Expand Your Game

Red Panda Surprise: Review Information: Mechanics : Card Shedding, Filler, Simultaneous Play Player Age :  8+ Player Count : 1 - 7 Game Designer: Dylan Coyle Game Artist:  Dylan Coyle Publisher: Charming Games Collective Time to Play:  5 - 20 Minutes  Year Published: 2026 Introduction : Red Panda Surprise is a card shedding game, where players are combining the sums of two cards. Players with the highest combined value played, are discarding their cards. Everyone has mostly the same deck to shed. The catch is that whichever player plays the lowest sum gains a plus 10. When the standard set of cards only goes up to 11 this is a big sway of value.  Game Anatomy: Number Cards: Number Cards appear in seven sets featuring nine cards each. One for each player.  At lower player counts players will use two or three sets instead to create their deck.  The sets include numbered cards from 0 to 11 appearing once each. The exc...

Pond: Review  Information: Mechanics:  Area Control, Assymetric, Deck Building Player Age: 13+  Player Count: 2 - 4 Players Time to Play:  30 - 60 Minutes  Game Designer: MingYang Lu Game Artist: PondHQ Publisher : Brother Ming Games Year Published: 2025 BGG Weight: 2.00 Disclaimer: A review copy for the game was provided by the publisher. Introduction : So far Brother Ming games seem to be focused on high interaction head to head games. This time they are exploring the calm nature of fwooogs, sorry frogs. Pond is an area control game with a good blend of light asymmetry and deck building.  Game Anatomy: Frog Cards: Anytime during the game five frog cards will be revealed and available for purchase. The frog with big net and the frog with two knives will also always be available for purchase.  Each frog card will have a berry cost on the top right, followed by points in the middle of the card. Each frog card ...

Use Up All Your Sick Days: Review Information: Mechanics : Card Shedding, Real-time, pattern matching  Player Age :  6+ Player Count : 1 - 6  Game Designer: Dylan Coyle Game Artist: Andrei Ebreo BGG Weight: 1.33 Publisher: Charming Games Collective Time to Play: 10 - 20 Minutes  Year Published: 2026 Introduction : Use Up All Your Sick Days (hence known as Sick Days) is a card shedding game, the main twist is the card shedding is a real time game. If a player plays illegally they leave the card on the stack and draw two replacement cards. If the player depletes a hand of seven cards three times they will win.  Game Anatomy: Days of the Week Cards: There are 10 animal suits of cards,.  Each animal has a identifying colour and a card for each day of the week going from Monday to Sunday. This is the main deck of cards that will need to be shed by players.  Event Cards: There are seven unique event cards. Each game tw...

Exploding Kittens - Double Feature Review: Curse You! and Rage Mode Information: Mechanics: Player Elimination, Card Game, Push Your Luck Player Age: 7+  Player Count: 2 - 5 Players Time to Play: 15 Minutes  Game Designer: Matthew Inman, Elan Lee Game Artist: Matthew Inman, Elan Lee Publisher : Exploding Kittens Year Published: 2026 Disclaimer: A review copy for the game was provided by the Asmodee ANZ. Introduction: Exploding kittens has always been one of my favourite push your luck games. This tried and true game has stayed around from my early days of getting into the hobby. I now have the big box Recipes For Disaster storing all my cards in a build your own deck for each game fashion, without a doubt these new stand-alone games will be stored with the rest to be used as expansions. So this double review will quickly rundown how to play the exploding kittens system. Then it will focus on what makes Curse You! and Rage Mode stand apart to assis...