Game of the Month
Calico
1-4 Players • 30-45 Min • Light-Medium — Gateway Games
A cozy tile-placement puzzle where players stitch together a hexagonal quilt, clustering colors and patterns to attract cats and complete personal design goals. Choose tiles carefully from a shared market of three — every placement is a trade-off between chasing a big scoring combo and grabbing the guaranteed points in front of you. Whoever builds the highest-scoring quilt when all boards are filled wins.
Staff Picks
GEORGE’S PICK
Moon Colony Bloodbath
1-5 Players • 45-90 Min • Medium — Enthusiast Favorites
An engine-building — and engine-losing — tableau game where players grow a lunar colony while simultaneously poisoning the shared deck everyone draws from. Each round, mine, farm, research, or build using cards the group has collectively added, then brace for the twists and disasters that come cycling back around: hunger, glitches, power failures, and worse. The game ends when one colony's population hits zero or the event deck runs dry, and whoever has the most survivors left wins.
DANI’S PICK
Booty Dice
2-6 Players • 15-20 Min • Light — Gateway Games
A fast-paced pirate free-for-all where players roll six dice up to three times a turn, deciding what to keep and what to reroll to collect gold, attack rivals, and defend their own stash. Steal doubloons with a Cutlass, weather a Mutiny, or risk it all chasing the dreaded Blackbeard's Curse. There are two paths to victory: be the first to amass 25 doubloons, or be the last pirate standing after the others walk the plank.
KATE'S PICK
Ticket to Ride
2–5 players • 30–60 min • Medium-Heavy — Strategy Buff Picks
The quintessential gateway game where players collect colored train cards to claim railway routes across North America. Complete destination tickets connecting distant cities for bonus points.
TYREL'S PICK
Dice Thrown: X-Men Uprising
A cooperative dice-throwing game where players take on iconic X-Men heroes defending a city overrun by Sentinels. Each hero has a signature set of powered dice — fire, telekinesis, adamantium claws, optic blasts — that you roll to complete missions, rescue civilians, and hold the line. Push your luck each round: bank safe results or gamble for bigger combos, risking overload that draws Sentinel attention. Build toward a final showdown where the team must combine every hero's dice in one last coordinated throw to shut down the enemy's command hub for good.
2-5 Players • 45-60 Min • Medium — Enthusiast Favorites
MARTIN'S PICK
2-5 Players • 30min • Light-Medium — Gateway Games
Bomb Busters
A cooperative deduction game where your team plays bomb disposal experts trying to defuse a bomb together. Each player holds a hidden set of numbered wires, and on your turn you point to a teammate's wire and guess its value based on the clues you've gathered — guess right and it's cut, guess wrong and the bomb ticks closer to going off.
SASHA’S PICK
2-6 Players • 20 Min/Player • Light-Medium — Gateway Games
Plunder: A Pirate's Life
A competitive area-control game where players command rival pirate fleets on a modular ocean map, conquering islands for resources and building up ships with masts and cannons. Wage war against other captains, hunt for buried treasure, and navigate a roaming storm that can strand your fleet. First to ten plunder points — earned through conquest, treasure, and sunken enemy ships — rules the seas.