Designers: Benjie Talbott
Publisher: Cosy Cub Games, Mighty Boards
1-5 players | 30-45 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $30 | BGG Entry
Time to teach and learn: 5 minutes

Game Synopsis

Ddinbych y pysgod is the name of one of the most charming seaside towns in Wales. It means little fortress of fish. Its long beaches, colorful terraced houses, and landmarks like a medieval city wall make it an ideal spot for a quiet holiday or a cozy place to call home. Ages ago English invaders renamed the town Tenby. Visitors now flock to Tenby from across the British Isles. In this game, players get the chance to build their own miniature version of Tenby, street by street, hoping to assemble the right combination of features, icons, and residences to make their little fortress of fish shine the brightest and score the most.

You have ten nights and ten days to build your version of Tenby. At night you place a token on the action card you want to use during the day. Day actions allow you to claim town cards from the marketplace that will shape the streets you build or resident cards whose preferences can give each new building decision a direction.

Three types of town cards will create your Tenby: terraces, piers, and landmarks. The charming illustrations on each town card depict houses, shops, restaurants, scenic, locales, and waterfront vistas. To create your streets, the artwork on each town card you place must line up correctly. You could create one long street or many shorter ones, hoping to cap off each street with end cards.

After ten turns every card in your little Tenby will score based on a simple condition, asking you to look closely and count features like seagulls or chimneys – flowers or clouds – lobster traps or lamps. Resident cards follow a similar method but apply their preferences to a single street or the whole town. Resident’s scoring potential is also greatly enhanced when your streets are complete. The town with the highest point total wins the game.

Why We Love Tenby

Tenby offers players a great deal of freedom and creativity in how they construct their town. Day actions may give you access to multiple kinds of town cards, each with their own scoring mechanism and series of illustrated elements. Many cards have life preserver icons, which are an additional form of currency in the game.

You can spend these life preserver tokens to add new cards to the marketplace, move a card within your town to a new location, or even take additional actions on your turn. So the freedom in Tenby includes a wide array of choices when building each card into a street and an equally flexible set of options when it comes to selecting your actions each turn.

Tenby is also incredibly modular, offering players of vastly different ages and experience levels a variety of ways to explore the game. I have described the base game above, but included in the rules are five different options that add depth and complexity. There is also a solo variant. Most surprising of all are the rules for eight additional family games that can be played using Tenby’s components. There are many worlds to explore in this one small Welsh town.

Tenby is the epitome of coziness. What does cozy mean in this context? Though there is a winner and a loser in a cozy game, greater emphasis is placed on the process of playing and each player’s shared investment in the world of the game. The world of a cozy game must be compelling to the point that players lose themselves in helping create it. How many games do you know of that come with their own soundtrack? 

We are still guided by a common goal: create optimal scoring engines for each town card we build into our streets. But the risks and sub optimal moves that are baked into the DNA of this game shift the focus to an equally important endeavor: playing for play’s sake. 

Many turns there may not be a terrace or pier or landmark card that meshes well with the compliment of features on your streets. You may decide to start a new street or place a seemingly useless card on an existing one, hoping it may pay off in other ways down the road. Or you may make a purely aesthetic decision because your current street doesn’t have enough restaurants along the seaside. 

The charming artwork creates a modular storybook landscape, rich in detail, and is far from window dressing. Almost every small element in each illustration on a town card could potentially benefit your Tenby in some way. If only you could find the right place for it, that is.  Each player’s tenby offers a series of puzzles to be unraveled as you build out your town over ten turns. 

Winning still provides structure and purpose in a cozy game, but there are internal victories, not measured by the final score in a cozy game that bring as much pleasure and enjoyment as winning. Given the vagaries of the marketplace of town cards and random resident cards you may have access to during the game, your goal may soon shift to creating the best little town you can with the options you were given.  And that achievement can be just as satisfying in Tenby as having the town with the highest score. 

Cozy games help us understand and rewrite the rules of why we play. Winning can be fun and is an important element to be sure, but it isn’t the only one that can bring real joy in satisfaction. Tenby insists that you can find just as much major fun wandering through the side streets, listening to the music of your very own quiet seaside town in Wales.

