Fossilium WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Euros to be brown and about fossils Published by: Giant Roc, Sinister Fish Games Designed by: Julia Thiemann, Christoph Waage This is a free review copy of the original German version from Giant Roc. The new enhanced version from Sinister Fish is coming to Kickstarter soon. See our review policy here Fossilium is a clever, satisfying museum-building game that makes digging up dinosaurs feel far more strategic than simply pulling tiles from a bag. One important note before getting into it. The version I have played is the existing German edition of Fossilium, while Sinister Fish Games is preparing an enhanced English edition for an upcoming crowdfunding campaign. You can find out more about that here. It looks great! So this review is based on the game as it currently exists rather than any improvements, component changes or refinements coming with that new edition. But I was kindly given the rule book in English via PDF! What matters most though, is that underneath all that is already a very good worker-placement game, and one I thoroughly enjoy. Building Your Museum Fossilium puts you in charge of a natural history museum with a rather significant problem: the galleries are basically empty. Across five rounds you will excavate fossil pieces, assemble skeletons, attract visitors, generate income and gradually turn a sparse museum into something considerably more impressive. The game is won on Victory Points, but those points come from enough different directions that simply collecting the biggest dinosaur you can find is not going to do the job. Although, it is often my goal! Each player has their own museum board containing a gallery, storage area, shops and entrances. Fossils come in sizes of one, two, four or six tiles, and larger specimens need to be pieced together correctly before they form a complete skeleton. You can start exhibiting a fossil once you own at least half of its required pieces, which means your gallery can slowly develop rather than forcing you to wait until every bone has been found. Placement matters just as much as completion. Shops reward matching fossil types placed within their rows, entrances generate Guests from matching fossils in their columns, while Pedestals can add end-game value to the larger exhibits. This turns what initially looks like a straightforward tile-placement area into a spatial puzzle where the position of every fossil can potentially affect several different systems. Digging For Dinosaurs Every round follows four phases: Income, Actions, Opening and Excavation. Income rewards the museum you have already constructed, but the Action Phase is where most of your decisions happen. Here players take turns placing workers onto empty spaces on the Action Board and immediately carrying out the action shown in that row. Single spaces need one worker, double spaces need two, and some spaces also gain or cost Dino Dollars. The key thing to remember is that rows determine the action, while columns determine where those workers will excavate later. Actions include Exhibit fossils from storage into your museum, Build Info Panels or Donate fossil tiles to other players, Buy/Sell fossils through the market, Tour to gain Guests or Dino Dollars, use a costly Joker space to repeat an action in that column, or take a simple Management action for a Guest, Intern or Dino Dollar. The fourth column usually gives a stronger bonus version of an action, but workers placed there will not excavate later. The third part of each round is called Opening. Opening converts the crowds you have attracted into points, and Excavation gives you the fossils needed to improve everything next time around. It creates a satisfying cycle because almost everything you do in one phase influences something coming later. The Actions Board The Action Board is the star of Fossilium. There are rows for actions such as exhibiting fossils, building Info Panels, buying and selling, running tours and using more flexible abilities, but the column you choose is equally important. The first three columns correspond to different excavation sites, meaning you are simultaneously choosing what you want to do now and where you want to dig later. That creates some excellent little dilemmas. You might desperately need an Exhibit action, but the only available space sends your worker towards an excavation site containing very little you currently want. Alternatively, you may sacrifice the perfect action space because you know you desperately need pieces from another bag. It is a simple connection between mechanisms, but it gives virtually every worker placement more weight than it first appears to have. The Excavation Puzzle Excavation itself brings some welcome uncertainty. When you dig, you draw a number of tiles based on the workers in that column, but you may only keep a number equal to your own workers there. So other players can effectively improve the size of your draw without increasing how much you are allowed to take, creating moments where you reveal several tempting fossils and have to choose which ones matter most. There is obviously luck involved. Sometimes the perfect piece appears immediately, while another excavation can produce absolutely nothing you need. Crucially, Fossilium gives you ways to work around that randomness through the market, Interns, donations and other effects, so I rarely felt that the bags were simply deciding the game for me. Interns are particularly useful because they let you draw several tiles from a chosen excavation site and keep one, giving you another shot at the fossil you are hunting. Permanent Workers also make the excavation system more interesting as the game develops. New workers can be earned by completing objectives, and those extra workers eventually become permanently attached to excavation columns, strengthening your personal draws from those sites. They then return for use during the final round, which gives the system a nice progression from fairly modest early excavations to much stronger options later. Guests, Regulars and Momentum The Guest Track is another part of Fossilium I really like. Completing fossils, arranging exhibits and triggering other effects generates Guests, and during the Opening Phase those visitors convert into Victory Points. They normally disappear afterwards, but achieving the round objectives earns you Regulars who permanently remain on the track and therefore give you a head start in subsequent rounds. That gives the game a pleasing sense of growth. Early rounds can feel relatively restrained, but once your museum starts producing income, Guests and Regulars more efficiently, everything begins accelerating. There is a genuine feeling that the little collection you started with has become a functioning attraction, rather than your engine simply producing slightly larger numbers each round. I also like that incomplete fossils are not useless. They can already contribute towards your museum's income and visitor generation, and fossils placed on Pedestals can still receive the Pedestal bonus even when unfinished. That makes the hunt for the final piece exciting without making every incomplete skeleton feel like wasted effort. More Going On Than You Expect Fossilium looks fairly approachable when first laid out, but there is quite a lot happening underneath. You are managing workers, fossil sets, spatial placement, money, Guests, objectives, the market and several different scoring opportunities at the same time. None of the individual mechanisms is especially complicated, but understanding how they interact takes a little longer. That is probably the game's biggest hurdle. The iconography and quantity of bonuses mean the first play involves a fair amount of checking, particularly when dealing with Info Panels, fossil abilities and some of the objectives. Once those systems settle in, however, the game becomes much smoother because the core loop itself is logical and consistent. The physical footprint is also significant. Between the central boards, excavation bags, player museums, market, fossils and assorted components, Fossilium wants plenty of table space. The large fossil standees are fun and certainly add presence to completed exhibits, although mechanically they mostly serve as reminders and a secondary tiebreaker rather than introducing another meaningful system. Pros Excellent worker-placement twist. Choosing an action and an excavation destination with the same placement creates meaningful decisions throughout the game. The museum genuinely develops. Fossils, Info Panels, Regulars and income build into an increasingly satisfying engine. Luck is present but manageable. Excavation retains the excitement of discovering something unexpected without leaving you completely at the mercy of the bags. Strong spatial puzzle. Where you exhibit fossils can matter almost as much as which fossils you collect. Cons There is a noticeable learning curve. Several interconnected systems and plenty of iconography make the first game slower than the core rules initially suggest. It needs plenty of table space. This is not a compact museum. The excavation bags can occasionally frustrate. Mitigation exists, but sometimes the fossil you need simply refuses to appear. Some components feel more decorative than necessary. The standees look impressive, but they contribute little mechanically. Is this really a con?! Final Thoughts Fossilium succeeds because its theme and mechanisms genuinely support each other. Excavating does not exist as a disconnected mini-game, worker placement is not simply a list of actions, and your museum is not just somewhere to dump collected tiles. Everything feeds into everything else, which makes finding a fossil, placing it cleverly and seeing the resulting visitors arrive genuinely satisfying. There is enough randomness to make every excavation interesting, but enough control to make your decisions matter. There is also enough going on that I immediately wanted another play once I understood the systems properly, because Fossilium clearly offers several different ways to squeeze more value from the same five rounds. The German edition already provides a strong foundation, so I am particularly interested to see what Sinister Fish Games does with the forthcoming enhanced English release. Fossilium is an easy game to like once you get past its initial learning curve. It is thematic, thoughtful and full of satisfying little connections, particularly the excellent relationship between worker placement and excavation. If this all sounds like fun to you, the enhanced edition could well be something worth checking out. I certainly plan too!

