13 New Games in October 2023

Faraway

Plays: 9
Publisher Description: You will play a row of 8 cards in front of you, from left to right. Characters on these cards will grant you victory points if you later fulfill the conditions they demand. At the end of the game, you walk back the same way, scoring cards in the opposite order you played them. There lies the heart of the game-play. Throughout the game, the cards you play will serve both to set new objectives, and to meet the ones you played previously.

Brief Thoughts: I really liked the decision space around knowing that you score the cards backwards to the way you laid them. This created a challenging choice at times of risking trying to get big points but not knowing if you’ll be able to lay the cards down after to score for it late in game.

Sky Team

Plays: 3
Publisher Description: Sky Team is a co-operative game, exclusively for two players, in which you play a pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner. Your goal is to work together as a team to land your airplane in different airports around the world.
Brief Thoughts: This is an excellent game. My favorite from this month. There is really good tension in not knowing what numbers your partner rolled and hoping in critical moments your co-pilot will come through.

Dracula Vs Van Helsing

Plays: 8
Publisher Description: Van Helsing must remove all of Dracula’s life points to win, but if Dracula turns all four inhabitants of the same district into vampires first, Dracula wins. Each round, players play in turn (starting with Dracula), drawing a card, then discarding that card or swapping it with one of the five cards on their rack to trigger the discarded card’s ability. Cards come in eight types, each with its own effect. At the end of a round, players compare the five cards on their rack. Whoever has the highest value card wins that district.

Brief Thoughts: I like the simple card play in this game. It has good tension, due to not knowing your opponents hand. There is a risk and reward to delaying the rounds to try to get better cards. Overall a fun quick game and great for the Halloween season.

Now Boarding

Plays: 3
BGG Description: Now Boarding is a real-time cooperative game in which you work together to fly a fleet of airplanes. You must deliver all the passengers to their destinations before they get too angry — and new passengers are constantly arriving! Upgrade your plane to fly faster and carry more passengers to handle the load. The twist: All players take all their turns at the same time! This allows for clever hand-offs of passengers. It’s a whole new level of pick-up-and-deliver game.

Brief Thoughts: This has been a fun game of flying around America delivering passengers trying to puzzle out the most efficient paths with the other airlines. The early game is easy but quickly ramps up into a high stress situation. We have yet to defeat the game, probably partially due to playing it on turn-mode on BGA with no undo button.

Betrayal at House on the Hill 3rd Edition

Plays: 1
Publisher Description: The House on the Hill still sits abandoned, and fearless group of explorers has been drawn to the house to discover its dark secrets. Immerse yourself in the narrative gameplay as you take on the role of one of those explorers.
Brief Thoughts: I really enjoy the immersive story telling experience this game offers, through its gameplay. Its exciting to explore a mansion but what makes this game good is you don’t know what’s coming! Which gives it the creepy unknown ambience you want on the Halloween.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Plays: 1
Publisher Description: Based on simple and intuitive hand management, Heat: Pedal to the Metal puts players in the driver’s seat of intense car races, jockeying for position to cross the finish line first, while managing their car’s speed if they don’t want to overheat. Selecting the right upgrades for their car will help them hug the curves and keep their engine cool enough to maintain top speeds. Ultimately, their driving skills will be the key to victory!

Brief Thoughts: This game has received a lot of “Best Game” awards for 2022. It’s a great game and is on our Holiday Gift List for a reason. Its one of the best Car Racing games I’ve played. As others do not offer as good of a strategic experience as Heat does. I love the hand management and risk/reward options.

Orion Duel

Plays: 3
Publisher Description: You can win in 3 different ways: by connecting 2 opposite sides of the board with an unbroken chain of hexagons of your color; by collecting 4 GALAXY PIECES on connected hexagons of your color; or by making your opponent get 3 BLACK HOLE PIECES on connected hexagons of his/her color. Pay attention to all 3 possibilities! Do not let any of them escape your mind.

Brief Thoughts: To be fair this is generally not my favorite style of game. It was a more chess-like experience. I did enjoy the strategy of trying to put your opponents pieces on black holes, and being able to convert goals between crossing to two sides or reaching 4 galaxies.

Quibbles

Plays: 3
Publisher Description: Quibbles is a fast-paced and tactical card game that combines set-building and tactical decision-making. Quibbles offers quick and intense gameplay sessions lasting around 5 minutes per player. The rules are easy to learn and the gameplay quite addictive.

