And that was July 2025

Soooooooooo hot!

But did that stop us playing games? Heck no.

In fact, we went a little epic with three different games days hosted in our new games room (have I mentioned the new games room?) Our first offical guests were @boardgamemeeple and @carrieongaming who brought with them a lot of cool new games for us to try (thus the New To The Table section being bulkier this month) including one we immediately wanted to add to our collection.

Two weeks later our good friend @thoughtsofameeple and her husband visited for another epic day where I ended up teaching four of the six games played. We opened with THE CASTLES OF BURGUNDY: DELUXE, as we’re all fans of the game, we rarely get to play at 4, and we wanted to show off the super gorgeous version.

The very next day two members of our D&D group came round with their recently purchased copy of NEMESIS so that I could teach them the game. It was an absolutely epic play with betrayal, slaughter, and an angry Pilot our for my blood. The game ran long but in the best way, and while no one claimed victory by the end, there were no early exits which is always great.

I also enjoyed a nice peaceful Oniverse day where I played through all eight games in the series. It was relaxing to have a solo game day and I’ve been wanting to go back and play some of the entries I’ve neglected in the last year or two.

With all those games played and more, the month ended up with my most plays of the year so far at 80+.

Now lets look at what arrived and what new games made it to the table.

FLIP 7 – This is a small box card game that I’ve had my eye on for a while and hoped to have played before now. I’ve watched several playthroughs and it looks perfect for our gaming groups. When I spotted a copy in Waterstones and remembered I had £10 worth of points on my reward card, I just had to pull the trigger.

Board Game Mat – A little board game adjactent here. Once the board game room was comleted and the table was ready, I knew I wanted to get a playmat to put down on it. Due to the size of the table, I was looking at custom dimensions and found my way to Deepcut Studios. The process of ordering the mat was super sumple; pick the dimensions, choose a nice design to go on it from their catalogue (I went with ‘Caribbean Sea’) and then add stiching on the edge if you want (I definitely did). It took a few weeks to arrive from Lithuania to UK, but when it did turn up, it was immediatly clear that it was worth every penny. It looks amazing and fits perfectly.

LOST RUINS OF ARNAK: ADVENTURE BOX – Lost Ruins is one of our favourite games and you can bet I was straight in on the pre-order for their latest release; the beautifully produced Adventure Box. Not only does it come with another expansion (that’s three now), but it is the ultimate storage solution for all that yummy content. Was it a little on the expensive side for what you get? Sure. But, like the Deluxe version of THE CASTLES OF BURGUNDY, that cost goes towards a product that we really enjoy and get a lot out of. I certainly wouldn’t buy something like this for any old game in the collection. This is one for fans.

VANTAGE – After I spotted this game last year I’ve been keeping a keen eye on it. The premise of exploring a world sounds interesting. The game started taking preorders a few weeks ago and I jumped on board as soon as the e-mail came through. It was a tough few days as other folks around the globe started receiving their copies and getting stuck in, but ours finally arrived towards the end of the month and, just mere hours later, we were already crash landing on a mysterious planet (first impressions below).

CASINOPOLIS – The latest ButtonShy release is the next in the series to the Sprawlopolis games, though the difference here is that it doesn’t add into the previous three games. This one is standalone. ButtonShy have got quite a few games flying out this year (I backed the next three campaigns after this one) so there will be plenty more wallet game goodness coming through the letterbox in 2025.

ARKHAM HORROR LCG: THE INNSMOUTH CONSPIRACY – This year we’re really getting into the Arkham Horror LCG and Innsmouth was the last campaign box we needed to get up to date. Unfortunately, I still need the Investigators box for this run, but as we’re still only back on THE FORGOTTEN AGE, I can wait to grab it when it’s back in stock.

ETERNAL DECKS – When @boardgamemeepl visited at the beginning of the month, this was one game that I requested he bring. I’d seen coverage on Instagram and been drawn in by the design and distinct artwork. But it’s not an easy game to get hold of, so I wanted the chance to at least try it out to see if it was even worth the effort of tracking down.

