Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Gaming Articles, Hidden Gems

Review: Magical Athlete (2025)

November 8, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

Magical Athlete, originally released in 2003, is a wacky roll-and-move racing game that gets a fresh reprint in 2025. The sales pitch is that Magical Athlete is a “racing party game of pure chaos”, targeting a wide audience and giving a generous nod to the party game genre.

I want to get something out of the way right from the start so there’s no confusion about my feelings on this. When it comes to board gaming, while there are plenty of successful games built around the simple roll-and-move mechanic, I consider it, and I think there’s a fair bit of consensus on this, to be one of the least interesting mechanics and gameplay loops in all of gaming.

There’s just something inherently boring about rolling a die, moving a few spaces and calling that a game. It reminds me of games I haven’t played since I was a kid, and for good reason, like Sorry!, Chutes and Ladders and Parcheesi.

There are exceptions, of course. Classics like Talisman and Formula D are great examples of games that have managed to take this incredibly basic concept and turn it into something genuinely entertaining, even beloved. But to borrow a phrase from modern internet lingo, generally speaking, the whole roll-and-move mechanic gives me the ick!

A racing game where you chuck dice and move is a gaming concept as old as time, and frankly, most of the time these sorts of games are terrible, but there are exceptions to the rules. Formula D for example, is amazing, truly!

Magical Athlete is attempting to be one of those exceptions, following in the footsteps of games like Formula D by taking a mechanic I (and arguably most) generally doesn’t sound exciting and somehow making it fun.

Did it succeed? Let’s find out.

Overview

Final Score: (4.2 out of 5) Surprisingly Great Party Game

The Magical Athlete reprint is a considerable visual improvement over the original. I say that, based purely on pictures I have seen online, I’ve never actually played the first print. This new version is bright, colorful and features a clever, appealing art style backed by some really nice components.

This is important, perhaps more important for Magical Athlete than for most games, because the reality is that for all its efforts to be a fun, chaotic racing game, mechanically speaking, there really isn’t much going on here beyond the roll-and-move roots this game is founded on.

Having never played the original, I can’t say whether the game has changed in any significant way, it appears there are considerably more characters, but what we have here mechanically is, let’s just say, a very minimalist approach to game design.

The original Magical Athlete looks like a prototype, yet despite appearances, this game has a dedicated cult following. The reprint is actually a highly anticipated event.

The game itself is incredibly straightforward. You start by drafting characters that will represent your racing team in the upcoming races. These wonderfully bizarre creatures really are the stars of the show. You’ve got ridiculous characters like The Banana, Cheerleader, Egg and a strange house with legs called Baba-Yaga, just to name a few. All with thematically on-point special abilities.

Each racer’s special ability activates during play, giving them some unique advantage designed to help them win the race. This, however, has a much higher-level purpose because, while these are mechanical gadgets that trigger as part of a game you’re trying to win, they are sort of the comedic juice that establishes Magical Athlete as a chaotic, let’s roll some dice to see what funny stuff happens party game.

The new edition of Magical Athlete is bright, colorful, and cannot possibly be described with a more enthusiastic “it’s weird”.

These powers create the silly moments, the stuff people are going to laugh about and remember. They are, in a word, the reason to play. Mechanically, it’s not something you are going to analyze, scrutinize and make part of some sort of strategic decision to help you win the game. It is, just as it appears, a silly game that offers an opportunity to be silly with your friends for the sake of silliness alone.

The rest of the game is considerably simpler than even this rather basic drafting setup. Each race consists of players taking turns rolling a six-sided die, moving along a racetrack with features like move 2 spaces forward or trip and fall, while hoping against hope to trigger their character’s special powers to execute the chaos and create the laughs. Whoever reaches the finish line first scores some points.

The completely ridiculous characters double down on the game’s whimsy by having outrageous powers. They are definitely the stars of the show.

Do this better than everyone else over the course of four races and you win the game.

There’s something undeniably charming about a very simple, funny-looking game that doesn’t take itself seriously in any way, shape or form. It’s just a zany little thing you can do with your friends, and sometimes that’s all a game really needs to be.

The wackier your friends are, the more likely Magical Athlete is going to work at your table, which arguably is a true statement about all tabletop games, I suppose.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Wonderfully eccentric retro artwork, vibrant colors, quality components and a huge cast of bizarre, memorable characters. The entire presentation oozes personality.

Cons: The gameboard is rather plain and underwhelming compared to the wonderfully imaginative character artwork.

I think the most wonderful aspect of Magical Athlete is that the designers and publishers understood that, given the game’s simplicity, the visual presentation needed to be something unique. Something special.

Everything about this game’s component presentation is as much a sales pitch as it is an important part of the identity it wants to establish.

From the box art to opening the box, this game’s components lean into the sales pitch. Wacky and chaotic is promised, and wacky and chaotic is what you are going to get.

Even the box art has this subtle nuance to it, looking like something that could easily be mistaken for a game released back in the 60s. There is a very conscious effort to make Magical Athlete visually memorable, the sort of game that makes you say things like “cool” and “weird”, which, very unironically, is exactly how I would describe it.

The gameboard, taking up very little table real estate, has a distinctly retro look, with a color palette reminiscent of old British cartoons.

The cards follow suit, all nicely cut and finished, designed to last, with each one more vivid and curious than the last. There’s something about the artwork that invites the same sort of fascinated inspection you might give a 70s Queen album cover. It’s all wonderfully clever and unique, inspiring exactly the kind of excitement you want to feel when unboxing a game and laying everything out on the table for the first time.

The many wooden characters representing the racers on the board are equally bright and colorful, easy to identify and nicely matched to their card counterparts.

The game comes with tons of characters, and there are already expansions that double and triple the character count. Each one is more ridiculous than the next.

Everything in this package has a strange and curious kind of appeal. It’s all deliberately designed to get you into the mood for the wacky racing game that’s about to unfold, and in that regard, I think Magical Athlete absolutely nails it.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Wonderfully bizarre retro theme bursting with personality, clever Easter eggs and imaginative character abilities that bring the cartoon chaos to life. An unexpectedly charming and cohesive experience.

Cons: The theme is largely carried by the artwork and character abilities, with little thematic depth beyond the wacky racing premise.

Magical Athlete definitely has a theme, if a strange 70s retro cartoon vibe featuring incomprehensible characters having a foot race constitutes a theme. It’s a bit like some bizarre fever dream version of the World Olympics.

The color palettes of 60s and 70s cartoons were wonderfully bizarre, seemingly without rhyme or reason, yet somehow they worked. Magical Athlete unmistakably borrows from this peculiar aesthetic, giving it an oddly nostalgic charm, like something you vaguely remember from childhood but can’t quite place.

The artwork populating this game and its bright, strangely disorganized color palette are what give Magical Athlete its rather neurotic personality.

The game itself, being such a simple, luck-based dice roller, is essentially brought to life by the barminess of its theme, primarily through the cards representing the bizarre contestants.

The character powers themselves are probably the only real mechanical connection to the theme, but if wacky and chaotic was the goal, dare I say, mission accomplished.

There are some clever historical and mythological Easter eggs, like Sisyphus from Greek mythology, who was punished by the gods and condemned to spend eternity pushing an enormous boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down every time he approached the summit. The card cleverly plays on this punishment with a mechanic that sends him warping back to the starting line whenever he rolls a six. I don’t know who this easter egg is for, but the game is kind of filled with these sort of academic surprises, giving it a bit of intelligence hidden in the absurdity.

I love easter eggs and quirky things like this in games!

Then you have even more chaotic characters like Flip Flop, who can skip rolling the die altogether and instead swap places with another racer, potentially turning the entire race on its head in a single turn. Big effects like this are standard operating procedure for this game.

Suffice it to say, each power seems stranger than the next, and these abilities can have a real impact on the race. The drafting round, when you’re picking your racers, is where you formulate a plan for the races ahead. Not that this gives you much actual control over the outcome, but there is definitely a bit more to Magical Athlete than simply rolling a die and moving along a track.

That little bit of extra something is the main connection to the theme, or at least the theme’s attempt to recreate the sort of ridiculous, unpredictable chaos you might expect from an old Saturday morning cartoon.

I wouldn’t really expect a theme like this to work, but, strangely enough, it all translates into a kind of fun, silly activity. In fact, I think it’s the theme more than anything else that manages to sell the whole experience when you first get it to the table.

So, yeah, it works.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Outrageously chaotic character abilities create hilarious, unpredictable races and plenty of memorable moments. Simple, accessible and surprisingly entertaining with the right crowd.

Cons: Mechanically shallow, almost entirely luck-driven and offers very little meaningful decision-making. Heavily dependent on player count and the atmosphere around the table to deliver its magic.

The gameplay in Magical Athlete can be largely explained by asking whether you’ve ever played a game like Chutes and Ladders or Sorry!, because mechanically speaking, that’s pretty much what you’re getting here.

That explanation, however, doesn’t really capture the experience. It more accurately describes the core mechanic, which, when spelled out in a review like this, sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. And frankly, it would be, if that really was the entire experience.

Roll a die, move your character, rinse and repeat. Riveting stuff!

The thing about Magical Athlete is that it somehow manages to exist beyond the limitations of its own mechanics. There’s a sort of higher function to the gameplay loop here, something that has very little to do with strategy, decision-making, or even the game itself. It’s much closer to a party game or a silly social activity than anything resembling a traditional board game, and much of the heavy lifting comes from the aptly advertised “chaotic race”, an effect produced almost entirely by the bizarre special powers of the characters.

It reminds me a great deal of Galaxy Truckers, even though these two games have very little in common mechanically, the atmosphere and emotional payoff at the table can be remarkably similar.

Galaxy Trucker is nonsense in a box, yet remains one of my all-time favorites in what I like to call “silly activity” genre of games. You frantically build a ship from random components and then put your ship through an obstacle course of disasters that tear it apart, hoping to survive long enough to score points. It barely qualifies as a game, yet it’s a ridiculous amount of fun.

It’s that wonderful sort of gaming chaos where everything is going horribly wrong, nobody can quite believe what just happened and the entire table erupts into laughter at the tomfoolery of it all. The difference, of course, is that Galaxy Trucker gives you considerably more agency in creating your own disasters, while Magical Athlete is perfectly happy to let the dice and its ridiculous cast of characters do most of the work.

