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.
haven’t encountered another 30-minute game that we’ve put on the table as often as Bloom Town. Easy to play and surprisingly deep in strategy, it’s a great game with unique mechanics and a variety of paths to victory.
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I’ve always been a fan of the medieval time period for its astonishing castles and Arthurian lore. Blazon focuses on one aspect of medieval history; heraldry.
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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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Blank Slate is a party style game in which players try to come up a word that completes a cue card and matches exactly one other player. My gaming tastes don’t really lean towards party gaming at all, but I did find Blank Slate to be enjoyable for certain occasions…
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“Busking” is playing music in a public place to earn money. And there’s no better place in the world for street musicians than New Orleans, the Big Easy. Use your band’s energy to play jazz standards and new pieces – then gain money and influence from the crowd! Big Easy Busking is a game for 1-5 players by Joshua J.
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Betta is an enjoyable game that will remain in our library. It only takes about a minute to explain the rules and players will be off swimmingly.
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Become the overlord you’ve always dreamed to be; flip the script by taking on the role of an Evil Lord. Invite goblins and dragons to join your ranks, gathering resources and looting human kingdoms.
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Beacon Patrol delivers a calm, enjoyable experience that’s accessible to many ages. Explore the North Sea by laying tiles, together.
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Family Gamers, we think silliness is a great way to relate to your children, and with the game BattleGoats from CardLords, there is ample opportunity for less-than-serious play.
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I love playing games with my kids that have either a simple setup, a simple cleanup, or simple rules. Battle Sheep, designed by Francesco Rotta and published by Blue Orange Games, has all three. With just a handful of quality components and a very limited set of choices to make each turn, games are breezy fun with your little lambs…
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From its first notes, Batman: Everybody Lies taps deeply into its roots in the award-winning Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game. But as big fans of Batman, we wish it had something more.
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Oh no! All the animals have escaped the barn and are hiding out. Can you fill your pen with the most valuable animals and avoid the sneaky crows? Barnyard Roundup is a simple bluffing game for 2-6 players designed by James Hudson and published by Druid City Games.
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For those of us who do remember the film, Back to the Future: Back in Time is a fun romp through a memorable setting in a legendary intellectual property. It eschews a hard faithfulness to the movie in lieu of making the game more fun…
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If your brother was missing, would you stop at anything to find him? Would you ask for help or steal anything that could help?
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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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We love Avatar: The Last Airbender. Now we can work together to fulfill Aang’s destiny, while building each character’s strengths.
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Move over, Modern Art! It’s time for Avant Carde, an innovatively simple deck-building game.
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Aurum is a trick-taking game where players take on the role of alchemists melding base metals into gold. Earn points from gold and correctly bidding on number of tricks you’ll win. The unique trick-taking hook in Aurum is that players must not follow suit!
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A security guard caught you red-handed sneaking into the school library late at night for some before-the-final cramming. Your penance is to sort and reshelve all the books that need to be cleaned up! Athenenum: Mystic Library is a drafting and spatial planning game for 2-5 players ages 10 and up. It takes between 30-45 minutes to sort and shelve
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Arraial is the closest analogue to Tetris we’ve seen yet, but with player interaction and the ability to choose your polyomino shape(s)! The goal of the game is to attract the most visitors to your festival in the form of meeples.
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