Case Pursuit WBG Score: 7 Player Count: 1plus You’ll like this if you like: Deduction and True Crime Published by: Case Pursuit Designed by: Case Pursuit This is a free print and play review copy. See our review policy here. There is something wonderfully appealing about a murder mystery that arrives as a pile of documents rather than a box full of tokens, boards and miniatures. Case Pursuit is a digital-first investigation game where you download a case file, work through the evidence, build your theory and eventually submit your conclusion online. You can play directly from the PDF, but I printed everything out because, for me, half the fun of this sort of game is physically handling the evidence, spreading documents around and feeling like I am actually working through a case rather than scrolling through one. The first Core Series case, Last Call at Blackwood Lounge, revolves around the murder of a wealthy businessman and gives you a sizeable cast of suspects to investigate. Your job is to work out who killed him, how they did it and why, using the information scattered throughout the case files. It is familiar territory for anyone who has played this style of mystery game before, but Case Pursuit is less interested in elaborate puzzles and codes than it is in straightforward detective work. Opening The Case Once purchased, the case is available as a digital download, with both a full case packet and individual evidence files. There is also a printer-friendly version, which is very welcome because there is a lot here to read. You can keep everything digital, print the lot or mix the two approaches, so there is a useful amount of flexibility depending on how you like to investigate. The evidence itself takes several forms. You will read suspect interviews, inspect photographs, study security records and compare timelines built from phone calls, messages, emails and other documents. The important information is rarely delivered in one neat place, so you gradually begin cross-referencing statements and noticing when one person's version of events does not quite fit with something you have already seen elsewhere. There are online elements too, with certain details in the files allowing you to unlock additional evidence. Eventually, when you are confident you understand what happened, you submit your theory and reveal the official resolution. There are hints available if you become stuck, but the experience is clearly designed around giving you enough information to work things out yourself rather than nudging you constantly towards the solution. Deduction Rather Than Puzzles That distinction is probably the most important thing to understand about Case Pursuit. This is not really an escape-room-style experience full of ciphers, cryptic riddles and elaborate mechanical puzzles. Instead, you are doing something much closer to traditional detective work: reading carefully, establishing timelines, checking alibis, looking for inconsistencies and deciding which pieces of evidence actually matter. Personally, I liked that approach. There were moments where I noticed smaller hidden details that I suspect were not absolutely necessary to solve the case, but which helped strengthen the theory I was developing. Those touches reward paying attention without turning the investigation into a hunt for obscure tricks, and they fit nicely with the feeling that you are building a case rather than simply cracking a succession of puzzles. It also means there is quite a lot of reading. I played alone, which suited the experience extremely well, although there is nothing stopping several people working through the evidence together and debating their theories. For me, though, this became a surprisingly relaxing couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea, some favourite music playing and a large stack of suspicious documents to work through. Following The Evidence The pleasure comes from slowly understanding how everything connects. An interview may initially seem routine, only for a security log or message elsewhere in the case to suddenly make one particular answer much more interesting. A timeline starts to form in your head, suspects move up and down your list, and pieces of information that originally seemed insignificant gradually become useful. Case Pursuit's creator has professional experience around security operations, observation, incident reporting and surveillance environments, and you can see why that background suits this type of game. The documents are designed to feel like things you might genuinely encounter during an investigation rather than colourful puzzle sheets wearing a police badge. That grounding helps the case maintain its atmosphere even when you are simply reading another interview or checking another record. It is not, however, doing anything particularly revolutionary. If you have played other murder investigation games, the basic rhythm will feel immediately familiar, and I never encountered a mechanic or revelation that made me think the genre had suddenly been reinvented. Case Pursuit's strength is not novelty. It is taking the familiar true-crime investigation format and presenting it in a clean, logical and enjoyable way. A Different Kind Of Game Night One thing I particularly appreciated was the pace. There is no timer pushing you onwards, nobody waiting for their turn and no pressure to solve something before the evening runs out. You can reread interviews, rearrange your evidence and disappear down whichever line of investigation currently interests you. That also gives it quite a different atmosphere from many puzzle games. Rather than constantly chasing the next "aha!" moment, I found myself enjoying the quieter process of forming and testing theories. It is methodical rather than frantic, and that is exactly why it worked for me. The digital format helps too. There is no box to ship and no large collection of components required, so Case Pursuit can provide a substantial investigation without the price or physical footprint of a traditional boxed mystery game. The trade-off, of course, is that if you prefer physical play you will need to do the printing yourself, and there are enough pages here that this is worth considering before you start. Pros Logical, evidence-led deduction. The focus is on timelines, contradictions and reasoning rather than cryptic puzzles. Flexible format. Play digitally, print the case or combine the two depending on how you prefer to investigate. A surprisingly relaxing solo experience. It works particularly well if you enjoy slowly absorbing information and developing your own theory. Believable presentation. Interviews, logs, messages and evidence combine to create a convincing investigation. Cons There is a lot of reading. If you want constant puzzles or rapid interaction, this probably is not the right style of mystery game. It does not reinvent the genre. Most of its ideas will feel familiar if you have played similar detective experiences. Printing is substantial. The printer-friendly version helps, but physical players still need to produce a considerable stack of pages. Final Thoughts Case Pursuit succeeds because it understands what is enjoyable about this style of mystery. It gives you a believable pile of evidence, enough suspects to create uncertainty and enough contradictions to keep you questioning what you think you know. More importantly, it trusts you to do the investigative work yourself instead of constantly interrupting the experience with artificial puzzles. I particularly enjoyed how calm the whole thing felt. Sitting down for a couple of hours, reading through interviews and records and gradually piecing together a murder is not necessarily what everyone wants from a board game afternoon, but for me it was extremely satisfying. It appealed to exactly the same part of my brain that enjoys true crime, logical deduction and trying to understand how a story fits together. It may not break new ground, but it does what it sets out to do very well. Last Call at Blackwood Lounge is a solid, engaging introduction to Case Pursuit and has left me interested in seeing how future cases develop the format, particularly if the creator begins experimenting with more unusual evidence and structures while retaining this grounded, logical approach.

Bingo Slam WBG Score: 7 Player Count: 2-6 You’ll like this if you like: Fast, frantic Bingo! Distributed by: VR Distribution This is a free review copy kindly gifted by VR Distribution. See our review policy here. Some games win you over with clever systems, deep strategy or a dozen interlocking mechanisms. Bingo Slam wins you over by making everyone stare at a card, panic for half a second, then slap the table as fast as humanly possible. It is gloriously simple, taught in seconds, played in minutes and far more tense than a game built around bingo numbers has any right to be. At its heart, this is bingo turned into a reflex game. Each player takes a board and 20 counters, cards are flipped from a central pile, and if the revealed number appears on your board you race to slam the card before anyone else. Win the slam and you cover that number on your board, with the first player to complete a line of five counters in any direction winning the game. How To Play Bingo Slam The basic rules could barely be easier. Flip a card, check your board, and if you have the number, slam. Some cards show a single number while others show two, and if you happen to have both then there is a small decision to make about which one will help you most. That is about as tactical as the standard number cards get, but Bingo Slam does not pretend to be anything more complicated. The special cards introduce a little extra chaos. Wham Bam lets you remove a counter from another player's board, Bonus Slam allows you to place a counter anywhere on your own board provided it does not immediately complete a line, and Steal Slam can be kept for later and used to steal a slam you lost but really wanted. These effects are simple enough that they never slow the game down, but they add just enough interference to stop everything becoming completely mechanical. If two players appear to slam at exactly the same time, you simply judge who got there first, usually by seeing whose hand is lowest or most clearly covering the card. We found these moments were normally obvious enough that there was very little debate. Incorrect slams are punished too, with a counter removed from your board, while three false slams eliminate you from the game entirely. Fast, Frantic And Surprisingly Tense Bingo Slam has almost no strategy, and that is absolutely fine. There are tiny decisions around the two-number cards, where to place a Bonus Slam, or when to hold back a Wham Bam, but most of the game is about reactions, visual scanning and keeping your nerve. If you are looking for clever tactical play, this is not going to suddenly reveal hidden depths after five games. What it does have is tension. When two or three players are sitting one space away from completing a row or column, every card flip suddenly matters, and the whole table becomes ridiculously focused on a tiny rectangle of cardboard in the middle. The difference between calmly checking your board and desperately trying not to slam the wrong card creates exactly the sort of silly pressure that makes these games work. We also had very few incorrect slams. The challenge is not really understanding whether you have a number or not, because that is easy enough, but identifying it quickly enough before someone else gets there. That keeps the game frantic without making it feel random or messy. Colour-Coded Chaos One side of each board uses colour-coded numbers, which is a really smart little touch. If a green 13 appears, for example, you know you are looking for 13, but you can immediately narrow your search to the green spaces on your board. It speeds everything up, makes the slamming more frantic and gives players just enough visual help to keep the game moving at the pace it wants. But there are two types of green, as you can see. So it is not that simple! The reverse side removes the colours and is presented as the more difficult option. In reality, I would describe it as slower rather than more expert, because everyone is still playing under the same conditions and the decisions themselves have not changed. Where it becomes more interesting is in family play, because adults could use the uncoloured side while children use the colour-coded boards to even things out. Although, based on my own experience, that might need to be reversed. My kids have quicker reactions than me, so giving them the easier board may just make things even worse. Either way, having two sides gives families an easy way to tweak the challenge without introducing extra rules. One Small Physical Niggle The coloured side of the board is dual-layered, so the counters sit neatly in place and are less likely to move around during play. The expert side is flat, which means a particularly enthusiastic slam can jolt the board and shuffle a few counters out of position. It is not a major problem, but it is worth being aware of. The easiest fix is simply table positioning. Keep your board slightly to one side rather than placing it directly between yourself and the draw pile, and give everyone a little room to attack the centre without smashing into their own player area. Problem mostly solved, and nobody has to calm down, which would defeat the entire point. Pros Incredibly easy to teach. You can explain the whole game in moments and start immediately. Genuinely tense. Close games become surprisingly dramatic when several players are one number from winning. Excellent family appeal. The colour-coded boards help speed up play and make it accessible across ages. Fast and replayable. Games are short enough that you will often want another straight away. Cons Almost no strategy. Beyond a few special-card decisions, this is primarily about reflexes and reactions. The expert side is less secure physically. Counters can shift more easily during enthusiastic slams. Player elimination exists. Three incorrect slams knock you out, although in our games this rarely became an issue. Final Thoughts Bingo Slam is one of those games that understands exactly what it is and does not waste time pretending to be anything else. It is loud, fast, silly and almost entirely driven by reaction speed, but that simplicity is exactly why it works. There is no rules overhead, no downtime and no long-term planning, just constant little bursts of tension every time a card flips. What surprised me most was how invested we became in such a simple race. Once several players are hovering one number away from victory, you can genuinely feel the tension build, and every new card brings another little explosion of panic. The special cards add just enough disruption to keep things lively without ever getting in the way of the main idea. Bingo Slam is not clever in the traditional sense, and it is certainly not strategic, but it is really good fun. It is taught in seconds, played in minutes and delivers exactly the sort of noisy family chaos it promises. Sometimes that is all a game needs to do.