But the end result is surprisingly similar.

It’s a kind of fun that doesn’t really come from the game itself. You and your friends bring that to the table. Magical Athlete simply provides the excuse, facilitating the experience by being sufficiently silly and creating just enough outrageous situations to keep the energy going.

Notably, and I think this is where Magical Athlete gets something absolutely right, the game is almost perfectly timed. Four races are exactly what this experience needs. One less and it would feel a little undercooked, one more and I suspect the whole thing would start to wear out its welcome.

It knows what it is, does its little dance and gets off the stage before anyone starts throwing tomatoes.

I honestly can’t tell you that Magical Athlete’s gameplay is “good”, at least not by any conventional measuring stick I can think of. It really isn’t. It’s too simple, too generic and offers far too little control over what happens at the table to be mechanically interesting. In fact, I’m fairly certain that even a game like Sorry! offers more rules and more meaningful decisions than Magical Athlete.

If you were to sit down and assess this game purely on the merits of its mechanics, you’d probably conclude that there isn’t much of a game here at all. I would imagine that for many, this is exactly the sort of reception this one might get.

If for some reason the original Magical Athlete wasn’t enough for you, there is a follow-up coming in the near future that appears to simply triple down on this chaotic racing game concept. Strange that a game I thought I would have no interest in has me seriously considering getting its follow-up. I say this often, but the way tabletop gaming surprises me all the time, even after over a decade of game reviews, is my favorite thing about the hobby.

And yet, here’s the strange thing. It’s actually quite a bit of fun.

There are, however, some important caveats to that statement, and I think understanding them is absolutely critical to getting anything out of Magical Athlete.

First, you want as many people at the table as you can reasonably gather. This is a party game through and through, and I really don’t think you’re going to discover the magical part of Magical Athlete playing with just two or three people. You want five or six. You want a crowded table, plenty of banter, people cheering for their ridiculous little racers and everyone getting worked up over the absurdity of it all.

The more people you have invested in the nonsense, the better the nonsense becomes.

Timing is equally important, perhaps even more so.

Magical Athlete isn’t really a game I’d recommend pulling out on a dedicated game night, at least not when everyone has gathered with the intention of playing some proper board games. You know the sort of evening I’m talking about, when people are ready to sink their teeth into something with a bit of mechanical substance, some interesting decisions and a satisfying strategic challenge.

Magical Athlete is not that game.

Instead, this is something you pull out when you’re hanging out with friends, having a few drinks, everyone’s already laughing and there’s a good, fun energy in the room. It’s the sort of game that works best when nobody is particularly concerned about winning, losing or even playing especially well.

In that environment, Magical Athlete becomes a kind of topper to the evening, a dessert of sorts. Something light, colorful and just ridiculous enough to add another memorable little moment to an already enjoyable gathering.

And I think that’s the secret to this game. It doesn’t really create the party. It joins one that’s already in progress and adds something a little unique and special, like a lover that surprises you in the bedroom. You didn’t expect it, even realize you needed it, but when it arrives, suddenly it becomes the highlight of the evening.

I honestly expected that by the time I reached the gameplay section of this review, I’d be preparing to deliver a fairly negative assessment. On paper, Magical Athlete has almost everything I generally dislike about board games. Its mechanics are simplistic, its decisions are limited and its outcomes are largely dictated by luck. If I were rating this game academically, based purely on reading the rules and assessing the design, there would be very little here to get excited about.

But tabletop gaming doesn’t happen on paper.

It happens around a table, with actual people, and sometimes the experience of playing a game is something entirely different from what its rules might suggest.

The truth is that, so far, every time I’ve pulled out Magical Athlete and actually played it, the room has lit up. People laugh, cheer, complain about their terrible luck and get far more emotionally invested in these ridiculous little races than they have any reasonable right to be.

This picture I think, illustrates the exact moment Magical Athlete should be hitting the table. Yeah, a couple of beers, some good friends, and simply the joy of doing something silly that is in a nutshell, what this game is all about, and I think it’s exactly what it’s going for as a design goal.

And perhaps more importantly, when the game is over, people remember having a good time. They talk about the ridiculous things that happened, and when we get together again, someone inevitably asks if we’re going to play Magical Athlete. The game creates memories, which, I think, is perhaps the greatest compliment you can give a tabletop game in a review.

That, to me, is a pretty compelling argument that something here is working.

It’s unexpected, certainly, but that’s one of the wonderful things about tabletop gaming. Games have this remarkable ability to surprise and delight us in ways that aren’t always easy to explain through an analysis of mechanics, strategy or design.

Sometimes a game is greater than the sum of its parts, even when those parts aren’t particularly impressive to begin with.

And when a game manages to capture a little magic in the box, perhaps trying to dissect exactly how or why it works is missing the point entirely.

Why explain it? If it works… it works…

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Timeless party game appeal with plenty of potential for hilarious, memorable moments. A charming little game that can earn a permanent spot in your collection when played with the right crowd.

Cons: Limited mechanical variety and strategic depth mean replayability depends heavily on the players and occasion. A niche experience that needs the right atmosphere to shine.

The replayability in Magical Athlete comes mostly from the fun memories it creates at the table rather than any mechanical juice or strategic garnish it provides. As such, much of this game’s longevity is going to come down to pulling it out at the right time, with the right people.

Fortunately, that’s actually a pretty easy caveat to work around. As gamers, it’s kind of second nature for us to read the room and know what game is right for the moment. In fact, I think this is something we think about quite a lot. Our gaming libraries are filled with games that, when pulled out with the wrong group at the wrong time, would be complete disasters. Yet, with the right crowd and under the right circumstances, those same games can be absolutely amazing.

I mean, I love Empire of the Sun and Twilight Imperium, but both require a very specific audience. Try introducing either of them to the wrong group at the wrong time and you’re setting yourself up for an unmitigated disaster. That doesn’t make them bad games, it just means there’s a time and place for them.

There is a time and place for every game, and while I think creating a flowchart like this is overkill, I do believe most gamers can relate. This is why a typical gamer has shelves full of games and has to often answer the question, why do you need so many? Trust me, we have our reasons, and this flowchart illustrates it. Magical Athlete has a place here somewhere!

Magical Athlete is no different, even if it sits at the complete opposite end of the gaming spectrum. This is very much a five- or six-player party game. You don’t pull it out on a dedicated game night, you pull it out at a social occasion when you want to inject a bit of ridiculous fun into an already enjoyable evening.

In that sense, I think Magical Athlete has a pretty good shelf life, perhaps even earning itself a permanent residence in your gaming library. It has its niche, certainly, but there’s nothing about the execution of the game that suggests its appeal is going to wear off any faster than any other good party game.

It’s actually a rather timeless little concept, the sort of game you can keep tucked away on your shelf, knowing that when the right occasion comes along, you can pull it out and trust it to stick the landing.

Conclusion

Magical Athlete is not a good game in the traditional sense, at least not by any conventional or analytical assessment of its mechanics. If you’re looking for clever design, meaningful decisions or strategic depth, you’re barking up entirely the wrong tree. Whatever magic this peculiar little game possesses, you’re certainly not going to discover it by reading the rulebook.

But there is a surprise waiting for you in this box.

Despite what your first impressions might suggest, Magical Athlete has charm. It has personality. It has this wonderfully infectious joy injected into it, a sort of natural charisma that somehow manages to transform a painfully mundane gaming mechanic into something genuinely entertaining.

It’s an oddball, a misfit, a wonderfully eccentric little creation that has absolutely no business being as much fun as it is.

And I certainly didn’t see that coming.

When I first read the rules, I honestly thought I was going to hate this game. Quite the opposite of being excited to play it, I was practically preparing my disappointment in advance. Roll a die, move a piece, occasionally do something weird. Oh boy, sign me up!

But somehow, against all expectations, Magical Athlete pulled a complete 180 on me. What began as a rather presumptuous dismissal of a game I thought I had figured out before even playing it turned into a wonderful little discovery. A game that, through sheer personality, charm and an almost inexplicable ability to generate laughter, managed to earn itself a permanent spot on my shelf.

I think Magical Athlete is a fantastic choice for family game night with younger kids, thanks to its simple rules and gloriously wacky characters. It’s a great party game for injecting a bit of madcap lunacy into an evening with friends, and it can even serve as a delightful little palate cleanser during a more serious board game night when everyone needs a break from all that strategic brain-burning.

It’s definitely a niche game, and timing its introduction is important, but I’d argue that’s true of just about every game in our collections. Magical Athlete simply knows what it wants to be, makes absolutely no apologies for it and gets on with the business of being thoroughly ridiculous.

I loved it.

Magical Athlete gets a big recommendation from Gamersdungeon, not because it’s some brilliant feat of game design, but because it reminded me of something that’s surprisingly easy to forget when you’ve spent decades playing, analyzing and reviewing board games.

Sometimes we get so caught up in mechanics, clever systems, strategic depth and all the little things that supposedly make a game good that we forget the most important thing of all.

Fun is fun.

You don’t always have to explain the how or why of it. You don’t have to dissect it, justify it or even fully understand it.

Sometimes all you have to do is enjoy it.

And enjoy it I did!

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Hidden Gems

Ticket To Ride: Europe – Refresh (2026)

November 2, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

Ticket To Ride is more than just one of the best-selling and most well-known games in the board gaming world. At this point, it’s practically an institution in its own right.

Ask anyone invested in the board gaming hobby to name some of the best introductory games, and I promise you, Ticket To Ride is going to be somewhere near the top of almost everyone’s list.

Ticket To Ride: Europe, however, has always felt like the gamer’s version of Ticket To Ride.

If I were sitting down with my regular gaming crew, a bunch of veteran hobbyists who have been around the block more than a few times, Europe is the version I would pick.

It’s tighter, more competitive, and introduces things like tunnels, ferries, and stations that give you a few more tactical decisions to make. Stations in particular give you some much-needed flexibility when someone inevitably decides that the route you desperately need belongs to them now.

Yet despite all of that, it maintains the simple rules, quick pace, and accessibility that makes the Ticket To Ride franchise such a fantastic game for newcomers and casual gamers in the first place.

