Coffee Roaster is a bag-building game all about coffee. You try to get your beans to the perfect roast temperature by adding them to your bag and randomly pulling out a certain number of them every turn.
Every time you pull them from the bag, their roast level increases, and there are special ingredients you can use to manipulate the odds of a good roast. Then, you try to pull out enough beans of the right value to equal the target roast level, which is dependent on the type of coffee.
It’s a fun probability-analysis exercise, but we found it to be a bit underwhelming.
Eila and Something Shiny is an ambitious story game played over seven chapters. It mostly functions as a resource management game that’s powered by a slim deck of cards, but it gets more complex as you proceed through the chapters.
It’s fun to play through once, which took me about six hours, and it has a whimsical, well-produced kids book aesthetic (though the story is a bit more mature than its look would hint at). But I simply don’t feel a strong desire to play it again.
We originally tested Food Chain Island for our guide to card games and liked it a lot. It’s very straightforward, wallet-size, and presents an interesting puzzle of moving cards around. However, it’s a bit too simple compared with our picks.
For Northwood is a well-regarded solo trick-taking game that we were excited to test, but due to stock issues we weren’t able to try it this round. If it’s reprinted or becomes more widely available, we’ll try it in a future update.
Friday is a solo deck-builder in which the player takes on the role of Friday from the novel Robinson Crusoe. The game is spent trying to help Crusoe get through the challenges of the remote island and return home. (You know… so that you, Friday, can go back to living peacefully by yourself.)
It’s a quick game that has interesting card choices, but we found the rules to be quite obtuse — all of our group testers had a hard time getting to grips with the game, despite its apparent simplicity. We also thought it was a little boring compared with our picks.
Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs brings the tactical combat mechanics of its much larger and more-elaborate multiplayer version and simplifies it into a tiny solo game. In the game, you shepherd your character (one of six classic RPG archetypes) through a series of combat encounters found on the backs of scenario cards. You use power cards to move and deal damage, and otherwise the game operates like a traditional tactics game.
It’s a neat little box, and it’s much lighter on both the wallet and the shelf space than the original, but we found it to be a bit disappointing in comparison.
Resist! originated the gameplay system that Witchcraft! uses but is themed around the conflict after the Spanish Civil War. You play cards that represent Marquis agents, sending them on missions to defeat associated enemy cards to resist the Franco regime. Like in Witchcraft!, each card has two sides, one hidden (and less powerful) and one revealed (and more powerful, but fleeting).
Unfortunately, it lacks Witchcraft!’s jury endgame mechanic, which we found was a useful framing for choosing when to end the game. And while we found Resist!’s theme of covertly resisting a dictatorial government impactful, it might be too fraught a subject for some people.
Rove is another wallet-size card game about guiding a rover around an alien planet. It’s essentially a block-sliding puzzle, tasking the player with arranging a set of colored cards to match a random symbol. It’s a fun game, if a little simple. One of our group testers, who has vision difficulties, also had a hard time with the color-matching aspect of gameplay, as well as with distinguishing the cards’ relatively subtle patterns.
Warp’s Edge is a bag-builder like Coffee Roaster, but instead of burning beans, you’re in a starship battling baddies. Each game, you select a different alien mothership to destroy by pulling useful powers and maneuvers randomly out of your bag.
As in Coffee Roaster, most of the fun of this game is trying to manipulate the odds of what you’ll pull out of the bag, though it adds a fair amount of strategic play that Coffee Roaster lacked. Nevertheless, we preferred our picks to Warp’s Edge.
This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.