Skyjo WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 2-8 You’ll like this if you like: Family friendly card games Published by: Magilano Designed by: Alexander Bernhardt . This is a free review copy kindly gifted by VR Distribution. See our review policy here. Skyjo does not look like much. A deck of numbered cards, a 4×3 grid in front of each player, and a goal as basic as keeping your score low. Yet somewhere between revealing a twelve you absolutely did not want, desperately chasing a matching column, and deciding whether you dare end the round before everyone else, it becomes ridiculously compelling. What I like most is how quickly the game creates its own drama. You are never doing anything particularly complicated, but every replacement, reveal and discard can suddenly matter, especially once players start closing in on the end of the round. The threat of doubling your score if you finish first without actually having the lowest total gives the whole thing a wonderfully cruel edge. It is light, fast and very easy to teach, but it never feels completely throwaway. There is just enough risk, memory and timing to keep you engaged, while the unpredictable scoring means one round can be calm and controlled and the next can completely implode. That is exactly why I can see Skyjo coming back to the table again and again. How To Play Skyjo On your turn, you either take the top card from the discard pile or draw blindly from the deck. If you take from the discard pile, you must swap that card into your grid, replacing either a face-up or face-down card. If you draw blind, you can either use that card in the same way or discard it and simply reveal one of your hidden cards instead. That already creates plenty of small decisions because taking a visible low card feels safe, but drawing blind could give you something even better. Of course, it could also give you something much worse. You are constantly weighing certainty against possibility, and because you cannot look at face-down cards before replacing them, there is always a little risk involved. The cleverest rule is the vertical column clearing. If you ever reveal three identical numbers in a column, all three cards are immediately discarded and no longer count towards your score. That means a higher number can sometimes suddenly become very attractive if it lets you complete a set and wipe an entire chunk of points from your grid. When To End The Round A round ends when one player has revealed all of their remaining cards. Everyone else then gets one final turn before any hidden cards are flipped and scores are counted. That alone creates a nice race, but Skyjo adds one rule that makes the whole thing much more interesting. If the player who triggered the end of the round does not finish with the lowest score, their positive score for that round is doubled. That creates some wonderfully dramatic moments because finishing first is not always the same thing as finishing well. You may think you are sitting comfortably on a low total, only for another player to reveal a couple of negative cards and suddenly turn your brave finish into a disaster It also means the length of a full game can vary wildly. One brutal round can send someone racing towards the 100-point threshold, while another game can stretch across several tighter rounds with everyone staying relatively low. I like that unpredictability because it stops the scoring from feeling routine and gives every round a bit of jeopardy. This would score 11 Simple, But Never Dull Skyjo is not a deeply strategic game, but there is more going on than the rules initially suggest. You are watching the discard pile, trying to remember what other players might need, judging whether to reveal another hidden card and deciding whether clearing a column is worth chasing. None of those decisions are especially complicated, but they create enough interaction with the luck of the draw to keep things interesting. That is probably its biggest strength. There is almost no friction between setup, teaching and playing, so the game gets out of its own way immediately. You are not waiting for everyone to understand an unusual system or spending the first few rounds working out what you are supposed to be doing, because Skyjo makes sense almost instantly. And yet it still produces those great little moments where everyone suddenly cares enormously about a single number appearing. You find yourself hoping someone discards exactly what you need, desperately trying not to reveal another twelve, or taking a chance on ending the round because you think everyone else is in worse shape. For such a simple game, it creates a lot of table talk and tension. The Travel Game That Needs A Bigger Table Skyjo also feels like it should be the perfect travel game. The box is small, the rules are light and the whole thing has exactly the sort of easy-going feel that would work brilliantly on holiday, on a train or while waiting around somewhere. Unfortunately, the table footprint rather spoils that dream. Every player needs room for a 4×3 grid, and once you add the draw pile, discard pile and space for everyone to reach comfortably, Skyjo takes up much more room than you might expect. That is a shame because the game itself feels almost purpose-built for travelling. A genuinely compact or mini version would make a lot of sense. With enough space, though, that issue disappears. The game runs smoothly, the cards are easy to manage and turns stay fast enough that downtime is almost non-existent. It is exactly the sort of experience where you finish one game and immediately hear somebody say, “Again?” Pros Incredibly easy to teach and play. You can be up and running almost immediately. The round-ending penalty is excellent. Doubling your score for finishing first but not finishing lowest adds genuine tension. Highly replayable. It is quick, unpredictable and easy to bring back to the table. Simple decisions still matter. Column clearing and timing give the game more bite than first appears. Cons The footprint is surprisingly large. It is not as travel-friendly as the box suggests. Luck plays a big role. A few brutal draws can swing a round quickly. Strategy is relatively light. If you want deep control, this is not really trying to offer that. Final Thoughts Skyjo is a great example of how little a game actually needs to be entertaining. The setup is simple, the teach is simple and the turn structure is simple, but the combination of hidden information, column clearing and that wonderfully mean finishing penalty gives it far more personality than you might expect. I especially like how often the score creates drama. One player can look completely safe, trigger the end, then suddenly find themselves punished because somebody else sneaks underneath them. Those moments give the game energy and make every round feel different enough to keep you interested. Oh and did I say the England football team and Jude Bellingham, in particular love it!? Photo credit - https://toyworldmag.co.uk/england-players-bring-skyjo-to-the-world-cup/

Cross The Line WBG Score: 7/10 Player Count: 2-8 You’ll like this if you like: Card games with interesting layers and scoring. Published by: Gray Matters Games Designed by: Joe Barron, Brady Peterson, David Yakos This is a free review copy kindly gifted by VR Distribution. See our review policy here. Some party games live or die on whether they can get people talking, laughing and revealing just enough about themselves to keep everyone interested. Cross The Line understands that assignment immediately. It asks one player to place themselves honestly on a spectrum, then challenges everyone else to judge just how well they know that person. That can mean anything from how good you think you are at dancing, to how bad your road rage is, to how long you think you would survive an apocalypse. The questions are personal without usually becoming too uncomfortable, and the sliding-scale format gives them just enough structure to stop the game becoming a loose conversation exercise. It is easy to teach, quick to get moving and, with the right group, genuinely funny. The obvious comparison is Wavelength, and it is impossible to ignore. Cross The Line is operating in very similar territory, just with a more personal focus and individual guessing rather than clue-giving. That familiarity is both its biggest strength and one of its main problems. How To Play Cross The Line Cross The Line is for 2–8 players, plays in around 30 minutes, and the aim is to be the first player to reach 12 points. Each player receives three Confidence Bars and a scoring meeple, while the central device holds the question card and hides the answer line. On your turn, you draw a card, choose one side and read the question plus the five possible answers aloud. You then secretly slide the line on the device to the point that best represents your honest answer to your chosen question, before covering it with the screen. The other players then take turns placing one of their Confidence Bars where they think your hidden line sits. The bars come in different lengths. The shorter the bar, the harder it is to cross the hidden line, but the more points it is worth if you succeed. Once everyone has committed, the screen is removed, successful guesses score, and play passes clockwise until somebody reaches 12 points. It is a neat system because confidence becomes part of the decision. You can play safe with a wider bar, or back yourself to know somebody extremely well and go narrow. That little bit of risk is what gives the game more shape than simply pointing somewhere on a scale. The Fun Is In Being Wrong The best moments come when somebody you know well completely surprises you. You may be convinced that your partner thinks they are an excellent cook, or that your best mate was a genius at school, only to discover their own assessment is nowhere near yours. That gap between perception and reality is where Cross The Line works best. It naturally creates follow-up conversation, arguments, explanations and the occasional baffled look across the table. The game is less about winning through clever deduction and more about discovering whether the version of someone in your head actually matches how they see themselves. That is a lot of fun to me. As is the continual debate around that! That also means the group matters enormously. With people who are willing to answer honestly and have a laugh about the differences, it can be great fun. The rules explicitly rely on that honesty, which is important because a player could otherwise deliberately place the line somewhere misleading just to deny points. But that doesn't happen in this game in my experience. Honesty is always more fun! Familiar Ground The biggest issue for me is that Cross The Line feels very familiar. If you have played Wavelength, the comparison is immediate, and while the focus on personal questions does create a slightly different atmosphere, the core experience still feels heavily borrowed. That is not automatically a problem. Plenty of good games refine familiar mechanisms. But if you are going to work this close to something already established, I want to see a meaningful twist, a smarter system or a clear improvement. Cross The Line does not really provide that. It is fun, and I enjoy playing it, but I cannot honestly say it brings enough new ideas to make me choose it over Wavelength purely on design. However, I do like the questions in this game over simple categories. And the answers along the scale amuse me. Others have found this affects the game as people don't want to answer literally to these points. As, you can't really. They are quite specific. But I think you just need to understand it is a scale with some example answers along various points of the scale. Its a party game. You don't have to take it literally. One Clever Device, One Frustrating Flaw Ironically, one area where I actually prefer Cross The Line is the way the active player sets their hidden position. The device holds that answer neatly and securely, and I prefer it to the reveal in Wavelength, where I have occasionally found the marker can shift slightly when the target is uncovered, especially with slightly older, more worn versions of the game. The ones I usually play with in board game cafes! That is why the other half of the device is so frustrating. The Confidence Bars used by the guessing players slide around far too easily. If the device is tilted or passed between players, those carefully placed guesses will move. For a game like this, that matters more than it sounds. Cross The Line should be perfect for casual sofa play, coach journeys, or anywhere you can simply pass the device around like a book or tablet. Instead, you really need to keep it flat on a table, which unnecessarily limits one of the settings where this type of game should shine and makes that part of the game frustratingly annoying. Stiffen them up, and this game scores a whole point higher for me. That affects it so much. The Questions Do The Heavy Lifting There are 100 double-sided cards, giving you 200 question sides in total, and the quality of those questions is going to define your experience. Some are excellent because they reveal something funny or unexpected about the player answering. Others feel much more ordinary, and that inconsistency is always a risk with this sort of party game. So I like to give each player ten or so at the start of the game, and they are all double-sided, so they can find a couple they like and find amusing and work to their own lives. It makes the game flow better, faster, and in a more entertaining way. There are plenty of questions in the game; I see no reason to not always play like this. Still, the personal angle is what gives Cross The Line its identity. You are not trying to invent a clever clue or interpret an abstract concept. You are trying to work out how another human being sees themselves, and that makes even fairly simple questions more interesting. It also means the game can work surprisingly well with people you do not know deeply. Sometimes you are relying on years of friendship. Sometimes you are relying entirely on vibes. Both can be entertaining. Pros Easy to teach and immediately social. The rules disappear quickly and the conversation takes over. Confidence Bars add a nice risk-reward decision. Narrower guesses make successful reads more satisfying. The hidden-answer device works very well. I actually prefer this part to Wavelength’s reveal mechanism. Personal questions create genuinely funny surprises. The best rounds lead naturally into stories and debate. Cons It is extremely close to Wavelength. For me, it does not introduce enough that is new, clever or better. The Confidence Bars slide far too easily. A strange component decision that makes casual non-table play awkward. Question quality is inevitably uneven. Some prompts generate great conversation, others are much less interesting. Final Thoughts Cross The Line is enjoyable. It is simple, sociable and capable of creating exactly the sort of moments you want from a party game: surprise, laughter and arguments about whether somebody really is as good at karaoke as they claim. My problem is that enjoyment alone does not erase how derivative it feels. Wavelength already occupies very similar ground and, overall, I still think it is the better game. Cross The Line needed either a stronger mechanical twist or a cleaner improvement on that formula, and for me it does not quite manage either. There are still things here I genuinely like, especially the way the active player secretly sets their answer. Unfortunately, the loose Confidence Bars undermine what should have been a brilliantly portable social game. Good fun, easy to recommend to the right group, but held back by familiarity and one surprisingly irritating physical design choice.

