[{"content":"What if you could write about whatever you want?\nWhat if you could tell the world about everything that\u0026rsquo;s on your mind?\nWelcome to Hugo.\n","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"","summary":"What if you could write about whatever you want?\nWhat if you could tell the world about everything that’s on your mind?\nWelcome to Hugo.\n","title":"","type":"page"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m so excited about my new website!!\n","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/here-we-go/","section":"Posts","summary":"…","title":"Here We Go!","type":"posts"},{"content":"A collection of thoughts that don\u0026rsquo;t fit anywhere else!\n","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/posts/","section":"Posts","summary":"A collection of thoughts that don’t fit anywhere else!\n","title":"Posts","type":"posts"},{"content":"","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/age-12+/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Age: 12+","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/max-players-5/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Max Players: 5","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/max-playtime-45m/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Max Playtime: 45m","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/min-players-2/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Min Players: 2","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/min-playtime-30m/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Min Playtime: 30m","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/topics/review/","section":"Topics","summary":"","title":"Review","type":"topics"},{"content":" Quick Facts Age range: 12 and up\nPlay time: 30-45 minutes\n# of Players: 2-5\nPrice point: $44.99\nThis is the most amazing game ever invented!\nRecommended! Not recommended. ","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/reviews/acquire/","section":"Reviews","summary":"…","title":"Review: Acquire (Renegade Games)","type":"reviews"},{"content":"blorp\n","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/reviews/","section":"Reviews","summary":"blorp\n","title":"Reviews","type":"reviews"},{"content":"Here\u0026rsquo;s some text. This will appear on the tags page.\n","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"Here’s some text. This will appear on the tags page.\n","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"22 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/topics/","section":"Topics","summary":"","title":"Topics","type":"topics"},{"content":"","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/max-playtime-30m/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Max Playtime: 30m","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/min-playtime-15m/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Min Playtime: 15m","type":"tags"},{"content":" Quick Facts Age range: 10 and up\nPlay time: 15-30 minutes\n# of Players: 2-6\nPrice point: $29.99\nGrowing up in the Midwest meant that when you pulled out a deck of cards, you almost always played some variant of a trick-taking game like Euchre, Spades, or Hearts. After all, there must be a reason so many trick-taking games are considered classics.\nLunar Skyline from Dead Alive Games shoots the trick-taking mechanic into the future by honoring those classic games while twisting some of the details into delicious game night surprises.\nThere’s a lot of unexpected depth and clever design elements to explore here, so let’s haul out that childhood telescope and focus it toward the future as we look at the top five things you need to know about Lunar Skyline.\nDefining the Terms # Gameplay in Lunar Skyline hinges on two specific terms: round and turn. A round begins when players receive their cards and use one of them to make a bid (more about that later). The round ends when all the dealt cards have been played.\nOne round contains several turns. On each turn, the lead player puts down a card and the others must follow suit if they can.\nMost other common trick-taking terms mean exactly what you expect in the game, like hand, trick, and lead player. The one exception is suit, which works a little differently here and deserves more explanation.\nPaired Suits # Lunar Skyline puts a twist on the classic concept of suits in a card deck. The twist starts with six icons: water, energy, robot, cybernetics, human, and plant. These icons represent the resources available in the game.\nA pair of icons makes a card’s suit. But the icons aren’t matched randomly. Instead, they’re matched in order following a circular pattern that subtly reinforces the game’s underlying themes of futuristic technology supporting life in space. (It’s a pretty cool detail to build so deeply into the game.)\nFor example, the humans icon sits between plants and cybernetics in the pattern, because both of those relate to humans. Thus, the suit of a card with a humans icon is always either cybernetics-human or human-plant.\nStarting a Round # Each round begins by shuffling the deck and dealing the cards. The number of players affects this step, because you always leave some cards out of play.\nPlayers begin the round by secretly choosing a card from their hand as their building bid, then simultaneously revealing their choices.