordinated for portrait day, as each group is wearing a uniquely colored t-shirt. There’s a fifth group, a multicolored cohort of five bespectacled workers, that overlaps the color groups.

On your turn, roll the five dice. Four of them correspond to the colors of the employee shirts. The fifth, a white die, knows no master. You take any colored die you want,…

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Fast forward with me into a future when tourists can hop aboard a Falcon X and visit the moon. Perhaps you have come to the moon to check out the Tycho crater, which you have seen from afar, or the Sea of Tranquility that Neil Armstrong walked upon decades ago. Like him, all of us astro-tourists are jumping and leaping around each other weightlessly. Well, here we are and now we are all vying to get as close to the most coveted craters.

[caption id="attachment_280458" align="alignnone" width="768"] The game box and board partially opened. It's so neat![/caption]

Space flight has been achieved! Which crater shall we visit?

The objective of the game is to score the most points by securing the most advantageous spots on the single-lane raceway made of up craters. Winning points are calculated by multiplying the number on the token with the value on the crater space.

Game play is simple; after each player has chosen their token color, the game begins with the youngest player's starting roll. Players place and move their tokens on the board by matching them with the number on the dice roll. Each astronaut's initial move begins on any of the available red starting craters. In consecutive moves astronaut tokens that match the…

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Have you heard of Sid Sackson?

For most gamers new to the hobby, my guess is that you have not. That’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but for those looking to learn more about the hobby (whoops, The Hobby™), I find it fascinating when we can celebrate designers who made games 40 or 50 years ago.

Case in point: Bazaar, a game that was first published in 1967 by Sackson and the 3M Bookshelf Games line. Along with a game called Acquire—maybe Sackson’s most influential addition to tabletop gaming—Bazaar and a handful of other games were published as a way to give gamers products with a small footprint and easy-to-learn rules that could be played in under an hour.

Bazaar has made its way through a half-dozen publishers over the years; on its own, I’m not sure Bazaar would be enough to warrant a new version. Eagle-Gryphon Games recognizes the history of the design and decided to package Bazaar along with another Sackson design from the 1980s, Samarkand, and released the duo as simply Samarkand Bazaar in a package released in 2022.

But wait, there’s more! Tripling down on the value proposition, Eagle-Gryphon packaged one more small card game in the Samarkand Bazaar box: Samarkand Market, a reimagined version of Sackson’s 1998 game Business…

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One of the things I love most about board games: no screen time. It’s actually why I’ve fallen so hard for games since COVID began. As my day job shifted from in-person to virtual, it took away my ability to stare at other co-workers in the flesh. After Zoom/Teams/Meet call #485, one tires of staring into the void to “engage” with work peers.

Similarly, I now subscribe to the newspaper the old-fashioned way, by getting one delivered to my door. I read more, too. And I have a big, 384-page book of puzzles called Ultimate Mind Games sitting on my desk, so that I can do word searches, crossword puzzles, and Sudoku among other tasks.

I love Sudoku. In fact, it’s probably the most consistent logic puzzle I like to do whenever I get the chance. I don’t think I’m an expert, but I love the challenge that comes from figuring out where the numbers fit, especially the medium and hard challenges in books I have picked up over the years.

Hiroba (2022, Funnyfox) is a Sudoku-adjacent, area control competitive puzzle game with pebbles, ponds, koi, and a short playtime. Should you dive into the pond or not?

Garden Salad

Hiroba, which Google tells me is “square” in…

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Every now and then something lands on my desk that charms me completely. Something irresistibly playful, smart and altogether beautiful. Something I can’t help but pore over, a fidget spinner for the mind.

Let me tell you about 21X.

Algebraic Blackjack

The goal of 21X is to get as close to 21 as possible without going over. Each round you receive two cards, the value of which might be fixed or could be determined by the number of cards you have (N) and/or an integer of your choosing (X).

You might be dealt these cards:

[caption id="attachment_269544" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Your starting cards are -5 and 8X.[/caption]

The total value of these cards is (-5 + 8X), but since you can choose the value of X you have some flexibility. If X is 1 then your total would be 3. If X is 2 then it's 11. With 3 you’re up to 19 and might call ‘Stick’, challenging your opponents to beat your score within a minute. But that leaves you open to someone else reaching 21 in that time so you might instead ‘Twist’ and take another card.

[caption id="attachment_269545" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Your third card is 3N.[/caption]

Since you’ve got three cards, N…

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I love a good logic puzzle. Games like HABA’s The Key series, The Search for Planet X, Decrypto, Codenames XXL, Awkward Guests, Cryptid, and many other deduction games are the types of experiences I will always try. (One game I won’t try: Alchemists. I have rules about long games, especially ones that overstay my body’s interest in solving a grand deduction puzzle!)

