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.
Final Girl: Core Box & Frightmare on Maple Lane
***
Resold
I'm not the biggest horror fan, but I'm enough of a solo board game and cheesy nostalgic 80s fan that I was tempted beyond my better judgment to get drawn into this endlessly repeatable game system and pick up a few appealing movies modules for whenever I'd eventually feel like learning the rules and actually playing one of them. When I finally forced myself, I realised that the cat and mouse hopscotch didn't do anything for me that Gloom of Kilforth didn't do better, with fewer fiddly dials. I've escaped its clutches, but other people will be hugely into it, and I wish them and their unfortunate dependents well.
Isaludo: Ten Modern Solo Games Using a Standard Card Deck
****
When looking into published games that can be stripped down and mocked up using regular playing cards and imagination, I came across Wil Su's compendium of original games (and variants with credits) purpose-built for the standard deck. Not all of them are likely to become new standards, but as a free guide to free games that most people can play right away to pass some time, it restored some faith in humanity. Now go forth and make card sandwiches and kill card zombies that are inexplicably dressed like royalty.
Weaving straights across time and space is beyond my mental capabilities, and I'm not convinced that my efforts fared much better than random chance would. Way to make me feel dumb at the first game, but fortunately the others are easier to manage.
The Sandwich Guy ****Simple, quick and pretty fun, even if you don't have significantly more control over it than Uno. This could become a new standard, and I expect to see it commercialised and unnecessarily repackaged to pretend it isn't just regular playing cards underneath.
Saying that, when I introduced it to my daughter, she immediately dismissed it as "boring" and wanted to play I Doubt It instead.
More interesting and less gruelling maths battles than Regicide. It's not hard to win, but then you're up against the ultimate boss of your personal high score.
This base-under-zombie-siege boss battler gets appropriately tense as the deck starts to run dry, but constant eye-shifting calculations make it kind of annoying.
Four-way The Price is Right, the theme of rude customers butting in line doesn't feel sufficiently savage for this card bloodbath, especially with no Brucie to lighten things up. I've yet to succeed.
Unchallenging, unengaging placement puzzle. There seemed to be no danger of exceeding the various rules of 4 unless I was doing something wrong.
Some of the random narratives contrived for these abstract matching games raise a smile, but this one really did start to feel like I was clearing out a sacred tomb (finders keepers) and was quite fun, if unchallenging.
Like the sandwich one, it's begging for a published version with illustrated traps, treasures and numbered trinkets that only more astute players would realise are just fancy playing cards.
I feel like I've been tricked into practising times tables when I wanted to play a game. I've got Kingdomino for that. This was my least favourite of the bunch.
An overly simple probability-based deduction exercise, I only fell short of the minimum score on the learning playthrough, and beating it was the only real reason to play more than once.
This one actually was commercially repackaged, and the Jacks' unbalanced special powers involve more learning or referencing than most of the others that you can get right into. It's one of the tenser ones, though I managed to succeed with a perfect score on my first play, so it probably won't have the replay value of the trickier ones.
Faves: The Sandwich Guy, Loot the Loop
**
Resold
I had a feeling this was going to be the dud entry in the collection. The concept of gorging on an exotic buffet is fun (though crazy cartoon art would have been a better fit), and there are amusing opportunities to screw up your opponents' plans, but it's not something I'd want to play over all the alternatives. The automated solo mode works fine, but having to constantly move two coins in different directions at different speeds is just annoying. It's starting to seem like shiny tokens were the main focus of this enterprise over actually making worthwhile games.
This cheeky and nitpicky "expansion" is really just three cards from the original 21-card game that were selectively removed from Button Shy's "Pocket Edition" to maintain their 18-card standard, then sold separately as an add-on. The horse and bike are at least distinct enough to feel expansiony, then there's another truck. There's no reason you wouldn't want these to complete your abridged game.
Rustlicker's Convoy solo variant ****
Seeing this fan variant on BoardGameGeek was more incentive to buy the game that probably doesn't suit my six year old's level or taste. It's carefully fiddly in the automa's favour, so it doesn't waste too much time doing stupid and self-destructive things, and it wins by chance often enough to be satisfying.