Punchboard

It’s that time of year again. I’ve made the crawl to Birmingham and back and attended the UK Games Expo at the NEC, and now I try to write something coherent while my brain fights the fug of convention come-down. This year was a very different experience for me. Normally, I attend as a member of the press. I wander the halls looking for new and interesting games, meeting with...

The Play Something Old series continues with one of my favourites today – Caylus! To get to Caylus we need to rewind the clock back to 2005, when William Attia adorned a box with the now-famous illustration of King Philip IV of France. Inside the box, he added the pieces for the game, which, despite often being described as a German-style Euro game, isn’t at all. A lot of peo...

Rumble Nation (or Tenka Meidou as it was first known) was released in 2017. It didn’t make huge waves at the time, but it persisted, and here and now in 2026, it’s still one of the best. It’s a stripped-back game about dominating Japan around the turn of the 16th Century. Sometimes keeping something simple feels empty, but in the case of Rumble Nation, we’re dealing with a ga...

I was sent a copy of Bella Vista for free by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts & opinions are my own. Bruno Cathala has a stellar back catalogue, and along with Andrea Mainini this time, he has spawned a twinkling new star in the board game cosmos. Bella Vista is a spatial placement game in three dimensions, building on the foundations (pun very much intended) of his previ...

If you’re anything like me, when you head to a big convention like the UK Games Expo (read my past coverage here), you’re always looking for that something a bit different. The unusual game. The hidden gem. Publishers and designers from the other side of the planet are hot in the board game world right now, thanks to games like Eternal Decks (read my review here) making waves...