In Quibbles, players aim to be the first to collect cards with a total value of 21 points. Through a clever combination of playing cards from their hand, selecting sets from the table, and strategically building their collections, players must carefully manage their hand and seize opportunities to gain an advantage over their opponents.

Brief Thoughts: This is a fun simple game that can create situations where you feel like you accomplished a lot while other times you feel stuck waiting for the right card. This game depends a little to much on luck in my opinion to be a game I’d want to regularly play.

Moon River

Plays: 1
Publisher Description: In the game, you will build a personal landscape of tiles to score points, but instead of tiling dominoes in your landscape, the game uses half-dominoes in which one edge has a jigsaw puzzle-style connection. You combine two of these half puzzle pieces to craft your own dominoes. This mechanism is meant to provide more variability and randomization in each play.

Brief Thoughts: I liked the concept of the game, being able to puzzle your own dominoes together for more strategic gameplay. However I found it to fall a little short. Could be due to playing it online. And to be fair I wasn’t a huge fan of Kingdomino either, though I love Dragomino for kids!

Don’t Go in There

Plays: 1
BGG Description: On your turn, choose a part of the haunted house to explore by placing a meeple in one of the 3 rooms. Each room has 5 placement spaces. The deeper you go into a room the more likely you are to get the cursed item you desire, but be careful! The further you go, the more ghosts will haunt you.

When 3 meeples have been placed into a room, the ghost dice are rolled. Depending on the result the placement of the meeples players will gain ghosts tokens. Next players will take cards from the room, depending on their meeple’s position.

At the end of the game. The player with the most ghost tokens is haunted! They will gain curses equal to the number of ghosts they have collected. Players will then add up the curses from their ghosts and their item cards.

Brief Thoughts: Another game we played because Halloween. The game definitely has a creepy art factor but lacks the mystery that Betrayal on House of the Hill brings. This game is all about strategically placing meeples deeper into the hallways of a room. The game I played was a tied game, losing the tie breaker by having more ghosts.

Mutant Crops

Plays: 1
BGG Description: You have 12 actions in the table (half face down, half face up) that allows you to gather resources (tokens), get plants, and nurture them. Each turn you have 2/3 actions, and what you use and what you block stop your friends to do the same. You need to take care of your resources, and you don’t know exactly what action is available next, so your plans can be hard to reach. You have to get your crops well nurtured to score, and they do crazy stuff together, so keep and eye in other players crops, to be sure you have the best mutants to score points and win the game.

Brief Thoughts: This was a interesting worker placement action selection game. I liked that better actions got revealed later on. There is definitely a spots that are better and a goal of blocking your opponent from getting spots they need. Overall it was an ok game, just not sure the theme fits well.

12 Chip Trick

Plays: 1
Description: A trick-taking game for exactly 3 players, the players are attempting to score the most points, but if a player scores 21 or more, their points are halved.

The game uses 12 discs, half red and half black, numbered 1 to 12. It is a “may follow” game where the players draft the discs played to the trick back to their hands. The winner takes a disc face up, not to be used again. The other players take discs face down, into their hand.

The game ends once a player has no discs to play. All players reveal their 4 discs and sum their points. The player with the most points after a number of rounds wins.

Brief Thoughts: This was an ok game about trying to hit 21. I found I struggled to keep myself from going over and often got stuck with high numbered chips I didn’t want. I am probably just not very good at this type of game. Overall I just didn’t find it that engaging. Would probably be better in person then on BGA.

The Number

Plays: 1
BGG Description: The Number is an expert mix of mechanics: Bluffing, Risk-taking, but also Guessing (a mechanic that involves anticipating your opponent’s next moves and adapting your strategy accordingly). It takes 5 minutes to learn, but you won’t have it all figured out yet!

Choose, check and resolve!
How to play?

A game of The Number plays over 2 rounds of 5 turns each during which everyone plays simultaneously.

Choose – Each turn, everyone secretly writes a number from 000 to 999 on their boards, then reveals them at the same time.

Check– Line up the numbers from biggest to smallest (top to bottom) and check if your number is approved (it doesn’t share digits with any of the numbers below it) or eliminated (it has at least one digit in common with any of the numbers below it).

Resolve If your number is approved, gain as many points as the first digit of your number. Then, you must cross off the digits you used in your number from your board. You will not be able to use them for the rest of the round.

Brief Thoughts: We found that picking lower numbers was usually always the best choice. Its a bit of a mind game about knowing what you think your opponents might write down. But overall this kind of game isn’t my style. I want pieces and theme.