Holidays, as I understand it, are coming. As I write this, Christmas is barrelling down on us like a festive red-and-white juggernaut, and it’s the time of year when families reach for games. If your experience of games at gatherings can be summed-up with Charades and Pictionary, you might be pleased to know that there are loads more to choose from.
Roll-and-write games are bigger now than they’ve ever been. The runaway success of games like Railroad Ink and Ganz Schön Clever paved the way for more ambitious, complex games like Hadrian’s Wall. There are plenty of games out to the gap between those light and heavy titles, and Rolling Realms is one of the latest.
Do you know that feeling at the start of a game of Chess? Your opponent makes their first move and you immediately start trying to get into their head. What are they doing? What’s their plan? That’s how Senjutsu gets after just a game or two.
Complete challenges, earn points, laugh, and get to know your guests a bit better. Let me tell you, when you play Final Challenge, you’re going to know everyone around the room a lot better than when you started.
When I first saw the name ‘Subastral’, I immediately thought “Cool, definitely a space game”. I was wrong. Subastral in this context refers to exactly what it describes – below the stars. The focus is our own blue marble, our own speck of beauty on the canvas of cosmic insignificance: planet Earth.
Tiny Towns is a damning indictment on urban sprawl, overcrowding, and an ever-expanding society’s need for quick, affordable housing! Actually, it’s not. It’s a really cute abstract puzzle about space optimisation, forward planning, and the most adorable little wooden buildings.
They say good things come in small packages, and they don’t get much smaller than Zuuli, which is about the size of a pack of playing cards. Zuuli is a card game from Unfringed, where players are building and upgrading enclosures at their wildlife parks, while rescuing the animals who’ll live there
I really like Z-Ball. It quickly turned from a game I wanted to play a few times to give it a fair review, to a game my son and I take when we go somewhere, because we really enjoy playing it.
The premise of this abstract game is simple. You play the roles of deckchair attendants aboard the infamous ship, and your goal is to appease the First Class passengers who want prime deck space for their deckchairs.
Kombo Klash is a tile-laying, ‘match three’ game from Hub Games. Players battle by playing the cartoon animal tiles from their hands, using each creature’s special abilities, and trying to make adjacent groups of three or more of the same type to score points.
