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Forbidden Island is easy to teach, has beautiful art and it appeals to the adventurer in all of us. The cooperative play makes it ideal for families, specially those with children. Be careful to allow everyone to make their own decisions. Sometimes, it’s a little too easy for one person to “boss” the others around. Finally, the difficulty of the game can be adjusted to fit any crowd! This is a winner!

I own the previous version of this game: Hollywood Blockbuster. Dream Factory is a fun family game about getting the resources together to make movies. The main resource required, of course, is money. Money is used to bid on the services of actors, directors, sound crew, etc. The ingenious part of this game is that any money spent is spread out to the competition. Thus, new money never enters the game and money never leaves. This leads to some very exciting auctions. The luck of the draw at parties has the possibility of swinging the game too far one way or another. Good family game.

Tikal II is a fine family game. There are enough decisions to make the game interesting. Short turns and a short playing time make the game good for families. However, nothing stands out about the game. The mechanics are ok. The graphics are good. Perhaps having ‘Tikal’ in the title of the game actually hurt this one as it simply does not stand up to its predecessor.

I enjoy a complex game, so I don’t find C&K to be horribly complex in an of itself. However, this expansion ruined the Settlers experience for some casual games. C&K unnecessarily complicated a great experience that regular Settlers of Catan offered for them. This expansion also adds to length of the game, making it the worst of the Settlers expansions in our experience.

This is a great looking game with fun little components that is very approachable to kids and families. But beware! This can can get very evil, as the main mechanism of the game involves picking on each other and feeding each other to the various sea creatures. If your family can enjoy the humour of feeding each other to a shark or a sea serpent, then this is the game for you.

Expanding Settlers to play with 5-6 is a great idea, and it allows a bigger group to play together. While the game is still good, it’s not quite as good as the 4-player game. While everyone is involved during other players’ turns, it’s still a longer time until your turn comes around and you can take maximum control. Allowing builds after everyone’s turn also minimizes the impact of rolling a 7. The game is still fun but only play with 5-6 if the group is not willing to split up.

Blokus is an easy to learn abstract that can be taught in less than one minute. The game looks great as the game progresses and the placement of pieces becomes more difficult. Highly tactical, each player has to react to what the others are doing. At the end, there is always the feeling of “one more time”.

Fantastic game! A very clever use of dice. Players battle for control in various districts of the city, gaining privileges that help them along the way. They use dice to fight off threats or gain privileges and prestige. However, rolling high numbers on your own dice may help other players just as much as you! A lot of choices every turn – and all the choices are good! Fun game, excellent execution and unique mechanics.

The alien powers are the highlight of this game. They make every game different and every game interesting. However, in the end, the negotiation phase takes the front seat as good negotiation will win over good guesswork and strategic play. I do not enjoy negotiation. Therefore, this is not my kind of game.

In the age of mindless iPhone apps and Facebook mini games, having a board game that simulates a simple puzzle game seems like a gimmick. However, Puzzle Strike has uncovered the fun of the puzzle game and wrapped it around a deck-building mechanic to produce a wonderfully fun and engaging board game.

In Puzzle Strike, players take the role of a fighter, attempting to take out their opponents by overflowing their gem piles. Players can collect and eventually crash these gems, sending them to their opponents. Each fighter has unique abilities that are augmented as the game advances by puzzle chips that help the fighters attack their opponents more effectively.

Puzzle Strike is greatly re-playable as it comes with 25 different puzzle chips, only 10 of which are used in any particular game. In addition, 10 different fighters can be found in the game, each of whom plays a little bit differently.

Great Fun!

The epitome of mass-market boredom. The game is very easy to learn, but it has next to zero decisions and a huge random factor. This means that it’s easy to play with kids and family/friends that don’t typically play games, but only for something to do with your hands while sitting around a table. The game is random and gets boring very quickly.

Play 6 Nimmt! or No Thanks or Coloretto instead.

Even though this is not a wargame, it has enough of a wargame feel for me – so I didn’t enjoy the game. The funky mixed up races are pretty neat, but the choices are limited and there’s always that final die roll to make luck a little too much of a factor. Just not my kind of game, I guess.

This is not the most strategic of games, but it is beautiful to look at, it’s built around a fantastic theme and – best of all – it plays in 30 minutes regardless of how many players are involved! Any game that plays from 3 to 7 in the same amount of time definitely belongs in my collection.

Dominion is a deck building game like no other. Well, it used to be like no other in that it initiated the deck building mechanic. While many other deck building games have arrived, Dominion is still the best. With expansion after expansion coming out, its replay value is extremely high. One of our favourite games of all time.