[Ryan] Harmonies continues to be a big winner as a crunchy spatial puzzle that has a relatively short play time. It is just so satisfying to try to squeeze as many points as possible as your board becomes more and more constrained. I love the aesthetic, as well as the tactile feeling of the non-quite-round wooden tokens. Daniel should have the opportunity to try it this next month, so we will see if he likes it as much as I have!

[Daniel] This has been the year of Terraforming Mars for me. I got it to the table again, and this time, it was something I'd never experienced before: a 5-player game. I still think 4 players is the sweet spot given the length, but it was a blast playing a tight, competitive game with a full table. The fact that I keep coming back to this one says everything about how much I enjoy it. One of my favorite game experiences of the month, despite having one of my worst games yet. 😂

[Ryan] It has been a while since I completed a 3-player campaign through Arcs: The Blighted Reach, so it was nice to get it back to the table with a standalone play of the base game. We tried some new leaders from the Leaders & Lore expansion, which was fun, and it was nice to be able to just jump into the game without some of the extra rules overhead that comes with the 3-game campaign. I can’t emphasize enough how polarizing this game is going to be and how cutthroat it is (especially in the base game!), but it is a system I find fascinating and enjoy a lot, and might currently be my “really high conflict” game of choice.

[Daniel] Long overdue, but I finally got Last Bastion back to the table. It's still a top-notch cooperative game — efficient, tense, and over before it overstays its welcome. One thing I noticed this time around: it may be slightly easier than its predecessor, Ghost Stories, so I'll probably dial up the difficulty next time. Lots of fun either way.

[Ryan] I am always intrigued by the challenge of translating the excitement of sports to a board game, and I finally had the chance to try Baseball Highlights 2045. What a unique and clever deck-building game! It takes the concept of head-to-head deckbuilding that you might see in something like Star Realms and injects some thematic baseball flavor with a bizarre futuristic twist with robots and cyborgs. But there is so much to like here: every new card removing one so your deck stays lean, needing to balance offense and defense with every card play, picking which card to save on deck, when to pinch hit… I’ve known about this one for over a decade, but so glad I finally got around to trying it!