Congratulations to designer Benjie Talbott

More information on Tenby at Cosy Cub Games

Designers: Zach Connelly
Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
2-4 players | 15 min. | ages 6+ | MSRP $30 | BGG Entry
Time to teach and learn: 2-3 minutes

Game Synopsis

Welcome to the cardboard arcade! You don’t need tokens or quarters. You don’t even need electricity. Just the flex of a finger! housed within this humble cardboard box is a pinball machine complete with all the challenges and excitement of its Blinky flipper based forefathers. line up three box tops from tallest to shortest in a stairstep pattern. add walls, bumpers, and monsters, and you have yourself a good old-fashioned Halloween themed haunted house.

Use a cardboard pedestal to launch dice from the top of the pinball machine, scoring points based on where each die lands and the number you roll. Haunted realm areas will multiply your score. Face down clue tokens could offer a windfall or a pittance. Wandering monsters provide juicy targets. Knock down Medusa, Frank (enstein) and Bob the flaming skull to cash in a hefty bonus. Aim for the summoning circle, and you’ll gain an extra die, giving you even more chances to score.

This haunted house is no walk in the park, though. It takes a combination of good aim and coordination to send your die careening into just the right place. And there are many literal pitfalls to avoid. If your die falls through the box, it’s gone for the round. No one scores points until the end of round, though, so even the best shot can be wrecked by the flick of another player’s finger.

Why We Love Boxtop Pinball: Haunted House

There is a kind of primal satisfaction at the heart of any dexterity game. Your actions translate directly into success or failure.  Box top pinball can reward skillful play but there is an ever present element of chaos that magnifies the fun. Even the greatest shot is in jeopardy until the last die is flicked. This echoes, the real experience of playing pinball in a deliciously frustrating way. You might make the most magnificent flipper shot and watch your silver chrome ball spin through lights and bumpers and bonuses. But every machine has its gremlins and you know the fickle finger of fate stands ready to undo even your best beautiful moves. In box top pinball those gremlins could be cardboard obstacles, or the other players themselves!

This is a game powered by nostalgia and imagination. The will to play is so strong that we can upend a series of box lids, and trick ourselves into an experience that captures the essence of the original in a very real way. And when we boil it down, the essence of pinball isn’t lights or flippers… it is dexterity divided by chance. If three box lids can be a pinball machine what other pinball challenges could we make on our own? This spooky playground is one we certainly enjoy exploring over and over. But the real brilliance of box top pinball is the invitation it offers for us to see the world around us as an arcade in the making.

Congratulations to designer Zach Connelly

More information on Boxtop Pinball: Haunted House at Pandasaurus Games

Designers: Michal Modler
Publisher: Amigo, Hasbro & 11 others
3-6 players | 20 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $13 | BGG Entry
Time to teach and learn: 5 minutes | Buy the game
Review Written by: Lucio Rodriguez

Game Synopsis

In Cabanga! (also released as Snailed it!*), players attempt to get rid of their hand of cards, or, failing that, end the turn with as few points as possible.

Four Row Color cards, each in a different color, are placed at the center of the table, and each hand these rows are randomly seeded with two of the eight grey starting number cards.

*both Cabanga! and Snailed it! cards will be pictured in the review

The deck is four colors, each set containing the numbers one to eighteen, and can only be played in the corresponding-colored row. You can play atop either card in that row, attempting to keep the range between these cards as narrow as possible, because if your opponents hold any of the on-color cards within this range, they can shout, “Cabanga!” and offload them, reducing their hand and increasing yours. Offloaded cards are counted and then discarded, and the player draws new cards equal to that number.

With your hand of cards winnowing down, your options narrow. Do you play it safe, playing in the same color as the player before you, forcing you to draw a penalty card? Or do you risk it and play your only yellow card, which will leave an uncomfortably large gap?

The game ends when a player has reached a cumulative 18 or more points—the player with the fewest points is the winner.

Why We Love Cabanga!

