Codenames Pictures
Codenames Pictures, is Codenames… with pictures, ya dig? The pictures however are not straightforward. They have multiple elements, and sometimes are a little bizarre. The benefit to this is that you have a lot of different elements in the picture to use for your clues, and the game is language independent.
Dragonwood
It’s time to slay the dragon, and also many other creatures. A regular murder spree if you will. You are trying to vanquish the monsters, but really all along the monster is you. But you knew that already, didn’t you?
If you like your art more on the surrealism side of things, then do I have a game for you. In Dixit you must take a hand of cards that have nothing on them except a painting, and use them to bluff out your opponents.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Deck building, wizard style. If you are familiar with deck building games like Dominion, or Star Realms, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle will be an easy game to pick up. If you’re not, it’s a great introduction to deck building games. This is a cooperative game where the objective is to beat up the nasty villains and not get beat up yourself over 7 stories, one for each book.
PitchCar Mini
Take a disc flicking game like Crokinole, or Flick ‘Em Up!, but make it a car racing game. You get road pieces to make the track, with the ever-important guard rails, pick how many laps you want to do, and get flicking. If you fall off the track you have to go back to where you flicked from.
Flyin’ Goblin
Have you been on holiday looking at a lovely castle, and thought that you’d love to yeet some goblins at it? Yes? OK weirdo, but the good news is that there’s a game for that particular kink.
A Fake Artist Goes to New York
Can you draw? No? Great! Much like other hidden role games like Detective Club, The Resistance, or Werewolf, someone in the game is hiding something, but what their hiding is ignorance. Ignorance of what they’re supposed to be drawing.
Do you like misleading people? Do you want to lure other people to their doom? Do you like to damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead to achieve victory? No? Huh. That’s awkward. Just uh, push the back button then I think.
Sushi Go! is a great introduction to the pick and pass mechanic that you’ll see in many other games such as 7 Wonders or Caper. Your goal is to collect sets of sushi cards that work together to score you sweet sweet points. You can’t eat the cards.
Hey, That’s My Fish!
Here FISHY FISHY FISHY! The game starts with player having penguins sitting on ice flows that have fish on them.As you move and eat fish, the ice flows disappear. Eventually your penguins have no other place to move to. The game ends when all the penguins are stranded, alone in the universe.
Not a game for quiet spaces. Everyone is yelling at the same time, trying to trade their commodities with each other as quickly as they can. The idea is that you are dealt a hand of wheat, oats, fruit bats, breakfast cereals, etc, and you must trade sets of items for other sets of items to make a hand of all one type of good. There’s no turn structure, the fastest trades the mostest. Is this the first real-time board game? It came out in 1904, so I imagine it’s a contender.
Flick me up (before you go go). Are you even Canadian if you’ve never played this? Huh? Are you? Maple syrup ain’t got nothing on this. Go ride a moose and eat some back bacon you hoser. The Queen and I both played this as children, so we bought our board shortly after we got married 21 years ago, well before we got in to hobby board games.
Forbidden Island
The Island is sinking, man, and I don’t wanna swim. A group of explorers have come to the Forbidden Island to find the lost treasures. As previously mentioned there’s a plot twist; the island is sinking. Now those explorers must hurry to find the treasure, and to save their own lives.
Solar Draft
Do you want to build a Solar System? C’mon, let’s go and play. Solar Draft is a family-friendly card drafting game where you build a solar system full of cute planetary bodies with very expressive, and very cute faces. Come for the art, stay for the gameplay.