We’ve talked about Cascadia many times before, from our review of of the Cascadia base game, to our review of the Cascadia: Landmarks expansion, our inclusion of Cascadia in a list of games you can easily play with kids and a humorous list of games which include bears. But I don’t think any of us expected Cascadia to get “the dice game” treatment.

That’s right; this newest member of the family (technically two newest members) is a reimagining of Cascadia as a roll and write game. But let me reassure you that Cascadia: Rolling Hills, and Cascadia: Rolling Rivers aren’t just some money grab. While they do share the same DNA, they’re totally new games.

Let’s dive in and find out what makes these two new entries tick. Note that while my main focus in this review is on Cascadia: Rolling Hills, I do talk about both games.

Cascadia: Rolling Overview

As the name implies, these are dice games built atop the Cascadia framework: the animals and habitats we’ve come to know and love, as well as the hex based layout of the countryside. Over the course of 20 rounds you’ll roll dice to gain various animal and nature token symbols. These symbols allow you…

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Here’s my bold opening: I think Carcassone is only OK.

Carcassonne, released more than 20 years ago, is the quintessential tile-laying classic in the eyes of most people I know, and many of the people who write for our site. Carcassonne won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres in 2001, and has been reimplemented more than a dozen times in various formats for gamers of all shapes and sizes.

But each time I play Carcassonne, I shrug my shoulders. Great design, and I can see the depth; it’s just not something I itch to play regularly. Never, at any point in my gaming life, have I been sitting somewhere when a player shouted:

“Hey everyone! I’m so fired up to play Carcassonne! WHO’S WITH ME!!!!”

When Land vs Sea (2021, Good Games Publishing) hit my table, I immediately noticed similarities with this game and Carcassonne. The two are certainly different enough; Land vs Sea has multiple play formats that distance it from Carcassonne, and I like the simple approach in the two-player version of the game. One player is Land, the other is Sea, and each only scores when tiles are laid that complete pictures featuring their faction.

The two-player version of this game, as my colleague Bob Pazehoski, Jr. agrees, is interesting. The three-player version…

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“DADDY! You got the next Exit Advent game?”

My daughter got excited when I brought the box up from the game closet to our kitchen island. That’s where last year’s entry, Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar: The Hunt for the Golden Book, lived for about three weeks as we worked through the 24 puzzles in that edition.

Our family thought The Hunt for the Golden Book was the best Exit game we have ever played, and maybe the best escape room / one-shot deduction puzzles we have yet tried. As I noted in my review, it is perfect for solo players or families who want a minor challenge spread across a number of 15-to-30-minute exercises for the brain.

Sure, the story behind The Hunt for the Golden Book was only OK. But all I need is a proper setup before diving into a puzzle, and that game had it. Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar: The Silent Storm (technically a 2022 release, but we got it during the summer of 2023 from our partners at KOSMOS) sets up another holiday mystery complete with interesting ways to solve a series of riddles.

If you have questions about how the Exit Advent games play, feel free to peruse my review of The Hunt for the Golden Book from last year. How did…

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From the rulebook: “It’s summertime. Amid the forest lies the glade. Bring your forest to life with creatures, leaves and forest fruits. Create sets of 3 tiles to place a toadstool into the glade. Complete a set of 4 tiles to add a toadstool into your store. Use toadstools in your store for extra actions.”

That’s The Glade in a nutshell (pun totally intended). In this quaint, abstract, tile-laying game from renowned designer Richard Breese (Keyflower, Keyper), the players will be drawing tiles from a bag, adding them to their tile rack, and then placing tiles into their tableau to create sets and score points. And when all is said and done and the last leaf has fallen, the player with the most points wins.

Of course this is a very high-level overview of the game. If you just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we learn how to play The Glade.

Setup

A game of The Glade is set up thusly:

Place the Glade board in the middle of the playing area. Then, each player receives a Forest board (turned to its basic side*) which they place next to the Glade board, abutting…

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Pyramido is a handsome game. Colourful tiles, playful icons, bold wooden markers, a vertical build, the tempting façade of tabletop satisfaction. It's a charming way to spend half an hour or so. 