Ticket To Ride has been republished and refreshed plenty of times over the years, and in 2026 it’s Ticket To Ride: Europe’s turn to get a fresh coat of paint.

So, what exactly has changed, and perhaps more importantly, is this still the version of Ticket To Ride I would recommend?

Let’s talk about it!

Overview

Final Score: (4.7 out of 5) Awesome Game!

First, let’s be clear. I’m not reviewing a new game here, and my opinion about Ticket To Ride: Europe is unlikely to change because of a reprint. Especially since this reprint only changes the visual elements of the game.

In fact, arguably, Ticket To Ride: Europe needs a reprint like Elon Musk needs another billion dollars.

It’s a bit moot. The game has never exactly been difficult to find and if you already own the old version, there is no particular reason it needs to be replaced. This isn’t a redesign or some effort to fix things that were broken. The original Ticket To Ride: Europe was already damn near perfect.

The original Ticket To Ride featured a map of the US and there is no question regarding the response from the gaming community. It was a smash hit, the start of what would ultimately become a kind of board gaming franchise. Still, if you ask me, it was not until Ticket To Ride: Europe that this game really became the staple that it is today.

This refresh is mostly a sort of tip of the hat to the board gaming world, ensuring that this fantastic game continues to be ready and available for anyone who wants a copy, or perhaps for those of us who have simply worn out the one we already own.

In fact, that latter point is why I’m happy this version was released. My copy of Ticket To Ride: Europe has been played so much over the years that I was well past due to replace it, so the timing of this release, at least for me, is pretty much perfect.

Now, if you have never played Ticket To Ride in any of its variants, which is a bit like telling me you have never seen Star Wars, a shocking revelation in its own right, let me bring you up to speed.

The amount of variations, maps, expansions, and upgrades available when it comes to Ticket To Ride is staggering. Like Monopoly, if you like the game, there is bound to be a version tailor-made for you. For example, Ticket To Ride: Nordic Countries is one of my favorites because it plays so well with 2 players.

The premise of Ticket To Ride is quite simple.

Each round you collect different colored train cards, the purpose of which is to create sets that match different sections of railway on the board. When you have a matching set, you play those cards, put your trains on the board and score points based on the length of the route you claimed.

The real trick, however, is completing tickets.

Tickets are essentially routes connecting one city to another that score bonus points if you manage to create a continuous connection between those two cities using trains of your color.

Naturally, part of the competition is that everyone else is trying to do exactly the same thing and inevitably someone is going to claim a route you desperately needed. Suddenly your beautifully planned journey across Europe has gone to shit and you need to find another way around.

That might mean taking a longer alternative route or, in Ticket To Ride: Europe, using one of your stations to borrow another player’s connection and get those cities linked up.

There are a few other ways to score points as well, including earning a bonus for having the longest continuous route.

When a game of Ticket To Ride starts, it feels wide open with plenty of space for everyone, but it quickly turns into a knife fight in a phone booth with people clamoring for positions so that they can fulfill their tickets and score points!

One of the cool aspects of Ticket To Ride is that any tickets you don’t complete score negative points at the end of the game. You can’t simply grab every ticket you see and hope for the best because doing so can absolutely wreck your score if you fail to complete them.

The end game condition is equally important. Once a player gets down to two or fewer trains, everyone gets one final turn and the game ends.

That can happen surprisingly fast, so Ticket To Ride really is a race. You are trying to complete your tickets, score as many points as possible and keep one eye on what everyone else is doing because someone can suddenly start dumping trains onto the board and bring the whole thing to an end before you are ready.

And that’s basically the game.

It’s not complicated and it’s not particularly mechanically challenging, but it is always fun. The rules are approachable, the theme is immediately understandable and the familiar gin rummy style set collection gives the whole thing a rhythm that pretty much anyone can grasp after a couple of turns.

It just works.

So the question we are trying to answer with this review isn’t whether Ticket To Ride: Europe is a good game. We already know that. It’s one of the best and most successful games in the hobby for a reason.

What we actually want to know is what’s new, what’s different and why you might want to pick up this particular version of Ticket To Ride: Europe.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Much clearer and easier-to-read board, improved ticket cards, excellent rulebook, high-quality components.

Cons: The new board sacrifices some of the personality and visual style of the original for improved usability.

I have maxed out the tilt for components here, but I want to be clear that it’s not because I think components are normally the most important thing when reviewing Ticket To Ride: Europe. It’s because this is a reprint and refresh of an already fantastic game, and the components are really the main focus of this new edition.

From a rules and mechanics perspective, absolutely nothing has changed in the 2026 refresh. The primary difference between this and previous versions of the game is in the presentation and components.

The first thing any fan of Ticket To Ride: Europe is going to notice, and probably appreciate, is the new map.

Previous versions of the map are very pretty and clearly a lot of effort went into creating that old world European aesthetic, but I have always felt that some of those artistic decisions compromised usability.

The thing is, you very often have to play Ticket To Ride: Europe from a weird angle to the board. Depending on where you are sitting, you might effectively be looking at the whole thing upside down.

That makes things like font size, shape, color, and contrast far more important than they might initially seem. Something can be perfectly readable when you are sitting directly in front of it, but considerably more difficult when you are looking at it upside down from the other side of the table.

The map at the top is the new map, not quite as fancy, but a lot more legible. I think people might see this and be on the fence about it, but when you have to look at these maps upside down, there is a very clear winner. The new map is simply easier to use.

Even if you know the map of Europe pretty well, trying to orient yourself on an upside-down stylized map and find a particular city can sometimes be surprisingly annoying.

This is where I think the new version scores really big.

The new map is brighter, the contrast is much clearer, and the font is blockier and darker, making everything considerably easier to read from around the table.

In a sense, when I compare my old version to this new one, the two maps make almost the exact opposite compromise.

The old version compromises some legibility and usability in favor of style and atmosphere. The new version compromises some of that style and atmosphere in favor of legibility and usability.

Because, yeah, I think the new board looks quite a bit plainer.

I also think that’s the right choice.

We all love a pretty game, but usability always trumps style. This is a game. You are staring at this board trying to find cities, plan routes and figure out where the hell you are going. No matter how pretty the board is, if that prettiness starts getting in the way of the pace of play because people can’t find things, the novelty of how nice it looks wears thin pretty quickly.

So I’m very pleased to see this shift in focus.

The same philosophy has been applied to the ticket cards. They are much easier to read and much easier to visually connect to the board, again thanks to a clearer design focused primarily on usability.

Again, the ticket cards are a bit more plain, but rather than using geography to orient yourself like the old ticket cards, these new cards actually use the game board. It’s much easier, so even though it’s not as sexy, it’s much more utilitarian.

I also want to give props to the rulebook.

Not that Ticket To Ride: Europe is a particularly complicated game, but they have done a great job explaining the rules with plenty of clear visual examples. There was nothing particularly wrong with the old rulebook, but this one uses clearer language, better examples and is simply easier to reference.

Definitely an improvement.

The component quality itself is pretty much what I expected from Ticket To Ride. The card stock, plastic pieces and game board are all high quality and feel built to last.

Given that my old copy of Ticket To Ride: Europe is from 2005, has been played a ton and is now more than 20 years old, I have some pretty compelling evidence that these games are made to survive years of abuse.

Hell, the fact that I’m finally replacing that copy after two decades probably says more about the component quality than anything I can write here.

Great job. A+ from me on the component side!

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Trains are a perfect fit for the mechanics, universally approachable theme, presentation works equally well for kids and adults.

Cons: If trains don’t do anything for you or you actively dislike train games, there isn’t a whole lot more going on thematically.

I’ll tell everyone a little secret here that I think all game designers should probably know.

When it comes to themes in board games, everyone loves trains.

Don’t believe me?

Go on BoardGameGeek, do an advanced search and use Trains as the category filter. What you will discover is a long list of some of the most celebrated board games in the entire hobby. It’s a veritable utopia of familiar titles that anyone who has been in the hobby for any length of time will immediately recognize, including Ticket To Ride right near the front of the pack.

My point is that picking trains as the theme for your board game is basically a cheat code for attracting an audience.

Now that is mostly just a fun observation and not really the point here, but suffice it to say that I think Ticket To Ride has to be a train game. I’m not even sure what other theme you could put on top of these mechanics that would make as much sense.

You collect cards to build railway connections between cities, slowly creating this sprawling network across Europe. The theme explains what you are doing almost without the game having to explain itself.

Russian Railroads is a great example of the train theme being used to sell a game, even though “trains” is very interchangeable here. This game could have easily been just about anything else, and I predict it would not be nearly as popular as it turned out to be thanks to this theme. 153 on BBG as of this writing, and frankly, this is just a rather mediocre worker placement game.

It’s just a perfect fit.

The fact that trains also happen to be a theme gamers seem to universally love probably hasn’t hurt Ticket To Ride’s success over the last two decades either.

What I think works particularly well is that the graphic style is clearly aimed at a sort of crossover audience.

There is enough color and personality here that kids are going to be naturally drawn to it. It looks inviting and immediately gives off that impression of being something they can understand and play.

At the same time, as an adult, you never feel like you are playing a children’s game.

That distinction is important.

This isn’t one of those games you play because your kids want to play it and you are willing to suffer through it for their sake. Ticket To Ride looks inviting to kids while still presenting itself as a proper board game that adults are going to be perfectly happy pulling off the shelf on their own.

From a design perspective Ticket To Ride has exactly the theme it should have and executes that theme in a way that appeals to just about everyone.

I’m not sure there is much more to say than that.

Thematically, Ticket To Ride is a perfect selection and execution.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Fast-paced, competitive and incredibly easy to learn, with just enough strategy to keep every game interesting.

Cons: Limited strategic depth and discovery, with enough luck that occasionally the cards simply aren’t going to cooperate.

I always say that my goal with GamersDungeon.net is to find perfect games and in 12 years of running this site, there has only been one perfect 5 out of 5 star game: Blood Rage.

Ticket To Ride: Europe gets about as close as a game can get, but misses it by a tiny margin and it’s here in the gameplay section where it takes a little hit.