It’s co-op deck building of sorts as you place your cards and complete chains, all while following specfic critiria for each row. We started beginner which had cards with values 1-9 on one track, values desending 9-1 on another, and then a basic ‘not the same colour consecutively’ rule for the third. There’s a lot more going on but the gist is completing certain parts of the board to score markers before any player runs out of cards. This was super interesting because you have to work together to complete certain rows to bring more cards into the game. It’s a tougher game to derscribe than it is to play. There are higher difficulty levels and different set ups for variablity, and I would absolutley love to play it again.

ALIBIS – This small box game was described to us as CODENAMES meets JUST ONE and that pretty much sums it up. Nine villans but only one is a target. Each villain has a word placed on it. Each player gets knowledge of two villains that are not the target. Now you have to pick a single world to link your two villains and hope that the other players guess corretly. Once you’ve all revealed your word, you need everyone to have selected the same remaining villain. Do this three times and hopefully you’ve removed enough tokens to win. It was a lot of fun, and for me, it superceeds both CODENAMES and JUST ONE. It’s a lot quicker to play and it’s so much fun when players think they have someones words and suddenly another plays clue throws it all out the window.

MEN-NEFER – It was hinted that this might show up during the games day and my wife was super eager to get it to the table when she spotted it in the selection. An epic game of worker placement and tracks, this game comes with a whole bunch of wooden tokens and a lot of possible spaces on the board to place them.

That said, you only have three types of actions to take to make all this happen, and it’s this part of the game that really intrigued me. You can either place one of your three workers, slide them across on the main board, or take a new action tile for next round. There is a lot to choose from in this game, and I tried not to spread myself too thin (as often happens to me in bigger games as I just pull all the levers). I focused on the river to gain end game scoring tiles, the temple, and Sphinx statues because their rewards often came in handy.

And we liked it so much, we quickly tracked down our own copy.

PHOTOGRAPH – A clever little card game that has players holding cards of different colours and numbers in their hand that cannot have their postion changed. You’re trying to lay the cards in assending or desending order to take good pictures, and avoid messing that up or you’ll gain minus pont cards. It looks like it should be quick basic, but there is a lot of cunch in the game as you work out the best way to move cards through your hand to be able to lay down the most cards efficiently. You also get penalised at the end for any missing colours in your photo collection, so you need to get a least one of every colour down. Clever and head scratchy.

CAPTURE THE BALD YETI – This prototype game was sent to us by the designer in the run up to the Kickstarter campaign going live in a few months. It’s a very take that game, reminisant of other games like EXPLODING KITTENS. In this one you’re trying to get Cameras and Traps set up at your camp (the area in front of you) so that, if and when you gain a Yeti card to your hand, you’re able to capture evidence of his exsistance. Of course, the type of game this is, you’ll find other players using other cards to constantly disrupt your camp area and steal or discard you cards, so you are all fighting the same uphill battle.

Our first play was a two, and I have to say, I was quickly turned off the game due to the experience. As the only focus of my opponent, the deck and her worked together to strip me of my good cards. This isn’t normally an issue, but you draw one card a turn so building up any sort of defense or offence is a slog. Thankfully, later in the month, we mamaged a couple of games at 4-player, and it’s a much better experience that way. The take that moments are spread out more and you feel less of a target when things go wrong.

REGICIDE – A game you can play with a deck of cards, this co-op game sees you use Ace to 10 cards to battle the three sets of Royals. And it’s tough. It’s what every one who has played it says, and it’s what we expereienced. But a first play also revealed an interesting and fun little battler, one that looks to improve with each play as you learn best practises and sharpen those tactics. Each of the four suits gives you an ability from healing to double damage. This means that it’s not just getting good numbers to do the most damage to the current Royal card, but also looking at what you need. Players getting low on cards? Play a Diamond and draw that many cards between all the players. I also like how the Ace cards are used. Their strength is a meager one, but they can be paired up on an attack and the suit doesn’t need to match. These allows you to gain two abilites at once. For a set of rules that uses a standard deck of playing cards, this one has a lot of meat on the bone.