It's also simple to play; a pyramid complex this is not. On your turn you’ll take a domino tile, placing it into your personal pyramid and sometimes placing one of those cute wooden markers on top. There are four rounds to the game and during each you’ll build another layer of your pyramid, starting with 10 dominoes (creating a 5x4 grid of half-domino squares) and in the final round capping your pyramid with a single domino.

[caption id="attachment_291531" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The first layer of a pyramid. Please note: The wonderful playmats that feature as a background to the images in this review are not included with the game.[/caption]

At the end of each round you score your 5x4 grid from above. Some dominos have icons on one or both halves and you’re trying to create areas with lots of icons in each of the six colours. However, you can only score an area if you’ve placed a scoring marker in it during the round. Points are awarded for the number of icons in each marked area, with a bonus…

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Because of the nature of the game, this is the only photo.There’s nothing quite like the particular feeling that comes from seeing people enjoy the fruits of your personal labor. If you knit, or cook, or fix up old cars, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a warmth in experiencing the joy of others and knowing you did that. The hours you spent crocheting that hat were worth it, because it’s keeping your friend’s head warm. You were worried you added too much paprika, but look how much everyone is enjoying the cream chicken.

It doesn’t even need to be something that serves the joy of other people. Maybe you make your own furniture, or you paint watercolors you’re never going to show anybody else. The making of things is a deeply personal experience, and probably our best way of proving to ourselves that we exist in this world. We need it.

The Promise of the Premise

Unboxed, from designer Jordan Sorenson and publisher WizKids, has a marvelous premise. You play as archeology students on a dig who have come across the remains of a series of ancient games. Given nothing but a (miraculously) complete set of components and a few hieroglyphics, you are tasked as a group with figuring out how exactly these games were played.

…

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On the home menu, for example, you can squish the quilting. You can walk about with your mouse, depressing whatever area of quilt you land on. During the game, when you select and place a tile, little threads appear and tighten around its perimeter, sewing it in. Most importantly, perhaps, you can pet the cats roaming around the screen.

Yes, my friends, you can pet them. If you click on one of these free-roaming felines, they stop immediately, ready for your attention. Other cats gather, envious. The soothing music—acoustic guitar paired with a variation on lo-fi beats that your grandmother would absolutely enjoy—renders the scene so inviting that you could very well find yourself spending several minutes simply petting these cats. Granted, I don’t particularly enjoy Calico, so it isn’t the most surprising thing in the world that I could get distracted in this way.

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Navigating the Ruins

In Mayan Curse, players are explorers who have stumbled upon an ancient Mayan temple. The path to the inner temple is divided into several sections, each with a series of tiled rows containing different symbols. It’s a long sprint to get to the end of the temple, but that’s where the most remarkable treasure awaits! Along the way, explorers can pick up Mayan monuments and artifacts (called stelae) that reward them with knowledge, the all-important resource needed to win the game. There is a catch, however: there are three giant boulders precariously perched along the walkways, and as the explorers get further into the temple and make more of a stir, these boulders will inevitably be shaken loose and start rolling towards the entrance of the temple. You must make it out of the door before all three boulders reach the entrance, or else you’re sealed inside the temple forever and automatically lose!

The key to navigating this temple comes from the ancient stone floors. In each round, players will draw three sacred stones from a bag. These stones are decorated with symbols matching the collection of symbols on the temple floor. Players can then make up to three slides, bumping the physical location of the floor tiles around to create a pathway. Then, players spend…

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Every time I review a Flatout Games title I feel like I need to insert a boilerplate sentence about how much I love their games, how creative and innovative their team is, and just how nice of a group they are. But this time I’ll just say that Nocturne is their newest title, and if you’ve enjoyed Point Salad, Cascadia, Calico, Verdant, and Fit to Print, you should check out Nocturne.

Nocturne Overview

In Nocturne, players take the role of foxes (foxen?) traveling through the woods at night. Throughout Twilight and Moonlight phases, players will place spell tokens onto forest tiles, gather mystical items for their collections and concoctions, and attempt to earn points for completing goals.

Before we jump into the review, let’s clarify a few terms.

