Top 5 games I played in August 2026
Transcript
Here are the top five games I played in August 2026. This was a slower month for me both for gaming as well as for the channel, but I still played some fun games I want to talk about. Number five is Citadels Duel. This new two-player version of Citadels was a fun play on Board Game Arena and a new release as of this year. It retains a lot of what the original game offers with role drafting and district building, but now one major difference is that you share a district board instead of building an individual one with special rules and bonuses about where to place buildings and what you get for them. Another unique thing about this game compared to the original is that you have a council track where you have a tug-of-war aspect between the two players based on the effects of roles and that's how it's altered, but also it plays a role in how, where, and what you get from building in the shared district if you have the majority of the council in your color.
Overall, it was a pleasant game that has some interesting variability with the different districts that you can build. With some of them being completely unique like in the original game and the roles that you draft were fun as well, but I feel like I can get something similar in Seven Wonders Duel, which ultimately has a little more competitiveness and strategy in it, especially when you factor in expansions. Number four was Soothsayers. This game was a sleeper hit from last year and after playing it a few times last month on Board Game Arena, I can see why it is acclaimed and fun. This is a drafting game where you are racing to get six fate tokens first, which is done by collecting them or having the highest number card of different categories in front of you on your tableau.
The cool way of keeping track of some of these fate tokens depends on the ever-changing board state of how well you are ascending up your four actions, meaning having the highest card in each action type, essentially representing money, uh your ability to gain money, drafting, and card placement powers, as well. And, in comparison, having the highest card amongst all players. And so, that's constantly changing, going back and forth between players. And so, it keeps a race element alive during the game. In addition, part of the variability comes with drafting unique cards that not only add to the opportunity to gain faith, but also give you special abilities throughout the game. All that, coupled with the really cool artwork that is true, and that is uh truly represented to real tarot cards from past, uh offer a really fun game with visual interest.
Number three was a game called Word Thief. This is an old game from 1994 that I played at work and just really liked. It's a Scrabble-type of game where you play letters from your hand to form words, as you would imagine. And you get points from forming those words, very much like Scrabble. However, after you play a word, the next player could play a word from their hand and get and score like normal, or they can use the letters from the previous player's word to build off of. You can uh rearrange them with certain rules, but as long as you have two complete words after the rearrangement, you get more points, essentially. This reminded me of when I was a kid playing Scrabble with my family. And this game, for some reason, captured that memory as I played it with friends at work.
Now, I'm not good at this game. I'm not good at word games in general. I In in my opinion, I It didn't help my reputation at work for being the board game guy. But, I still had a lot of fun coming up with words and just having some laughs with friends. And so, it did stand out as uh among those other word game building word building games that I've played in the past. And it just kind of stood out from amongst those. And so, this was a a really cool game from from all the way from the '90s. Number two was Falling. This is a new worker placement game this year that I had a chance to play in person and interestingly enough play alongside other friends with other friends who had a copy of it, too. So, we had two uh games going at a time. And they um you know, we offered our perspectives on the game uh from our respective plays.
This game has artwork and a theme vaguely inspired by Japanese anime. But, essentially you are utilizing worker placement to get resources to spend on building machines and buildings from your tableau onto a centralized location, which is essentially this large building that is ever-changing and uh degrading quickly. And so, the mechanism behind that is in a similar sense to how cards move off of a tableau in games like Ancient Knowledge and Echoes of Time. But, for everyone in this game that changing landscape is shared. And so, the movement of that offers bonuses not only for placing it, but also placing it high on the tiers of this building and keeping them those buildings on it. So, you know, you get certain bonuses from that. But, of course you get bonuses once once those buildings come back to your tableau. It's a very uh it's a game that has a lot of opportunities for resources and bonuses everywhere you look. Whenever you place something, you're always getting something. It's one of those types of games.
