Matthew Smail

Continuing our recent run of two player only games, Kahuna is a small box standalone game from publisher Kosmos and designer Gunter Cornett, in which the players act as deities vying for dominion of an archipelago in the South Pacific.…

I could think of more loveable heroine’s than the Velociraptor, yet there’s something about Bruno Cathala and Bruno Faidutti’s Raptor that invokes a primal instinct to protect, and leaves the players in no doubt about who the bad guys are.…

Since the second quarter of 2020, I’ve been playing more and more games with just two players — primarily with my wife and one of our children. Whilst many games work with two players, relatively few multiplayer games scale down well, and…

When it comes to choosing board and card games, I’m always on the lookout for options that might appeal to me, my wife and our kids equally. This is a heck of a challenge, and so far only the likes of Jurassic Snack and Zoo Run have managed…

Whilst I’m not overly familiar with Arc System Works games in general, Granblue Fantasy: Versus recently caught my eye thanks to its incredible visuals and silky smooth animation. At first I thought I might be stepping into a fairly average…

As our lives become more and more complicated, we often seek simpler, more straightforward pleasures — things like drawing with our children, or taking a walk with friends. In a related parallel, I seek release from playing board games, and…

It’s no small thing being asked to produce a digital adaptation of one of the most popular new board games of the last few years, but Dire Wolf Digital (who previously gave us the excellent Raiders of the North Sea) have really gone to town…

Wonders never seem to cease when it comes to what can be achieved on Nintendo’s Switch. For me, being able to access a pretty much complete edition of Civilization VI will be tough to beat, and yet developers continue to push the envelope…

As modern board games become more and more popular, the temptation to use increasingly bigger boxes with more and more elaborate components is more than some publishers can resist. For design Anthony Gibbins and his company (Bow String…

In these uncertain times, when the next lockdown could be imposed at any moment, it makes sense to keep a stock of games that really work at low player counts — and for most households, that means two players. Patchwork, from legendary…