When playing Carcassonne, you’d be forgiven if you dismissed there being any notion of strategy in Carcassonne. After all, each turn, you’ll draw a tile and you’ll either get what you need or don’t. While part of the game is dealing with randomness, there’s more to Carcassonne strategy than meets the eye. Peel back the layers and there are ways to work around Carcassonne’s luck factor. And that aspect is what we’ll look at in detail so that you understand what it takes to play Carcassonne well. Carcassonne Strategy Basics Every board game you play comes with a set of foundational skills to mas ..read more

Cascadia Board Game Overview The Cascadia board game takes place in the Pacific Northwest where your goal is to create habitats and populate them with creatures in a way that supports their existing habits. You’ll start the game with a foundational tile. On your turn, you’ll choose from a pair that includes a new habitat tile that you can place onto your board and a wildlife token that you can place on a space that accommodates that type of wildlife. When you choose your habitat tile, most will have one or a combination of the following terrain types: plains, grasslands, forests, rivers, and m ..read more

Power Grid is an extremely good introduction to economic games. But the one thing the game doesn’t do as good a job of is teaching you how to play Power Grid because the rulebook is organized poorly. Thankfully, the game is very simple to learn. So to help you out, I’ve gone through and rewrote and reorganized the Power Grid rules to make it easier for you to learn how to play. Power Grid Game Goals Power Grid is a network building and resource management game. Each player represents a power company that wants to be the most profitable and efficient at delivering energy to various cities. The ..read more

Castles of Burgundy Overview In the Castles of Burgundy, you’re a prince who has been granted an estate. A vast tract of land upon which to develop your realm into a prosperous kingdom. In it, you’ll be setting up shipping networks to bring exotic goods and various baubles from faraway lands, mines to gather precious metals to turn into coin, buildings to improve your trading prospects, farms and pastures for food, and research institutes to discover knowledge to help you prosper. At the same time, other princes will be jockeying to hire the workers to help them develop their estates. You’ll h ..read more

When you play Castles of Burgundy, you are a prince trying to build a profitable realm. On your turn, you will acquire tiles that represent various assets that can be added to your realm to improve it. For example, there are ships you can build to facilitate trading, city buildings that allow you to be more efficient, animals to score you points, and mines that generate resources for you to invest in. In each phase you will roll two dice and use them to take actions. Objective The player with the most points at the end of the game wins. Setting Up to Play Castles of Burgundy Board setup Sort ..read more

Overview In Animal Upon Animal, you’re given a coterie of creatures who want to show off their balancing skills to form a giant pyramid. All atop a crocodile! The path to glory requires using your finely-tuned dexterity to create this critter construct. After all, you’re going to need to get snakes, sheep, penguins, monkeys, toucans, hedgehogs, and iguanas to hop on board and stay there without tipping over. Each turn a player rolls the die. Based on the results, that player will add one or two animals to the stack of animals or pass that stacking duty on to someone else. Of course, if any pie ..read more

Overview Dragomino has you in the role of a novice dragon trainer sent out into a mysterious island. Your goal is to scour this island for baby dragons that you can potentially train. But be aware that there are other dragon trainers that have been sent to this island for the very same purpose! Will you be the dragon trainer who can discover the most baby dragons? In Dragomino, you will place terrain tiles and discover eggs in the process. Some eggs will be broken! Those dragons have already hatched and matured. But some eggs will have baby dragons. Perfect! Those are exactly what you were loo ..read more

Playing Agricola single-player can be a great way to learn how to play and get a feel for the board game’s rhythm and tempo. This is relevant when you’re learning how to deal with Agricola’s resource constraints. So whether you’re learning the Agricola single player game online or on the table, you’ll be wracking your brain to figure out how to do well and build as robust a farm as possible without starving. And if you’re looking how to play Agricola multiplayer, you can look at this guide. Building a kickass farm in Agricola in the best of times is already a challenge. Playing Agricola as a s ..read more

Overview There’s some monkey business afoot in the new high-rise building and it’s up to our stout-hearted Rhino Hero to put a stop to it. But unlike before, he must now compete against other fellow heroes who are also looking to nab the ne’er-do-wells and bring them to justice. Rhino Hero: Super Battle is a game for 2-4 players who are 4 years old or older. Players will be given a hand of cards where each card represents a floor arrangement. On their turn, they will choose to play one of the cards in their hand by looking at the design blueprint on the card and grabbing some wall structures t ..read more

Fans of the Street Masters board game have had to deal with the fact that the game has been out of print for a long long time. Steamforged Games, the company that purchased the Street Masters license from its previous publisher, has changed that. They’ve launched a new Kickstarter campaign on February 21, 2024 that, as of this writing, has raised over $300,000. Street Masters is a cooperative board game designed by Adam and Brady Sadler. The core mechanisms in the game emulate the beat ’em up video games of old. That is, you choose a fighter, engage hordes of enemies, and duke it out against a ..read more