In addition to my regular gaming tables, I started off 2025 visiting my brother and his kids. We gamed a marathon, including many games that were new to me.
New games with the Nephews
- Mantis
– A silly card game from the Oatmeal. Spend your turn making sets, scoring points, or stealing from other players. - Villainous: Marvel
– Like Disney: Villainous, but with new mechanics for Infinity Stones and sending Allies to mess with other players. - Karen
– A social game of guessing the right answers, similar to Balderdash and Dixit. - Power Hungry Pets
– A Love Letter style game of guessing what other players have for a card, being the last one eliminated, or having the highest card left at the end of the round. - The Crew: Mission to the Deep
– A game of cooperative trick taking to meet the randomly drawn objectives to complete missions. It comes with a book of missions, specifying how many objectives and obstacles to overcome to complete the campaign. Might try again, but was kind of Meh at first blush. - Very Bad Lands
– You start with a dinosaur with a unique ability and a hidden card. On your turn you either swap the card or pass, aiming to get the best (not always the highest) card in your hand compared to the other players. First one to lose three times goes extinct and everyone else wins! - Wingspan
– One of the highly praised board games of the year. It’s an engine builder, gathering and playing cards to generate more actions or points. - Spyfall: DC Heroes
– A game of social deduction set against locations in the DC Universe. Having DCU knowledge a definite asset! - Civilization: Sid Meyer’s New Dawn
– It has a lot of similarity to the video game, though it would benefit from some reference cards. Likewise the board parts weren’t the easiest to decipher what land types they were. - Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
– It’s the Gloomhaven quick-start. It starts as simple as it can, spreading out the mechanics by introducing new ones over multiple scenarios. Unlike Gloomhaven, it saves on space by using a scenario book as the map pieces instead of having all kinds of board pieces. - House of Danger
– Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure Books? Here’s the card game! Instead of turning pages, you draw the designated numbered cards and try to roll the die to beat the ever rising Danger Meter to overcome challenges. It is very forgiving towards losing, not unlike how we all kept a finger or bookmark at our last choice just in case we made a bad decision. Of some replayabiity, but there are only a finite number of endings. - Waterfall Park
– A game of property control and building park features. Trading and bargaining happens between rounds to help you put together sets and control connected property slots. - Talisman: Batman Villains
– Talisman but with Batman Villains, roaming the board in search of the items and allies that will help them gain access to the innermost region and to be the first to defeat Batman. It has the benefit of some optional rules to speed things up but still a game that takes some time to play. - Funko-Verse: Batman
– Small unit tactics, using Funko figurines. It’s one of many Ips offered (ranging from Jurassic Park to Harry Potter to even The Golden Girls and many more) that should be interchangeable between sets. Pretty simple tactics with two board layouts and multiple scenarios with different win conditions. Easy enough to homebrew a few of your own scenarios. - Marvel: Splendor
– Mostly the same as regular Splendor but with Marvel characters and attempting to gain Infinity Stones for the big points.
Added Bonus, I got to replay a number of games that I hadn’t played for awhile but also got to teach them how to play Hearts and Wizard!
Side note – not a copy of Wizard was to be found at all the game stores or even book stores that we went to. Heck, at one book store they looked blankly at us and suggested a Harry Potter card game because, well, wizards … In the end, we took a cheap ordinary deck and modified the jokers and promotional cards to be some jesters and wizards. We didn’t have enough for a full 4 and 4, but we had enough to get a feel for the game.
A Geek for All Seasons 