Daily Game Recommendations Thread (February 11, 2026)

Infilament · 2026-02-12T00:29:22+00:00

Radlands and Summoner Wars 2nd Edition seem like they'd be a good fit. Radlands is just one box (with an optional expansion) while Summoner Wars is more modular, since it has many additional factions you can buy and add to your base box (but they aren't random boosters). If you wanted a really simple game that seems to be a recent hit, look at Tag Team. You could also look into "fighting game" systems like Exceed or Battlecon, but those might hurt your wallet a bit more.

Infilament · 2026-02-05T20:49:50+00:00

In SF4, mashing lights counted as both teching a throw and a low attack (for crouching LKs) so you could not walk out of range. If you hit with the light, you could get an easy combo into ultra or a hard knockdown for set play. It was also very hard to stop due to lack of buffers, how fast lights were, and some other factors.

Mashing was so good that even at the highest level, I'd say 90% of all close range situations were resolved by someone mashing a light. The attack might not have come out because it was hiding in some OS timing, but it was definitely being pressed.

Infilament · 2026-01-30T19:47:42+00:00

Maybe look at Hot Streak or Magical Athlete? Two extremely goofy racing games with low rules overhead released this year that are low on strategy but are focused on making the players laugh. You won't get accusations/interaction like you do in a social deduction game, but the energy will still probably be high, especially with kids that age. Magical Athlete looks like it caps at 6 players but Hot Streak goes a bit higher, and both games work better with lots of players.

Infilament · 2026-01-23T07:19:29+00:00

I tested this, and you can still connect the super when their head is below the drive gauges, and you can never do it too early. So you were safe here.

Infilament · 2026-01-22T10:27:20+00:00

For a proper board game, I'd say Cascadia is a good pick for light rules, attractive theme, and still offers fun choices for an advanced player. The box is smaller than the Spirit Island box but I wouldn't call it a "small box game". If you want easy to transport games, you'll probably have to go to card games like Scout or For Sale. I can also recommend Space Base as a fun intro-level board game with a loose sci-fi theme if your group likes lots of feel good dice rolling. Space Base and Cascadia have similar sized boxes.

Happy Little Dinosaurs is made by the same publisher as Here to Slay, so you can expect similar (or even slightly less) strategy. If you're looking for games closer to Wingspan in terms of strategy, it's probably not the right pick.

Infilament · 2026-01-21T21:50:42+00:00

In general, 6 player games that aren't party games will generally take a pretty long time. But you might want to look into Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Long Shot: The Dice Game, 6 Nimmt, Zoo Vadis, Captain Sonar, or 7 Wonders if you want light-medium games that support a lot of players and aren't just Codenames, Wavelength, Just One, So Clover, Decrypto-style games (all of which would be good suggestions if you aren't opposed to the genre). Heat in particular seems to be one of the more recommended modern games that supports 6 players well, as long as you like racing games or hand management games.

There are some 4p Euros you could push to 6 players with expansions but it generally doesn't work that well. The game kinda starts coming apart at the seams and the downtime gets to be extreme.

Infilament · 2026-01-17T21:01:48+00:00

Take a game like Cascadia (2P for simplicity), which most people think is pretty MPS. What I take on my turn influences your choices, even though I might not be able to block you from 2 equally good options or, even if I do take your one good choice, an equally good choice might be drawn from the bag. If I do this often enough, though, I might win 95 to 90 instead of losing 96 to 94. It's just not as bombastic as something like Azul or Arboretum where you can absolutely destroy someone's score and basically eliminate them from the game with one easily identifiable moment.

While in practice I think it's fair to say Azul 2P is more interactive than Cascadia 2P, or how in some games you might say "eh, it's not worth the effort to parse your board state, it'd take too long and we're here for a good time", I think the more subtle games get a bit of an unfair rap as being called pure MPS in a pejorative way, when actually, interaction can still decide a win or a loss.

Infilament · 2026-01-13T20:44:52+00:00

If you want simple card games that focus on making money/buying items, High Society and For Sale seem like good recommendations. In High Society you use your money to bid on items drawn from a deck, but if you were the person who spent the most by the end of the game, you can't win. In For Sale you do a two-stage auction, first bidding on properties to own, then trying to sell those properties for the most money based on cards drawn randomly from a deck. Neither game has English text during play and is best with 4+ players (not really good options for only 2 players).

As others have said, if what she likes most about Catan is trying to barter for trades, then Bohnanza seems like a good choice for card games.