Cabanga! is all the things you could want in a short card game: it’s easy to teach, easy to set up, and keeps players engaged even when it isn’t their turn. And with a 20-minute playtime, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Set up is quick: A total of twelve cards, four row color and eight starting number cards; shuffle the 72 card deck and deal eight to each player. Somehow, even with new players, you’ve basically taught the game by the time set-up is complete.

Each hand starts similarly—you play a card that creates the non-gaps. 5 next to 6, 17 next to 18. But the few cards remaining in your hand feel like debts you eventually must pay. Sitting on a solitary red and bunch of yellow, and then the player before you plays yellow? You have a choice: play the yellow but draw a penalty card, which feels like treading water because your hand size hasn’t decreased. Or risk playing the red, even though it’s creating a four-card gap.

As light and straightforward as the game is, it isn’t entirely luck based. A keen player will keep an eye on what numbers have been played in each color—there’s only one of each, so remembering which cards have been played can inform which gaps are safe.

Also, the cards have 1-3 “point” icons on each side, with the icons distributed in a normal curve—that is, cards on either end of the line (1 and 18, for instance), being worth only one point, while those in the middle (such as 7 and 8), have three point-icons. Sometimes, when it looks like someone is close to ending the hand, it’s best to rid yourself of the high-point value cards.

Most importantly, Cabanga! is raucous. Though players may be gentle the first few times they’re able to offload cards to an opponent, it’s not long before they’re shouting, “Cabanga!” and tossing cards across the table. Even when it’s not your turn, you’re engaged, watching for the moment an opponent leaves a gap that allows you to shout and offload cards from your hand.

Cabanga! does a great job building moments of tension where you’re forced to leave a too-large gap, punctuated with a sigh of relief—or an explosion of laughter, cards flying at you from three different opponents. Even when you’ve played your last card, winning isn’t guaranteed: you still have to hope your opponents can’t save themselves with one last “Cabanga!”

Congratulations to designer Michael Modler

More information on Cabanga! at Board Game Geek

Designers: Sooyoung Youn, Stuart Wineman
Publisher: Playte
Artist: Wanjin Gill
2-6 players | 15 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $15 | BGG Entry
Time to teach and learn: 2 minutes | Buy the game

Game Synopsis

Can you say several slippery phrases consecutively without getting your tongue tangled? Slide through without a mistake and the silly sentence will grow for the next victim! Stumble a bit and you’ll take the card that tripped you up (and any cards stacked beneath) as a penalty. An arrow on the card back will tell you which way to read the line of words, adding even more potential for pronunciation pandemonium. The first player to collect six penalty cards will end the game. The player with the least penalties wins.

Why We Love Betty Botter Bought Some Butter

This game celebrates the silliness of language by asking us to play with it we don’t often think of the physical demands or challenges words can make on our mouths when stacked together in just the right order. Betty Botter Bought Some Butter sets delicious traps for your tongue, one card at a time. The genius and joy of the game is best experienced and not explained to death, though. So let’s play along right here!

The first card drawn is

Bad Money, Mad Bunny

If you read it without any goofs, then draw a card and add it to the line before or after

The second card is

Fred Fed Ted Bread

So now you’re on the hook to say

Bad Money, Mad Bunny – Fred Fed Ted Bread

The third card is

Pretty Preppy Peppy Pink Pigs

So now we have a line of cards creating word soup that looks like this

Pretty Preppy Peppy Pink Pigs – Bad Money, Mad Bunny – Fred Fed Ted Bread

Go ahead and give it a go. No slow talking, though! Now try reading the cards starting right to left instead. Did you flub it up or make it to the end? Either way, even playing solo, I bet you’re cracking a smile.

One more card to finish us off. The fourth card drawn is

Irish Wristwatch, Swiss Wristwatch

Let’s say all those P words are tripping you up. You could choose to play the new card over those pesky pigs, so now the lineup is

Irish Wristwatch, Swiss Wristwatch – Bad Money, Mad Bunny – Fred Fed Ted Bread

And on we go… The next card is The Truer Rural Juror… which sends the whole group into hysterics because no one can even come close to saying it right.

Some may be reticent to play at first because they are overly worried they’ll get their tongue twisted. One: the game is very forgiving, so the cost of failure (especially early on) is very low. Two: everyone will mess up. The heart of the game is designed to create traps for players. The fun is in the failure!