\nThe card’s number is how many tricks each player wants to take this round. Hitting your bid means getting bonus points. Going over your bid costs you points for every extra trick you sook, while scoring less than your bid means missing out on that round’s bonus opportunities.\nPlaying a Turn # The player with the highest bid plays a card onto the lead card board (cleverly, the game box lid). In clockwise order, the other players must follow suit with a card that matches at least one resource icons on the lead card.\nA player could also follow suit with an Ace card. Aces have one resource icon and can be played either high or low. A high ace is the highest matching resource card in that trick; a low ace is the lowest.\nIf a player can’t follow suit, they play any card from their hand (including an ace) and then “smuggle” that card into their resources area where it counts as a trick toward their bid.\nThe player with the highest matching resource card wins the trick. The trick’s winner takes the cards played (except any smuggled cards) and puts whichever card they want on top of the trick. The resources on that card count toward the round’s bonus points, provided they make or exceed their bid amount\nClaiming a Bonus Card # After each trick, all players see if they have at least as many tricks as their bids. If they do, they claim a contract bonus card.\nThe bonus cards give points for a variety of things ranging from having specific resource icons on top of tricks you took to the number of smuggled cards you or your opponents have.\nPlayers only claim one bonus card per round (not per turn), so choose your bonus wisely. And you only get a bonus card if you at least make your bid, so choosing the wrong bid number can really hurt.\nVerdict # The extra twists and clever turns that Dead Alive Games baked into the design turned this game into a winner for us. Using paired icons for suits kept players more engaged since they had many more possible plays available. Even when you couldn’t follow suit, figuring out which card to smuggle became a strategic decision since it turned into a trick toward your bid.\nThe ace cards also made an interesting innovation that subverts the classic trick-taking mechanics. Being able to play a single card as either highest of lowest in a hand is really clever. They also created a delightfully simple mechanism to break any ties in a trick by ruling that the last card played takes precedence. We appreciate simple, elegant solutions like that.\nThe game also includes an optional mini expansion in the box. It adds a set collection element to the game on top of everything else that’s going on, so we agree with the designer’s recommendation to learn the base game before attempting the expansion.\nRecommended! ","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/reviews/lunar-skyline/","section":"Reviews","summary":"Euchre, Spades, or Hearts… trick taking games are classics for a reason, but what if they could be more? 10+, 2-6 players, 15-30 minutes","title":"Review: Lunar Skyline (Dead Alive Games)","type":"reviews"},{"content":"","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/age-10+/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Age: 10+","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/max-players-4/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Max Players: 4","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/min-players-1/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Min Players: 1","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/min-playtime-45m/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Min Playtime: 45m","type":"tags"},{"content":" Quick Facts Age range: 10 and up\nPlay time: 45 minutes\n# of Players: 1-4\nPrice point: $50.00\nWhen disaster strikes, first responders are there to help the people in danger. But what about their animals? The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina changed the way the country approaches emergency response by requiring formal disaster planning and training to take care of animals in affected areas.\nIn Animal Rescue Team, a cooperative game from Play to Z, you and the other players work together to rescue 12 types of animals from dangers like floods, fires, or falling into wells. Dispatch your team of specialists with the right gear and the proper vehicles to resolve each time-sensitive assignment while gathering what you need to complete the big missions and overcome unexpected events.\nGrab your gear and monitor your radio, because it’s time to explore the top five things you need to know about Animal Rescue Team!\nMeeting Your Crew # The game includes six rescue specialists with unique skills. For example, the rope rescuer specializes in vertical rescue situations, while the extraction specialist gets animals out of tight spaces.\nAt the beginning of the game, each player either chooses or is randomly assigned a specialist to play. The remaining specialists are on the board as well. Players can take them on missions to improve the chances of a successful rescue.\nGathering Gear # Each specialist starts the game with a piece of gear unique to their expertise. For example, the swift water technician has a drysuit, while the veterinarian has an animal medical kit. Every piece of equipment has its own token on the game board and needs to be carried from location to location as needed.\nTo make those rescues happen, you, your gear, and the animals you’re rescuing need some transportation. That’s why the game includes six unique vehicles: a motorcycle, a car, an SUV, and a truck, plus a towable boat and livestock trailer.