The most unique thing about this game, however, is the way that points are tallied. So, every time you traverse uh every increment of 10 points, you are going around a very small little, you know, victory point track. So, once you hop from nine to 10 points or nine to zero, you receive a card from a large deck and you flip it over, you get a random bonus. But, the fun surprises you sometimes you would flip over a card that has some foil on it and it kind of reminds you of like flipping over a rare card in a trading or collecting card game. And it has extra resources on it. And so, it was a really fun surprise every time you or someone else got that card and it made keeping track of score fun. It actually kind of motivated me to focus on just getting victory points as a strategy and not really focusing on like building up a an engine for resource gathering, right? And so, I thought it was a really fun element to the game. Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward with very manageable play time as well. That was another thing that I liked about this game.
Uh you could play this game in under an hour with two players and around an hour or so with three, probably an hour and a half to with with four players. And so, I found it very comparable to a game that when I made a {quote} "weeknight game", right? Like games that are around an hour or so, but they do pack a strategic punch. Games like White Castle and Glass Road are games that I would consider in that category. And I would put Falling in that category as well. So, I really enjoyed it. I would play it again. And then finally, number one is Wingspan Pocket. A lot of hype has been going on for this game recently. And I'm going to add to that hype. When this was announced, I knew I was going to get it because I recently have been playing more Wingspan lately with the folks at work. And so, I was going to get, you know, a pocket-sized version of Wingspan anyway.
But, I thought that it would work really well in the setting that I would typically play it at where I or in other words, where I would bring out Wingspan. And Wingspan is on the longer end of the game that I would consider appropriate for the workplace lunch hour setting. So, I was very excited to try this out and I it does hold true to the time frame delivered on the box in the route 30 minutes. We were able to play a three-player game for example and it went smoothly. I like the similarities it has with Wingspan, but especially appreciate how many times you can activate your tableau as you race to be the first one to build out your tableau of one row. Uh but being able to take that advantage of that every turn as you build up that engine and activate it consistently, it kind of hits, you know, uh you you get a hit of endorphins every time you take your turn and so uh I I really appreciated that. It is difficult sometimes to have the resources be on the backs of cards. I do realize that that makes this game more portable. It saves space and room for a pocket-sized game box, but it can leave you in a bind sometimes when you're actually playing the game because of the randomness. It felt a lot like Sanctuary compared to Ark Nova. Randomness is present in Ark Nova and Wingspan. It's definitely present in games like Sanctuary and Pocket. And the thing that
is a good, you know, it's a good thing in Wingspan Pocket and Sanctuary that despite there being a lot of randomness to the point where the game state changes so much in between turns that you really can't plan ahead too much. You can You can still try to strategize and often times you have the opportunities to do so with what is available, but I feel like it's harder to do so in a game like Pocket and Sanctuary where the cards or the tiles are ever-changing. And it's different in Ark Nova and Wingspan. There are more options available or at least it's set up in this in a way where you can um have the actions in the cards available to plan ahead and not really be bothered per se by the actions of other folks.
And so there obviously there is still interaction in that regard, but the you know the the trade-off of having a very quick game is that there is introduced a wider variability in terms of randomness from game to game. So it's does have that element to it, but you know, it is what it is. It's still fun. I really like the essence of Wingspan distilled into a 30-minute game. And despite the increased amount of randomness in my opinion, I still would rather play Wingspan Pocket if I had, you know, an hour or less to play Wingspan. And so I really enjoyed it and uh it fits in with the types of games that I've been able to to play and have a lot of fun with at work like Castle Combo and Harmonies even.
Uh obviously different games, but I yeah, I think Wingspan Pocket was a hit. It was more of a hit to me than some of the other pocket-sized games recently based off of bigger um you know, bigger parent games. And so I'm yeah, I'm very excited to play this one more. And yeah, think it was a hit. So those are five games that I played in August that I really enjoyed. Let me know if you have played these games, if you like them or not, and also what other games stood out to you in your own plays from August last month. And let's have a discussion in the comments. So thank you for watching. Hope you have a good one. I'll catch you on the next one.