When Kavango first arrived on my table, it became one of those games that reminded me why I love this hobby. I described it at the time as “a glorious, interlinked, cascading, connected puzzle that will fill your heart with every play”, and clearly I was not alone in falling for what designers Matt and Zara had created. Since then, Kavango has travelled far beyond that first crowdfunding campaign, selling around the world in five languages, picking up major awards and even helping fund conservation work across southern Africa. Photo Credit - https://www.mazazagames.com/pages/our-story So when I heard their next game was on the way, I was immediately interested. Scavengers stays within the Kavango world but heads in a very different direction, swapping the sprawling nature-reserve puzzle for a fast, highly interactive card game about vultures and other scavengers competing around a carcass in the Kalahari. Played across dusk, midnight and dawn, it is built around bluffing, bidding and trying to outmanoeuvre everyone else at the table, with action cards and even the threat of a lion ready to upset the pecking order. What makes Scavengers particularly interesting to me is that the story behind the game feels every bit as deliberate as the design itself. The idea came after Matt and Zara visited conservation partner Vulpro in South Africa and learned more about the vital role vultures play in preventing the spread of disease, alongside the considerable image problem these extraordinary animals still face. Before getting the finished game to the table, I spoke with them about where Scavengers came from, how Kavango changed their lives, why sustainability remains central to everything they make, and what comes next. Wow, Kavango has been just such a huge success. So many copies have been sold. Great reviews. And now a distribution deal with a major European manufacturer. You must be buzzing! Did you ever think your debut game would achieve such success? Thanks so much, Jim! You’ve been such a huge support since the start. We still remember when we read your review of Kavango and it really made us feel so happy to know that we’d connected with people in the way we were aiming for. We still remember it by heart: “It’s a glorious, interlinked, cascading, connected puzzle that will fill your heart with every play.” The thing that resonated most was “will fill your heart with every play”. That’s exactly what we wanted it to do. We wanted it to inspire joy and awe towards the natural world and help people feel connected to the amazing wildernesses in southern Africa. Your review was the first inkling we had that we’d managed to do that for some people and it meant so much. We couldn’t really have dreamt that Kavango would have the reach that it has. It’s now sold in five languages across the world, has won the Origins and Green Game Guide Award for Sustainable Product Design 2026 and we get the most wonderful messages from people all the time who love the game and who have these amazing personal stories of connection to nature and wildlife. We’ve also been able to financially support conservation charities that are doing vital work to protect nature and biodiversity in southern Africa with the profits from Kavango - this is incredibly important to us and we’re so honoured that we can contribute. It’s quite something to know that a game we have created from our minds and lived experience has resonated with so many people. It’s been the most fulfilling couple of years and gives us a lot of hope for the future of the natural world. It is clear to us every day, from the messages we get from people all over the world, that there is a huge global community that cares deeply about nature. We feel very lucky to be building this Kavango community where the focus is on joy, fun and connection with friends and family through a shared love of the natural world. So often the climate and nature crises are framed in such negative terms and there is only so much despair that we can sustain. We are proud to be contributing to joy and a positive hopeful message about nature in our own particular way. That is the ultimate success for us. Cards from Kavango I could not agree more. Often in life, people respond to things either with a push or pull. And I feel with sustainability and environmental issues, we need to see the hope and work we can do to repair what we broke. Not the despair of how badly we broke it in the first place. That often can make people feel hopeless, when there is so much hope. Back to the game, what do you attribute all this success to, what do you think made Kavango so special? Truly I think it is an excellent game, with a satisfying story arc and beautiful art. I think that is why it has continued to grow beyond the Kickstarter. But most people hadn’t played it when they supported our first Kickstarter. Over 3,000 people across the world backed us to bring our dream to life. How do we account for that success? I think that it’s ultimately a testimony to the amazing global board gaming community and their love and passion for the hobby. I think that reviewers and players saw two people who were trying to fulfil their dream and wanted to support us. We came to our first Kickstarter completely new. We had no board game industry insight, had no networks in the industry, we had never done crowdfunding, marketing, graphic design or art professionally before. Looking back it is quite amazing and we owe it all to the board gaming community and to people like you, Jim, for seeing what we were trying to do and believing in us and ultimately putting their hard earned cash behind supporting us. I think a lot of us in the community saw a great game made by great people with a great cause behind it. You deserve it all. Since then, what have you been up to? We did our second Kickstarter campaign in 2025 for the Lodges Expansion, Let’s Go Kavango and some new animal booster packs to add 21 new animals to your nature reserve. This has been really well received - including by you, thank you again! - and we’re really excited for people to start playing with the Lodges Expansion and relish the new puzzle it adds to the game. We’ve introduced 21 new animals through Captivating Cats, Brilliant Birds and our Animal Booster Pack and we’re really glad that we’ve got some of these animals into the game. Again this is a personal story for us. We made Captivating Cats in honour of our cat Precious Ramotswe who died in early 2025. We adopted her in Botswana and she was the third member of our team throughout the whole Kavango journey. She was a great cat and we wanted to immortalise her in shiny form. We love the idea that she is being played into Nature Reserves by people across the world. We’re also very proud of Let’s Go Kavango, which is a streamlined travel version of Kavango. It has all the strategy and all the animals but in a small box. As you know, the environment and sustainability is the no.1 priority for us with our games and that’s where the idea for Let’s Go Kavango game comes from. We wanted to update the decks of cards for our original Kickstarter backers because we had made some changes to the cards in a later edition and we wanted our original backers to have the best version of the game. However, we didn’t want people to throw out their cards and recycling services can vary based on where you live. So, we positioned this problem through the lens of the circular economy and decided that the best option was for people to be able to reuse their original cards. It tied in perfectly with other feedback that we’d been having that people wanted to take Kavango on holiday with them but the game was too big and heavy. And we also wanted to design a version of the game that we could sell more easily in southern Africa with a lower price-point and lower barrier to shipping. So this idea of making a travel edition of Kavango, which people could create themselves with their old deck of cards, was how Let’s Go Kavango was born and we included it as a free add-on for all of our returning fans in our Lodges Expansion Kickstarter campaign. Building on from Kavango, we are more committed than ever to our mission of inspiring people to protect our world’s biodiversity through the power of games. We’ve got a pipeline of games and so many ideas. We’ll talk more about Scavengers later but that is our next game which is a fun card bidding game that’s perfect for group game night. We’re working alongside this on our next big game offering, Beaver: Born to Rewild. We live in the Scottish Highlands now and Zara is working on Beaver reintroductions after 400 years of absence for our landscape. It’s been amazing to see how much positive impact the beavers have had on the landscape by recreating wetlands and supporting entire ecosystems returning to these landscapes. We became inspired to make a game about these incredible ecosystem engineers and tell this beautiful story of rewilding. In the game you will play as a family of beavers reintroduced to the Scottish Highlands and you’ll build your dam to create a mosaic of wetland habitats and reintroduce an array of native wildlife. Sounds great! I am excited to try it. But for now, tell me about your next game, Scavengers? We came up with the idea for Scavengers when we were visiting one of our charity partners, Vulpro, in South Africa in January 2026. We heard from them the importance of vultures to African ecosystems as a vital clean-up crew to stop the spread of disease. But they are difficult to conserve and protect because they have a PR issue. So we decided to make a game about vultures and other scavengers to showcase the beauty, power and importance of these animals. Scavengers is a new addition to the Kavango world. Over one dramatic night - split into 3 rounds: dusk, midnight and dawn - you'll play as scavengers in the Kalahari competing for food at the carcass. Bluff, bid and outmanoeuvre your opponents to win the most food for your scavengers. You’ll be dealt a hand of cards at the start of each phase of the night (dusk, midnight and dawn). Each round consists of five feeds, where you can bid to win food. The value of the feeds increases as the night progresses. Action cards can invert the power of your scavengers so even the underdog can win and beware the power of the lion who will scare away your scavengers and steal food from the carcass! It’s designed for 2-5 players, ages 8+, with a playtime of around 20-30 minutes. It’s an easy-to-learn, small-box, quick-playing card game in the same genre as games like Scout, Skull King, Flip 7 and Perudo, but with the bonus of some beautiful animals! It is a lot of fun and has high player interaction, making it perfect for group game night or family holidays! Well, I have been loving it myself, my full review is below. And I understand you are making this game in Europe to reduce transport emissions. How easy was that to change budget and logistics-wise? Sustainability is our no.1 priority and we are always looking for ways to improve. Scavengers is plastic free, made from 80% recycled materials (the rest is FSC sourced) and was manufactured in a factory that is powered by the Spanish sun! There’s no way of getting around the fact that transport is one of the major sources of emissions from our products. We wanted to try manufacturing in Europe to reduce these emissions by manufacturing closer to our European and British customers. It is more expensive but it also has a shorter lead-time so there is benefit in being able to get the product to customers more quickly. We’re working with AGR who are based in Spain and have a solar powered factory. They’ve been great so far and we are really excited that they’ve been able to make Scavengers in time for a release at Essen Spiel 2026. We’ll be selling the first copies at the convention and then will do a wider release in the weeks after Essen. I love this. Good on you for leading the way - again! Do you think others in the gaming sector can do more in this area? Others in every sector can and should do more in this area. We think a lot about a quote from the naturalist Dr. Jane Goodall: “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” We are very honoured to be able to make products that people want to buy and we take that responsibility with the utmost seriousness to produce products that touch the world as lightly as possible. A lot of people are doing this in the board gaming world and we’ve taken inspiration from other games. We’ve definitely seen increasingly more games embrace sustainable materials and manufacturing approaches. We’re trying to show that it is possible and help people reimagine what a good, high quality, sustainably designed game can look like. We want our games to be as sustainable as possible with no increased cost to our customers. It is possible. We are doing it - and we hope others will follow suit. Here here! So, what are your plans for the next few months? We are launching Scavengers at Essen Spiel in October 2026 which is very exciting. And we’re also extremely excited to see Kavango being played as one of the tournament games in Europe Masters at Essen Spiel! So those are two major milestones and moments for us. Once we’ve launched Scavengers we will go full on into the final development and art for Beaver: Born to Rewild. We are doing playtesting events at the York Environment Festival in October and plan to do a Beaver Tour of Britain in the new year where we take the prototypes to play with people and then visit beaver wetlands. More to come on that soon. What a delight to speak with you! (Let's hope our review of Scavengers is good, that could be very awkward!) You can check that out here.