To be clear, I think the hit it takes is the result of a very intentional design choice rather than some oversight or problem with the game.

My critique is actually very simple.

If you play Ticket To Ride enough, you will eventually reach the end point of discovery.

This is a relatively simple game and there aren’t these intricate layers of strategy that slowly reveal themselves over dozens or hundreds of plays. You are going to figure out how Ticket To Ride works strategically pretty quickly and once you do, there really isn’t some deeper level waiting for you underneath.

You could argue that this belongs in the replayability section, but I don’t think it does because, strangely enough, it doesn’t really affect replayability.

Ticket To Ride isn’t a complex game and it doesn’t have deep, meaningful strategic avenues that take years to master, but it’s still a ton of fun to play over and over again.

While the criticism that Ticket To Ride: Europe is not a well of strategic exploration might feel very negative, as its very intentional, you really can’t fault it for not delivering something it doesn’t intend to. However, if you love the mechanic and wish it was more, I can strongly recommend Ticket To Ride: Rails & Sails. It adds a lot of “extra” depth and offers a lot more strategic options than most of the Ticket To Ride games.

I’ve been playing this game for two decades and it still makes it to the table regularly.

The strategy and depth that is here is sufficient and, more importantly, fun.

There is definitely some luck involved. You are collecting sets of cards and sometimes you desperately need a particular color and it just doesn’t come up. You will absolutely lose games periodically because the cards simply refuse to cooperate.

Set collection is a classic and natural mechanic that makes Ticket To Ride feel intuitive: collect the cards you need and use them to execute your planned routes. That simplistic approach offers plenty of flexibility, ups and downs and satisfaction when a plan comes together. It’s what makes Gin-Rummy such a classic.

The same is true of ticket cards. Sometimes you draw tickets that you immediately know are going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to complete because of the current board state. Suddenly you are stuck with a lame duck that is probably going to cost you points at the end of the game.

That can be frustrating, but generally speaking, there is enough going on strategically to make the decisions you make matter.

Building quickly and keeping pressure on the board, knowing when to block someone and when to focus on your own routes, well-timed and well-placed stations and keeping a keen eye open for opportunities all combine to create a great strategic experience.

The game is also very fast and I think that speed is one of the most important elements of the design.

Most players are going to have plans that never see the light of day because someone else will finish the game before they get a chance to execute them.

That pressure creates this race element where you constantly have to pay attention to the current state of the game. You can’t just sit there quietly building some master plan with the expectation that eventually you are going to unleash some massive end game scoring push.

There might not be an end game by the time you get there.

You have to keep an eye on how many trains people have left, where the scores are sitting, what routes are disappearing and whether you actually have enough time to finish what you are trying to do.

You have to keep up with the point race.

That constant pressure is a huge part of what makes Ticket To Ride: Europe work. The decisions themselves might not be particularly complicated, but you are constantly being pushed to make them.

Ticket To Ride: Europe is just a lot of fun.

It brings home that “let’s play again” energy that every great board game should have and despite having played it for more than 20 years, I’m still perfectly happy when someone suggests putting it on the table.

I dock it a little here because I’m a game reviewer and if you want to get that perfect score from me, strategic depth and continued discovery matter. Ticket To Ride: Europe eventually shows you everything it has.

It just happens that what it has is really damn good.

Awesome game, fantastic execution and, of course, this is news to pretty much no one.

There is a reason Ticket To Ride continues to make so many best-of lists around the board gaming blogosphere.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Extremely easy to get to the table, fast-paced, addictive card collection mechanics and games almost always end with you wanting to play again.

Cons: The replayability comes from the strength of the core gameplay loop rather than any significant strategic variety between plays.

You can say whatever you like about how much or how little depth Ticket To Ride: Europe has, but its addictive gin rummy collection mechanics combined with the pressure of the race make this an excessively replayable game.

I couldn’t even begin to guess how many times I have played Ticket To Ride over the last 20 years, but if I made a list of my most played board games of all time, I would imagine it would be somewhere in the top five.

That alone probably tells you everything you need to know about its longevity.

There are quite a few things that make Ticket To Ride so replayable.

For starters, it’s incredibly easy to teach and understand. It’s one of those games that almost anyone can learn and thanks to its theme and presentation, you aren’t going to run into very many people who have some sort of aversion to it.

That matters more than I think people give it credit for.

There are plenty of fantastic board games sitting on shelves collecting dust because you need the right group, the right mood and three hours of free time before anyone is willing to play them.

Ticket To Ride doesn’t have that problem.

Another big selling point is that gin rummy-style set collection is just a weirdly natural mechanic that I rarely see anyone object to. Collecting cards, slowly building that perfect hand and then getting the delight of finally executing it is incredibly satisfying.

It’s simple, but it works.

A big part of the longevity of this game and probably why it’s so popular is that most games are going to be very close. It’s a tight board, the winner is usually the person who was just slightly more efficient than everyone else.

Then there is the pace and length of the game.

Ticket To Ride moves quickly, there is very little downtime and usually by the time the game ends everyone is complaining that it ended too soon.

“If I just had one more turn I could have finished this.”

“If I had two more turns I would have won.”

That sort of thing.

That creates a fantastic atmosphere and, frankly, it’s one of the biggest compliments you can give a game designer.

The kiss of death for any board game, no matter how good it is, is when people start looking at the clock and wondering when the damn thing is going to end.

You will almost never get that with Ticket To Ride.

Instead, it ends with people wishing they had just one or two more turns, which naturally creates that “let’s play again” energy that keeps a game coming back to the table year after year.

Since the first time I played Ticket To Ride, I have always thought of it as the Monopoly of my generation.

I don’t mean that mechanically, obviously. I mean culturally.

It’s that game you can put in front of almost anyone. Kids, parents, grandparents, casual gamers or veteran hobbyists. Everyone understands what they are trying to do, everyone can compete and nobody needs a 45-minute rules explanation before you can get started.

Except unlike Monopoly, Ticket To Ride is actually a damn good game.

It is, in my mind, damn near the perfect family board game and after more than 20 years of playing it, I see absolutely no reason to believe that is going to change anytime soon.

Infinitely replayable.

Conclusion

Strangely, despite running a review blog and having played this game for more than 20 years, I have never actually reviewed Ticket To Ride: Europe until now.

I’m not particularly surprised by the results, but perhaps this review was a bit overdue.

It’s a very simple conclusion really.

Ticket To Ride: Europe is one of the best board games on the market and has been for a couple of decades. Its fun and addictive gameplay loop rarely lets me down, it’s simple and approachable, anyone can learn to play it and most people I introduce it to fall in love with it.

I don’t think this is a game that serious gamers are going to sit down and try to master. It doesn’t have that deep, meaningful strategic depth that you might expect from a proper gamer’s game and eventually you are going to discover everything it has to offer.

The thing is, that doesn’t seem to matter.

I’ve been playing Ticket To Ride for more than 20 years. I know exactly what this game is, I know how it works and there really aren’t any surprises left for me.

I still want to play it.

That, more than anything, is probably the best compliment I can give it.

Ticket To Ride: Europe is one of those rare universal games that you can play with just about anyone and still have a great time. I can put this in front of veteran hobby gamers, casual players, kids, parents or someone who barely knows what a modern board game is and I’m confident we are going to have fun.

It gets my highest recommendation.

In fact, if I were to make a list of the top five board games everyone should own, Ticket To Ride: Europe would almost certainly be near the top of that list.

This is a staple game that belongs in everyone’s collection.

As for the 2026 refresh, I think it does exactly what it needed to do.

It doesn’t reinvent Ticket To Ride: Europe and, frankly, it didn’t need to and definitely should not have tried, why screw with perfection? What it does is clean up the presentation, improve the usability of the board, make the cards easier to read and generally make an already fantastic game easier and more pleasant to get to the table.

If you already own Ticket To Ride: Europe and your copy is in good shape, there really isn’t a compelling reason to replace it. You already own the game and this new version isn’t going to fundamentally change the experience.

If, like me, your copy has survived 20 years of abuse and is ready for retirement, this is a great replacement you will definitely appreciate.

And if you have somehow made it this far into the board gaming hobby without owning Ticket To Ride: Europe?

For the love of god, go see Star Wars, read Lord of the Rings, and then buy this game. Be a proper nerd!

Highly recommended.

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, On The Table

Review: That Tracks (2026)

October 31, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

In my house, trivia-based party games are king. In fact, they’re one of the very select few types of games that even the wives enjoy, so any opportunity to introduce a new one into the mix is always welcome.

That Tracks, however, was one of those games I approached with a bit of caution because I wasn’t entirely convinced the concept was actually going to work. Mostly because, despite appearances, That Tracks isn’t really a trivia game.

Hitster is a great example of the sort of game that has that universal trivia thing going for it that just works with everyone, always. It’s a party game and a trivia game, a perfect combo.

The basic gimmick here is that players are asked to remember the popularity of various trends and then make educated guesses about where they belong on line and pie graphs.

Yeah… graphs.

It’s a strange concept for a party game and, frankly, a difficult one to even imagine being fun. Nothing gets a gaming group fired up quite like someone slapping a pie chart down on the table and saying, “Alright everyone, party time!”

Still, test it we did.

So today we’re going to talk about That Tracks, a party game that asks just how much you really know about the trends, fads, and cultural nonsense that have surrounded us over the years.

Overview

Final Score: (2 out of 5) Poor

That Tracks has a very simple premise. Players are split into two teams and presented with either a dot or pie graph alongside four popular trends, fads, musicians or whatever else the game decides to throw at you.

The goal is to correctly figure out which part of the graph belongs to which trend. You do this over six rounds, scoring points for the answers you get right, and naturally, the team with the most points at the end wins.

Looking at graphs like this gives you the sense of this being more of a corporate presentation than a game, but there is some fun in trying to figure out the popularity of pop culture fads.

There is, however, some procedural stuff designed to make this a little more involved and introduce a bit of mind gaming into the proceedings.

Each team gets two turns every round to make their guesses. Your team picks two trends, then the opposing team does the same, after which you go back and forth picking the remaining ones.