But something will happen during almost every game. The line up of cards will grow and grow to a ludicrous level. No one will care about points at this point. Everyone will be tippy toeing on the tongue twisting tight rope hoping to keep the streak going and the line of cards growing. That tension between collective success and hilarious individual failure is exactly the kind of Venn diagram where you’ll find Major Fun!

Congratulations to designers Sooyoung Youn and Stuart Wineman

More information on Betty Botter Bought Some Butter at Playte

Designers: Ralf Zur Linde
Publisher: NSV
2-4 players | 20 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $25/ | BGG Entry
Time to teach and learn: 3 minutes

Game Synopsis

Every turn, dice clatter into a common pool. Every pool offers a new set of choices and chances. Which one will click the best for you? Select one die and click it onto another, adding the numbers together. I choose a five and click it into a six to make eleven.

Now, I write that eleven in one box on one row of my scoreboard. Each row has its own rules. Numbers must go up, numbers must go down, numbers alternate between odd and even, and so on. Advance your numbers across the rows, hoping to increase your score.

But here’s the catch: the pool shrinks as each player clicks a die and makes a combination. You may end up with a number you don’t want, forcing you to take negative points or mess up one of your rows. This game is fast, so the end can sneak up on you! With skill and planning and maybe a dash of luck, your score will clickety clack up the charts.

Why We Love Clickety Clack

This game is beautifully honest. The story it wants us to tell is simple:  pick a die, make a number, write it down, try to earn points. Even so, there are truths waiting for us to discover, created by the collection of choices we make as we play. 

One truth to contend with is no number can repeat within a given row. This means each number you place will limit future choices.

Another truth to wrestle with is probability. Saving the more easily rolled numbers can give you an escape route later in the game. The harsh reality is: you are often not in control of the numbers. Late in a game round, other players may only leave you combinations of 6-7-8, with all the harder to roll combos already clicked away. Facing that truth may force you to accept an occasional negative point in order to keep future options open. 

The most delicious truth waiting to be discovered in Clickety Clack is the design of the scoreboard itself. Not every space on every row will net you points. This means there are traps set for you, set by you, as you roll and click and write your way through each turn. If the game ends and your final number on a row has no point value, you score nothing for the entire row! In order to go for larger scores, you must risk scoring nothing at all!  

There are three waypoints to watch for on each scoreboard – any of which will bring the game to a quick end: two rows completed, three rows with numbers past a line, or all penalty boxes filled. If you lose yourself too much in your own scoreboard, you’re likely to lose because you won’t see the end coming. Last, and perhaps best of all, the scoreboard has two sides with different rules for the rows, giving players even more to ways to explore and enjoy.

Clickety clack offers meaningful, challenging and fun decisions from its simple framework. Don’t confuse its streamlined elegance with easy or boring. To us, those beautiful words are synonyms for Major Fun!

Congratulations to designer Ralf Zur Linde

More information on Clickety Clack at Board Game Geek

Designers: Rob Sparks, Brett J. Gilbert
Development: Joshua Perry, Anthony Howego
Publisher: Alley Cat Games
Artist: Rory Muldoon
2-6 players | 3-15 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $50 | BGG Entry
Time to teach and learn: 2 minutes

Game Synopsis

The coals are hot and the crowd is hungry. It’s time to get cooking!

Flip a card, then find a way to fit the food shown on the world’s tiniest grill.. using the world’s tiniest tongs. Make sure the food is touching the right number of bars along the grill and make sure not to drop anything into the fire. Burn too many things and you’ll have to turn in your apron and let someone else finish the meal.

Why We Love Barbecubes

Barbecubes is a game of simple joy amplified by its size.

The small tin the game comes in serves as the imaginary kettle for your grill, holding the hot coals. Two wooden grates are arranged over the tin to create the cooking surface. Charming wooden pixelated pieces of food: chicken legs, steaks, burgers, sausages, fish and pork belly all await the fire (the selection is surprisingly very meat-centric – why not an onion? Some asparagus? Maybe even a mushroom or some tofu?). Tiny plastic tongs are the tools of your trade. A deck of small cards depicts a specific food item and exactly how many grill bars it must touch.

