I’d like to take a moment to address the uncomfortable prosody of the title. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is, at the very least, guilty of dropping a “The,” is it not? There’s something about the way “Trick-Taking Game” is thrown in there, with a lack of propriety that brings nothing to mind so much as the words “Cheese Product,” that feels off. The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game feels better.

I’m Not Stalling, You’re Stalling

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a cooperative card game, very much in the same spirit as The Crew. Designer Bryan Bornmueller seems to have drawn particular inspiration from the second installment, Mission Deep Sea, which has a wider variety of mission types than The Quest for Planet Nine. Each chapter of Fellowship provides the players with a variety of characters to choose from, each of whom has a specific victory condition that must be met in order for the team to succeed.

In Chapter 1, for example, the players are presented with a choice of Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Pippin. Frodo needs to win a specified number of Ring cards, one…

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Publisher Shadowborne Games burst onto the scene in 2022 with their debut hit Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. The sheer enormity of Oathsworn is impressive to say the least, from both a first-time publisher and first-time head designer Jamie Jolly, although the staff is composed of some industry veterans in both the board game and screenwriting industries,  Behemoth in both size and scope, this game comes complete with optional high-quality miniatures, terrain, and even an ‘armory’ of various weapons that can be physically equipped to the character miniatures via a removable push-fit system. Want your hero to swashbuckle two swords at a time? Just pop out their current arms and replace them with the new blades you picked up last session. The armory system and larger-than-life terrain, while completely superfluous, adds to the experience in a fun way. It’s a “they didn’t have to do that” kind of sentiment that you’ll end up seeing throughout the entirety of the game.

[caption id="attachment_310504" align="alignnone" width="1500"] To flail or chop? Decisions, decisions.[/caption]

Into the Woods

Oathsworn is a large campaign game that effectively boils down to two phases: exploration and combat. In a given ‘chapter,’ the formula is the same. Players start with a narrative-driven exploration, making choices throughout, until finally reaching a…

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2016 was a much different time for me. I was newly into my love of board games, Meeple Mountain was not even a year old, I’d never heard of Reiner Knizia, and the selection process I used for games was a mix of “did it look good on Tabletop” or “that cover looks really cool”. The latter criteria was what I used to decide on Kickstarting an unknown to me game called Circus Flohcati, by the aforementioned Reiner Knizia. I ended up selling it several years later, unplayed, because the game just never spoke out at me.

Fast forward to this past October when I received a box of games to review from our friends at 25th Century Games. Included were Tasso Banana, Sausage Sizzle, and Circus Flohcati. But this time I was ready: the good Dr. Knizia had become one of my favorite designers, my love of light card games had grown immensely, and it didn’t hurt that the cover and graphic design was still eye-popping!

Let me tell you about Circus Flohcati.

The Greatest Show On Earth a Dog’s Butt

Ahem! A quick reminder that Circus Flohcati is a game about literal fleas in a circus.

In gamer parlance Circus Flohcati is a “light press…

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Not So Neighborly is a 2-4 player party game that lets players live out the fantasy of terrorizing their neighbors over petty grievances—like putting the garbage bins too close to the driveway. The goal is simple: play cards to score 10 points while dodging dog poop, casual arson, and general pettiness. On each turn, a player either plays or draws a card, and then passes the turn to the next player.

The Cards and Gameplay

Scoring cards represent various neighborhood buildings, each worth 1-3 points. Along the way, players might draw mundane action cards, which allow them to skip an opponent’s turn, steal cards, or force discards. Then, there are the attack cards, the real chaos-makers. If you don’t enjoy “take-that” mechanics or prefer not to alienate your family before the next holiday gathering, I suggest you stop reading now and pick up Machi Koro instead. It’s likely to provide a far more enjoyable experience.

Attack cards are instant turmoil, designed to raze a neighbor’s carefully built plans. Imagine: just as a player envisions a serene neighborhood, they smell smoke—because their house is on fire. Or perhaps they wake up to find someone (or something) has left an unpleasant surprise on their porch, negating the ongoing power of…

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Slay the Spire is a rogue-like deck-building video game that burst onto the scene in 2019 to great acclaim. Initially launched on Steam, it was an instant critical darling that soon expanded to both console and mobile platforms. While it wasn’t the first deck-building rogue-like game—Dream Quest and Hand of Fate come to mind—it still stands as the pinnacle of the genre that it helped to take mainstream, spawning many imitators but no true challengers to the throne. I’ve personally sunk at least 500 hours across multiple platforms, enthralled by its difficult but addictive gameplay. 