The interesting part of this is that while the other team is making their decisions, they’re inevitably debating their reasoning out loud. You’re sitting there listening to them argue about whether something was popular in 2005 or 2015, whether everyone actually watched some TV show or whether it just seemed that way, and whether some ridiculous fad was genuinely a thing or just something that happened in their particular corner of the world.

All of that is information you can use when it’s your turn.

Each team also gets a bonus tile that can be placed on a guess they feel particularly confident about. Get that one right and you double the points for that trend.

I wouldn’t exactly call any of this strategy, but these two mechanics prevent the game from simply being one team doing its thing, followed by the other team doing its thing, and then everyone checking the scores to see who did better. There is some actual back and forth here, and it’s partially within those little gears that the party game atmosphere starts to emerge.

One important caveat here is that each round is timed, so all of these debates and decisions are done in a pressure cooker, which is fitting for a party game.

People argue about these trends. They try to convince their teammates that their memory is correct. They listen to the other team and suddenly start second-guessing themselves.

It’s particularly entertaining when you have different generations at the table because their perspectives can be wildly different. Something one person remembers as an absolutely massive cultural phenomenon might get a blank stare from someone ten years younger, while another player is utterly convinced something was huge simply because everyone at their school was doing it.

That’s really where That Tracks starts to reveal what kind of party game it actually is.

The question is, does all of that make it a fun one?

Well, let’s get into it.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: The game is very inexpensive.

Cons: While some of the components are fine, the problem areas are painful and disruptive.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to start out negative here because, to be frank, the components and component design in That Tracks leave a lot to be desired.

First, there is this contraption that holds the graph cards on the table, along with sliders designed to hide the answers until they’re revealed.

It’s terrible.

Pictures don’t really tell the story here, but I can tell you from our handling of the game that this setup is extremely fragile. One bump and this whole thing will collapse.

The stand itself quite literally fell apart the first time we handled it. It constantly tipped over, the sliders were awkward to use and the whole thing just feels incredibly cheap.

This actually impacted the game quite a bit because we were constantly accidentally revealing the answers printed at the bottom of the cards. You’re trying to carefully manipulate this flimsy little stand without exposing anything and the whole thing is threatening to collapse in your hands at the slightest touch.

And somehow, that wasn’t even the worst part.

This is a party game, so presumably you’re going to have five or six people sitting around the table. We had three people on each team, but the cards are printed extremely small. You need to be fairly close to actually read them and, because the stand faces in one direction, half the table can’t see it without moving it.

Naturally, you want to move it around so everyone can see. Except you can’t because if you so much as breathe on the damn thing, it falls apart.

It became a real nuisance.

It’s just cheaply made and poorly designed, which is particularly frustrating because the entire game revolves around everyone being able to clearly see and interact with these cards.

Now, the game does come with whiteboard pens, boards and tokens you can write on, which is nice. Those work perfectly well and make everything easy to manipulate and reuse, but as a whole, the component experience was terrible.

Then we get to the rulebook.

The instructions are awful, which is kind of crazy because you can explain how to play That Tracks in about thirty seconds. Somehow, however, it took us nearly twenty minutes to grasp the language utilized in this rulebook; it was frustrating.

They took what is an incredibly simple game and seemingly found the most complicated possible way to explain it. Eventually we gave up, went on YouTube and found a tutorial video.

Thirty seconds later, we understood the game.

Afterwards, going back and reading the rules, they made sense, but the language and structure used to explain everything was unnecessarily confusing. When your game can be verbally explained in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee, there is really no excuse for a rulebook making it feel complicated.

I don’t normally completely flunk a game on components, but That Tracks comes about as close to an F as you can get without actually getting one.

They really need to rethink the components and component design here because I genuinely don’t understand how this setup made it through playtesting in its current form. For us, the problems were obvious the moment we opened the box.

These components actively got in the way of playing the game and sabotaged the experience.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Pop culture fads are familiar, fun, and often surprising; it’s fun to muse about them during the game.

Cons: When answers are revealed, there is a lack of impact, it’s kind of a meh.. experience.

The theme in That Tracks is actually kind of clever and fun, far more than I imagined it would be when you consider that the main gameplay loop involves analyzing pie graphs!

There is something strangely satisfying about knowing these fads and trends. You get that same little burst of satisfaction you get from a trivia game when you know the answer and everyone else at the table is looking at you like, “How the hell did you know that?”

More importantly, though, there is a surprising amount of deduction involved.

If you’re reasonably confident about two of the four trends, the other two suddenly become a matter of educated guesses and process of elimination. You start talking it through with your team, everyone adds their two cents, someone remembers some obscure detail and gradually you piece together what you think the answer must be.

There are plenty of cool topics, from music pop star popularity, to weird YouTube fads. Things I think most people will find familiar, and even if you’re not, as it’s a team game there, it’s not really something that gets in the way of the fun.

It becomes this kind of collective problem-solving exercise, and that part of That Tracks actually works quite well.

My issue is that none of this really adds much “party” to the concept.

I mean, it’s a game. You’re playing it together, you’re talking, arguing and having fun, but it doesn’t really generate those funny moments and quotable outcomes that I typically associate with a great party game.

The whole thing is just a little dry.

You’re essentially solving a communal problem together rather than being given a setup designed to create comedy, chaos or memorable moments. There can certainly be some entertaining conversations, particularly when people have wildly different memories of how popular something was, but the game itself isn’t really creating those moments.

I think the theme works. In fact, I think it works considerably better than “the pie graph game” has any right to.

Calling That Tracks a party game, however, feels like a bit of a stretch. It’s a light team-based deduction game that happens to work with a larger group.

I thought it was fun enough, but it certainly didn’t blow the doors off. The theme and concept fell into the “meh” category, not disappointing; I have a fun time playing it, but I’m itching to bring it to my next dinner party.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: There is some entertainment and satisfaction to be found in trying to maximize your points based on guesses you feel certain about.

Cons: The reveal at the end of a round falls on deaf ears, even when something interesting happens, it’s mostly interesting in a sort of academic, abstract way, not a fun party way.

In terms of gameplay, That Tracks has that straight-to-it quality that makes party games the delight they can and often are. You explain the rules in a minute or so, everyone immediately gets it, and you’re off and running.

In that regard, That Tracks handles itself quite well.

While the theme is interesting and I think will work with most people, it doesn’t necessarily surprise or delight. The actual gameplay loop falls somewhere between “just fine” and “a bit static and uninteresting”.

Party games should absolutely be simple, but there really isn’t much between the pages here, so to speak.

The only semi-interesting wrinkle is that each round is split into two parts. You pick two topics, the opposing team does the same, and then you go back around for the remaining choices. This gives both teams an opportunity to undermine or challenge each other’s decisions, while introducing a little strategy regarding which topics you want to grab early and which ones you’re willing to leave until later. You also get to listen in on the opposing team, which can give you some added insight you might not otherwise have had.

The booster token adds a little tactical oomph as well. All it is is a frame you place on one of your choices, which doubles your score if you get it right. It gives you an opportunity to manipulate the score when you’re particularly confident about an answer.

Unfortunately, none of that really saves That Tracks from what is ultimately a pretty lackluster gameplay loop.

When you get right down to it, you’re looking at charts and guesstimating which trend belongs to which pie or line on it, often in a way that feels fairly arbitrary. Sometimes the answer is obvious, but quite often, even when there is an unexpected surprise when the answer is revealed, there still isn’t much of a party payoff.

It sort of feels like discovering that the pie of 38 is 119.38.

I don’t know what that means either, but that’s kind of the point.

The reveal isn’t some endorphin-infused event where everyone screams, laughs or throws their hands in the air. It’s more like, “Oh… Taylor Swift was less popular than Pink in 2015. Weird. Interesting… I guess.”

Then everyone kind of stares at the card for a second or two and moves on.

You don’t really know what to do with that information; it’s not funny, even if sometimes it’s surprising, and I’m not entirely convinced anyone cares. The only thing giving the reveal any weight is whether you guessed correctly and scored some points.

That’s the fundamental problem I had with the gameplay.

There is no real entertainment payoff, it’s a party game that isn’t much of a party and it doesn’t really hit any sweet spots in any other reckognizable genre.

A great party game takes a ridiculously simple mechanic and somehow turns it into a machine for creating moments, laughter, banter, that sort of thing. That Tracks has the simple mechanic, but it never really finds the second half of that equation. You guess, you reveal, you score, and you move on to the next graph.

Whatever else That Tracks might be as a game, I just don’t think statistics make for a particularly exciting reveal.

There’s no pizzazz, no real tension, and very little excitement. It’s all just a bit static and mundane. Worse is that if a team gets ahead on points, there is no real catch-up mechanic, so at the midpoint it can feel quite hopeless if someone gets ahead and you’re not going to care about it much.

It didn’t really do anything for me or anyone I introduced it to, as a game mechanic and as a method to entertain guests and family, it was pretty forgettable.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: There is plenty of content in this box to entertain people who like this game.

Cons: Sadly, the first playthrough won’t motivate you to play again.

There are a lot of cards in the deck, and you’re really only using six over the course of a game, so from a purely content perspective, there is quite a bit of replayability in the box in principle.

You might assume there is a natural limit here because eventually you’re going to see every card, but that actually amounts to quite a few games. Even if you eventually swing back around and start seeing cards for a second time, chances are pretty good you will have forgotten most of the information anyway because it wasn’t that interesting the first time around.

It’s a bit like playing Trivial Pursuit. Even when a question comes up that you know you’ve seen before, there are so many cards and so much random information floating around that actually remembering the answer is another matter entirely.

So I don’t think running out of content is really the issue.

The bigger question when it comes to longevity and replayability is whether That Tracks is fun enough as both a novelty and as something you actually want to keep playing because you enjoyed it so much the first time.

Sadly, I think the answer is probably no. In fact, I never managed a single time when I brought the game out with my various social circles to get a second game going. Once was enough, and I doubt anyone will ever ask to play it again in the future.

In a sense the replayability score is kind of the domino effect of the rest of the review, if you didn’t really hit any marks anywhere else worth speaking of, by the time you get here, the conversation kind of repeats itself. You certainly can play this game many times, I’m just not sure who would want to.

There weren’t any hidden layers that revealed themselves once we understood the game better, nor did familiarity with the mechanics make things more interesting.