Scavengers WBG Score: 7.5/10 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Card games with interesting layers and scoring. Published by: Mazaza Games Designed by: Matt Brown, Zara Reid This is a free review copy of the pre-production version. The box art will change, and some art and components may change a little. See our review policy here. There is something immediately compelling about Scavengers. Dusk has fallen over the Kalahari, a carcass is waiting, and every creature around the table wants a piece of it. Coming from Matt Brown and Zara Reid, the designers of Kavango, this is a very different proposition from their previous game, but it shares the same fascination with the natural world and the same desire to turn real ecological behaviour and learning into something playful. This time, rather than building a nature reserve, you are fighting over dinner. Across one night, split into dusk, midnight and dawn, players send scavengers towards the carcass, bluffing and bidding for increasingly valuable piles of meat. The subject matter may be a little grislier than your average family card game, but that is part of its appeal. Scavengers are a vital part of healthy ecosystems, and I like that the game does not shy away from showing that side of nature. It is also a much smaller and faster game than Kavango. Scavengers plays in around 20 minutes, supports two to five players and can be taught very quickly. The box is compact, the cards look excellent, and the meat tokens give the whole thing just enough physical presence to make the central carcass feel like something everyone genuinely wants to fight over. How To Play Scavengers A game lasts three rounds: dusk, midnight and dawn. Each round contains five feeds, with the amount of meat available steadily increasing as the night progresses. At the start of each round you receive scavenger cards and four action cards, and that hand has to see you through all five feeds, so spending everything too early can leave you badly exposed later. On your turn, you can bid with scavenger cards, play certain action cards instead of bidding, or withdraw from the feed entirely. Your bid must equal or exceed the current highest value, but bids are not cumulative. If someone overtakes you, you cannot simply add another card to what you have already played. You need to make a completely new bid, which is where much of the tension comes from. Scavengers of the same species can be combined into sets, while action cards can completely change their value. Marabou Storks can be added to certain sets, Gregarious cards multiply the strength of weaker scavengers, and the Watch and Wait Vulture card lets you remain involved without committing another bid immediately. Then there is also the Lion, who can scatter the whole feed, send scavengers back to players' hands, discard action cards, and remove meat from the carcass before bidding starts again. But this happens rarely. There are only two Lion cards in the deck, one with lower player counts. Eventually everyone except the highest bidder withdraws and the winner takes the meat. Tied players split the available food, while cards used during the feed are discarded. After five feeds you move into the next part of the night, draw new cards and once dawn is finished, the player who has collected the most meat wins. The More Scavengers, The Better Scavengers works at two players, but this is absolutely a game I would rather play with three or more. At two, the bidding can feel slightly processional. There is less uncertainty around what the other player is holding, fewer people capable of disrupting a feed, and bluffing inevitably becomes more straightforward. Add another player or two and everything changes. Suddenly you are wondering whether somebody is genuinely strong or simply trying to push everyone else out, whether that apparently weak bid is hiding an action-card trick, and whether you should spend your best cards now or let somebody else burn through theirs first. Bidding and bluffing games generally thrive on additional personalities around the table, and Scavengers is no exception. The increasing value of the feeds helps enormously too. Early meat is useful, but throwing your strongest cards at everything can leave you watching helplessly while everyone else fights over the more valuable carcass later. There is a satisfying rhythm to knowing when to push, when to withdraw, and when to let somebody else overcommit. Lions, Underdogs And Chaos The action cards are where much of Scavengers' personality appears. Gregarious can suddenly make a collection of weaker animals surprisingly formidable, while Marabou Storks create extra possibilities when building sets. These are simple effects, but they introduce enough uncertainty that you cannot always judge a bid purely from the numbers already sitting on the table. The Lion is considerably less subtle. When one appears, carefully constructed plans can collapse immediately, meat disappears and everybody is effectively thrown back into the fight. It can be brutal, but it suits the game because Scavengers is never trying to be a perfectly controlled bidding exercise. That unpredictability also feeds into the bluffing. Sometimes you really do have an excellent hand. Sometimes you are simply hoping everybody believes you have something they do not want to challenge. The rules are straightforward, but the people around the table create the interesting decisions. Theme With A Purpose I particularly like the theme. Scavengers could easily have been an abstract auction card game with numbers and colours, but vultures, hyenas and other animals competing around a carcass give the mechanics context. The hand-drawn artwork is lovely, and physically collecting meat tokens makes winning a feed feel considerably more satisfying than simply writing down points. There is also something worthwhile about focusing on animals that do not normally receive the cute treatment in nature games. Scavengers perform essential ecological work, clearing carcasses and helping prevent the spread of disease, and the designers have deliberately chosen to shine a light on that role. It may not be a theme for everyone, but I found it fascinating rather than unpleasant. That environmental thinking extends to the production itself. The game is plastic-free and uses predominantly recycled materials, continuing the sustainability approach Matt and Zara established with Kavango. It fits naturally with the wider message behind their games rather than feeling like a marketing badge stuck onto the box. Pros Excellent with three or more players. More bidders create much stronger bluffing, uncertainty and interaction. Distinctive theme. The scavenger ecosystem gives a familiar bidding mechanism plenty of personality. Quick and approachable. The basic rules are easy to grasp while the cards still create meaningful decisions. Great presentation. The artwork and meat tokens bring the Kalahari setting to life. Cons Two players is noticeably flatter. It functions perfectly well, but much of the social tension disappears. Some swings are deliberately chaotic. The Lion can undo plans very quickly, which will not appeal to players wanting complete control. Its depth depends heavily on the group. The mechanisms are straightforward, so much of the fun comes from the people doing the bidding. Final Thoughts Scavengers is a very different game from Kavango, and I think that is a good thing. Rather than trying to recreate the same experience in a smaller box, Matt and Zara have taken the same interest in wildlife and built something faster, sharper and much more confrontational. The result is an accessible bidding game with a strong identity. For me, player count is the important caveat. With two players, I enjoyed it but could feel the missing personalities around the carcass. Get three, four or five scavengers involved and the bluffing becomes much more interesting, the action cards become harder to predict, and every decision about whether to stay involved or back away carries more weight. There is nothing hugely complicated hiding underneath Scavengers, but there does not need to be. It is attractive, thematic, quick to teach and genuinely entertaining with the right group, while also introducing players to an often overlooked part of the natural world. A good game that becomes considerably better as more hungry scavengers arrive at the table. Find out more about the game here.

This is a preview copy sent to us for our early opinions. No money exchanged hands. Some art, rules or components will change in the final game. Find out more here. There is something immediately appealing about the idea behind Excursions. Take the systems and iconography of Galactic Cruise, streamline them, make turns simultaneous, and aim for a game that still feels meaty but plays in a fraction of the time. That is very much what Excursions is trying to do, and from my plays so far, it largely succeeds. This is a preview rather than a full review, as the game is still pre-release and the final components and presentation are not yet locked. I am therefore judging the gameplay, flow and current prototype experience rather than the finished production. That distinction matters, especially because some of my reservations are around the current visual presentation rather than the underlying design. Setup and First Impressions Excursions is a medium-weight game built around a rotating central station, seven action spaces and individual player boards. Each player starts with ships, upgrade potential, developments, resource tracks and secret goals, while the central board handles action selection, technologies and company goals. The game ends once somebody reaches 50 points, at which point everyone gets a final opportunity to act before final scoring. The rulebook currently makes the game look more complicated than I think it really is. It covers everything thoroughly, and there is plenty of useful iconography support, but the actual flow becomes intuitive very quickly once you start playing. If you already know Galactic Cruise, much of the language and symbology will feel familiar, but even without that background, I found the game settled into place during the first few turns. I am less sold on the current main board visually. The layout is clear, the rotating middle is a clever and practical feature, and the whole thing functions well, but the current light blue presentation feels more abstract than thematic to me. The space-cruise setting never really came through strongly during play, and I wonder whether a little more visual space for artwork with a larger board might help sell that theme more effectively in the finished version. How the Action System Works The centrepiece is the simultaneous action system. On your turn, you choose one of seven actions around the station, and every player gets to perform that action. The active player also receives an additional bonus, with the strength of that bonus changing according to the position of the rotating station. That immediately keeps everyone involved. There is very little sitting around waiting for your turn because somebody else choosing an action is still relevant to you, and often useful. The rotating bonuses also mean timing matters, because the same action might be merely decent now but considerably stronger a few turns later. The clever part is how your flexibility develops. By placing developments between action spaces, you can eventually gain access to neighbouring actions when another player chooses something that does not quite suit you. That means the system begins relatively restrictive, then gradually opens up as your own network improves, which is a really nice bit of mechanical progression. Planning Your Excursions The main engine of the game revolves around preparing and launching trips, the excursions in the game. You collect guests, play excursion and days-in-space cards next to your ships, gather the required resources of food and fuel, upgrade your capabilities, and then eventually launch when you have everything lined up. Excursion cards have guest requirements to fulfil and can even be stacked to reduce fuel costs, so you can do two at one stop. However, that may increase the guest requirements you need to fulfil, as each guest can only do one excursion per stop. There are only so many hours in the day, after all! Launching is deliberately demanding. You need the right guests, enough food, enough fuel, the cards you want in place and a return-home card ready to go. Food is based on the number of guests, while fuel is based on the number of stops, including the trip home. That creates the kind of frustration I often get from efficiency Euros. Sometimes an opponent picks Launch and you realise you are one resource short to do so yourself, and it can feel like a wasted opportunity. But that is also the point, because when you have planned ahead properly and everything clicks at exactly the right moment, it feels great. You therefore need to keep one eye on your own engine and one eye on everyone else. If you can see another player getting close to launching, you want to be ready to take advantage too. That makes the simultaneous system more interactive than it first appears, because the value of other players' choices depends heavily on how well prepared you are to follow them, and do what they do at the same time. Can you be ready? Guests, Cards and Upgrades Guests come in three types, and once placed into a ship they are committed to that trip. The active player gets greater control over which guests they take, picking openly from the bag. While others draw randomly. But ad tokens can later be spent to temporarily convert guests into another type for scoring purposes if you are forced to board the wrong guest. There is a nice amount of control here without the game becoming overwhelming. You are constantly making little choices about which guests to recruit, which cards to play, which upgrades to prioritise and when to commit resources to a launch. None of those decisions are individually difficult, but together they create a satisfying puzzle. This is an efficiency puzzle. What do you do first. What do you prioritise. What route to the many scoring options do you take. The upgrades are also important because they gradually make your player board more capable. And there is a fair bit of choice. You probably wont upgrade it all, and the order you do this is also crucial. You can increase ship capacity, improve trading, expand your hand limit, create a lounge for holding guests and enhance various funding bonuses. The dual-layer player boards keep all of this tidy, with everything slotting neatly into place instead of sliding around as the game progresses. Scoring and the Endgame Scoring is one of my favourite parts of Excursions. Early in the game, the end game trigger target of 50 points feels a long way away because you are scraping together small amounts here and there. Then the engine starts to build, your launches improve, your bonuses compound, and suddenly the scoring accelerates much faster than you expected. Once somebody hits 50, the game does not simply stop. Everyone gets a final action, ships still in space get one last chance to advance, and then final scoring adds points for leftover resources, upgrades, developments, company goals and secret goals. That final scoring can be enormous. It is entirely possible to go around the scoring track again, which makes the endgame genuinely exciting because the player who triggered the finish is not necessarily safe just because they were ahead at that point. Secret objectives are particularly important because they can deliver significant points that the other players cannot fully account for, so there is always some uncertainty going into the final tally. Simultaneous Play The simultaneous structure is mostly a big positive for me. It keeps the game moving, keeps everyone engaged, and makes even other players' turns relevant. That helps Excursions feel much quicker than something with this amount of planning and scoring might otherwise feel. You are always making some progression. Some steps forward just feel a lot bigger than others. There is a trade-off, though. At higher player counts, the table does become harder to follow, especially if everyone is resolving bonuses and side effects at once. If you are the sort of gamer who likes to track other players turns, then it can become a little chaotic. For me, the main benefit outweighs that concern. I would rather have the constant involvement and occasional need to check what somebody else is doing than spend long periods waiting for my turn. Presentation and Table Presence The player boards are excellent in their current form. They are dual-layered, everything fits exactly where it should, and components stay put even as you manipulate ships, upgrades and resources. It is one of those practical design choices that makes the game noticeably nicer to play. The game does take up more table space than the central board initially suggests. Your cards spread out above and to the right of your player area as you build itineraries, so each player needs a decent footprint. That may explain why the main board itself is relatively compact, and mechanically the overall layout works very well. The main board art is where I am less convinced at the moment. It is functional, readable and intelligently laid out, but it feels a little too clean and abstract for a game about luxury cruises through space. Since this is still a preview build, I am interested to see whether the finished production pushes the theme harder. Final Thoughts Excursions is a streamlined game, not a simplistic one. There is still plenty to think about, but the simultaneous action system and more focused structure keep it moving at a much better pace. You are constantly making decisions, constantly reacting to other players and constantly trying to prepare for the moment when the right action appears. The scoring curve is especially satisfying. What begins as a slow crawl towards 50 points gradually turns into something much more explosive, and the final scoring gives everyone a real reason to stay invested until the end. Add in the excellent player boards, strong action flexibility and rewarding cruise-planning puzzle, and there is a lot here that already works. The current rulebook feels more complicated than the game itself, and the visual presentation does not yet fully sell the theme to me, but both of those things can still evolve before release. As a gameplay experience, though, Excursions is already fun, clever and impressively efficient, and I am very interested to see where the final version lands. Find out more here.

