This is Wizard with some extra hot sauce. My lunchtime gaming group and I played Wizard all the time until we tried Skull King. We haven’t played Wizard since. If you like trick taking games at all, you should try out Skull King, it’s a hoot and a half.

A fast-paced head to head duelling card game without the massive expense of a CCG or LCG. Clash of Decks gets right down to brass tacks and gets you beating on each other immediately. Games are quick and full of delicious card interactions.

The Empire Strikes Back of trick taking games. How do you take a great and fairly innovative game and make it even better? Mission Deep Sea takes the same formula from Quest for Planet Nine, but introduces enough new elements to make it feel fresh and exciting.

One of my favourite games of all time even though generally I don’t dig cooperative games. What separates this for me is you still feel like your personal performance matters, even though you’re working as a team. You’ll experience such highs and lows as you and your team try to grok out how to pull the mission off.

If The Wind in the Willows had a board game, it might look like this. Cute woodland creatures living together in a woodland village. Mice as farmers, crows as teachers, moles as miners, and dozens more. Anyone who looks at the game will be enchanted by the art that brings all the critters to life.

Building on the mechanics from Fantasy Realms, Red Rising is a hand building game where you’re looking to score the most points by having cards that work together the best. If you’ve read the books, the characters that combo together make a lot of sense thematically.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.