It was kind of meh the first time and remained kind of meh afterwards.

I will say that if That Tracks clicks with your group and you enjoy what it’s doing, there are plenty of plays in this box. You’re certainly not going to burn through the content quickly.

For us, though, the limiting factor wasn’t the number of cards. It was the desire to keep playing.

Conclusion

I think it’s fair to say that my experience with That Tracks was pretty lackluster. It’s always sad to give any game a negative review, but if you know gamersdungeon, we are generally a pretty positive voice. You really have to miss the target by a wide margin to end up with a score in the 1-2 star zones, Unfortunatetly That Tracks just doesn’t have the juice to punch through even my relatively generous barrier.

It started off on a negative note with component issues, both in terms of quality and design, and followed that up with a game that was, at absolute best, a mediocre experience and not much of a party.

The strange thing is that I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the rules or even the premise here. Some games just don’t work, and That Tracks doubles down and also fails to entertain.

I absolutely think there are people who will enjoy That Tracks. In fact, I suspect there are plenty of groups for whom the relaxed, collaborative deduction and nostalgia surrounding the various trends will be exactly what they’re looking for.

For me, though, it’s a pretty hard pass.

Unless you have a particular fascination with statistics, trends and fads, I just don’t see a compelling reason to choose That Tracks over the mountain of genuinely great party games already competing for space on the table.

Best of List, Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Crowdfunder, Hassela Weekend, Hidden Gems

On The Table: Mini Boardgaming Weekend

October 21, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

This weekend a few of my friends and I got together for a two day blowout where we did pretty much nothing but eat, drink and play board games.

As is always the case when this particular group gets together, we had a blast. There was too much food, probably too much alcohol and absolutely too many board games crammed into too little time.

In other words, a pretty damn good weekend.

Of course, we are here to talk about the games.

The cool thing about this particular weekend was that we played almost exclusively new stuff. Games that, for one reason or another, had been sitting on our collective radar but had never actually made it to the table.

So this list is effectively a collection of first impressions. Some good, some bad and, as you will soon discover, some that landed squarely in the great kingdom of “it was fine.”

Here we go!

Star Wars Outer Rim

We kicked things off with Star Wars Outer Rim, a 2019 Fantasy Flight Games release that has picked up some notable accolades over the years, including a Golden Geek nomination for Best Thematic Board Game.

This one has been on my must try list for quite a while, so when it finally hit the table I was genuinely excited to give it a go.

In Outer Rim, each player takes on the role of one of the many rogues, scoundrels and bounty hunters floating around the Star Wars universe. You have characters like Boba Fett, Han Solo and, naturally, one of my all time favorite smugglers, Lando Calrissian, who I immediately snatched up.

Nobody else was getting Lando.

The game itself is a competitive adventure game in which you travel around the Outer Rim delivering cargo, hunting down bounties, taking jobs and trying to avoid, or occasionally confront, patrols belonging to the various major factions. All of this earns you fame, which is effectively the game’s victory point system. Get enough fame before everyone else and you win.

Pretty straightforward stuff.

The production, as you might expect from Fantasy Flight Games, is completely over the top. There are cards everywhere, piles of tokens, character sheets, ships, markers and enough gorgeous Star Wars artwork to wallpaper a small apartment.

Fantasy Flight Games never disappoints when it comes to production values, all of their games look amazing on the table and Outer Rim is no exception.

Visually, the game absolutely delivers.

The gameplay itself is a little harder to pin down.

I would describe it as unique and interesting, but not particularly groundbreaking or deep. In fact, underneath all of the cards, tokens, characters, abilities, and various moving parts is actually a fairly simple game.

It is simple in that wonderfully overcooked Fantasy Flight Games sort of way.

There is a lot going on, but that does not necessarily mean there is a lot going on.

Outer Rim is clearly designed primarily as an entertainment experience rather than some deep strategic puzzle, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of decisions to make and certainly opportunities to play well, but at least in our game, luck played a pretty significant role in determining how things ultimately shook out.

I won, for example, and while I would love to sit here and explain how my brilliant tactical mind and mastery of intergalactic smuggling carried me to victory, the reality is that Lando caught some very fortunate breaks.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

The game was also a bit too long for what it was. Again, this is something I have come to expect from Fantasy Flight Games. Outer Rim has enough going on to keep you entertained, but not quite enough going on to justify how long it takes to reach the finish line.

That said, I had fun.

I would certainly play it again and I think there are still plenty of characters, ships, jobs and strategies I would be curious to explore. I do suspect, however, that Outer Rim has a relatively short shelf life. This does not strike me as the sort of game you are going to pull out twenty or thirty times and continue discovering new layers.

It’s a fun Star Wars adventure game with great production values, plenty of theme and enough randomness to produce some memorable moments.

It was entertaining. It looked fantastic. I won.

It was… fine.

World Order

Definitely the highlight of the weekend and, judging by the reaction around the table, I suspect not just for me.

World Order comes from the same team that gave us the absolutely fantastic Hegemony, so expectations were pretty damn high going into this one. It did not disappoint.

In fact, I would argue that it exceeded my expectations in just about every way.

In World Order, each player takes control of one of the major powers of our modern world, China, Russia, the United States or the European Union, and then proceeds to do what major powers do best. Compete for influence, manipulate everyone around them and generally make the world a worse place in the name of national interest.

You know, geopolitics.

Mechanically, World Order is effectively a card driven deck builder, but describing it that way really undersells what is going on here. Deck building is the engine that makes the machine run, but wrapped around it is resource management, area control, economic competition, political maneuvering and a mountain of player interaction.

Like Hegemony, World Order blew the doors off almost immediately. Just from the rules explaination, I already knew I was going to love this game. It was everything I hoped it would be and more!

This game is a well of asymmetrical strengths and weaknesses, clever plays and wonderfully vicious gotcha moments.

Like Hegemony, however, the real magic is how perfectly the mechanics capture the theme.

You genuinely feel like you are engaged in this constant geopolitical tug of war where everything you do affects someone else. Every action feels meaningful, every play creates an opportunity for someone to respond and every mistake feels like an opening your opponents can exploit.

It doesn’t take long before this turns into a competitive grudge match.

Exactly as it should.

There are also so many clever little ways World Order tweaks familiar deck-building concepts to fit the game. One of my favorites is incredibly simple. When you purchase a new card, rather than putting it into your discard pile as you would in the overwhelming majority of deck builders, you put it directly on top of your deck.

That sounds like a tiny change. It isn’t.

It means that every card you purchase is effectively a card you are buying for your next turn, essentially planning your next move. You are not just improving your deck at some vague point in the future. You are making a strategic decision about what you are going to be able to do next.

This becomes even more important because World Order is an incredibly tight game. You play six rounds and, in each round, you play just four cards. Do the math.

You effectively get 24 actions in the entire game.

That is not a lot of time to establish global economic and political dominance.

Worse yet, there are only two scoring rounds, which means timing is absolutely everything. You can’t simply build some magnificent engine and assume that eventually it will pay off. Eventually may be too late. You need the right cards, in the right place, at the right moment and you need to understand exactly what everyone else is trying to accomplish while you are doing it.

That creates an enormous amount of tension from surprisingly few actions.

The production also deserves some praise, not because it is extravagant, but because it is incredibly clean. Almost everything you need to understand the current state of the game is right there on the board. Who controls what, where influence is building, where the money is flowing and where the next fight is likely to break out is all immediately visible.

The only truly hidden information is the cards in your opponents’ hands and even that mystery only goes so far.

World Order is a highly deterministic game. Luck exists, naturally, but this is very clearly a game that rewards good planning, good timing and, perhaps most importantly, understanding what the other players at the table are trying to do.

I absolutely loved it. There are games you play once and think, “Yeah, that was pretty good.”

Then there are games where you finish and immediately start thinking about what you would do differently next time.

World Order was very much the latter.

Without question, one of the best games I have played all year.

Meeples and Monsters

Released in 2022, Meeples and Monsters seems to have fallen between the cracks of the board gaming world, which is a little surprising given the caliber of its designer, Ole Steiness.

This is the same guy who gave us sleeper hits like Champions of Midgard, Altay: Dawn of Civilization, another really clever game that seems to have largely fallen through the cracks, and the visually stunning Deep Rock Galactic.

That said, after playing Meeples and Monsters, I kind of get it.

There is quite a bit of Lords of Waterdeep DNA here, but Meeples and Monsters is a considerably simpler worker placement game, lighter and executed with far less flair.

In Meeples and Monsters, you collect and upgrade heroes, whose various strengths and abilities you use to fight monsters and score points. As the game progresses, increasingly powerful monsters appear, eventually leading to final showdowns with end-game bosses. Manage your little army of wooden heroes better than everyone else and, presumably, you walk away with the most points and win the game.

The theme is actually quite fun, built around the gag that your heroes are literally wooden meeples. It is colorful, bright, very easy to learn and there is something inherently satisfying about upgrading your little wooden adventurers and sending them off to murder monsters.

The problem is that there really isn’t a tremendous amount to think about.

Unlike Lords of Waterdeep, where you are constantly weighing different options and trying to figure out how to squeeze the most out of each turn with a fair amount of player interaction, Meeples and Monsters has a tendency to present you with several options where one is very obviously better than the others.

Here are the things I can do. That one is clearly the best. So I do that.

Next.

Upgrading and finding interesting combo’s for your heroes is probably where the game was most interesting; there were certainly many ways to go, but really the game was kind of one-dimensional. If you played it once, you have seen everything your going to see.

The fact that it’s a worker placement game where after you place your workers down you remove them, means that blocking actions isn’t a thing, so there is considerably less interactions if any at all between players.

That is really the issue with the game. It is not that there are no decisions to make, it is that too often the game effectively makes the decision for you and it really doesn’t have much impact on the other players.

The main gimmick is that the heroes you have available for this worker placement game are drawn randomly from your bag. Part of the strategy is building the contents of that bag so that the heroes you draw work together and support whatever strategy you are pursuing.

In theory, that should create an interesting puzzle.

In practice, I think there is just a little too much luck involved in what actually comes out of the bag.

As a result, much of the game felt less like I was deciding what to do and more like I was drawing meeples from a bag to discover what the obvious best move was going to be that turn.