Distilled: Cocktails WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Viticulture, The Networks Published by: Paverson Games Designed by: Dave Beck, Richard Woods This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Distilled: Cocktails is not a small expansion. This is another full box of stuff, and unlike Africa & Middle East or Cask Strength, it genuinely changes how Distilled feels. I really like it, but I can absolutely see why some people will decide they preferred the cleaner base game. There is a lot of stuff on the table when you add all this in. But does it make the game better? What appears to be the headline is the addition is the second washback, which lets you pay to distil a second spirit in the same round. The cost rises each time you unlock it, but it gives you far more flexibility and dramatically increases what your distillery can produce. But there is a lot more below the surface. On top of the second washback come cocktails, mixers, collectors, renown, a world map, more scoring opportunities and more reasons to care about exactly which spirits you are making. Lets get it to the table and see how it plays. More Game, More Decisions Cocktails are the biggest shift in the game mechanics and flow. You can now buy cocktail orders, collect mixers and later serve those orders using spirit labels you have already earned, gaining Renown and spreading your influence across the world map. Collectors then add another reason to make higher-value spirits, rewarding specific tiers and opening up extra end-game scoring based on the labels you have accumulated. Its delightfully connected and crunchy. That all means you are doing more every round. Your spirits now feed into more systems, your decisions branch in more directions and there are more ways to build a strategy. Once you understand how everything links together, that extra decision space is where the expansion becomes genuinely interesting. And if you felt the base game was good, but lacked a bit of depth and complexity, well this expansion could well be for you. I can just about set up a two player game on my table! Better, But Bigger! The important thing to note at this point is that Distilled was not broken. The base game already worked brilliantly, but it was a little simple. Cocktails is not fixing a problem, it is asking whether you want a bigger, busier and slightly more complicated version of something you already enjoy. For me, the answer is a resounding, "sometimes". Once you have learned the new systems, they start to feel natural and you find yourself doing more interesting things with the spirits you produce. The cocktails and collectors give you fresh reasons to shape your distillery in different ways which I find to be very interesting, and make the game feel quite fresh against the base game. But there is a cost. There is more setup, more table space, more to teach, and more to think about. A two-player game only just fits on my table! Hence, I have not tried this with the full expansion beyond two yet! The rulebook itself recommends introducing the second washback alone first before adding cocktails, Renown, and Collectors, which tells you how substantial this expansion really is. I certainly would not teach a new player with this. And I won't always use it myself. There is just too much to sort out now. But when I have the time, I will always add it all in because the game is simply better with this all. It's just a fair bit of pre-game admin now. Beautifully Integrated The reason I liked the base game of Distilled was the sense that every round you are making something. Even if something goes wrong, you can make something. It is not always the thing you want, and that can be tough when you remove the cards you desperately need in the distilling phase, but there will still be a nice juicy mix of points and money up for grabs. A sense of progression every turn. And the chance to develop your engine to make more point-worthy batches in a later round. This all exists in Cocktails, but it feels dialled up to eleven! The chance to make two drinks some turns. The opportunities to get your hand on the gorgeous new cocktail glasses and fulfil an order there too and ramp up your points. It all feels just so satisfying. Production-wise, though, it is excellent. The new boards, cards, tokens and artwork feel completely at home alongside the base game, and visually it all slots together far more seamlessly than the sheer amount of additional content might suggest. And I love the new dice. They look and feel (other than not being cold) a bit like ice cubes! Mechanically, it all flows seamlessly, and this is important because it could easily have felt like a bolt-on, being this big of an expansion. Instead, once everything is laid out and you know what you are doing, it feels like a larger, better, more satisfying version of Distilled rather than a different game awkwardly attached to it. You block off some spaces in the two-player set-up Pros Adds much more strategic variety and decision-making. Second Washback is an excellent addition. Cocktails and Collectors make your spirit choices matter in new ways. Production and artwork integrate beautifully with the base game. Cons Adds a lot of setup, table space and rules. Not necessary if you prefer Distilled's original simplicity. Too much to throw at a brand-new player immediately. Final Thoughts Cocktails makes Distilled a little better, but asks quite a lot from you to get there. You are adding another box of components and several new systems to a game that was already very good, so I completely understand anyone who decides they do not need it. For me, though, the extra depth is worth it. I would not use it when teaching someone their first few games, but from game three or four onwards I would be very happy to bring it in, and once players understand the extra systems I suspect most will want to keep them when they have the time, or I am setting up for them! If you love Distilled and want more to do, more to plan and more ways to shape your distillery, this is the expansion that changes the game the most. It makes a good game better and offers me options I am delighted to have.

Distilled: Africa & Middle East WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Viticulture, The Networks Published by: Paverson Games Designed by: Dave Beck This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Distilled was already a game I rated highly, so an expansion did not need to reinvent the still. What I wanted was more variety, more interesting combinations and a reason to keep exploring a game I already enjoy. Africa & Middle East does exactly that, although anyone expecting a dramatic new way to play should temper those expectations immediately. There is another expansion that will do that for you! This is very much a “more Distilled” expansion, and I mean that positively. Six new distillers arrive alongside new signature recipes and ingredients, market cards, upgrades, goals, awards, flavours and six additional tasting flights. The headline additions are four new spirits, Akpeteshie, Arak, Boukha and Grogue, bringing Africa and the Middle East into a game that already celebrates distilling traditions from around the world. What's New? Almost everything simply slots into the existing game. You can shuffle most of the new components straight into Distilled even when you are not using the expansion-specific tasting flights, although regional goals and awards need to be redrawn if their region is not represented in your chosen flight. There are three new balanced tasting flights and three more specialised options focusing on Africa and Middle Eastern spirits, non-aged spirits and aged spirits. There are only two genuinely new mechanisms. Double Sugar ingredients show two sugar symbols, count as two sugars and therefore generate two Alcohol cards when you distil. Wild Sugar, currently represented by Glucose Syrup, can count as grain, plant or fruit when satisfying a recipe requirement. Neither requires much additional teaching, which is exactly what I want from this sort of expansion. They simply give you more options within systems you already understand rather than stopping the game to introduce another board, phase or currency. More Choice, Same Game Double Sugars are probably the more interesting of the two additions. Getting two sugars from a single card can help you reach more demanding recipes efficiently, but that efficiency comes with a lovely little dose of Distilled's existing push-your-luck. Lose that one card when you remove the top and bottom cards of your spirit stack and you have potentially lost two sugars at once. Wild Sugar offers the opposite experience. Rather than increasing the risk, it gives you flexibility when the market has not quite offered what you wanted. It can help you pivot between potential spirits, and anything that lets you make a slightly smarter decision without removing Distilled's uncertainty feels very natural here. There are other nice touches scattered through the cards too, including more flexible barrels, ingredients, bottles and upgrades. The expansion also introduces a fourth geographical region for bottle collecting, with a new eight-point reward for displaying bottles from all four regions. None of this transforms the game, but collectively it gives an already variable system more combinations to explore. Do You Need It? That really depends on how often you play Distilled. If the base game only reaches your table occasionally, there is already plenty there. This expansion does not fix a fundamental problem or add some missing mechanism that suddenly makes Distilled complete. The core experience remains almost entirely unchanged. But that is also why I like it. I did not want Distilled to become heavier, longer or harder to teach. I wanted more recipes, more distillers and more interesting cards appearing in the market, and Africa & Middle East adds all of that without disrupting the game I already enjoy. The regional focus is also particularly welcome. Distilled has always benefited enormously from its theme, so bringing in spirits such as Akpeteshie, Arak, Boukha and Grogue feels more meaningful than simply throwing another stack of generic cards into the box. The expansion broadens the game's cultural scope while remaining completely recognisable as Distilled. Pros Adds plenty of variety without making Distilled meaningfully more complicated. Double and Wild Sugars create useful new decisions inside the existing distillation system. New spirits, identities and tasting flights strengthen an already excellent theme. Integrates almost seamlessly with the base game. Cons It does not substantially change how Distilled plays. Players who only occasionally play the base game probably do not need more content yet. Adding another region creates a few minor setup and scoring considerations around goals, awards and bottles. Final Thoughts Distilled: Africa & Middle East is exactly the sort of expansion I am happy to mix permanently into a game. It does not demand attention every time you play, nor does it make you relearn anything significant. It simply increases the number of interesting things that can happen. The Double Sugar and Wild Sugar cards are clever additions, but they are seasoning rather than a new recipe. The real attraction is the increased variety, particularly if you already know Distilled well and want new distillers, spirits, upgrades and combinations to explore. I like this expansion. It does not dramatically improve Distilled, but it makes a game I already enjoy broader and more replayable without getting in its way, and sometimes that is exactly what an expansion should do.