When I heard that a board game version of Slay the Spire was being made, I was a little surprised. Not surprised that people were cashing in on the popularity of a mega-hit and the growing board game hobby. I was surprised because Slay the Spire already feels like a board game in digital form. It has a pretty standard deck-building format. Start with a 10-card deck of basic cards, draw five cards, take actions, repeat and reshuffle as necessary. Throughout the course of the game, you’ll be adding cards to the deck, perhaps removing some of the weaker starting cards, trying to optimize that card deck engine to engineer powerful turns that hopefully translate to winning.

Granted, Slay the Spire super-sizes the format…

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Christmas Tree is one of those games that I had no idea existed. My friend, Steve, knows that my wife is a Christmas fanatic (e.g., she watches Hallmark-style Christmas movies year-round, parts of our house are decorated with Christmas lights that never come down, etc.). So a few years back, a bunch of people in my social group were doing a Secret Santa when he stumbled onto this game. He had drawn my wife’s name, so this was a no-brainer. My wife fell in love with this beautiful drafting game.

[caption id="attachment_309900" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A beautiful box that begs to be played during the holidays![/caption]

Game Play

Christmas Tree is a fairly straight-forward drafting game. Each player starts with a player board in the shape of a tree with 21 spaces allotted for decorations. Along the edges are halves of lights (bulbs, in the game’s vernacular) which can be used in scoring later. Players are also given three cards that show Linzer cookies, and three four goal cards (with snowflakes on the back) that they keep secret.

[caption id="attachment_309901" align="aligncenter" width="600"] There are 21 spaces to decorate, seven pieces per round.[/caption]

Next, the decorations deck is created. The deck has glass ornaments in…

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I’ll play any game by the prolific designer Friedemann Friese, the man behind hits such as Power Grid, Fancy Feathers and Findorff. That’s because he is always trying to do something different, as opposed to rehashing some of the things that worked in past designs. I wouldn’t call him a maverick, but I would call him a guy who seems to have a flair for the dramatic, right down to the green hair he sports whenever I see him running around at conventions.

Friese’s latest design is a card game called Fishing (or Fischen, in German), published by his 2-F Spiele label. The best way I can describe Fishing is to call it a trick-taking game, with elements of deckbuilding baked into the design. Over the course of eight rounds, the player who scores the most points wins—earned with a simple metric of one point per card won at the end of each round.

There’s a lot more to it than that, some of which worked well, some of which did not. I tried this game twice with three players—using a different audience for each play—then once at five, with a group separate from the first two groups. Then, I took the extreme step of asking other peers in my space for their opinions of the game.…

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I love the cover image on the new Studio H game Ratjack. It’s a picture of, yep, a rat, but decked out in casino card dealer attire, in a dark and smoky environment, with details nailed right down to a slick-looking hat while the rat is dealing cards to a table of presumably other rats, sneakily reaching in from “offscreen” to take cards into their rat hands.

I have wanted to take a shot at Ratjack ever since I met with our Studio H marketing contact back at Festival International des Jeux in February 2024. (It helped that our contact went big and dressed like the dealer pictured on the cover of the box.) The tease was enough for me—”Blackjack, with a twist”—and after I picked up a copy of the game months later at SPIEL 2024, I got Ratjack to the table.

Ratjack, designed by Mathieu Can and Maxime Mercier, is a 2-4 player card game. To put a twist on that earlier tease: Ratjack is Take That Blackjack, with half the deck of normal Blackjack, a 25-value target instead of 21, and enough math to make your head spin.

The math alone will make some potential players run for the hills. I get it. For the players still here, what’s left is an interesting decision…

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I love shedding and trick-taking games because of the drama. It comes in stages. There’s the initial, private drama of looking at your hand, picturing the round ahead and how you have to play it. There’s the acute pin prick of each new trick and new card, the anticipation that condenses around the edges of the table as whoever leads throws down. Most delicious of all, those moments when you succeed in pulling off a daring maneuver, those moments when you are able to shake off misfortune before it has the chance to find you.

These games are fun, you know?

