Top Board Games May 2026: The Best New Discoveries!
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Transcript
Hello, welcome to June, which we are going to talk about our top games of May 2026, games new to us that we play in May 2026, and a few things as usual in our monthly vlog. What are they, Trent?
Yes, this is This will be a little bit of a shorter vlog than usual. So, exciting as it sounds, we spent most of May overseas in the UK. We went to UKGE, and we did a holiday around the UK for about 2 weeks before that. Uh but we have a whole separate video where we talk about that, and we take you in gratuitous detail through a slideshow with everything we saw. So, we're not going to talk about that here.
No.
out that video.
Because we have separate video that's about 5 hours long. No, not really 5 hours.
But it is about 2, so there's plenty there. Do get some popcorn and strap yourself in for that one.
And coffee. We haven't had coffee in that video.
We did. We paused in the middle and had had some coffee. That
was um maybe a little casual of us, but that's okay.
But like, you know, grab your popcorn for that one, even for this one, or maybe listen to the podcast, but maybe look at the videos or photos after when you're not driving.
Yes. But in any In any case, what were we talking about here?
I lost my train of thought as usual.
So, we'll we will take you through the games carousel of games which have arrived to us during May, and again we are excluding games that arrived to us through UKGE in that. And then we'll talk about the top new to us games that we played in May.
Yeah, so. And if you played any exciting games recently, please do let us know. You never know. Lots of your suggestions has been working for us, whether it's games or places to visit in the UK.
Yes.
I really appreciate that.
Yes, we try to give the hype to you and we take the hype back. It's a big hype loop.
Okay, let's start with that game over there.
Yes, this is uh
Set that up there.
Everything that's come, so
Yes.
Plenty of games, plenty of new games. Dog Spotting.
Dog Spotting, so this is going on Kickstarter soon. This is a dog version of Cat Spotting um funded already. It's a little card games. They're kind of like What? It's like Spotted? No, not Spotted, like um find the things. Find the pictures. This is Godswills, a social deduction game.
Yes, this has a little bit of a blend of blend of Avalon teams with uh more werewolfy style of voting, so
And this is a prototype going to crowdfunding.
Yes.
All right.
We have the Vault Trials. This is a cooperative This is the second cooperative release in the Alpha Clash TCG series.
Mhm. It's card game. Um and then this is Quad Quagmire.
Quad Quagmire or Quagmire, depending upon where you're from. This is a game of a tactical frog movement game. Frogs squishing each other and scoring for each other.
Almost like an open programming game. It's not hidden programming.
Yes.
Yes, it's like predetermined programming game.
Yes. We have a couple of games from Korea Board Game.
Mhm.
But Abraca Who?
Yes. It's kind of got partners like card game, I should say.
Yes. And we have Coffee Rush Winter.
So, this is the Korean version, but the rule book's in English. We'll have a video for this one. Um
Video for both of these games coming.
That's good. All right, I got This is very cute games. Um so, again, these videos if we have anything related to it, we'll put it in the link below. Or we not yet if we don't have or we haven't uploaded video yet and just find it on the on our YouTube channel. And these videos can come from the game we purchased, the game for review copy, or the games we've been commissioned to do.
Yes. We have the new Euro inspired war area control game from Phalanx. This is Sovereign Dragons.
With Arc Nova style action selection.
The new one coming from Lucky Duck. This is Yumegari.
Yes, and which also was also displayed on UKGE. It's very very pretty in a a Studio Ghibli is style.
Mhm.
I'm running out of space. You should probably put it back there.
Reverse the reverse the carousel.
Go game carousel. Yes.
Boss battle with the small box here for the
What are the expansions? I already pressed that way. Sorry.
I see you holding it now. The next one is Playground Empire. Literally it just arrived a few minutes ago.
Yes, this is from Huchu Games who had the the only game that we have played that has plasticine figures in it so a few years ago again. Plunder Bundt. So excited to see what they've come up with here.
And this is the finished version. I thought that were came in three boxes or something like that.
but it is already the largest thing we're showing here.
Mhm.
Abyss Echo of the Forbidden Right. Sorry about the glaringness on that. This is from Teen Universe. And this is a big expansive
narrative
Very narra- very narrative style of Lovecraftian adventure.
And puzzle games or what are in the other two boxes, Aaron, of um this game?
Further stories and further things to explore.
Oh, nice. Are they all the games?
That is That is the games that have arrived in May.
Oh, let's get to our top games then.
Indeed. So, this month for the top games, uh I will be doing only a top three and Stella has a top five. And these will be new to us games that we've played throughout May. Again, they may not be a brand new games. In fact, they're not all brand new games.
