Staff Picks

Finished your Pandemic Legacy campaign and unsure where to go now? Are you looking for something other than Catan for the millionth time for family board game night? Come check out our staff's favorite recommendations!

Katrina: Canvas

Create beautiful works of art in this unique hand management and drafting game. Spend Inspiration on Art cards and layer them together to create masterpieces that you will then score with a selection of known and unknown scoring rubrics. Canvas is an easy to learn, extremely repayable, and beautiful game that I would easily recommend to anyone who enjoys the process of creating art. It even doubles as a fun hanging piece of art that creates a triptych when combined with the two expansions!

Kendall: Unmatched

Nathan: Rone Invasion

Rone:Invasion is a competitive/cooperative/solo deck and dice-building game of taking down your opponent or working together to survive an invasion.

This review will be based on the cooperative and solo game, although the competitive game is very similar, just attacking each other rather then an invasion force. Each player receives their own player board, starting deck, 4 chunky dice and... a SCREWDRIVER. You'll need to set up the invasion board as well which is pretty simply. Each player will choose a leader card and technology card and then will also get 4 free recruit actions to set up your initial training area.

During a players turn they are going to be able to draw cards, roll dice for resources, play cards with rolled or stored resources, recruit new cards to your training area, spend spare parts to do various actions like adding more screws to your dice to generate more resources, activate leaders and technologies, train cards to add to your deck, attack the invasion force and more I'm probably missing. It sounds like a lot but there's a nice round summary on the back of the rulebook that make it super easy to understand. This a very unique deck-building game since you can draw as many cards as you want, but be careful as any cards you can't play with your available resources go into your garbage dump and when need to reshuffle your deck you take damage from those cards.

I love Rone: Invasion because it feel so different and fresh. I've never played anything like it and it is quite challenging. Trying to figure out how many cards to draw with your potential resources is tricky but it's not all bad because any cards you can't play you can store their resource costs to use in later turns. I had a lot of fun playing this one, I never felt like a had a super bad turn. although I could clearly see it was a losing battle most of the time. There's just a lot going on and I always felt fully engaged and never confused or bored, just so much strategy and fun. 2 small issues I'll say, the first time you set it up will take some time as you'll have to screw all those grey screws into the dice, and 1 of each colour, luckily once that's done you won't have to do it again. The other is I have no idea why the box is so big... WHY.

Nicole: Ringer

Ringer is a fun, easy to learn game for the whole family. With bright colours and large print cards this game is accessible to almost all ages! The simple set up and small box make Ringer an ideal game for travelling with. Wild cards provide variability, while the regular numbered cards with actions allow for multiple decisions to be made with each round!