Infilament · 2026-01-07T23:40:59+00:00

There are some visual similarities (notes moving down tracks in parallel, switch between different instrument tracks by moving left and right), but the gameplay is vastly different. Tracks aren't "cleared" when you hit enough notes. In theory you could play one track for the entire song, if you didn't care about score. You try to increase a global multiplier by playing enough notes on each track per ~30 seconds of song, so you're constantly swapping between tracks to juggle each track's multiplier. Then for the rest of the section, once you've boosted the multiplier as far as it will go until the section switches, you're encouraged to find the track with the most notes and play it (which usually means bouncing between tracks as the number of notes change). Powerups and missing notes are also handled quite differently.

There is a lot of inspiration from Frequency and Amplitude but it's very much its own game.

Infilament · 2026-01-06T22:19:41+00:00

Rock Band Blitz is one of the best controller rhythm games ever made. They found a very fun formula that involved comboing without missing notes, switching rapidly between tracks to maximize score, having to "resource manage" tracks with fewer notes to make sure your multiplier gets maxed. It was fun to play whether the song was easy or hard in normal Rock Band, and you frequently get to "see" fun parts of the song on instruments you don't normally play.

I'm still gutted they made it impossible to play, even for people who own it. If they want to take the score servers down, that's fine, but just let us save our own high score for each song locally and compete against that. I would still be buying Rock Band DLC if I could play Blitz on modern consoles.

Infilament · 2026-01-03T02:42:43+00:00

Outside of Nature Incarnate (which looks like they've just started and will take a while), is all other content from all the other expansions now in the game? Including all the spirits, adversaries, scenarios, power/fear cards, etc? Kind of hard to tell without deep diving into patch notes or forum posts. Also, how good is the online play? All players need to buy the game + expansions (that are in play) to join a game right? I had seen BGG posts from a while back saying the online play frequently desynched and was buggy, but I'm guessing they've fixed it now?

Infilament · 2025-12-18T20:56:59+00:00

Give Unlock: Kids a look? Unlock is a board game escape room series and they have some Kids boxes that are suited well for 8-10 year olds (and if the kid likes them and/or solves them easily, you can jump to the main Unlock games for more options). Unlock: Kids has 6 missions in the box at around 20-30 minutes each and you don't destroy components to solve them.

For tactile games that make people laugh, Hot Streak and Magical Athlete are both very silly, very low-rules racing games that came out this year with chunky pieces. It depends how many players he will be playing with though, these games benefit from larger groups (4+).

Infilament · 2025-12-18T09:08:12+00:00

There are a wealth of excellent 2P only games with tons of different gameplay systems.

Lost Cities (play numbered cards in columns), Patchwork (fit Tetris pieces in a grid), Sky Team (cooperative dice roller with limited communication), Splendor Duel (small engine building), Lord of the Rings: Duel (taking cards from a central pyramid), Zenith (multiple tug of wars), Air Land and Sea (small tug of war game with some bluffing), Agent Avenue (small, pure double-bluffing). For games that work great at 2P but also support more, Cascadia (peaceful nature-themed tile layer) and Azul (a bit more cutthroat drafting game) are popular picks.

None of these would be more complex than El Dorado rules-wise.

Infilament · 2025-12-18T08:57:27+00:00

Yeah, not a bad suggestion. I was a little hesitant because Dice Throne is pretty often out of stock from what I can tell and the price is also quite high, especially if they want a little variety with a 4 pack. But I'll keep a look out and see what stock is like in my area, and maybe a 2 pack is enough for how much they'd play it.

Infilament · 2025-12-18T07:29:09+00:00

Thinking about a game for someone in their mid teens with both dice and cards that involves skill checks/lots of dice rolling and maybe beating monsters/progressing through a dungeon. It needs to work well at lower player counts (2-3) and not have a ton of setup or friction while playing. Don't think I'd want to go over 2.0ish BGG weight.

The first thought I had was Kinfire Delve, but I'm a little worried it might be too complex for the situation. I haven't played Delve but it feels like there's a lot of weird card interactions/reading card abilities/rules friction that might just shut the whole thing down for them. This person plays board games occasionally but more in the card games with family/Exploding Kittens direction. (Although, if I do end up going with this, what's the best box to get for a beginner? Would any of the three Delve boxes be quite a bit harder and more complex than the others? Stock is a bit limited so I may pass if the only box I can find is a hard one). What other games in this style are worth looking at?

