Board Games Categories

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…

One of my goals in 2026 is to write a few more series’ of articles, one of which will be focused on crowd funding opportunities available. These will happen as I see projects I’m interested in; we will look at new projects – perhaps 2 or 3 per article – and projects you can still late pledge for, so let’s dive in things for this week! Mountain Goats: Legacy Mountain Goats is a really fun, small box game from AllPlay…

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…

Board games have always been popular, although most people think about Monopoly, Scrabble or Clue. Modern board games are a bit more niche, but are becoming increasingly sought after experiences for families and friends. Are there good benefits to playing board games? One reason I know that board games are becoming more popular? Walk into a café in Berlin, a library in Toronto, or a living room in São Paulo, and you’re as likely to see people hunched over cardboard…

We’ve had the the privilege of working with many board game publishers over the years on reviews; for many of these publishers, I was playing their games for the first time when review copies arrived at our office, but one specific publisher was in our homes long before we had a review relationship with them. To that end, I thought it would be fitting to rank my favourite Stonemaier Games titles – I have had the privilege of playing them…

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,…