If all these components were life size, the game would still be a lovely experience. But Barbecubes makes you adjust to its scale. The choice to make the game mini, maximizes its fun.

The squared off edges of the miniature 8-bit shaped food might seem like a blessing, but once you pick up something seemingly simple, like a burger, you’ll understand. The tongs may grip those corners, but they also make it devilishly hard to readjust things mid-stream without the food flying off out of your control. This means even when grill space is mostly open, it can still be a tricky challenge to get your food placed properly. And once the grill gets packed, that’s when the real fun begins. You may have to nudge a sausage or slide over a plank of salmon to clear space for your steak. And you might even be forced to tip that beef on its side, so it won’t take up as much room over the fire. Knock any food into the tin and you’ve failed this round. Fail twice and you’re out.

Player elimination is often vilified without paying attention to how it is used in a game. Every turn in Barbecubes is fun and full of tension because of the chance for failure and the chance for someone to be knocked out of the game. You can even try to set the next player up for failure by how you choose to place your food on the grill. You can be mean but the cost of that meanness is small. You can fail, but the cost of that failure is short. Even a long game of Barbecubes is less than 10 minutes. You may be crying after burning your bacon in one game and, 5 minutes later, be cheering as you are crowned the king or queen of the grill. As players, I think we hunger for chances at triumph and redemption. Barbecubes delivers us the potential for both multiple times in less time than it takes to grill the perfect steak. Dont let the tiny tin fool you. This game is no side dish. It serves up a heaping helping of Major Fun.

Congratulations to designer Rob Sparks and Brett J. Gilbert

More information on Barbecubes at Alley Cat Games

Designers: Oussama Khelifati
Publisher: Captain Games
Artist: Adrien Journel
2-7 players | 20 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $18 | BGG Entry
Time to teach & learn: 4-5 minutes

Game Synopsis

It’s bath time and all your rubber ducks have decided to join the fun. It’s nice having the whole flock together until you realize one big problem. With all this splashing around, you won’t have any water left in the tub!

One by one, players try to consolidate their duck cards from a grid into stacks. Everyone plays at the same time. Like Bingo, the Captain draws a card and calls out a number. Everyone must find this number duck in their grid and use it to cover a neighor OR fly it to a new part of the tub. If your duck has already been covered, you QUACK to let folks know you didnt get to move. If everyone QUACKS, we are all one step closer to the end of the round. The bathtub with the lowest number of splashes after three rounds wins the game.

Why We Love Duck & Cover

There’s a puzzly challenge in each bathtub grid of cards you face in Duck & Cover. Every time the Captain calls a number you have the opportunity to improve your situation. You want to manipulate your ducks into fewer and fewer stacks before the end of the round. Points are bad in Duck & Cover, so each duck you can see at the top of a stack will add to your score UNLESS… you manage to pull all your ducks into a single stack. In this case, the value of this final duck is subtracted from your score!

There’s no middle ground here. High numbers could make your score skyrocket or plummet. From the very first card the Captain calls out, there’s a deliciously tense decision to make. Do you press your luck and keep high numbers face up in your tub OR do you play it safe and cover them the first chance you get?

This tension is created by the chaos of the shuffle. No one knows what the Captain will draw next. There are two of each numbered duck plus two special cards. If a round continues deep into the draw deck, players can make more informed decisions based on which numbers remain. Informal alliances or cheering sections will form each round because of the shuffle. Some players will be begging for a 7 while others booo 7s and chant to the soapy gods for a 5.

Every bath builds to a fun crescendo in Duck & Cover. It’s a game of fluid tactics guided by a sometimes fickle and sometimes forgiving deck of cards. This means victory for you on a given round could look very different from others. Maybe the best you could do was limit your losses, given the flow of the cards. There’s an ebb and flow to Duck & Cover that makes for engaging highs and hilarious lows. It plays so quickly that, even when our toes were wrinkled up like raisins from another round of baths, Duck & Cover kept us coming back for more.