\nThe board itself also gets two pieces of gear: a large and small animal shelter. Every time you play, the shelters go in two regions on the board. After a successful rescue, you drop off the animals at one of the shelters where it can safely rest. But the shelters can only hold so many animals — overcrowding isn’t allowed!\nMissions and Rescues # To win at Animal Rescue Team, players need to complete three large-scale missions while also juggling random rescue calls pop up every turn.\nCompleting missions requires players to deliver a certain mix of reward tokens to one or more areas on the board. This represents the infrastructure, materials, funding, and sometimes just plain luck that goes into emergency response work.\nBut while you work on the big issues, you also need to cover the random pop-up emergencies from the rescue cards. Each rescue card describes your assignment and its difficulty, along with the specialists, gear, and vehicles that will help you succeed. All rescues are time-sensitive (more about that in a moment), but some get harder if you let time go by.\nThe rescue cards also tell you which rewards you get for completing that rescue. Those rewards help you resolve your team’s larger missions.\nMission Time Ticking # Managing time is your biggest challenge in this game. And let me tell you, time does not want to be managed here.\nThe mission time track along the bottom of the board is your primary game clock. It moves ahead randomly based on rescue card pulls and die rolls. When it moves, it can trigger events (rarely a positive thing) and empty out animal shelters (giving you room for more drop-offs). It also tracks the time left to complete your big missions.\nIf the time marker enters a deadline space, and you haven’t finished that mission, the game ends and another team gets called in. You lose the game.\nRescue Right Away! # The rescue track sits on right side of the board. It has seven spaces for rescue cards.\nThe game begins with three rescue cards face up on this track. These are the current rescues you need to perform. At the end of each player’s turn, you shift the current cards down one space and add another card to the top of the track.\nWhen you complete a rescue, you flip the card face down, but leave it on the track. It eventually “falls off” the track when you advance the cards at the end of the turn.\nIf a face-up rescue card “falls off” the track, then your team didn’t get to that rescue in time, so another team is called in. You lose the game, the same as if you don’t complete a mission in time.\nVerdict # Animal Rescue Team delivers a challenging and fun cooperative playing experience. We love the tension it builds for players due to multiple time stresses and the way it encourages creative team problem-solving.\nThe game’s immersive feeling comes from the partnership between award-winning cooperative game designer Matt Leacock and real-life animal rescue expert Lisa Towell. Many of the rescue situations described in the game come from her personal experience and interviews with her colleagues.\nThe game’s table presence brings the rescue situations to life. It’s a blast to load your team into a vehicle, take off across the board, and then pick up the animals so you can take them to one of the two shelters.\nAlthough the game portrays dangerous moments, it focuses on the rescue aspects, not the perils. That makes the gameplay family-friendly without compromising on tension.\nRecommended! ","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/reviews/animal-rescue-team/","section":"Reviews","summary":"When disaster strikes, first responders are there to help the people in danger. 10+, 1-4 players, 45 minutes","title":"Review: Animal Rescue Team (Play to Z)","type":"reviews"},{"content":" Quick Facts Age range: 12 and up\nPlay time: 30-45 minutes\n# of Players: 2-5\nPrice point: $44.99\nThe city of Solara needs your help! It’s a beautiful place to live, filled with new buildings and all kinds of opportunities — and you can make it even better by turning bland rooftops into stunning gardens.\nThat’s the premise behind Solar Gardens, a tile drafting game from Darrington Press. Players try to select the best tile each round to expand their growing garden. Do you add more flower beds? Build more wind turbines or solar panels? Or maybe add a walking path so visitors can stroll by your wildlife habitats?\nYour rooftop canvas awaits, so grab your tools and roll up your sleeves as we lay out the top five things you need to know about Solar Gardens!\nBasking in the Theme # Solar Gardens presents each player with a square four by four grid of spaces for their tiles. The grid also affects how some of the tiles score (more about that in a moment) and acts as a countdown timer for the game. When you run out of spaces for tiles, you’re done playing!\nYour playing space is square because you’re building gardens on top of a skyscraper. It’s a fun explanation that shows the designer’s dedication to the theme. Plus it makes the game feel more immersive by giving players a story to support their work.\nPushing Your Luck # Before adding a tile to your roof, you need to select it during the Construction phase. The starting player draws one tile face down for each player plus a spare. They stack the tiles and then flip the top one to begin the turn’s draft.\nThe starting player then decides if they want to play the tile they flipped or pass it to the next player. If they pass the tile, then the second player makes goes through the same choice again, and so on through all players.