Yeah.
Um and they may have come to us through various means, review copies, purchased games, commissioned games, and so
that.
You did. Well, you mentioned it about the games that arrived.
Oh, that's true, actually.
it again.
Yes, yes.
Okay. This is the moment that we've been waiting for. I have. I don't know about you, Tarrant.
Yeah, I've been waiting for it.
Okay.
My number five is Cicada.
And that's also my number three.
Yeah, so let's talk about that.
This is a It's a filler card game.
Mhm.
Uh simple cards, simple rules, but but quite a clever way of thinking through it. So, you've got cards in three different suits, which rank from one to five. There's a lot more ones than fives. And you On any given turn, you can play any number of cards of the same number face value number. And then you draft as many cards as that face value number. So, you can get ones out a lot more. Or you will gain a lot more ones, so you can get ones out a lot more quickly, but then you're only drafting one card. As you build them into your columns, you have to build them in ascending order as well. So, if you are putting the high numbered cards, so you can draft a lot, you aren't you don't have as many options on what's left to put on there.
Yes.
And then ultimately you're trying to score those piles based on some objectives. And there's even a bit of clever restrictiveness in there as well, because there's objectives that you're chasing in the three different suits.
There's restriction.
And there's a restriction. You've got to Half of them are light and half of them are dark day and night. You have to alternate between the two. So, there's a bit of timing in there.
It's great. What I love about it is that it's, you know, you want to play high number card because then you get to draw that many amount of cards, but then you kind of like block your um your column so that you can't it you can't easily add more cards into the column, hence winning the contract. You know, I love that. Like really simple, but tricky decision there.
Yeah, it's it fits into that good category of a thinky little filler. It doesn't have that many rules. You can play it with play it with people who are familiar with games of any complexity. And yeah, it's going to it's it's not going to break your brain. It's going to scratch a little itch and give you that good filler experience.
Yep. Game number four for me is Rising Sun Culture, which is a light jewel civilization game.
Yes, this is a card driven game. It is an asymmetrical card driven game. So, each player has their own deck representing their own empire. So, there's Persian and Egyptian and various empires there. And it's a big game of multi-use cards. That's ultimately what it is cuz you're going to see your entire deck across the course of the game. The question is what order do you get the cards in and what do you do with them? Cuz each card can be flipped for its military or rotated for its military symbol or played down for its resource symbols or uh built or purchased based on the resources you've got. And each of these things, if you have military, you can win the competitive aspect of the game, but you lose those military cards.
Yeah.
If you build things, you can also advance your society with cogs, but that's going to break down your resources. And so, you have to try to work out the optimal way of scoring.
Yes. It's gorgeous looking. What I love about it is that there's this catch-up mechanics, as Tarrant explained. When you win the battle, you got to have to get rid of a card. Means that, you know, you have to catch up or the other person that didn't win got slightly disadvantaged maybe because they don't have the once off ongoing benefit of the card they won, but you know, they have more cards to potentially win the next one. And multi-use cards always my favorite, right?
It's a mechanism, yeah. Definitely always have an opinion.
my favorites. Correction. Um this is a dual board game, but don't expect this pull and tuck um too much of this. It's a lot of it's is quite um multiplayer solitaire. When I say multiplayer, it means two player solitaire
because it's specifically two player. But, it's very satisfying when building it, when trying to decide how do you want to use a card for the resource, for the battle, you flip it for these things and and so on. So, that's that's why I love it. Game number three for me. And
Game number two for me is Moon Colony Bloodbath.
Very fun, light-hearted game.
Yes. So, this is a game that of course it came out last year. It didn't cross our gaming table last year. We only We only gained this recently. And it is in the news. It's in the Kennerspiel nominee at the moment. In the news.
In the news.
game. In the online news.
In the hot at the moment.
Yeah, somewhere.
So, it's in the Kennerspiel nominees. And it's a very fun game. It's It's um slightly tactical.
Slightly tactical.
I'm not going to say it's
Somewhat tactical.
I'm not going to say it's really tests the brain out that much, but it's a tremendous amount of fun.
Yeah.