• Forest tiles - tiles that are used to layout the “game board”. There are 80 in total, of 8 different types, each with their own variations. The starting board size is based on player count.
• Spell tokens - a set of identically numbered discs players use to claim forest tiles. Players will use fewer tokens at higher player counts.
• Twilight / Moonlight -…

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When a game wins a major tabletop award before you review it, you don’t really have much ground to stand on.

The world already agrees that Dorfromantik: The Board Game (2022, Pegasus Spiele) is at least a very good game, because it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres over the summer.

While there’s always commentary on the games that win this award (in part because there’s always a debate on the shifting sands around the weight of games in this category), time is usually kind to the winners. If you look at the list of winners since CATAN won in 1995, almost every single one is still being celebrated today. This year alone, I’ve been at game nights where we played Just One, Codenames, Pictures, Dominion, Hanabi, Azul, and Kingdomino. Many of these made repeat appearances.

Those are all amazing games. Dorfromantik: The Board Game is no different. That’s because it combines an incredibly simple teach and infinite replayability in a package that can be played solo, multiplayer, campaign-style, and/or as a high-score challenge.

I get it now. Dorfromantik is really good.

Spelling Error

Dorfromantik is a cooperative tile-laying game for 1-6 players, although given the ruleset, I decided to just…

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When I was a kid, pop-up books were rather rudimentary, but even then I was enthralled by the possibilities. Today I am thankful for names like Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda, creatives whose efforts have produced some of the pop-up books that grace our kids’ shelves. Few of these intricate productions survive intact, but that is only due to the vigor with which they are engaged and enjoyed in our home. They are popped until they drop.

It should come as no surprise, then, that The Shivers drew my attention. Described as a “Pop-up Tabletop Mystery Adventure” by the folks at Pop Fiction, this inaugural design from Andy Logan is the sort of box that begs investigation—both of the product itself and within the story it aims to tell. Players work together to solve a mystery via the clues dropped all over the pop-up rooms representing the Shivers family house in Fogmoor. 

Before I ever cracked the shrink on the box, though, I trembled at the other side of the coin. The Shivers is also something of a role playing game. One player assumes the responsibilities of the Storyteller, sitting behind the pop-ups leading and guiding the others through the scenario. The intended experience, then, also involves the other players loosely “becoming" the characters represented on their standees in…

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As much as possible, I try almost every review copy of a game with my family if the ages on the side of the box align with the ages of my children.

I have a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son. When the new tile-laying game Neotopia (published by MEBO Games and distributed by Arcane Wonders in the US) arrived recently, I looked at the side of the box:

“Ages 8+”

Good enough for me. I did my first play of Neotopia with my daughter, and I was impressed by how quickly she got up to speed on the game’s simple ruleset. About 25 minutes later, our game was over and we talked a bit about the game.

That post-game discussion, paired with plays I did with adults in my other gaming groups, have left me in an interesting place. For those seeking a beautiful game at family weight for anyone over the age of seven, Neotopia is a good fit.

For adults, the reception has been mixed, in part because the adults kept blaming a different game: Azul.

Here Are All of the Rules

Neotopia is a tile-laying city building game for 2-4 players. Over a series of turns, players will take three actions on…

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Monkey Mayhem

The year is 2083. The last humans died out forever ago, and the Earth has continued to grow and thrive. Fruits, grains, and various flora have continued to flourish, giving way to a whole new ecosystem to support the growth and evolution of apes. Broken-down electronic objects lost their power a long time ago, but you can bet with a couple of new batteries, that old Nokia phone will still work. This is the strange yet beautiful world in which After Us drops us. Players take on the role of competing tribes of apes trying to strike out and establish dominance by being the first to 80 points in this brave new world.

After Us is a deckbuilder, with some familiar setpieces for fans of the genre. At the start of the game, every player’s tribe consists of eight tamarins, from which each player draws four and assembles them in a tableau in front of them. These cards can be moved around and placed in any order. Each card has several “frames” on it—most of the time, these are partial frames that continue off to the right or left side of the card. By lining up these open frames between cards, players can “close” them off, thereby gaining the benefits contained within the frames. This is all…

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