Things I Liked Last Month: June 2024

01 July 2024

Welcome to another month of recommendations! Featuring for the very first time… subheadings! Isn’t that exciting? Earlier this month I wrote about the Opposite of a Haunted House. I’m really happy with that essay so give it a read if you haven’t already!

UK Games Expo

On May 31st I went to UK Games Expo for the second time! I picked up a great haul of games and got to meet so many amazing creators. I’m opening this month’s article with a roundup of all the great stuff I bought and found out about there!

BILGE

Check it out on Itch.io here

BILGE is a GM-less TTRPG about convicts delving into the body of an alien leviathan to harvest materials and earn their freedom. The game is a perfect soup of Suicide Squad, body horror and dungeon crawler, with gorgeous art to boot.

When I met designer NeonRot at the expo, they told me all the art for this game was made by photographing paintings with the Game Boy camera accessory, then touching the photos up digitally. This gives the game a dark, crunchy aesthetic that reminds me of horror video games like Iron Lung and Inscryption. I was immediately hooked.

I haven’t gotten around to playing BILGE yet, but I love the presentation of the book and I definitely want to get it to the table soon!

Vivarium

Published by Studio H Games

Vivarium is a super unique set collecting game! Each player has 2 dominoes, and uses one number from each to form a coordinate on a grid of cards to pick up creatures, items and contracts to score the most points. Trying to work out your options from your two dominoes is a really satisfying puzzle, and having additional objectives sitting alongside the creatures and items gives the decision-making amazing depth. It's great fun and the creature designs by Satoshi Matsuura are amazingly diverse!

Whale to Look

Published by Oink Games

I've decided to make it a tradition to pick up an Oink game each time I go to the Expo. I love their tiny boxes and the three games that I've played so far (Deep Sea Adventures, Scout and now Whale to Look) have been consistently great little experiences.

Whale to Look is a deduction game that sees players running rival whale-watching companies competing to put their boats of guests on to the card that the whale or orca will appear in.

The game does a great job at mixing deduction based on the information you've gathered with deduction based on the actions of the other players to create some really tense moments. So far I've played it with 3 and 5 players, but I suspect 4 is the sweet spot (and Board Game Geek agrees). I've had some great fun with this game and it's really scratched an itch in my puzzle-y brain.

Mappa Mundi

Check out their website here

Mappa Mundi is a nonviolent, exploration themed RPG that's crowdfunding in 2025. It sees players exploring a fantasy world and studying its creatures, overcoming them by learning about their behaviours and weaknesses

Thematically, it really reminds me of Biosphere Guardians 2050, an upcoming solarpunk TTRPG which I’ve written about previously. If I ever had the brainpower to run a TTRPG double feature, these two would make a great pair!

I haven't made it to one yet, but the team at Three Sails Studios host playtests over on their Discord server. I'll probably write about the experience here when I get to play it, like I did with Biosphere, so keep an eye out for that!

Terraria: the Board Game

Published by Paper Fort Games

I've always loved Terraria, it was a core game of my teenage years and I really admire its design, especially the bosses. So when I saw the stand for a co-operative tabletop adaptation of the game, I knew I had to take a look.

Terraria: the Board Game currently follows the first act of the game (“Pre-Hardmode”), with potential plans for expansions if the game is successful. You select a number of objectives from the verbs that make up the game's tagline (dig, fight, explore, build) and aim to complete them before you run out of time or lives. There is also an alternate win condition: defeat the Wall of Flesh, the final boss before hardmode in the video game.

I love how open ended the game is, I think it does a great job at emulating the open-world sandbox gameplay of the video game, which is something I've never seen a board game do before!

If you want to check it out yourself, a 90 minute gameplay video is available to watch here on Paper Fort Games’s YouTube channel.

That’s everything from UK Games Expo, I had such a great time and I’ll definitely be there again next year! Now for some more games!

Pile-Up Poker

Play it on Puzzmo here

The amazing designers behind daily puzzle site Puzzmo have come out with a new game, Pile-Up Poker! Pile-Up Poker sees the player taking 4 consecutive hands of cards and placing them in a 4x4 grid to create the best poker hands and earn the most points. It’s a really fun game, and very accessible to players unfamiliar with poker (like myself). My highest score so far is $9,750, let me know if you beat me!

My favourite mechanic is if you score all 9 hands on the grid (4 columns, 4 rows and the four cards in the corners) you can also score a hand out of the four cards you discarded throughout the game, meaning the card you discard each round is another meaningful choice to make. I’m definitely stealing that for something in the future!

Also add me on Puzzmo!

Jet Lag: the Game Season 10: Au$tralia

Check it out on YouTube here

Jet Lag: the Game's latest season sees the trio rejoined by YouTuber Toby Hendy (A.K.A. Tibees) for a betting game played across all of Australia. The two teams travel across the country, gaining money by completing challenges and depositing it across the 7 territories to claim them. Whichever team has claimed the most territories at the end wins.

After mostly designing racing, tag, and hide and seek games, it's amazing to see the crew make something that feels completely original, with an amazing depth of strategy. The choice to use the same currency for paying for travel and for scoring territories makes the decisions in the game really impactful in a way that I love! It's definitely one of my favourite series from a design perspective.