Distilled: Cask Strength WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Viticulture, The Networks Published by: Paverson Games Designed by: Richard Woods This is a free review copy. See our review policy here Cask Strength is a small expansion that does exactly what I want from this sort of box. It makes Distilled a little richer without making it noticeably heavier. There are four modular additions here, and all of them slot neatly into a game you already know. Stronger Ingredients, Better Decisions The star is the set of upgraded Premium Ingredients. They now have their own effects and rewards, giving you more reason to care about which ingredient you buy rather than simply its sugar type and value. They cost a little more, but that extra investment can lead to better combos and more satisfying spirits later. You can simply replace the previous premium ingrediants with these or go half and half. Up to you. The Dynamic Market adds another nice wrinkle. Prices of ingredients rise and fall, certain regions become more profitable, and importantly you can see what is coming next round. It adds some useful forward planning without turning Distilled into an economics game. The new Upgrades and Flavour cards are smaller additions, but they still create a few interesting moments. Some let you bend the usual rules around ageing or take another chance on a poor Flavour card. None of this changes the game dramatically, but collectively it gives experienced players more to think about. A Little More, Not Too Much That is really the appeal of Cask Strength. Where the Africa & Middle East expansion mostly adds variety, this one adds a touch more depth. Ingredient choices matter more, timing matters more, and there are a few extra opportunities to build clever combinations. I would not necessarily use every module with brand-new players. Distilled already has enough going on, and these additions become more interesting once you understand the base game. For anyone who already knows it well, though, this is an incredibly easy expansion to throw in. Pros Upgraded Premium Ingredients are an excellent addition. Adds more planning without much extra complexity. Fully modular, so you can use as much or as little as you like. Cons Nothing here radically changes Distilled. The Dynamic Market will appeal more to some players than others. Better for experienced players than first-timers. Final Thoughts Cask Strength makes Distilled slightly deeper without making it harder to enjoy. The upgraded ingredients are the highlight, while the Dynamic Market adds just enough extra planning to keep familiar decisions interesting. It is a small expansion, but a very easy one to recommend if Distilled already gets regular table time.

Which One Deserves Your Love? AI Grass was used - my own grass is too depressing (see below pictures!) Board games are wonderful, but every now and then the sun comes out, somebody lights a barbecue (when safe), and sitting around a table suddenly feels like a terrible waste of the sunshine. That is where garden games come in. The best ones keep the accessibility of a party game but replace cards and cardboard with throwing, aiming, catching and, occasionally, making yourself look ridiculous in front of the neighbours. I have been trying a lot of very different outdoor games over the last few months to find the very best garden game and have narrowed down my favourites into a top 5: Bat & Trap, Cornhole, Rope Quoits, Canoff, and Mölkky. I have also included one other extra surprise honourable mention for more able garden gamers! Some are centuries old, some feel distinctly modern, and one surprised me by becoming easily my favourite of the lot. They all share one important quality though: you can explain them quickly, hand someone the equipment, and start playing almost immediately. Masters Traditional Games kindly loaned me the Bat & Trap, Cornhole and Rope Quoits sets featured here, while Canoff supplied the Canoff crew for review. Mölkky and the other games I tried were my own sets, or ones I tried with friends. There was no obligation to provide positive coverage and, as always, these arrangements have had no knowing influence on my opinions. You can read our full review policy on WhatBoardGame.com. So, lets get playing and find out which are our Top 5 Garden & Beach Games. And from these, which is our favourite and the best garden game! Bat & Trap Bat & Trap feels like someone unearthed an old English pub game, polished up the wood, and dropped it straight into my garden. It is an ancient relative of cricket and, some say, the inspiration for the classic summer team sport. It has a wonderfully eccentric combination of batting, fielding, and bowling that immediately gives it more character than most modern lawn games. There is something enormously satisfying about playing a game with this much history using equipment that looks as though it belongs in an old village pub, but plays so well. It's proper craftsmanship. How to set up The centrepiece is the trap itself, a rectangular wooden mechanism placed at one end of the playing area. At the opposite end are two posts forming the target area, with the fielding team standing behind and between them. You will need to supply your own posts with most sets, but it really can be anything. Stones, twigs, chairs. Two grandparents! Whatever you want. And it's nice you can adapt the width to suit your preferences. Traditionally, the game uses teams of eight, with each player batting once and the team totally their score. Although in a garden there is absolutely nothing stopping you from adapting numbers, distance, and scoring to suit whoever happens to be available. We played one vs. one plenty of times. The Masters Traditional Games Bat & Trap set I used is beautifully made.. The wooden trap is substantial, the mechanism feels reassuringly solid, and there are thoughtful touches designed to keep everything stable during play. It is the sort of object that looks good simply sitting around, although you will need somewhere sensible to store it because this is not lightweight garden equipment. It's pretty heavy, and you wouldn't want to just leave it out to become weather damaged. It's too nice! How to play The batter places the ball over the hole then strikes a lever on the trap, launching a hard rubber ball into the air, then attempts to hit that same ball with the bat towards the opposite end of the pitch. Get it through the target area and avoid a catch from the fielders and you survive the first part of the turn. Miss the target or send the ball directly into somebody's waiting hands and you are out. Then comes the clever bit. A fielder returns the ball towards the trap, aiming at the small hinged black target on its front, and if they knock that wicket down the batter is bowled out. Miss it and the batting side scores a run, with the same batter continuing for another attempt. Cricket's strange garden cousin I really enjoy Bat & Trap because the two halves of each turn work beautifully together. Launching and striking the ball is satisfying, but then suddenly you are watching the ball bounce back towards a tiny target knowing your entire innings depends on the bowler missing it. It creates a surprisingly entertaining rhythm. Distance also becomes an easy difficulty setting. Better players can stand further away, while children or less confident players can move closer, meaning the game adapts naturally without needing a complicated handicap system. Scoring and team sizes can be loosened up just as easily, which makes the traditional eight-a-side format far more practical for family play. There are drawbacks. You need a decent amount of space, the equipment is large and heavy, and this is not something you casually sling over your shoulder for a walk to the park. It transports perfectly well in a car, but compared with most garden games this is very much a piece of proper equipment rather than a portable toy. The hard rubber ball also has a personality of its own. On my less-than-perfect lawn it bounced around like it had somewhere important to be, making accurate returns considerably harder than they would be on flat ground. Rather than spoiling things, that unpredictability became part of the fun, although anyone expecting pristine sporting precision may want to mow the lawn first. Pros Beautifully crafted equipment with loads of traditional character. Easy to adjust distance, scoring and team sizes for different players. The combination of batting and bowling gives everyone something to do. A wonderful history and story to tell. Cons Large, heavy and expensive compared with simpler garden games. Needs a fair amount of playing space. Enjoyable, but ultimately a little one-dimensional after repeated plays. Bat & Trap is beautiful, unusual and steeped in history. It may not have enough depth to become an every-week obsession, but as something different to pull out with friends or family it has considerable charm. Cornhole Cornhole might be one of the most straightforward games here to explain, but there is slightly more lurking beneath the surface than throwing a bag towards a hole. Its popularity in America makes complete sense because this is exactly the sort of game that can sit alongside food, drinks and conversation without demanding everyone's complete attention. The problem is that the full-size version also occupies roughly the same amount of space as a small dining table. How to set up The game uses two raised wooden boards with a hole towards the far end, together with eight throwing bags. Players stand at the opposite end and take turns throwing their bags towards the board. The rules are simple enough that most people will understand what they are doing after watching a single throw. The Masters Traditional Games Cornhole set is a full-size wooden version and it feels suitably substantial. Unfortunately, substantial also means very large and very heavy. Although it comes with a protective carry bag, I never really thought of this as something I would want to carry any meaningful distance. We mostly played this one in our own garden. How to play Get a bag through the hole and you score three points. Leave one resting on the board and you score one. Everything else scores nothing. That sounds almost suspiciously basic, but the board creates the game's most interesting moments. Bags can skid across the surface, stop in front of the hole, knock earlier throws into scoring positions or interfere with an opponent's bags. Suddenly you are not only aiming for the hole but thinking about what your throw might do to everything already sitting there. Bigger than expected in more ways than one Cornhole is undeniably fun. Throwing games work because missing is funny, succeeding feels good and everyone can immediately tell whether you have just produced brilliance or embarrassment. The possibility of using one bag to shove another into the hole gives the game just enough tactical interest to keep things competitive. My biggest issue is simply the physical product. These boards are huge, heavy and awkward to move, and whenever I carried them around I found myself worrying about damaging the wood. For a permanent garden setup, fête, fair or organised event that is not necessarily a problem, but it removes much of the spontaneous portability I normally associate with outdoor games. The game itself also reaches its ceiling relatively quickly. There is skill in judging distance, angle and power, and the blocking possibilities add a welcome tactical layer, but fundamentally you will spend the evening throwing bags at the same board. Whether that is enough depends entirely on how competitive your group becomes. Pros Extremely easy to teach and immediately accessible. Sliding and knocking bags creates more tactics than expected. Excellent for relaxed social play. Cons The full-size wooden set is exceptionally bulky and heavy. Awkward to move and potentially vulnerable to knocks during transport. The gameplay can feel repetitive fairly quickly. Cornhole is a good garden game trapped inside a very large piece of furniture. If you have the space and can leave it somewhere convenient, it is easy-going fun, but I would not choose it when portability matters. Rope Quoits Rope Quoits has perhaps the nicest origin story of the five games here. Sailors fashioned quoits from rope and threw them towards suitable targets aboard ships, with versions of the game later becoming familiar on passenger liners and cruise ships. There is something rather lovely about bringing that same simple activity into a modern garden. How to set up The Masters Traditional Games Deck Quoits set uses a wooden stake and rope rings. Set the target at whatever distance suits the players, divide up the quoits and you are essentially ready to begin. Like most traditional outdoor games, the exact scoring can be adjusted depending on how formal you want proceedings to become. The set itself makes a strong first impression. The rope quoits feel pleasant in your