Board Games Reviews

Resource management and contract fulfillment games are a lot of fun, and I love when completing contracts provides ongoing rewards as you play. Tabriz has this in spades, and while the experience was may be a bit lighter than I would want regularly, it’s a great game to take out with people who don’t love heavy, long experiences. With a quick play time and early to learn rules, Tabriz is incredibly approachable, despite a 14+ rating on the box (which…

Ever wanted to play poker cooperatively? Me neither, not because I didn’t want to, but because I would be asking myself, who plays poker cooperatively!? Well, with The Gang, now you can. Using a standard deck of cards, The Gang has players working together in a really unique way, and while I didn’t think it would work when it was originally pitched to me, I’ve come to really enjoy it! The game uses standard Texas Holdem poker rules, but if…

For better or for worse, Zoo On looks like a kids game, but it packs a bit of depth and strategy you might not realize by looking at the cover. Zoo On isn’t my favourite game to play, and it’s one that probably will get played less each year than other titles, but yet still one I plan to keep around for a little while. The game does invest in a them I’m excited about – you’ll be playing animal…

Through the Desert is a game I’ve wanted to play for a good long while now, and thanks to our friends at AllPlay, we had the chance to do that in December! We already waxed poetic about the game’s components, but good components don’t mean a good game! Did I enjoy Through the Desert as much as I thought I would? Let’s take a look. There feels like a ton of game in this little box, but once you get…

The Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom is much more about the journey you are on and making it thematically relevant than it is on providing deep strategy. In a cooperative, family weight Lord of the Rings experience, I think that is more than OK. You’ll be guiding your group of adventurers all the way from Rivendell to Mordor to destroy the one ring, avoiding the Nazgul and the Uruk-Hai along the way. Card will be played, dice…

After a few shipping snafus in October, we finally got our hands on a review copy of the Cretaceous Rails expansion, Cretaceous Skies. If you’ve read our review of Cretaceous Rails, you know how much we loved the experience, and called it one of our favourite games of 2025. Another expansion is coming for Cretaceous Rails called Cretaceous Seas, which you can check out and still pledge here! I was actually lukewarm on Cretaceous Skies the first few times I…

Negotiation style games is generally a genre I steer clear of, but when I first played Moonrakers I decided I needed to rethink that opinion. I really enjoyed completing contracts with the help of others around the table, and enjoyed negotiating rewards as a part of that experience. IV Studio has another game in this universe – Brink – which uses trading, a type of negotiation in my books. That said, it melds that with another mechanic I really enjoy,…

The ideas and strategies behind Fromage aren’t anything crazy or difficult, but the unique cheese piece placement and how those locations activate and pieces are returned to you is unique and interesting. Fromage isn’t much different than other worker placement games, but the recalling workers mechanic is enough to make this one worth keeping in your collection. On the surface, Fromage is a charming Euro-style game about making cheese in various regions of France. This is achieved through a wide…

Snake Charmers is a hidden role game I can get behind. I absolutely suck at bluffing, so games like Coup are not good for me when I’m stuck with a specific role. In Snake Charmers, though, your role can change and I absolutely love how that works. There are always two groups of people: snakes and others. In the middle of the table are numbered cards from 1-6 and they are all on their “night” side. The deck that players…

Long before I was reviewing board games I had the chance to play Wild Serengeti from Bad Comet Games. This game made me fall in love with animal themed games, and we even wrote about it in our top 5 animal themed game article a few years back. Wild Serengeti is definitely a bit longer than than I would like, but the turn to turn moments are really strong. In Wild Serengeti, players are attempting to maneuver animals into positions…