\nIf the tile gets to the last player in the turn order, that player can either play it or discard it out of the game, but if they do that then they must play the next tile that comes their way.\nPoints from Position # Each tile can contain a mix of features to improve your solar garden. Two features, solar panels and windmills, earn points at the end of the game depending on their position.\nTo earn points from these, you need at least four wind turbines on the same row or four solar panels on the same column. Each row and column is worth a different number of points ranging from one to four. The top row is worth the most points for wind turbines, and the right-most column scores the most for solar panels.\nBeds and Filters # Flower beds and water filters are your next scoring option. Here, you want to extend the flower beds so they connect across multiple tiles. You also want a border around the beds or to place them along the board’s outside wall (which acts as a natural border).\nThe final thing your flower beds need is one or two water filters each. An enclosed flower bed with one filter makes each bed tile worth one point; two or more filters makes the tiles worth two points. But what if you didn’t enclose the whole flower bed with a border? Then you lose half the points for the bed, rounded down. (And yes, that can leave you with zero point flower beds at the end of the game!)\nAnimals, Sculptures, and Paths # Your final options for scoring points come from animal habitats and sculptures.\nThe game features five animal habitats to keep your garden healthy and your visitors entertained. If your finished garden has one of each animal habitat anywhere on your board, you earn five points at game end. If you put two more more of the same habitat next to each other orthagonally (in the same column or row, not diagonally), you earn three points for each pair.\nYou can also dress up your garden with sculptures. These appear either alone of in groups of two or three. Each sculpture in your garden scores one point, so a group automatically gives you either two or three points.\nFinally, you can build walking paths for visitors. Your longest continuous path earns one point per tile, plus another three points if your path is the longest on the table.\nVerdict # Solar Gardens adds some fun twists to the classic tile-laying game experience. We especially liked the drafting mechanic and the various point scoring opportunities. Making the solar panels and windmills worth different point values depending on where they are in the board added a nice tension to the tile placement choices.\nThe game shines with three to five players. It still works for two, but because you’re only working with three tiles each round, we felt it tilted the game’s strategy toward luck over skill. To rebalance that, try drafting four tiles instead of three and letting the second player discard up to two tiles. That increases the number of tiles both players get to see each game.\nDarrington also did a great job with the components. The players boards are thick and solid, and the tiles have a great feel to them. Giving each player their own reference card smooths out any issues before they can happen.\nRecommended! ","date":"8 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/reviews/solar-gardens/","section":"Reviews","summary":"The city of Solara needs your help! 12+, 2-5 players, 30-45 minutes","title":"Review: Solar Gardens (Darrington Press)","type":"reviews"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/authors/","section":"Authors","summary":"","title":"Authors","type":"authors"},{"content":"Writer, speaker, \u0026amp; gamifier. The higher ed version of a Broadway triple threat.\nThink of me as a bridge \u0026ndash; I explain computers to people and people to computers.\nMy passions focus on customer service, customer experience, system design, game-based learning, and helping parents connect with their kids through modern tabletop games.\nI also organize the Fort Wayne \u0026ldquo;elf hub\u0026rdquo; for IC3D\u0026rsquo;s national 3D printed Toys for Tots campaign. In 2024, my team\u0026rsquo;s elves printed and donated over 2,500 toys that supported Columbia City\u0026rsquo;s Toys for Tots program, the Iris Family Support Center (formerly SCAN), and other local non-profits. (If you have a 3D printer and want to make toys to donate, send me a message!)\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/authors/john_kaufeld/","section":"Authors","summary":"Writer, speaker, \u0026 gamifier. The higher ed version of a Broadway triple threat.\nThink of me as a bridge – I explain computers to people and people to computers.\nMy passions focus on customer service, customer experience, system design, game-based learning, and helping parents connect with their kids through modern tabletop games.\nI also organize the Fort Wayne “elf hub” for IC3D’s national 3D printed Toys for Tots campaign. In 2024, my team’s elves printed and donated over 2,500 toys that supported Columbia City’s Toys for Tots program, the Iris Family Support Center (formerly SCAN), and other local non-profits. (If you have a 3D printer and want to make toys to donate, send me a message!)\n","title":"John Kaufeld","type":"authors"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/series/","section":"Series","summary":"","title":"Series","type":"series"}]