hands, the wooden components look attractive and the whole thing suits a garden aesthetically far better than brightly coloured plastic equipment. It is also much easier to move around than either Bat & Trap or Cornhole. How to play At its simplest, players take turns attempting to throw their rope quoits over or as close as possible to the target. Different versions use different scoring systems, and traditional Deck Quoits itself has never been completely standardised. That informality suits the game perfectly because nobody is going to spend ten minutes debating the finer points before throwing a rope ring across the lawn. And that is really all there is to it. You aim, you throw, you either celebrate or retrieve the ring and try again. The challenge is entirely about distance control and accuracy. Lovely, but lightweight I enjoyed Rope Quoits. The equipment feels nice, it looks good in the garden and there is something relaxing about repeatedly trying to land a clean throw. It is the kind of activity you can teach somebody in seconds and then casually play while chatting. But there simply is not much underneath it. Unlike Cornhole, where bags can interact with one another, or Canoff, where the defending side remains involved, Quoits is largely just repeated target throwing. That is fine for a quick diversion, particularly with children or during a gathering, but it struggled to hold my attention for long. Pros Attractive, tactile equipment. Exceptionally easy to teach. Quick, relaxed fun for mixed groups. Cons Very little tactical depth. Repetition arrives quickly. Better as a short activity than a main event. Rope Quoits is pleasant rather than compelling. I am happy to own it, happy to play it, and equally happy to move onto something else after ten minutes. Canoff Canoff was the game I expected the least from and enjoyed the most. When somebody explains that you are going to throw a flying disc at a can balanced on a pole, it does not exactly sound like years of development went into the concept. Or that you need the official set! Then you start playing and discover that this ridiculously simple idea produces laughter, spectacular misses, frantic catches, and constant involvement. And the official kit is wonderful. How to set up Two teams each have a pole with a can balanced on top, with the teams positioned opposite each other. Players stand at least one metre behind their poles during play, and one flying disc travels backwards and forwards between the sides. The whole setup is compact enough to work in a garden, park or on the beach. Canoff supplied the set I used for this review. The format is much more portable than the larger wooden games in this feature, which immediately makes it easier to imagine taking somewhere rather than merely owning it at home. It all packs down into a small supplied mesh bag. That proved particularly useful when we played on the beach. How to play Players throw the disc towards the opposing team's can. Knock the can off cleanly and you score two points, while hitting the pole and causing the can to fall scores one. If the defending team catches the can after the pole is hit, however, the attacking side scores nothing. Knocking the can off after hitting the pole too low in the red zone also scores nothing. There are additional opportunities for chaos. Knock your own can off by mistake and you lose a point, while bad throws or dropped catches can earn whatever penalty your group decides is appropriate. The official suggestion that players keep one hand behind their back, or hold a drink in it, tells you almost everything you need to know about the intended atmosphere. Why is this so much fun? The magic is that Canoff keeps both teams engaged. With a normal throwing game, the defending side mostly stands around watching someone else take their turn. Here, the moment that disc leaves someone's hand, the other team is preparing to react because even a poor hit can suddenly turn into a desperate attempt to catch a falling can. Throwing a flying disc is already enjoyable on its own, but giving it a target makes every throw more interesting. You begin trying different angles and powers, while the defending side watches the flight knowing they may have to move instantly. The simplicity that initially made me suspicious turned out to be exactly why it works. When we played on the beach, this was easily the game that attracted the most attention. People watched, laughed and clearly understood what was happening without needing any explanation, which is perhaps the strongest endorsement an outdoor party game can receive. It creates a spectacle without trying particularly hard to do so. Most importantly, Canoff creates moments. A perfect direct hit feels brilliant, a ridiculous miss becomes funny, and a last-second catch can produce more celebration than it has any right to. Out of all five games, this was the one I most wanted to keep playing. Pros Constant involvement for both attacking and defending teams. Brilliantly simple yet surprisingly exciting. Portable, social and superb at creating memorable moments. Cons Disc throwing ability can create a noticeable skill gap. Probably at its best with a lively, competitive group. Canoff is the surprise package of the entire test. I expected a throwaway garden distraction and found the game I would most happily take to the beach, park or barbecue tomorrow. Mölkky My friend Tom, looking heroic on Woolacombe Beach Mölkky might be the smartest game in this group. The Finnish throwing game begins like a straightforward skittles challenge, but within a few rounds the pins have scattered across the playing area and suddenly every throw feels like a small tactical decision. It combines accessibility, skill and just enough arithmetic to make reaching the finish genuinely tense. How to set up Twelve numbered wooden pins are arranged tightly together, with players throwing from roughly three to four metres away. The throwing pin is tossed underarm towards them, making the basic physical action accessible to almost anyone. Younger children or less confident players can simply stand closer, which is an easy way to balance the game without changing anything else. One warning though: give yourself more room than the initial setup suggests. The starting formation is compact, but the game will not stay that way for long. By the later rounds, the pins can be scattered surprisingly widely. How to play Knock down exactly one pin and you score the number printed on it. Knock down multiple pins and you score only the number of pins that fell, so flattening pins three, seven and 12 gives you three points rather than 22. After every throw, the fallen pins are stood upright again exactly where they landed. That final rule transforms everything. Early on you can simply launch the throwing pin into a tightly packed group, but gradually individual numbers become isolated and awkward to reach. What begins as something resembling skittles evolves into a precision game where you are hunting specific targets. Traditionally, reaching exactly 50 points wins, with different versions handling overshooting in different ways. I particularly enjoy playing a harsher variant where going beyond 50 eliminates you completely. It creates genuine tension late in the game because somebody sitting on 47 suddenly needs to find that isolated three and absolutely cannot afford to hit anything higher. We also play where if you miss entirely three times in a row, you are out. Just for more tension. (and it was in the rules that came with our friends version). Simple rules, excellent development I love Mölkky. It works brilliantly in a garden or on the beach because players understand the basic idea immediately, yet the changing board state means the challenge constantly evolves. There is a satisfying transition from carefree early throws to increasingly deliberate attempts to hit one particular number. It is also wonderfully adaptable. Moving less experienced players closer keeps everyone competitive, while stronger players can stay further back without anybody feeling as though they are playing by completely different rules. That makes it an easy game to introduce at family gatherings where ages and abilities vary. Most importantly, Mölkky creates stories. Someone inevitably needs one exact pin, another player accidentally sends it flying into the distance, and suddenly the next throw looks impossible. Those little moments are what turn a simple lawn game into something you remember afterwards. We call the game Hatutappi, don't ask me why. And we have a whole ceremony around giving the stick you throw to the next player, with bows and repeating of the word "Hatutappi." It makes it a lot more fun - for us! Pros Brilliant scoring system creates increasing tactical tension. The spreading pins make every game evolve naturally. Easy to adapt for different ages and abilities. Cons Requires considerably more space as the game develops. Larger groups can mean longer waits between turns. Some scoring variants work better than others. Mölkky is a superb example of getting a lot from very little. It starts as throwing bits of wood around the garden and somehow ends with grown adults intensely calculating whether they can hit a seven without touching the nine. Honourable mention: Spikeball - Best Team Game! Spikeball, officially known as Roundnet, feels less like a traditional garden game and more like a proper sport that happens to fit beautifully into a garden. Two teams of two gather around a small trampoline-style net, with each side allowed up to three touches before smashing the ball back down onto it. Once the serve is in play, there are no fixed sides of the play area, so everyone can move 360 degrees around the net, which makes rallies fast, frantic, and brilliantly unpredictable. It's like volleyball but the net is on the floor and bouncy, and the court can be anywhere you can bounce the ball off the net too. That freedom of movement is what makes it such good fun. You are constantly setting up your partner, chasing awkward rebounds and trying to find an angle the other team cannot reach. It is easily one of the best team experiences here, and while it works perfectly well in a garden, I actually prefer it on the beach where the soft sand makes diving for a desperate save feel considerably less stupid afterwards. And diving for a ball is always fun! Spikeball deserves an honourable mention rather than a place in the main ranking because it sits in a slightly different category. It asks more physically of the players, feels more competitive and athletic, and has enough depth that people play it as a serious sport rather than just a casual lawn game. For the right group, though, it is absolutely brilliant. Pros Fantastic team game with constant involvement. 360-degree play makes rallies fast and unpredictable. Even better on the beach where you can properly commit to dives. Cons More physically demanding than the other games featured. Really wants four players to shine. 2v2. Skill gaps can become obvious quite quickly. Honourable mention If the rest of these games are about relaxed garden fun, Spikeball is the one that might have you sweating, diving and arguing about whether that ball clipped the rim. And that is exactly why it is so good. Which garden game wins from our Top 5 Garden & Beach Games? Six games in, the biggest lesson is that complexity has almost nothing to do with how entertaining an outdoor game can be. Bat & Trap has history and beautiful craftsmanship, Cornhole provides relaxed competitive throwing, and Rope Quoits offers an elegant traditional diversion. All three have something worthwhile about them, but all three also reveal their limitations fairly quickly. Mölkky is different because the game itself develops as you play. The spreading pins, changing targets and exact scoring create genuine decisions, while its accessibility means almost anybody can join in. It is easily one of the best garden games I have played and exactly the sort of thing that can quietly consume an afternoon. Spikeball is a the best team game and wonderful with younger more active players. But can be limited if you are not willing or able to run and dive about! I adore it - it short bursts! But Canoff wins. It is my favourite garden game. It’s my favourite beach game. It is not the prettiest game here, it’s not the oldest game here or even the cleverest game here, yet it produced the most laughter, the most interaction and the moments I remember most clearly. Sometimes all you need for a great game is a flying disc, two cans and several adults becoming far too invested in catching one of them before it hits the sand. Apparently, the secret to excellent outdoor gaming really was just learning how to Canoff. Big thanks to Canof and Masters Traditional Games for their help with this feature. https://www.mastersofgames.com/ https://www.canoff.co.uk/ Also big thanks to the Llewellyn family who played a lot of Spikeball, Canoff, and Hatutappi (Mölkky) with us.