Uh it is it is a game you don't get very many of them. It's got a It's a common deck build, so there is a central deck which players which either the game or players will take actions to contribute to. And then kind of in a bingo style, you're just going to flip those cards and do whatever it says. And in the deck, there's you're really going to take four actions per time through the deck, and those can let you get resources or ultimately build a building. And those buildings are what's going to give you the points of difference because they'll have different powers. And they're also what's going to give you settlers for your moon colony. And the game is kind of if you if you thought of it That's what's clever about this game. If you think of it from a boring context, each of these like if you if you treated this from a a boring game design standpoint, you'd be building
I've never heard of that standpoint before, but
you'd be building all of these building all of these things, and they'll be scoring you points, and then after a set amount of time, whoever's got the most points wins. In Moon Colony Bloodbath, the deck is going to keep having cards added to it that will
The event cards.
The event cards and the robots robots, they're going to kill all of your settlers, and your points see your settlers. And everyone's settlers are going to die at roughly the same rate as each other.
Yep.
Um and eventually someone's points will get dragged down to zero, and at that point, whoever has the most points wins. And so, where I say the boring way is you just build up the points, and no one ever loses them.
Yeah.
In this, you're building up the points, and everyone is also losing points at roughly the same rate. So, you still get the same outcome.
dive in.
It's just that everyone sits around the table and has this uh enjoyable experience of "Ah, four more people have died. Ah, five more people have died." So, and it's just it's just fun to see that happen.
Just uh my favorite about this is like the light-hearted fun of losing your colonies. It's just like as Tarrant said, "Ah." It's like more more and more bad events got added to the common event deck, so you know that it's going to come and bite you, but you just you can plan to sit in the grey to build. Like the satisfying bit is when you get the actions, you can build buildings, you can earn incomes, and so on. You can draw cards. Um you can try to combo your actions. I found that um there are a few cards that combo well with each other. Let's say one action is farming, you can build up the buildings for your farming cards, so that whenever you do that farming action, you also can get money, for example, and cards, and so on. But I realized that that's just the early game strategy, but then towards towards the end game, you need to build buildings, which is probably a bit expensive, but comes with a lot of population, which means that you can probably stay stay in the game longer.
It's just really fun and chaotic, and um it's almost like push your luck, but like everyone's on the table like "Yeah, like at the first half maybe." Like let's like satisfying building this, building that, but then at the end like "Ah, losing." And then "Ah, losing." Like the table will be like "Ah, losing." losing game uh losing populations.
Yeah. I did oversimplify before, where I said everyone gaining points at the same rate is the same as gaining losing the same rate, cuz you do also have the decisions of what buildings to kill first and kill later, and what building strategy. So, it does have that bit of strategy. And there's a really clever thing in here uh which I've always found adds the most interesting uh dynamic is that one of the events comes in lets you draw one card but forces you to discard two and those are the buildings. And so, it's kind of this effective way that you you do get to see a lot of buildings, but you have to use them or lose them. It creates this pressure. And that that pressure and urgency is actually a it underlies the whole game cuz that comes into the event deck quite early.
It's actually really I think without that event, that that event adds a lot to the game. So, I think it's really well designed.
Yeah, some of the events are are great and then the the robot AI that start killing everyone. I just thought of this series that I watch on Apple TV, Murderbot. I was like Oh, like the real Murderbot. No spoiler. What what but whatever. Um, anyways, next game, parent. Which sounds quite strange because strange is actually in the title, as part of the title. Strange Slot Simulator. This game is um, this year's release by Hobby Japan. So, it's a Japanese publisher. You know how the uh, Japan or Japanese games could be a little quirky. I've never seen puzzle deduction that is done in this way in real time and with probability, random probability.
Yeah, in this game you've got six decks of cards and they all have like cherries and bells and other things in different proportions.
yeah.
And in this real-time game, what you'll be doing is taking the deck, shuffling it, drawing three as if you just spun a slot machine. You take note of what you've drawn and then you shuffle it all back in and you go, "Yeah." And over multiple shuffles, you'll build up a distribution of what's in these of what's spun up for you.
Mhm.
And you need to try to match that. Try to match that against the distributions in one of the the six decks cuz you know what the six decks are. You just have to work out which one is which.
Yeah.
And so it has the it's it's very different in that way.
I know. It's like I had real fun. It's it's real time. I just so fun that it's just trying to every 4 minutes you just like pick a deck. Like in 4 minutes you can just take as many decks as you want and then you can stop. You can go come back to the deck again if you want to just deduce a little bit more. Um and you gain a little bit of bonus as well if you hit certain targets and then you can draw more cards. So maybe that way your your deduction is faster. It's just so quirky. It's just so fun.
And there's a lot of different variants that the game comes with as well once you once you're you know familiar with just doing the basic the basic deduction. You can add these things where you're also trying to debug the machines and like capture cards out of the machines to avoid losing points.
Yeah.
