Our games room was
We really like the Roll ‘n’ Write ‘Railroad Ink’ series, but I ended up not backing the KS campaign for this tile version because there was too much content on offer, and I’m usually either all in, or nothing at all when it comes to crowdfunding.
Which is a shame because this straight forward tile drafting game is pretty good. Good enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually ended up in our collection after now trying it. Though perhaps with a couple of the expansions in case it gets stale.
It has the vibe of RAILROAD INK crossed with a little CARCASSONNE as you build your own area out, making sure to get city tiles grouped together, making sure road routes and rail routes link togerther, and making sure you have a nice big rectangle at the end.
I read the manual and taught this in about 10mins. It’s smooth and simple, a nice opener to a games day (which is exactly what it was for us).
This is a game that had so much hype going for it when it came out. I’m not sure why I avoided it; i guess it just didn’t look like it was for me.
Well, I’m glad I got to finally try it. More drafting, this time with wooden tokens representing different environments. You build out certain colours in certain patterns to score animal cards that you’ve drafted.
You can’t do it all, so picking a couple of different types (I went mostly on Trees, Rivers, and Mountains) will let you focus. Of course, that’s if there are any of the tokens you need still available when it’s your turn.
Overall the art is really nice, and the game looks simple but has some tricky decisions as it closes in on the end game.
This is a game I’d never heard of and was introduced to us by someone we were gaming with at Shake, Battle & Roll.
Essentially you are building out a space station with various cards. The cards come in six posible colours, with each colour having a theme as to what it’s abilities are. Yellows are good for gaining more money (essential for most actions). Blue lets you draw more cards.
The rounds play out until every player has passed in a row. So you could pass a turn and then come back in next go round as long as at least one other player took a turn after you.
But not everything is peaceful in space. This is a take-that game where you can damage other players stations. While the cards themselves don’t go away, damage does stop you from using them. You can pay to repair as an action, or wait until the start of the next round where all damage is removed, but it’s less effecient that way.
It was an alright game. The art is simple and a little old school. I like that you can purchase cards to make yourself asymetric. Not one I’d seek out, but happy to play again if someone wanted to.
I’m still to play the original KAVANGO. A few of my gaming friends own it, but for some reason I’ve just not gotten round to trying it.
While at Shake, Battle, & Roll, a friend brought along a copy of a spin-off game set in the same series. A push-your-luck bidding game called SCAVENGERS.
The game consists of three rounds, with each round consisting of five ‘bids’. Here you are a bunch of scavenging animals (hyenas, vultures, and the like) trying to take the most meat from a carcus. Unique, for sure.
You bid with a hand of cards. The cards represent the different scavengers and range from 1 to 6. You also have a small number of action cards that break rules and let you do some fun things.
The challenge here is that your hand of cards (12 scavengers and 4 action in a 4-player game) must last an entire round of 5 bids. And each bid’s reward increases. So you might want to withdraw from a bid, letting other players burn of useful cards so you can be stronger later.
It’s a pretty good game. Sure, the luck of the draw can be a deciding factor (I had a weak hand in the final round and could barely compete). There is also the fact that any cards you don’t use at the end of the round count as minus points which means if you’re not leading a bid, you can just be stuck with cards an unable to do anything about it.
But for what it is, SCAVENGERS works well as a nice pallete cleanser between bigger games.
Another game that came out at Shake, Battle & Roll was this remake of the classic auction game, CONTAINER.
Here you are producing goods and pricing them in a way that they make you money and undercut competitors.
There are five different colours of goods, and each player will be chasing down one type more than others so as to score big at the end. Having my first play at the maximum count was a good first experience.
That said, while I enjoyed the gameplay with the people at my table, and I understood the rules perfectly, this game does not click with me.There are too many steps to get to what you need (mainly getting those containers to the central island in your company’s spot).
I don’t think this is a bad game. It’s a classic for a reason, and the new edition has great production and a few new mechanics. I’d still play it (probably only at the full player count), but it’s a game I would never own, and will never get to grips with.
There is a series of games that all come in boxes that look like old leatherbound books. BRISTOL 1350 is one of them and it’s my first dive into these games.
This one is a race, but with a twist. While dice are used to determine the distance the carts move each round, they also form part of the unique gimmick of the game, namely that all players across the carts have the potential to contract the plague.
In BRISTOL 1350, winning is only half the battle. You must cross the line healthy. More importantly, your cart must be desease free when it makes it out of the city, even if you are healthy.
There is some fun bluffing here because you don’t know who has the plague until the end of the game. And it can change mid game. I started healthy (each player has two cards, and if they total 6 or more, you’re infected).
But later I went from a 2 all the way to a 5 after my cart was forced to mingle. While my wife, the only other play in my cart assured me that she was healthy, I had no way of knowing for sure (and based on previous bluffing game experiences with her, I didn’t trust a single word she said).
There are action cards involved too that let you reroll dice, infect people, add to the mingle piles, move between carts, and do more things to come out on top.
It was a fun and chaotic game, one that works well at big meet ups (it goes to 8-player!). Silly fun that I would easily play again.
GAUDI has been on my wishlist since I saw images of it last Essen, so I was very fortunate to receive a review copy of this Devir release.
This is a card drafting and tile drafting game with some beautiful art and some clever scoring. Over three rounds players are trying to score points in three aspects; Nature, Catalunya, and Religion. Importantly, the lowest two of the three of these will be your total at the end of the game.
GAIDI joins a small list of games that we own that got played a whole lot in their first week of us owning them. My wife and I were fasinated with it and have enjoyed plays at 2 and 4.