Congratulations to designer Oussama Khelifati

More information on Duck & Cover at Captain Games

Designer: Kenechukwu Ogbuagu
Publisher: Nibcard Games
1-8 players  |  20 min. |  ages 7+  |  MSRP $24.99
Time to teach & learn: 2-3 minutes

Game Synopsis

Oya One More is a press-your-luck dice and card game. Players race to reach a point total by matching dice they rolled to the pattern on a card. Here’s the catch! You can match only a single die to a card or ALL the dice to a card. You can stop and bank your points, but if you want to keep going, you flip another card. Each card you score entices you to try for another, but if you bust, all your gains this turn are lost. Special cards may also entice you to keep going – allowing you to add points, steal dice, and manipulate or reroll dice. Bonuses for filling a card or using all the dice will have everyone chanting OYA ONE MORE as you decide whether to stop or keep going.

Why We Love Oya One More

Oya One More is a dice game that creates tension by how you spend your five dice instead of how you roll them. You roll only once each turn and then hope to apply the results on the dice to the card you have drawn. Sometimes a bust will happen right away. In this case, perhaps the dice gods really dont love you!  In most cases, though, you’ll assign a single die to a card to score it or occasionally fill the card (which triggers a score multiplier). 

Now the real fun and tension begins! Do you stop and bank your score or do you keep going? If you only have a couple dice left to assign, this can be a risky move, especially if they are the same value. Then again, it might be worth the risk, since bonuses for using all your dice or filling a card are tremendous. Special cards can also tempt you to continue since many of them help skew the odds in your favor. Oya One More is a game of relentless temptation. Can you resist? 

Oya is the word for quickly in the Nigerian Pidgin Language and the game takes this word to heart. Turns are fast and furious.  Every turn people are engaged. Everyone leans in to see whether a player busts or gets to keep going. Someone at the table will be cheering or moaning each time a card is drawn. Either the crowd will be cheering when another player busts, or the active player will be celebrating when they stop with a good score.

There are two other variants included, inspired by Blackjack and Poker, which add additional ways to explore and enjoy the game system – assigning dice to cards.

Press Your Luck games are accessible to such a wide array of players young and old. This can explain their popularity and success across many years. However, most press your luck games walk down a well worn road and fail to offer players a new or challenging experience. Oya One More creates a new approach for players to press their luck and in doing so carves a path straight to Major Fun.

Congratulations to designer Kenechukwu (KC) Ogbuagu

More information on Oya One More here

Designers: Tedman Getschman
Publisher: Big Potato Games
Developers: Ed Naujokas, Drew Richards, James A. Vaughan
2-6 players  |  20 min. |  ages 8+  |  MSRP $24.99 | BGG Entry
Time to teach & learn: 2-3 minutes

Game Synopsis

Eight races down a metal cone stand between you and marble racing immortality. Secretly choose how many of your marbles to risk on each race, then load everyone’s marbles into the launcher and let them fly! They will spin around and around the metal disc until one marble drops through the center hole and wins the race. Finish first, second, or third and you get to claim a trophy and score points. Be careful as you spend your marbles, though, because you lose them as you use them. And even if your marbles are slow, there’s an underdog bonus that will keep you in contention. Whose marbles will score big and rule over the Whirlyverse?

Why We Love Whirly Derby

The subtitle to this game should be: Physics is Major Fun! Who knew gravity and centripetal acceleration could produce so many laughs and so much joy? The simple truth of Whirly Derby is this: everyone picks a number of marbles, then we all cheer them on as they spin toward the center of a gently sloping metal funnel. If this sounds both silly and ridiculous, by god, it is. You have very little control over the outcome of any race but, if you let yourself, you will become totally invested in how each marble traces its course around the track. You’ll indignantly curse the marbles who shoulder yours out of the way and you’ll take a victory lap and look for fist bumps when your marble rockets to the finish first. You’ll claim skill when it suits you and cry foul when physics betrays you. The advanced rules introduce an element of tactics and strategy with scoring cards that require some added thought and the Thunderball, a giant marble that can prevent any player’s marble from winning. The genius of Whirly Derby, though, is its gentle but stubborn invitation to relax and give in to the essential absurdity of the game. Whirly Derby reminds us that a game doesnt require skill or grand strategy or even success to produce lasting moments of pure fun.