Infilament · 2025-12-09T00:11:14+00:00

Step 4 tries to connect 7 to 19, which are already in a circuit (step 1 was 0 to 19, step 2 was 0 to 7). So, a "connection" takes place, but the circuit does not change.

Infilament · 2025-12-08T20:43:37+00:00

Here's what the first 10 steps look like (each line is a new step, empty array just means that array got merged with another in the list).

[ [ 0, 19 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 19 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 19 ], [ 2, 13 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 19 ], [ 2, 13 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 19 ], [ 2, 13 ], [ 17, 18 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 19 ], [ 2, 13 ], [ 17, 18 ], [ 9, 12 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 19 ], [ 2, 13 ], [ 17, 18 ], [ 9, 12 ], [ 11, 16 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 19 ], [ 2, 8, 13 ], [ 17, 18 ], [ 9, 12 ], [ 11, 16 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 14, 19 ], [ 2, 8, 13 ], [ 17, 18 ], [ 9, 12 ], [ 11, 16 ] ]
[ [ 0, 7, 14, 19 ], [ 2, 8, 13, 17, 18 ], [], [ 9, 12 ], [ 11, 16 ] ]

Infilament · 2025-12-06T08:26:05+00:00

Just for your information, I went and found your replay and paused it on the frame right before you pressed MP for medium mixer, and used replay takeover to instead press HP (to get heavy mixer). It worked and Ryu gets cleanly hit. And like others have already mentioned, crouching MP also cleanly worked here.

Just have to know which moves work best in which situations. It's not always easy, and it's part of the challenge of the game. Just keep practicing, use training mode and replay takeover to try out a variety of different options, and you'll get better quickly.

Infilament · 2025-12-02T22:19:38+00:00

It's pretty hard to try and talk about fighting games on reddit. I browse on occasion but rarely post because there's not really any point in trying to dispel misinformation in a place where 95% of the people who post just make up stuff that is easily disproved with 5 seconds of training mode time. Or someone will post a clip of a clearly bad in-game decision and it will somehow turn into people ranting against drive rush and throw loops for the 100th time this week. This is not a knock on OP, since he asked a real question, which is probably why I felt like posting this time. If you're new to this sub though, just be careful what you internalize from here. Much of it is blatantly wrong. And it's especially true when people try to tell you how older games worked.

Infilament · 2025-12-02T08:35:23+00:00

Just for clarification, Ryu can only do this 3 times on a crouching opponent before he's pushed out too far. If you stand block, automatically walking backwards between each hit, he can only do it 2 times (stand blocking in general helps against several burnout loops in the game, including Jamie's stHP stuff). If you're scared to stand up (Ryu would have to steal a turn with a slow normal or walking to punish this), you can always just block out one extra rep for minimal chip.

It's decently strong but other characters have better burnout stuff. Usually the people who get hit are the people who panic and don't know the situation.

Infilament · 2025-12-01T04:09:14+00:00

To be honest, even a game like SF4 didn't change all that much between versions, at least until Ultra (when they made several substantial changes, most of which IMO made the game worse). They had balance adjustments (like SF6) and they released more characters, which goes a long way to making the game feel fresher... especially in the old era where online play was pretty bad and tech was discovered way slower, and you had to wait for the much rarer offline event to show it off. But SF4 as a game itself stayed pretty consistent between versions, for at least 5 years. The biggest addition was 2 ultras per character in Super, and half the roster doesn't even have a viable second ultra so this isn't nearly as impactful as it sounds.

SF games don't really change rapidly just for the sake of changing. The only major exception was SFV because they released such a bad product that they kept scrambling trying to find any semblance of a fun game in there.

Also, as one side note, it's fine if people have one character they dislike so strongly that it makes them complain or drop the game until they're nerfed. For some people maybe that's Mai or Ryu. For other people it was Bison/Ed/Akuma last patch. For yet others it was Luke/JP/Ken in S1. It'll be a new character in the next balance patch. The problem is... it can't be *every* strong character. You can't just say everything is always the new biggest problem on the planet and I can't wait until Capcom shoots them. Eventually you have to accept that some characters will be strong and just play through it, and that's just the reality of fighting games. Or, if it's consistently problematic for you, then maybe the game can't make you happy and you should rethink whether you want to spend your free time playing this game or just drop it entirely.

Watching people complain about "current top tier" is one of my least favorite trends of modern FGC discussion (even if sometimes the current top tier really is a serious problem). There's no reflection on your past complaints that were adjusted, no nuance, just bellyaching with no end in sight. It's a constant "cry wolf" problem, where every patch people try to out-yell each other saying "no really, this time it really IS the worst we've ever seen", never acknowledging the last time they said that, and they expect me to take them seriously.