Draw your meeples. Look at the board. Spot the obvious move. Execute it.

Occasionally you might have two choices that are equally appealing and you actually have to stop and think about what you want to do, but those moments were the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time the game felt strangely scripted, despite the fact that the script itself was being randomly generated by whatever came out of your bag.

That is not necessarily terrible. There is something pleasant about the whole experience. You are upgrading heroes, killing monsters, getting stronger and watching increasingly ridiculous creatures appear on the board. The game moves along nicely and there is enough going on to keep everyone engaged.

It just never really challenged me.

Meeples and Monsters was fine, but I can understand why it disappeared under the radar despite having a recognizable designer behind it. This is certainly not Ole Steiness at his best.

I do think there is an audience for it, however.

If you have younger kids who are ready to move beyond basic family games and into proper hobby board games, I could actually see Meeples and Monsters being a pretty great step up. The colorful presentation, fun theme, straightforward decisions and constant sense of progression would probably go a long way with that audience.

For my group? It was fine.

Cascadia: Landmarks

Cascadia was the only game in our lineup that I had actually played before, but this time we added the Landmarks expansion and bumped the game up to five players.

Cascadia is, by just about any reasonable measure, one of the premier board games of 2021. It’s sitting pretty in the 61st spot on the 100 games of all time on BoardGameGeek list as of this writing and has collected awards from just about every place you can collect an award from.

At this point, I think it is fair to call Cascadia a modern classic.

I’m a pretty late bloomer here. I only played it for the first time this year and, apparently, I am considerably less impressed with it than the rest of the board gaming world.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Cascadia is a very clever puzzle game. There are plenty of interesting decisions, it moves at a brisk pace and there is something genuinely satisfying about watching this little ecosystem slowly come together in front of you.

When you pull off exactly what you were trying to do, it feels great.

For me, though, the whole experience is just a bit too benign.

We are all sitting around the same table, supposedly playing a board game together, but really everyone is off in their own little corner playing their own private game of Cascadia. The entire scope of player interaction basically boils down to someone taking the tile or animal you wanted.

You bastard. Then you move on with your life.

It reminds me quite a bit of Wingspan, which falls into a similar category for me. Everyone is technically playing the same game together, but most of the time we could probably erect little privacy screens around our play areas and it wouldn’t dramatically change the experience.

I’m just not a huge fan of games like that.

That said, I completely understand why so many people are.

In Cascadia, the basic premise is that you are placing habitat tiles and populating them with wildlife, trying to arrange everything into particular patterns that score points. Each turn you select a habitat tile and an animal token and add them to the growing puzzle in front of you.

At the end of the game, whoever has done the best job putting all of this together scores the most points and wins.

What keeps the puzzle fresh is that the wildlife scoring conditions change from game to game. You randomly select scoring cards that determine what arrangements of bears, salmon, elk, hawks and foxes you are actually trying to create.

It is simple, elegant and very easy to understand.

The Landmarks expansion adds another layer to that puzzle by rewarding you for building sufficiently large connected habitats. Put together enough of a particular terrain type and you can place a landmark, which gives you access to additional scoring opportunities unique to you.

It is certainly interesting and gives you one more thing to consider while constructing your little wilderness.

I’m just not convinced Cascadia needed it.

The additional ways to score points in the Landmarks expansion is a kind of benign way to approach extra scoring. You sort of did whatever you were going to do anyway for your main scoring and then grabbed things when the opportunity presented itself. I’m sure more advanced players will find better ways to use this expansion, but for me that approach worked fine.

For me, one of the game’s greatest strengths is how clean the original puzzle is. Landmarks adds another decision point and another scoring consideration, but I’m not sure it actually makes the game better. It makes it more complicated, certainly, but those are not the same thing.

I suspect this expansion makes considerably more sense for people who play Cascadia all the time. If you have played the base game twenty or thirty times and know its puzzle inside and out, adding another layer probably gives you exactly the sort of additional complexity and variety you are looking for.

For someone like me, who is going to pull Cascadia out once in a long while, I think I would rather just play the base game.

Ultimately, I walked away with pretty much the same impression I had the first time.

Cascadia is clever, polished, easy to teach and beautifully paced. I completely understand why people love it and I certainly wouldn’t object to playing it again.

It’s simply not the kind of board game that gets me excited. I liked it. It was…

You guessed it.

Fine.

Hamlet: The Village Building Game

The last game on my list is Hamlet: The Village Building Game, which is a clever little puzzly game about, as it says right there on the tin, building a village.

Who says board game names need to be complicated?

This very colorful and incredibly busy game has players collectively constructing a village out of awkwardly shaped tiles, connecting buildings with roads and creating a network through which resources can be transported.

The ultimate goal is to use those resources to construct the central building of the Hamlet, the church. Once completed, your humble little Hamlet officially becomes a Village and the game ends.

Apparently all that separates a Hamlet from a Village is a church. Who knew?

Along the way, everyone scores points for their participation in this increasingly chaotic group construction project, with each player trying to make sure that their contribution to civic development is considerably more valuable than everyone else’s.

Of all the games we played this weekend, I think Hamlet was the only one besides World Order that really got my attention.

There was something going on here.

The village is technically a shared construction project, but everyone is naturally trying to shape that village to benefit themselves. You want roads going where you need them to go, resources available where you can reach them and buildings entering play that support whatever little economic empire you are trying to construct.

The village tiles are oddly shaped; there was no real symmetry to how the village comes together, which creates a lot of weirdness when trying to put different buildings into play. At first I saw this as a drawback, but the result was actually kind of interesting because you really couldn’t make a definitive plan on where you are going to put stuff. You sort of shoved it in where you could.

That creates some surprisingly interesting interaction because when you add something to the village, you are not simply improving your own position. You are changing the board for everyone.

Sometimes that means helping yourself. Sometimes it means accidentally helping someone else.

Sometimes it means putting something somewhere specifically because you know it is going to be a pain in the ass for one of your opponents.

Now we’re playing a board game. There were also clearly layers here that a single play did not fully reveal.

Certain buildings, for example, do not produce resources at all but can score you a considerable number of points. Building them, however, means making sure you can actually get the required resources to the right place. That requires planning your routes, understanding what resources are available and making sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin trying to accomplish everything at once.

There is a surprisingly delicate balance to all of this.

You need to pay close attention to which buildings are available, where resources are being produced and how the growing network of roads connects everything together. It is very easy to get ambitious, overextend yourself and suddenly discover that what looked like a brilliant plan two turns ago now requires you to spend several turns recovering while everyone else happily gets on with scoring points.

I did that. More than once.

That is probably what I liked most about Hamlet. When I made a mistake, it generally felt like my mistake. I could look back at what I had done and see where I had overextended, failed to plan properly or misunderstood how the village was developing.

That immediately makes me want to play again.

I also suspect there is considerably more strategy hiding underneath the colorful presentation than we uncovered during our first game. I came away thinking about different approaches I could take, different ways I could manipulate the village layout and, most importantly, things I would do differently the next time it hits the table.

That is usually a pretty good sign. I liked Hamlet.

It was clever, interactive, pretty to look at and had enough going on beneath the surface that I genuinely want another crack at it.

So after an entire weekend filled with games that were mostly some variation of fine, Hamlet managed to climb a few notches above that.

Not World Order good. But definitely better than fine.

Conclusion

This was a really fun-filled weekend; the truth is that even when games aren’t blowing your mind, it’s hard not to have a good time surrounded by friends.

I will say, however, World Order was the unquestionable king of the hill this weekend. It was a robust, clever, and deeply interactive game that really triggered an unquenchable urge to get it back to the table as soon as possible!

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Hidden Gems, On The Table

Review: Got Five! (2026)

October 19, 2026 5 Minutes 1 Comment

Some of the best games ever made aren’t built around some revolutionary new mechanic nobody has ever seen before. More often than not, new games are the result of taking a couple of familiar ideas, smashing them together, and discovering something that feels new. The fact is, most games aren’t trying to reinvent board game design; they just want to be something fun to play.

Maybe it’s Gin Rummy mixed with railroad building. Maybe it’s worker placement with dice. Or, as is the case with Got Five!, maybe it’s abstract logic combined with good old-fashioned deduction.

If you’ve ever played classics like Mastermind or even a game like Clue, you’ll immediately recognize the basic concept here. You’re given a set of information, in this case, hidden number tiles that everyone else can see, but you can’t. Your job is to figure out exactly what those numbers are using nothing but logic, deduction, and the information sitting right there in front of you.

I’m sure I’m showing my age here, but if you’re a Gen-X’er, you probably played Mastermind, it’s one of the granddaddies of deduction games right along with Clue!

Simple enough, but there is one small wrinkle in Got Five!. Everyone else is doing exactly the same thing, they have their own set of hidden tiles to figure out. The game is a race to see who gets it done first.

With a 15-minute playtime for up to 4 players, Got Five! nails that filler sweet spot, and because the rules are simple to learn and the game is colorful and bright, it’s perfect for family board game night, a no-brainer really.

The question I think I want to answer in this review is wether or not Got Five! has the chops to be a little more, a good filler for the board game geeks out there like me who are looking for an excuse to buy another shelf to put more games on.

Let’s find out!

Overview

Final Score: (4.50 out of 5) Awesome Game!

I think the most interesting thing about Got Five!, once you’ve got a few back-to-back games under your belt, is the realization that deduction and logic aren’t actually the only things going on here.

Something happens around your third or fourth game.

You realize that if you’re going to sit there and wait until you’re 100% certain about every number hidden in front of you, you’ve probably already lost.

Because the winner of Got Five! isn’t necessarily going to be the player who solves their puzzle with absolute mathematical certainty. It’s going to be the player who recognizes when they know enough, looks at the odds and pace of the game, takes a calculated risk, and goes for it.

You don’t have the luxury of sitting there like some pipe-smoking professor of mathematics, spending ten minutes constructing a flawless proof that the blue tile in front of you must be a seven. While you’re doing that, Susan across the table has made two educated guesses, solved her hand and is already looking at you like you’re an idiot.

You have to think on your feet.