FLIP 7 – This card game has been the talk of board game town recently, and after a handful of plays I can totally see why. It’s push-your-luck with some neat little extras. A dealer holds the deck. Do you stick or twist. So far, so Blackjack. But here you’re not really aiming for a number, you’re hoping not to get a duplicate number. The deck contains cards 0-12, but each number has that manay copies in the game. If you already have a 12, and you’ve not seen any others, either in front of players or in previous rounds (the deck doesn’t get shuffled across rounds until it’s gone) then you have eleven more 12’s waiting to spring up and knock you out for zero ponts. It adds in some modifiers and a handful of power cards that can screw other players up and that’s about it. It’s so much fun and well deserved of all it’s praise. If you get the chance, definiately give it a go.

BARCELONA – We had more friends over later in the month and one game they brought to teach was BARCELONA, a game I’ve been wanting to try for ages. I have this thing with big, heavy games in that I’m terrible at most of them, but I really like the act of playing them. Two hours later I’m usually propping up the score board but I still have fun. The same happened here.

The action selection is clever (though it has been done before) with your pieces being put down at an intersection, giving you two actions that turn depending on where in the city you placed it (it’s a grid system with different actions located at the ends of rows and columns). What it adds is the build action following your choices with the people pieces you used being put towards one of three building types. Most of the actions either give you pieces of road to put on the board, or add things to your own player board. There’s a lot going on, and you can’t spread yourself too thin. It remains not overly crunchy while still giving you lots of decision space.

VANTAGE – In the build up to it’s release, the latest Stonemaier game from the mind of Jamey Stegmaier had a marmite feel to it. Some weren’t keen on how un-board game it looked and played, coming off as an expensive Choose Your Own Adventure game and nothing else. Others (myself included) were extremely keen to crash land and get stuck into the mysterious world Jamey had created over eight years. I don’t think this game will produce many casual fans. You’re either not interested or fully invested.

For me, and my wife who joined on the first ‘expedition’, it was a lot of fun. In fact. I’m almost jealous of my wife’s experience as she could not have gone in colder. I watched a few of the How-To-Play videos in the build up to release, and also followed Jamey’s design diary’s on BGG, and while nothing was spoilt, my first time exploring felt like my second visit. For my wife however, her confidence in the game mechanics grew parrallel with her confidence within the world of the game. It was magical to witness.

I still absolutely enjoyed it though. We had our crash sites and began to venture out, one location card at a time. We stumbled upon a little something awesome that I didn’t know was in the game. We’ve been back a second time with different characters and different crash locations and had a very different experience. It’s a very interesting game.

CASINOPOLIS – This is the fourth entry into the ‘opolis’ series of games from ButtonShy, and it plays mostly the same. It’s standalone this time round though, so there won’t be any of those combining shenanagans.

So if you’ve played SPRAWLOPOLIS, you know what you’re doing here, for the most part. Overlaping cards, building up blocks of matching colours, and scoring three cards. But they’ve added a few extras here that I like enough to make this my potential favourite in the series. The Jackpot icons add an extra twist to placement as you’re trying to get at least three matching Jackpot symbols in a row. It’s not easy.

My favourite new thing is the way the score cards work now. Once dealt, they stay in a set row, with the first card scoring 1pt per criteria, the second scoring 2pts, and the final card a whopping 3pts for each compleation of it’s goal. This will lead you to focus more so on that third scoring card as it’s reward can, and most likely will, be the difference between success and failure. Definitely like this one.

• Having our first game room guests over for a fantastic games day.
• Having our second game room guests over for another awesome games day.
• Receiving our Deep Cut Studio playmat.
• Finally getting UPRISING: CURSE OF THE LAST EMPEROR back to the table.
• Teaching my friends their recently aquired copy of NEMESIS. It was epic.
• Having an Oniverse day and playing all eight games in the series.
• Switching my reviews from Instagram to my Website to give me more words.
• Hitting my 200th Blues Reviews!!!