Uh there's a method where you just shuffle two of the machines together and so four of the machines will match what you expect and two of them will just be a random mix of the others and you still have to work out which is which. It's just you have to with the ones that are blurred together you say that's a blurred one and that's a blurred one. So
Yeah.
They've thought through a lot of different ways to play.
Yeah. Well, the actual theme is that you go you went and then trapped in a cursed casino and you're trying to get out and by deducing which ones go to which slot machine.
Yes. And so now we come to Stella's and my number one game for the month which is Green City.
A game that we picked up from UKGE and which we have played with one of the two designers, Fabio Lopiano. This might be Fabio's lightest games that I've played because the other one is like Trajan Circle, Marrakesh, Santa Maria.
Autobahn.
Autobahn, which is like quite heavy, and Shackleton Base. So, this is a route about route building that incentive is very interactive and incentive to It highly rewards you for looking at what everyone's building like so much, and you are also building the routes together.
Yeah, it's a It is quite a light game, and there's elements of flukiness to when when scoring comes out in times, but the route building is very much fun. You've got a hexagonal grid, you've got all of your passengers alternating with all the other players' passengers around the outside, and their destinations are kind of near the middle. And then there's four types of routes, which are the walking routes, the cycling routes, the buses, and the trams. So, all different green forms of transportation. And every tile you have has two of those on one side and two on the other side. And so, every turn, you place the tile that you've got into any one space. If that matches up a a full route to connect one of your people to its destination, you move that, and then that goes on the scoring track for that type of transport.
And through the game, each type of transport will score once, and the more players who have already used that kind of route, the fewer points you get for it. And so, there's a really important timing aspect to that.
Very important.
But then at the Sorry.
No, you go.
But then at the end, any passengers who have not gone on public transport, they just take the car instead and that loses you points. So, that's the big That's the big finish as you can lose a lot of points if you have failed to
to deliver the passengers. And the more players with undelivered passengers, the higher negative point it is. So, in a way you kind of like I'm not saying working together, it's a definitely competitive game and trying to, you know, it's just like could be a little cutthroat in some ways. But it's just like you really got to have the um you know, that's that incentive There's always incentive to build the road together. You can talk about it. You can do table talk if you want. There's incentive to not get negative points because the more of those like each player then the more they have, but you probably going to end up like working on yourself, trying to sabotage other people as well. It just can go both both ways.
And in a very simple way, there's all these different incentives. There's incentive to do a well-timed specialization because you know that if it if you have specialized at the point that it scores, you'll get a whole bunch of points. But then there's incentive to generalize because each of the methods of transport has a bonus scoring once per game for you where you can double its immediate points or get extra points if it goes via a park or something like that. And then the different routes all have different styles as well. So, walking walking will get you more points the shorter distance the walk is. Cycling will or catching the bus will get you more points the longer the route is. You want to create this really long path.
Yeah, you start seeing as well along the path or something like that.
Cycling gets you points the most points for a middle amount. So, you don't want the cycle to be too short. You got all dressed in your life for nothing. But, you don't want it to be too far cuz you get really tired. So, just these little things all feed in with this really simple to play game. Uh so, it's even though it it looks Um it doesn't look thematic. It's not artistic, but it feels thematic and yeah, it feels fun. It's very approachable.
It's really fun. It's easy. On your turn, you basically play a thing and then you draw a thing from the uh bag because this at some point when somebody scored, like things get inside the bag and when it's drawn, that particular transport gets scored.
Yeah. That's the good thing. It does randomize.
fluky.
It does randomize. That is the one fluky thing. It randomizes when the four methods of transport score based on the market. [snorts]
And you can plan ahead though. You can plan ahead. I had I like it's not like, "Oh, it's a surprise." But, you can see that what uh method of transport are going to be scored on the game at which point in the game. But, like it will be random when it's going to be, but you know you can you can plan ahead.
Yeah. What it does is it's incentivized cuz they do come out they can or do come out moderately early. So, it creates an urgency as well.
Correct, yeah. I just love it. I just love how um interactive it is and how this core is simple, but very effective. Um I'm I think Simurgh Games they're looking for distributors in other areas. I don't know where they're based. Where are they based? Do you remember?
Um
Um
Japan.
Yes, Japan. So, I thought it was like Japan. So, uh you know, I'm hoping that this will get distributed widely, you know? And hopefully they'll be in Gen Con, Essen, and then somebody will pick it up. Highly recommend it. And those are our games and our vlog. Thank you so much for watching again. I'll link our UKGE vlog and anything that is relevant to what we talk about. And thank you so much for watching and have a great day. Bye.