When playing Got Five! for the first time, you’re going to have this feeling that you have to be 100% certain about your tiles before you guess. What you quickly realize is that you will never win a game by doing that. Some guesswork becomes mandatory.

You’re eliminating possibilities, making assumptions, watching what everyone else is doing and constantly deciding whether you have enough information to make your move. There’s logic here, certainly, but there’s also intuition, probability and just enough gambling to keep the whole thing from feeling like homework.

Abstract deduction games are difficult to describe because explaining their mechanics inevitably makes them sound far more academic than they actually feel at the table. Got Five! has some of that academic feel to it but in practice, Got Five! has the energy of a party game.

Turns move quickly. Everyone is paying attention. You’re racing against each other, second-guessing yourself and occasionally taking a shot before you’re entirely certain you’ve got the answer. Then somebody suddenly announces that they’ve figured out their tiles and everyone else groans because they were one bloody turn away.

That’s Got Five!.

It’s clever without being exhausting, competitive without being particularly mean and thinky without demanding that everyone at the table be a hardened strategy gamer.

And that’s perhaps its greatest strength.

I can see this working with almost anyone, from relatively casual players looking for a quick 15-minute game to heavy gaming nerds like myself who normally consider a rulebook under 30 pages suspiciously lightweight.

Got Five! is just a lot of fun to play, and so far, everywhere I have tried, it would take 3-4 rounds before anyone was willing to move on to the next game. A very strong sign that this one is a keeper.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Bright, colorful, and sturdy; feels wonderful to handle, everything is perfectly tuned.

Cons: It has the look of a kids game, some might pass on it for that reason.

Components

Got Five! is a fantastic little production, especially considering that we’re talking about a 15-minute filler game here.

The tiles are chunky, colorful and feel great in the hand. The artwork is bright and clean, the numbers are immediately readable, and everything has been designed with the rather important idea that you should be able to glance across the table and instantly understand what you’re looking at.

I love it when a game has exactly what you need to play it, not a single token too much or not enough, a perfect, streamlined design that wastes nothing. I love it!

The game also comes with erasable whiteboard pens and boards for tracking your deductions, which might sound like a small thing, but it’s a fantastic addition. They feel good to use, keep everything organized and, perhaps most importantly, help keep the game moving at the brisk pace it was clearly designed for.

Even the rulebook gets it right. It’s clear, concise and doesn’t waste your time trying to turn a simple game into a 30-page technical manual. You can crack open the box for the first time, learn the rules, teach everyone else, and have your first game finished in under half an hour without anyone sitting there wondering what the hell they’re supposed to be doing.

There isn’t anything particularly extravagant here, nor does there need to be. Got Five! simply understands exactly what kind of game it is and gives you everything you need to play it in the best possible form.

It’s pitch-perfect execution.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: A party-game-like atmosphere that creates a great table presence.

Cons: The game really doesn’t have a theme unless putting funny faces on tiles is a theme.

Got Five! doesn’t really have a theme. It’s very simply an abstract deduction game, but it does have this wonderfully friendly and colorful presentation that is going to get the attention of kids scanning your game shelf. Which is great, because while I think Got Five! works with pretty much any sort of gaming group, I think it’s particularly strong with kids.

More importantly, it has that perfect balance of rules, strategy, and fun where everything feels like it has been thoroughly tested, adjusted, and stripped down until the designers arrived at the ideal version of the game.

The game doesn’t really have a theme, but it has personality.

You can almost reverse-engineer the design process just by playing it.

If Got Five! used six numbers instead of five, it would essentially be the same game, except slightly longer, and I think it would start overstaying its welcome. With four numbers, it would probably be over too quickly. If you had to identify the colors as well as the numbers, suddenly you’ve added a layer of complexity the game doesn’t need. If you only had one type of action instead of the two, sorting and category questions, the deduction would become too straightforward, and the whole thing would lose much of what makes it interesting.

Everything feels like it’s sitting exactly where it should be.

I obviously wasn’t there during development, but Got Five! feels like a game that went through a hell of a lot of testing. I can easily imagine versions with more numbers, fewer numbers, additional rules and different ways of asking questions, with each unnecessary piece slowly shaved away until only the good stuff remained.

The result is a game that might technically be themeless, but still has a very clear identity. It’s bright, friendly, fast and immediately approachable, with that easygoing party-game energy that makes you want to pull it off the shelf and say, “Alright, one more.”

And because a game takes about fifteen minutes, one more usually turns into three.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: A perfectly tuned game that knows its design goal and achieves it with perfection.

Cons: If you don’t like deduction games, you will only like this game instead of loving it.

In Got Five! you have a single objective: be the first player to figure out what the five tiles sitting in front of you are.

The problem, of course, is that you can’t see them.

The only information you have to work with is the tiles revealed during the game and the information you can squeeze out of the other players.

Each round, a player does two things. First, they reveal a tile. Then they get to ask one of two types of questions.

You can compare the dots on a revealed tile to one of your hidden tiles. Every tile has either one, two, or three dots on it, and the other players simply tell you whether or not they match. Alternatively, you can ask the other players to place a revealed tile into the correct numerical position among the five hidden tiles sitting in front of you.

That’s basically the game.

From those tiny scraps of information, you have to figure out exactly what five tiles you have through deduction and process of elimination. At any point, even during someone else’s turn, you can shout “Got Five!” and attempt to solve your puzzle. Get all five right and you win. Get even one wrong and you’re out of the game.

To help you along, each player has a board hidden from everyone else and an erasable marker for taking notes. The board shows all the possible tiles in the game, including their colors, dots, and values. As information comes in, you start crossing off possibilities until eventually the answer begins to emerge.

The clever bit is that you’re rarely eliminating possibilities one at a time.

For example, a sorting question might suddenly tell you that the blue, red and orange tiles in front of you are all higher than 40. Bang. Every possible tile below 40 is eliminated from those positions.

Then you notice there are only four unrevealed red tiles left. You know three of them have two dots and one has a single dot. Another player reveals a blue tile, asks whether its two dots match one of their hidden red tiles, and gets a positive answer. That little piece of information might suddenly allow you to eliminate with a fair amount of certainty several more possibilities and identify your own red tile.

That moment, when you solve it, and you realize you’re the only one, is very satisfying; you feel very superior and rightfully so!

Now you know your red tile is 21.

But that doesn’t just tell you the red tile.

If the orange tile was previously sorted to the right of it, you now know the orange tile must be higher than 21. Suddenly another chunk of possibilities disappears from your board.

One answer leads to another deduction, which leads to another, and occasionally a seemingly insignificant piece of information causes half your board to collapse.

I know that sounds slightly confusing when I’m trying to describe it in a blog post. It’s considerably easier to understand when you’re actually sitting at the table. The important point is that information in Got Five! compounds. A single reveal or answer can eliminate a surprising number of possibilities if you’re paying attention and applying a bit of logic.

In our games, we saw players solve their entire puzzle in as few as five or six turns.

And this is where Got Five! becomes wonderfully tense.

I love a good deduction game, even the classics like Clue, but with Got Five! you get that satisfaction in a much shorter game and considerably less rules explanation.

There isn’t a timer. Nobody is counting down. Yet the entire game develops this pressure-cooker atmosphere because every time a tile is revealed or a question gets answered, you know that might be the piece of information somebody else needs.

You might be sitting there thinking, I’m almost certain I’ve got this.

Then someone else shouts “Got Five!”

Dammit!

That’s the trap. You don’t really have the luxury of waiting until you’re 100% certain. Eventually you have to decide whether the information you have is good enough and take the shot, because somebody else is probably reaching exactly the same conclusion about their own puzzle.

The rules are incredibly simple, but what emerges from them is fast, competitive, and surprisingly exciting. Got Five! creates that wonderful little dopamine hit when a pile of apparently disconnected information suddenly clicks into place, and you realize you know the answer.

And then you want to do it again.

I can pretty much guarantee that Got Five! isn’t going to be played once and put back in the box. You’re going to play it again and again.

Because once you’ve solved your five faster than everyone else, it feels amazing and if someone beats you to it, that unsatisfying, can’t let it go sensation will drive you nuts.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Addictive; you’re going to want to play this over and over again.

Cons: I’m sure there is a limit somewhere; I would imagine eventually you will tire of it.

I’m going to make this one short and sweet.

From the first time I put Got Five! on the table, everyone I introduced it to was immediately hooked. There was simply no such thing as playing one game, and since then it has been played over and over again in my house.

It has very quickly become one of those standard “Let’s do a quick one” games, which I think is about the highest compliment you can give a filler.

There aren’t piles of different modes, variable setups, or mountains of content here. It doesn’t need any of that. The replayability comes from the fact that the puzzle is different every time, solving it feels great and, win or lose, fifteen minutes later you’re ready to have another crack at it.

That’s really all there is to say.

Got Five! has the chops. The 15-minute playtime makes it incredibly easy to get to the table, and the game itself makes it difficult to play just once.

It really sticks the landing.

Conclusion

Got Five! is a fast, clever, and ridiculously fun little filler that asks almost nothing from you. Set it up, spend a few minutes explaining the rules, and everyone at the table will be dialed in and, before long, demanding another game.

It pretty much sells itself.

This is an incredibly easy recommendation for me because I’m genuinely struggling to come up with a group that wouldn’t enjoy Got Five! It’s simple enough for kids, clever enough to keep experienced gamers engaged, and short enough that even the most reluctant board gamer isn’t being asked to make some sort of blood oath committing their entire evening to it.

Hell, this is a game even my wife will play, and we’re talking about a person regularly quoted in our house as saying:

“I hate board games.”

She likes Got Five!

Frankly, if Got Five! were on trial for whether or not it belongs in everyone’s collection, that’s the only piece of evidence I’d present.

The prosecution rests.

Gamers Dungeon

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Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

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On The Table: Mini Boardgaming Weekend

Star Wars Outer Rim

World Order

Meeples and Monsters

Cascadia: Landmarks

Hamlet: The Village Building Game

Conclusion

Review: Got Five! (2026)

Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

Dedicated To All Things Gaming

Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

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Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

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Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

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Star Wars Outer Rim

World Order

Meeples and Monsters

Cascadia: Landmarks

Hamlet: The Village Building Game

Conclusion

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Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

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Dedicated To All Things Gaming