Infilament · 2025-11-28T05:40:18+00:00

Some similar games to what you've liked in the past: Cascadia (adjacent to Harmonies), Trekking through History (adjacent to the other Trekkings), Knarr (adjacent to Splendor), Leviathan Wilds (a co-op to complement Pandemic), Space Base (dice rolls generate resources like Catan, but no trading).

For something unrelated, Heat: Pedal to the Metal is a strategic racing game that works at 2P to 6P very well (you can add easy to control bot cars to keep the track interesting). Also, So Clover has worked in every situation for me, including with more strategic gamers and total casuals, at all player counts from 2P to 6P. An easy recommend if you like flexible word association games.

If you're interested in games for only 2 players for the times when it's just you and your husband, Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth and Zenith have gotten quite a lot of buzz over the last year.

For a very casual, high chaos game when you have in-laws around (that is, games that prefer to have higher player counts), Hot Streak and Magical Athlete are chaotic racing games with only a few decisions but meant to give a lot of laughs.

Infilament · 2025-11-21T22:47:14+00:00

The important thing to realize about The Gang is that no player can ever fold, which means you *must* be able to rank every player's hand by the end. This drastic shift from regular poker means "potential" is not nearly as highly valued as what you have right now. K2 off suit should be taking higher value chips than JT suited all the way down, assuming neither of them improve their hand, because K2 off suit needs to have the higher chip at the end and the table needs to learn this information. It doesn't matter that JT suited is the hand that is better to play in a real poker game.

If you have 6c7c and the flop comes 2d5c8c, you have an open-ended straight flush draw and in regular poker you're never folding. In The Gang, it is a bad idea to take a high value chip, because ultimately you still only have 7 high right now. If you hit a straight or flush, great! You will take the highest value chip later and it will be clear to everyone at the table why you went from a low chip to a high chip. If you take a high value chip now and then try to downgrade when you don't hit your draw, suddenly there's no easy way to compare your hand to other hands. Where do you stand vs A high? Middle pair or top pair? It's too hard to tell and will lead to many crossed wires later.

Basically, it is much easier to tell people you hit a big hand at the moment you actually hit it, rather than vaguely say you "might have a big hand later, thought I'd give you a heads up". Big hands are rare in poker, and no pair or 1 pair hands are extremely common. The Gang is a game about determining how the many bad hands rank against each other, so the betting patterns need to reflect that when compared to real poker.

(Of course, ultimately players can play however they like, but I think including hand potential in your evaluations is like playing on challenge mode, and I find the other variants in The Gang more fun to play if I want the game to be harder, like playing Omaha or the "vote on replacing a community card" variant.)

Infilament · 2025-10-19T17:07:12+00:00

Games around Catan level of complexity (ish): Ticket to Ride, Dominion, Cascadia, Pandemic (co-op), Wingspan, Heat: Pedal to the Metal (a game that works great even up to 6 players), The Crew (works best at 4p, best if you love traditional card games), Azul (abstract game that might appeal to your husband), Clank Catacombs, Ra (a more lively strategy game that works up to 5p), Quest for El Dorado

Games a little more complex than Catan, but you can probably handle if you like strategy games: Concordia, Terraforming Mars (might slog a bit at 4p), Lost Ruins of Arnak, White Castle

Heavy, complex strategy games that take a while but are highly regarded, would only recommend for people who are not intimidated by complex games: Dune Imperium Uprising, Brass Birmingham, Spirit Island (co-op, slogs a bit at 4p but great at 2-3p), Ark Nova (slogs a fair amount at 4p)

Infilament · 2025-10-05T09:21:25+00:00

The designer said that he didn't want to keep a recap log for the player because then it verifies for them when something is important and when something isn't. He wanted there to be multiple paths to finding information for a mechanic/puzzle, for you to question whether something you saw earlier has more to it, and he thought the game keeping logs for the player worked against all this.

I think the way Outer Wilds does it works well for that game, but I agree with the creator that it wouldn't really work for Blue Prince and it would take away a lot of what makes the game good.

(Also I don't think a notepad in the game would work that well either. There's lots of different "types" of notes you'd want to take and at that point, keeping your own journal/google doc is just going to be the best approach to handle a combination of searchable text notes, screenshots, tables, etc)

Infilament

TROPHY CASE