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.
Gruff is a two-player tactical battle game. You play as a Shepherd, shepherding a flock of mutated monster goats called Gruffs. Your goal is to kill all of your opponent’s Gruffs OR to kill your opponent’s Shepherd.
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In episode 80, The Family Gamers explored games that are pure fun. Not necessarily the “best” or “most mechanically sound” game, but games that are just plain fun to play. This week we have a game that absolutely fits that mold. We will look at a new game designed by Théo Riviére and published by Iello, Sticky Chameleons.
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“My family is better than yours!” That’s the premise behind Ancestree, created by Eric Lang and published by Calliope Games. Draft tiles and build a dynasty worth commemorating! Or will your lineage be merely mediocre?
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Playing puzzle games with children can be frustrating. If it’s mildly challenging for me, it may be impossible for my 7-year-old; but if it’s the right level for him, it’s far too easy for me. I don’t want to hold back: I want to beat my children fair and square. What to do? Match Madness gives us a possible solution.
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The rules are so simple and intuitive, even a toddler can understand them. In fact, since the game is easy enough for toddlers to understand, this makes it a great game to play with them. You can slowly introduce them to strategy, and the materials are resilient enough to handle whatever it is that makes their hands sticky all the time.
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What comes to mind when you read the phrase “video game adaptation”? Jean Claude Van Damme as Belgian Guile? XCOM: The Board Game: The Companion App? Endless Resident Evil sequels? An absolutely epic pile of cardboard tokens for Civilization? Turning a video game into a movie or a tabletop game is a difficult challenge. Robots Love Ice Cream: The Card Game,
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As a city planner, you naturally want to make the most beautiful and crowd-pleasing city. But watch out! Other players may offload their problems to your beautiful city, even as you upgrade your buildings to become more useful. Will you flip for Flip City, or is it more of a flop?
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Arr, mateys! We be pirates, sailing the high seas in search of Loot. We play cards to capture or defend merchant ships. Loot is one of the earliest games from designer Reiner Knizia. It’s been available in the United States since 2005 from publisher GameWright, but the newest version has updated artwork and comes in a metal tin.
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A rare video-game review! Harmonix is known for rhythm-and-music video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. We love every game they have made (we regularly rave about Amplitude), so when they announced their new game for Switch, Super Beat Sports, we were intrigued. Sports in a music game? How could that work?
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Onitama replaces complexity with elegance and layers with simplicity. With a ruleset that could literally fit on an index card, Onitama delivers a quick, compact strategy game experience that allows its players plenty of room to breathe and ruminate on their next moves.
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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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Birds and flowers and fish, oh my! This beautiful abstract game has players work together to make a beautiful garden. But will the garden be most pleasing from your perspective, or will your opponents have a better view?
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Remove windows from the Macroscope and be the first to guess the picture correctly. Did Macroscope reveal hidden depths, or was it out of focus?
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What does the word “Voodoo” make you think about? Is it a doll with pins? Is it an African religion? Most likely, you don’t think about the game Voodoo, a crazy magic game from Mayday Games. This week we take a stab at this game to find out if it casts a spell on us.
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Did you know that ghosts can scare each other? Neither did I until I played BOO, a compact game for two players from Perplext. Did this ghostly game grip us, or were we perplexed by this petite phantasmal puzzler?
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“There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!” – Sneakers, 1992 For some of us, it’s quotes like these that are about as close to hacking as
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Didn’t you play Daytona 500 when you were a kid? Downforce is just like that, but with superpowers and betting. Sold, amiright?
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In Dairyman, you are a dairy farmer, competing with your fellow farmers to see who can produce the most milk. Make cheese and ice cream along the way, and don’t let it spoil! Do we think Dairyman is a gouda game, or is it all jacked up? Read on to see if it hits a rocky road, or if it is the cream of the crop!
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Masters of the approachable family game, Gamewright delivers another multi-age filler game in Qwingo, a roll & write game designed by Heinz Meister. Read on to find out if we think Qwingo ranks highly, or if it makes us roll our eyes!
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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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