Reviews

Your first game of Terra Mystica probably ended something like this: you picked a faction because the name sounded cool, spent forty-five minutes unsure whether your terraforming wheel was facing the right direction, accidentally formed a town in round five without meaning to, and finished with a score you could not explain. Someone at the table said “I think we misread the cult track.” You all nodded. Nobody was sure. ...

Pandemic is one of those gateway games that never quite leaves the collection. It’s the cooperative game that made cooperative games respectable - a tight, elegant puzzle about stopping viral outbreaks before the world collapses. With a BGG rating of 7.51 across nearly 136,000 ratings and a permanent spot at #174 overall, it remains one of the most-played games on the planet. But Z-Man Games has been busy. Over the years, Pandemic has accumulated six major expansions plus a growing family of standalone spin-offs with the Pandemic brand on the box. Which ones actually improve the game? Which feel like cash grabs? And which should you buy first? ...

BGG Rank: #11 | Rating: 8.34 | Weight: 4.07/5 | Players: 1-4 | Time: 90-120 min | Age: 13+ Your first game of Spirit Island will probably end in defeat. Not narrow defeat - total, bewildering collapse. The Invaders will spread faster than you expected, your Power cards will feel like they don’t quite connect, and somewhere around the third Ravage phase you’ll realise you’ve been misreading a key rule for the past forty minutes. ...

BGG Rank: #38 | Rating: 7.99 | Weight: 2.48/5 | Players: 1-5 | Time: 40-70 min | Age: 10+ Wingspan has a peculiar reputation. It sits at #38 on BGG with nearly 115,000 ratings. It won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019. It’s probably the most-gifted hobby board game of the last decade. And it also generates a specific brand of irritated pushback from experienced gamers who find it shallow, lucky, and overhyped. ...

Some games age like fine wine. Others age like milk someone forgot in the back of the fridge. And then there’s El Grande - a game that somehow ages like stone. It was a monument when it arrived in 1995, and thirty years later, it’s still standing. Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich’s masterwork didn’t just win the Spiel des Jahres in 1996. It didn’t just sit in the BGG Top 10 for over a decade. In 2025, it was inducted into the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame - a recognition that this isn’t just a good game, it’s a historically important one. ...

Your first game of Agricola probably went something like this: you stared at a hand of seven occupation cards you didn’t understand, spent six rounds desperately collecting wood while your opponents built fences, forgot to plan for the first harvest, took two begging cards worth negative six points, and finished with a score that made you wonder why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to this. You’re not alone. Agricola has earned its nickname - Misery Farm - for a reason. But there’s an equally strong consensus among the hobby’s most experienced players: this is one of the greatest board games ever made, and it only reveals itself after you stop drowning. ...

There’s a moment in every game of Tigris & Euphrates where you realise the civilisation you spent six turns carefully building doesn’t belong to you. It never did. Someone drops a red leader into your kingdom, triggers a revolt, and suddenly the temple network you’d been nursing is generating points for them. You sit there, tiles in hand, recalculating everything. That feeling - the vertigo of sudden loss, the scramble to adapt - is why this game was inducted into the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame in 2025. Twenty-nine years after its release, Reiner Knizia’s masterpiece still does things no other game has managed to replicate. ...

Fair warning: your first game of Brass: Birmingham will probably be terrible. Not the game itself - the game is extraordinary. But your experience of it? Confusing, frustrating, and almost certainly full of rules you got wrong. You’ll finish your first play with a nagging sense that you did something illegal in round three, that the scoring made no sense, and that maybe the 83,000+ people who own this thing are all sharing one massive delusion. ...

There’s a moment in every game of El Grande where someone dumps four caballeros out of the Castillo into a region you thought was locked down, flips the entire scoring round on its head, and grins at you like they’ve been planning it for three rounds. They haven’t. They just seized the opportunity. And that’s the whole game. Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich’s 1995 masterpiece sits at a 7.77 rating on BGG with nearly 33,000 ratings, ranked #100 overall and #78 among strategy games, carrying a weight of 2.93/5. It plays 2-5 players in 60-120 minutes. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 1996. It was inducted into the BGG Hall of Fame in 2025. It invented area majority as a genre. ...

There’s a moment in every game of Tigris & Euphrates where someone connects two kingdoms, triggers a cascade of external conflicts, and the entire board state transforms so violently that everyone needs a moment of silence to process what just happened. Large swaths of tiles vanish. Leaders get expelled from civilisations they spent twenty minutes building. Someone who was cruising discovers their score is effectively two. Two. And it’s magnificent. Reiner Knizia’s 1997 masterpiece sits at a 7.70 rating on BGG from tens of thousands of ratings, ranked #131 overall, with a weight of 3.48/5. It plays 2-4 players in 60-120 minutes. Those numbers tell you it’s respected. They don’t tell you it’s one of the most elegant, brutal, and intellectually rigorous designs in the history of the hobby. ...