I used to love the parts of those old SAT tests when the logic problems showed up on the math portion of the exam: Lamont and Sally walk X miles, then pick up groceries, but then Sally takes the long way back, while high-fiving 40 of their best friends. What time is it?

Ridiculous, right? Love those brain teasers. That’s why Turing Machine (from Le Scorpion Masqué) was so high on my list. The game was so hot at Gen Con 2022 that media members couldn’t grab a copy, so I tried to stay patient while our friends at the publisher secured a review copy.

Once the game is in hand, Turing Machine is easy to get to the table because its playtime is so brief. If you love a good logic puzzle, Turing Machine fills a brand new niche for me: the 15-minute punch card deduction…

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I ran into Nora Meiners from Gamewright while strolling the exhibition hall at GAMA Expo. After she sold me on giving Sushi Roll a spin at Gen Con last year, she had nice things to say about some of our other Gamewright reviews, such as Happy City.

“Have you played Sleeping Queens? It’s a classic.”

I hadn’t even heard of Sleeping Queens, a 2005 release from Gamewright that got re-released a few years ago for its 15th anniversary. I was traveling later that day but the Sleeping Queens box was pocket-sized, so I slipped it into my carry-on and wished Nora well.

Now that I’ve played it a few times, I have to admit: Sleeping Queens is a fantastic light card game that fits on any game table and gets quality family fun into a 10-to-15-minute package.

Why have I not heard of this game before now?

Play Kings, Get Queens, Win Game

Those are essentially all of the rules to a game of Sleeping Queens.

Combining a mix of math, Memory, and some light combat with cards that play offense or defense, Sleeping Queens plays 2-5 players and can squeeze between almost any game you are going…

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The idea of Coyote is simple enough. Each player is dealt one card, which they do not look at, and sets it in the provided base so that all the other players can see it. An additional card is placed face down in the middle of the table, and can only be inspected by players with Peek cards to spend. The cards number from -10 to 20, with two additional special cards. On your turn, you either say a total you believe to be less than the total value of all the cards—keeping in mind that your information will never be perfect since you can never see your own card—or you challenge the previous player.

If…

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Introduction

Even in the midst of Covid in 2021, the Ferrari Pit Crew practiced more than 1300 pit stops between April and December—a sign of dedication to their work, to the team, and their desire to get it perfect during race day. I want my car crazy kids to know that greatness comes with hours of work especially when it comes to math practice!

The Prix

Pit Formula is a frenetic card game that requires concentration and quick thinking to be the fastest pit crew to solve your race car’s issues in order to win the race! Different car parts are repaired by different math operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication or numeric intervals, as players simultaneously solve these math problems and find the missing parts to fix their car.

Formation Lap

The game is set up like so:

[caption id="attachment_246698" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The set-up for a 2 player game.[/caption]

Each player receives a Player Car Mat and a Car Marker. The number tokens are set up in 2 random arrays of 7 by 5 and placed within easy reach of all players. These are the tokens that will be used to replace faulty parts throughout the game. The stack of 12 Spare Part tokens should…

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Once I Built a Tower

In a game of Sky Towers, each player will be building a series of towers using numbered cards ranging from 1 to 10. A player can only have 1 tower at a time (or 2 in a 2-player game). Each tower is completed when the total of the numbered cards in that tower reaches exactly 21. Scored towers are set aside until the end of the game. After the final round of play, each player will look through their completed towers and count the number of yellow kites therein. The player with the most yellow kites wins the game.

[caption id="attachment_234971" align="alignnone" width="696"] A sample completed tower worth 3 points[/caption]

On a player’s turn, they may take any 2 actions of their choice in any order (including choosing the same…

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And make sure to check out Brody's solo play through of Long Shot: The Dice Game.

And our our unboxing

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“Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries, which is most commonly used in first-past-the-post electoral systems. Two principal tactics are used in gerrymandering: "cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).” - Wikipedia

Cakeland’s got a power vacuum and it needs filling (of the berry kind). The blueberry party and the strawberry party will square off in an effort to divide Cakeland between them, each in an effort to guarantee themselves the bigger slice. Will the strawberries come out on top or will the blueberries take the cake? Only one way to tell. It’s time for some Berrymandering!

Mmmm... Berries

In the game of Berrymandering, two players are going to be taking turns slicing up the cake that has been laid out between them. The cake is made up of 36 small square tiles, each illustrated with 1 to 4 blueberries or strawberries. There are also a few mystery tiles that, when flipped, will reveal between 1 or 2 mystery berries apiece (each fruit has an equal number of single and double…

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