They rely to some extent on the chaos of a deck of cards, on the mathematics of distribution. As a result, shedding and trick-taking are notoriously tricky to translate into a two-player format. Sail and Fox in the Forest are basically evergreens at this point, but two-player trick-taking games are still rare. Two-player shedding games, Haggis aside, are almost non-existent. There’s a good reason for that: it’s hard to make shedding interesting when there are only two players. There’s always something of a novelty to even the idea of attempting one. That’s why I was so interested when Thomas Lehmann, designer of Race for the Galaxy and Dice Realms among many others, announced…

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Castle Combo finds the table. I’m not sure I can pinpoint a singular reason. I love Stéphane Escapa’s art—not unlike the style of the current iteration of Mr. Peabody and Sherman, playfully disproportionate and colorful. I also love the simplicity of the turns—buy a card for a 3x3 grid. Far from frivolous, though, this simplicity is coupled with meaningful decisions that come from the interaction of cards within the grid. The playful nature of it all creates a feel-good, but engaging after-school family play. 

Ease

Players select a card from two rows of three, at first restricted by the location of the Messenger token. One spent key could move the Messenger or refresh the current row if the options aren’t quite right. After paying the coin cost, the card enters the grid and triggers an immediate effect. These effects typically provide coins or keys based on any number of conditions. The Messenger might move as the cards are replenished (indicated by the placed card), and play moves on.

In the event that none of the cards are appealing after exercising options with the keys, cards play face-down into the grid and grant coins and keys as a near-sighted boon. After nine turns each, the grids are full and the…

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From the rulebook:

“‛RESAFA’ takes place during the 3rd century AD in the area of today’s Middle East. Resafa now lies in ruins in modern-day Syria but at this time it was a fortified desert outpost which flourished as a stop along important caravan routes.

In the game, players represent merchants who are establishing their businesses in Resafa. They build workshops which produce goods, resources and camels. They also build gardens between their workshops which help generate more resources. They visit nearby trading centres to buy and sell goods that they transport using their camel caravans and they can also build trading bases in those locations. Resafa had no local sources of water so it depended heavily on large water tanks to collect the spring and winter rainwaters to make the area habitable. Players also build water tanks and canals to distribute that water where it is needed.”

Overview

In Resafa, players begin the game with a set of cards that they will use to perform actions on their turn or, when flipped 180 degrees, a different set of actions. In addition to the two action icons printed on each card, the tops and bottom edges of the cards have one of four possible colors assigned to them. When a player selects a card for its action, they…

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I’m a huge video game junkie, spending nearly 40 years of my life grinding on the Sega Master System and the Atari 5200 as a child before moving up and around the ranks of every system you can think of through to modern-day consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PS5.

I love video games, but I usually don’t like video games ported into other formats. Movies based on video games? Usually, no thanks. TV shows based on video games? This is a growing category, and one that is getting better (Fallout and The Last of Us were worth it), but it still has a tough legacy to overcome. Board games based on video games? My experiences with board game adaptations of video games have been almost universally atrocious.

Frostpunk: The Board Game? My group thought it was terrible. Fallout: The Board Game? No…just, no. This War of Mine: The Board Game? I’m in the minority on this, but by the time I found myself going through the 18th different deck of cards to find out if my character’s fate was sealed or not, I wanted to chuck This War of Mine out the window. I did a demo of Call of Duty: The Board Game last year and it was a massive disappointment. I wanted…

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I don’t like trading card games (TCGs). I don’t generally like the gameplay, which I find joyless. I don’t like the business model, which is inherently and increasingly predatory (“It’s heroin for children,” a customer said to me just today). I don’t like that serious engagement with competitive play requires a significant and material financial investment. If you want to dedicate yourself to chess, you only need a chess board and a whole lot of time. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on pieces.

Though I am far from the only person with these misgivings, they are clearly irrelevant. Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon, the two TCGs that have dominated and defined the space for the last three decades, are billion-dollar industries. They are the behemoths forming the top of the jungle canopy, but they are far from the only trees in the forest. Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Flesh & Blood all have solid—if comparatively minute—followings, and every year, sapling after sapling pops up, hoping to get even a sliver of whatever sunlight the canopy lets through.

2023 saw the release of Lorcana, which uses characters from throughout the Disney Animation cannon. Earlier this year, Star Wars: Unlimited came out. Whether either game becomes a staple remains to be seen. Initial sales for both were incredibly strong, but…

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