Congratulations to designers Tedman Getschman

More information on Whirly Derby at: Big Potato Games

Designers: Brendan Kendrick, Bernie Lin
Publisher: Dead Alive Games
Artist: Alex Pei, Maria Zvonkova, Zach Leo
1-4 players | 40 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $30 | BGG Entry
Time to teach & learn: 5-8 minutes

Game Synopsis

It’s 2050 and most of the citizens of San Lazaro have become techno-zombies, infected by a virus in their gadgets and implants. Stupid humans! Only your ragtag team of sentient cyber pets can save the day! Jane the cat, Clay the dog, Freya the raccoon and Roman the goose must search the city hoping to find their friend Howard the Scientist who vanished suddenly and mysteriously.

Over multiple chapters, your team will explore and investigate new locations, overcome enemies and solve puzzles. Your choices will advance the story and level up your abilities and equipment. Can your bionic brains band together to outwit these many dangers? Adventure is calling. How will your quest unfold?

Why We Love Cyber Pet Quest

Cyber Pet Quest adapts video game sensibilities into an engaging set of clever cardboard challenges. From the choice of pet characters each with their own skill tree and backstory to turn-based combat and waves of increasingly difficult enemies and boss battles, the framework of the game will be familiar. It feels like a story driven tactical rpg. the stakes may be lower in Cyber Pet Quest, but video games like Final Fantasy, XCom, Disgaea, and Banner Saga draw players into a rich world seen through the eyes of a cadre of characters whose abilities will mesh to provide new and interesting tactical combos. And with each objective you complete, the story will advance and unfold. Even the introductory scenario introduces concepts and rules much like the tutorial level to a console game. This familiar framework is purposeful and makes the game immensely approachable to younger players who might be less likely to cross the digital divide and play a game without a screen.

The game teaches teamwork. You quickly learn that flexible thinking is most often the best path to victory. Each round, initiative will bounce back and forth between two decks of cards, the player deck and the Cyms deck( Cyms are the dreaded techno zombies). Every pet will get a turn but you won’t know from round to round when each pet will get to go in the batting order. Each Cym operates according to a simple set of programmed rules, but you don’t know in what order they will go either. this means communication must be constant between all the pets and any plan could be contingent on turn order.

Even an individual pet’s turn forces flexible thinking. Actions like moving, inspecting, interacting, healing or attacking require energy. But the energy you have available on a turn is modified by a die roll. And because each pet has skills better suited to certain actions, you may need a higher roll to accomplish more tasks. When the dice cooperate, pets can get a lot done. Most often, though, the dice may betray you and you’ll have to find new options to make your plans work. 

Perhaps the best example of true teamwork in the game is the choice between being aggro and sneaky. In order to attack and subdue your enemies you must be aggro, but this choice comes at a cost. Any enemy who activates will target and attack the pet who was last aggro. Deciding as a group who should be aggro and how they can distract or contain enemies is a key to success but it can also very easily lead to a pet’s demise and the end of the game. 

Cyber Pet Quest is an ambitious game with a big story to tell, all within the confines of a very small box. A spiral bound scenario book will guide you through each chapter in the campaign. locations, objectives, equipment, upgrades, charms and bosses have their own deck of cards. There are tokens galore and custom dice for energy and dodging damage, plus personal pet boards for each player. Even the magnetic lid of the box becomes a reference board for the menacing Cyms. Unpacking the game and setting the stage for each chapter feels like an event –  a miniature world taking shape – a world that becomes your personal playground for an hour or two. 

This bite size game offers us more than snacks, though. Each chapter feels like a satisfying course. And while you could race through the entire experience over an extended session if you tried, I think this is contrary to the spirit of the game. Cyber Pet Quest is meant to be savored over multiple sessions. You might squeeze in two chapters in a sitting, but don’t rush. Enjoy each new twist and turn of the story. Revel in your new levels and skills. The anticipation and excitement for what lies ahead is part of the fun for any good adventure, especially one with adorable robot cats.

Congratulations to designers Brendan Kendrick and Bernie Lin!

More information on Cyber Pet Quest at: Dead Alive Games