Our staff reviews games to help your family find new games to play that are worth your time and money! Please see our review policy for more information.
BLANK is basically a starter pack for the interested designer; it provides a template to create rules and effects to make the game your own.
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Blank Slate is a party style game in which players try to come up a word that completes a cue card and matches exactly one other player. My gaming tastes don’t really lean towards party gaming at all, but I did find Blank Slate to be enjoyable for certain occasions…
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“Busking” is playing music in a public place to earn money. And there’s no better place in the world for street musicians than New Orleans, the Big Easy. Use your band’s energy to play jazz standards and new pieces – then gain money and influence from the crowd! Big Easy Busking is a game for 1-5 players by Joshua J.
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Betta is an enjoyable game that will remain in our library. It only takes about a minute to explain the rules and players will be off swimmingly.
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Become the overlord you’ve always dreamed to be; flip the script by taking on the role of an Evil Lord. Invite goblins and dragons to join your ranks, gathering resources and looting human kingdoms.
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Beacon Patrol delivers a calm, enjoyable experience that’s accessible to many ages. Explore the North Sea by laying tiles, together.
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Family Gamers, we think silliness is a great way to relate to your children, and with the game BattleGoats from CardLords, there is ample opportunity for less-than-serious play.
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I love playing games with my kids that have either a simple setup, a simple cleanup, or simple rules. Battle Sheep, designed by Francesco Rotta and published by Blue Orange Games, has all three. With just a handful of quality components and a very limited set of choices to make each turn, games are breezy fun with your little lambs…
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From its first notes, Batman: Everybody Lies taps deeply into its roots in the award-winning Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game. But as big fans of Batman, we wish it had something more.
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Oh no! All the animals have escaped the barn and are hiding out. Can you fill your pen with the most valuable animals and avoid the sneaky crows? Barnyard Roundup is a simple bluffing game for 2-6 players designed by James Hudson and published by Druid City Games.
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For those of us who do remember the film, Back to the Future: Back in Time is a fun romp through a memorable setting in a legendary intellectual property. It eschews a hard faithfulness to the movie in lieu of making the game more fun…
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It’s time to bear down and start building! This week we take a look at one of the hottest games to come out of Origin this year, the tile-laying game Bärenpark from Lookout Spiele and Mayfair. We’ll tell you whether it’s a universally koality* experience, or if we think it’s a bit more polar-izing.
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Move over, Modern Art! It’s time for Avant Carde, an innovatively simple deck-building game.
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Aurum is a trick-taking game where players take on the role of alchemists melding base metals into gold. Earn points from gold and correctly bidding on number of tricks you’ll win. The unique trick-taking hook in Aurum is that players must not follow suit!
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A security guard caught you red-handed sneaking into the school library late at night for some before-the-final cramming. Your penance is to sort and reshelve all the books that need to be cleaned up! Athenenum: Mystic Library is a drafting and spatial planning game for 2-5 players ages 10 and up. It takes between 30-45 minutes to sort and shelve
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Arraial is the closest analogue to Tetris we’ve seen yet, but with player interaction and the ability to choose your polyomino shape(s)! The goal of the game is to attract the most visitors to your festival in the form of meeples.
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Crashing lightning, booming thunder, and thousands upon thousands of gallons of water pour from the sky. The drumming of torrential downpour on the roof of the Ark is calming in its regularity, as the unending rows of matched pair animals bray and paw nervously. There is a loud creaking as the rising water level begins to lift the massive boat
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Mapping a hidden city full of traps is the theme of ArcheOlogic, a new logic and deduction game from Ludonaute. ArcheOlogic is a deduction and polyomino placement game for 1-4 players ages 12 and up. A game should take a little under an hour. Setup In ArcheOlogic, players race to determine the correct placement of six buildings (represented by polyominos)
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Anomia is a word from a Latin root and means “without name”. It’s the term for being unable to come up with the name of an object. Anomia is also a game (from Anomia Press), in which players race to come up with a word that fits a certain category, ranging from “color” to “rock opera” to “shampoo brand”.
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It’s time for a safari with Animix! Collect animals of different types and make sure the ones still on the table are arranged in their favorite patterns.
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