2018 / Estimating card game / 2-4 players
***
Minimalist number deck The Game sees more use as a resource when I need to borrow some sequential number cards between 1 and 100 for a game variant or fan expansion, but you can play other games with them too, like this probability estimator. It's hardly a game at all, but it's an amusement.
Santorini (DIY)
1985 (2007 edition rules) / Strategy board game / 2-3 players
I'd taken this for a kids' game when seeing the inappropriate cutesy box art of the modern editions, but its minimalist indie precursor is much more appealing, not least for inviting intellectual property theft using whatever unobtrusive tiles and other bits you have lying around.
I put unloved, unsellable Flanx tiles to use (two sides of two colours for the base plus three levels), with Atmosfear figures for fun. I didn't like the game all that much, but at least I didn't have to spend anything to find that out. Next project.
2016 / Card game / 2-6 players
***
Some cheap cards that paid for themselves by padding out an order for a discount and free shipping last year when buying other counterfeit goods. We might not get around to playing the mean Halloween party game, but I came up with some functional solo rules so I still get to look through the creepy comic art.
***
Resold
Possibly the most overpowered promos in the game, these alternative cloisters are more interesting than the puny standard ones, if you're not concerned by the temporal paradox of injecting buildings from the wrong time and place into your medieval French tableau. I wasn't planning on buying them until they featured in a larger set I was reselling already, and I can just keep house-ruling regular cloisters like I was before.
2021 / Card game / 2 players
***
Completing the ex-McDonalds Happy Meal card game set much more comprehensively than necessary, this was also supposed to teach her the folly of gambling, but after the first surprising playthrough we learned exactly how many bad lizard cards there are and now she usually wins. Its hierarchy of pet values is sure to have caused arguments, but you have to admit that hamsters are comparatively rubbish, come on.
Atmosfear II: Baron Samedi, Zombie
1991 / Video board game expansion / 3-6 players
***
Finally getting to experience Baron Samedi in the incrementally rotting flesh, decades after seeing these stills in The Harbingers, the barely re-disguised Gatekeeper turned out to be a fun alternative host. And way more annoying with his constant interruptions if you were taking the game seriously, which is never advised, but we rolled with it and had a good time. They may have based his entire personality around the pun potential of catchphrases, but I can dig it.
2022 / Task prompts / 3+ players (played with 2)
***
We occasionally play one-on-one Taskmaster, and this cheap pack of prompts (taken from the show, but it's not like I can remember them all) made things easier than trying to come up with ideas or wading through websites and seeing the same suggestions all the time.
Every time I thought we'd worked through them, a random draw would reveal more. If one item summed up Easter break 2026, it's this guy.
Star Trek: Missions
****
I had enough disappointment with lazy franchise cash-ins growing up that I learned to avoid pasted-on branding, but when this... thing popped up on eBay for not much more than the cost of postage, around the time I was wrapping up my epic TNG adult rewatch, I hesitantly checked out what it was.
Sure enough, it turned out to be mainly a retheming of a generic fantasy game to sell pretty much the same product to differently-oriented nerds, but the way the cards interacted to create emerging narratives looked alluring. Finding out there were popular unofficial solo rules that were considered better than the normal game, I was sold.
This is the perfect Star Trek game for failed and lazy writers that lets us imagine we're in the writing room, scraping together familiar plots and struggling to find things for the characters to do against a tight deadline and running time. It's five-minute fanfic and roleplaying without the effort, the Customizable Card Game without having to sell a kidney, and it became one of my favourite activities for a while, until the repeat run started getting repetitive. I don't imagine there's much realistic hope of a Deep Space Nine sequel, but I still have that spare kidney.
Managing two high-tech evil lairs by myself can get a bit much, so I checked out what the fans came up with under unhelpfully nondescript names.
Solo Mode **
This attempt at a quadruple solo dungeon seemed to be well thought through on digital paper, but didn't work in practice. Since it was specifically designed for the first game (and removing some incompatible cards even then), this might have been the fault of the more interactive Boss Monster 2 cards in the mix, but it's a hassle to separate the decks now.
Solitary Rules with Heroes Abilities ***
A streamlined solution that puts rival bosses' spells in the hands of the harder Heroes and works as well with the combined game, though it's necessary to make more fiddly adjustments to keep it from being way too easy at the start, even with the items from the mini expansion, and most of the game feels fairly pointless until the Epic Heroes come out later. I played it a few times, then went back to regular Me1 vs Me2.