You really have to balance the cards you take and which aspect they are for. Nature scores each time you add a new card to it’s column. Catalunya usually scores between rounds. And Religion is all about end of games points. So the score track doesn’t always show the whole picture.
The tile drafting is also fun and is a necessity because the cards have a requirement to play (based on colour and amount of tiles) and this increases with each card played.
This is definitely a review game that will be staying in our collection for a while, and don’t be surprised when (not if) it appears in this years Top 50.
Our friends left in the afternoon of the final day of Shake, Battle, & Roll, but my wife and I weren’t ready to go home yet.
I’d gone to buy TIMBER TOWN, a 2-player only game from AlleyCat Games, at UKGE 2025, but they were sold out when I got there.
So, seeing it on the shelf of the games library, I figured it was about time to see what all the fuss was about.
In TIMBER TOWN, players are drafting tiles which represent different buildings, and placing them on their 4×4 town board. Each building has a scoring criteria for the game, so placement is key.
But the drafting area is the unique mechanic for this one. The buildings come down a river, four narrow boards that move from one end to the other between rounds. The old goes away, dumping any tiles left on it, before being placed at the start and gaining new tiles.
The buildings come in seven colours, and each colour (other than red and brown) have different cards to choose from or randomise in each game (much like TINY TOWNS).
The game ‘flows’ nicely and has some nice extras like the tool tokens that let you do things a little extra on turns.
It has the feel that it might get stale after several plays. Not one I’d own, but definitely one I’d play at conventions if we needed something 2-player only.
I really enjoy the original TAG TEAM and was really excited to get some new characters to add into the mix.
Here the theme is Arthurian legends, with some really cool characters included in the smaller roster.
This expansion is stand alone, so you don’t have to have the original. And the characters are massively different to play with. They each do some cool unique things that make them great additions to the TAG TEAM roster.
In our fist play I took Percival and Morgan up against The Dragon and The Green Knight. It was a close game, but I lost it on a single card placement.
What I love about this game is that you go in knowing that it’s a luck fest, with very little strategy, yet some card placement decisions can make or break your game. And it’s so short and easy to set up, that a loss is but a brief moment, and you can go again right away.
Looking forward to what other characters come out for this series. Scorpian Masque have a nice little franchise available to them now, and while I’ll be skipping the next expansion (just because I have no history with the SNK characters), I’ll be paying attention to every release.
This is a game that I knew only by name and by that alpaca. I didn’t know anything about gameplay, components nor mechanics.
ALTIPLANO is a bag builder, one where you’re gaining resource tokens (food, wood, stone, wool) in order to gain more resource tokens.
Each round starts with players pulling tokens from their own bag and placing them onto their board. Different combinations of spots on the board, coupled with different location spots, give you different rewards.
What gives this one a little extra is that you have a meeple that moves around between seven different locations in the centre of the table, and certain actions can only be carried out if your meeple is there. Couple this with limitations and costs on movement and it becomes a nice little puzzle.
It’s an older game, and one that I’m glad to have finally experienced. I liked the puzzle of planning what to do and working out if I had the efficient movement to do it all that round. And it’s cool that you can place tokens for future use. Say a spot needs two wood, and you only drew one, you can place it there this round, hoping to pull the second one next time. Doing this clears up your limited token draw each round.
Very glad to have tried it, and could definitely find a place for it on our collection.
HORRIFIED: DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
I’ve played the original Hammer Horror HORRIFIED, and I own the cryptid themed HORRIFIED: AMERICAN MONSTERS sequel, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten with the series so far.
But at our annual Hallowe’en meetup, we skipped Greek myths and Cthulhu mythos, and went straight to D&D. And it was fitting that two people that I play a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons with were the ones to bring their copy and teach it to us.
Most of the game is typical Horrifed fare; collect items, rescue people, and take down 2-4 monsters who each have specific mechanics.
But this version adds some D&D flare to it that was actually a nice touch for people who are into this flavour of TTRPG.
The biggest addition is the D20. Not only can a player tempt fate and use one of their four actions to roll a D20 in the hope of having something cool happen, but the monsters also rely on the most infamous of dice when it comes to them attacking or being attacked.
Add to that the locations on the board and the characters throughout the perk deck should be familiar to the fans of the setting, and it’s a nice twist on the series as a whole.
I do however think that it is lacking in a few departments. Only four monsters for a start, meaning that variabilty is lower than earlier entries. I would also have liked more classes, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they do more with that in the Horrified D&D follow up coming soon.
It took me a while to build up the courage for my GALACTIC CRUISE video. I received the game at the start of the year, but I lacked the confidence to talk about it, especially with so many better content creators out their doing it justice.
But October saw me brave up and finally cover one of my favourite new games of the year. Definitely expect to it to show up in my Top 50 at the end of 2026.
Another game that I reviewed this month was WINGSPAN POCKET. I grabbed a copy on impulse a little while after it’s release and we’ve been playing it at most player counts to get a feel for it.
My final ‘review’ of the month was GAUDI, which quickly became a firm favourite. So much so, that I don’t even try to hide it in my final video of the month.
Our only gaming convention of 2026 was Shake, Battle & Roll. It was our first time attending, and it’s conveniently on our doorstep.
Here I produced a video about the experience and the games we played. It ended up being . . . a little long.
And finally we visited some friends for a board games day. I leanred one, taught two, but mostly it was about playing games at more than 2-players, which is what we usually do when we meet up with a lot of our friends.
