The Hanging Gardens – Justin Bell
Last year, I played The Hanging Gardens and covered it in our Dusty Euro series of articles. A card-splaying gem from 2008, The Hanging Gardens was a fun time at the table and reminded me a lot of the game Honshu. In this way, both games require players to lay small cards on top of other cards to satisfy scoring conditions in a very snappy 30-minute format.
I picked up a review copy of the 2025 version of The Hanging Gardens during my trip to SPIEL Essen 2025, and immediately noticed that the game format had changed. Now, players must complete a 12-card pyramid of garden cards that include scoring options for various elements, such as visitors, animals, irrigation cards (which must be placed in a certain pattern to satisfy a private milestone card), and various adornments to empty garden cards. There are public objectives along with a mechanic that requires players to choose from different card markets (in three columns) to draft the right cards.
The new version of The Hanging Gardens is pretty ordinary. In fact, this new version feels very much like what an industry friend likes to say about the modern state of the hobby: “new games are for new players.” Nothing about the 2025 version feels particularly special, there’s not much in the way of “wow”, and matching irrigation cards to the milestone card is often the only real drama during the game. If you are a hobbyist who plays a lot of tile-laying games, you can safely skip this version. If you are newer to the hobby and are looking for a very easy-to-teach card game with a nice-looking production and well-written rulebook, you can do a lot worse. Take a look on the secondary market for the 2008 original; I think that’s the better version of the game.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
Hits & Outs – Justin Bell
The Japanese publisher Itten provided a copy of their new two-player-only baseball game Hits & Outs at SPIEL Essen 2025. The game distills a normal three-hour baseball game into a 10-minute, three-inning affair where players alternate turns as the pitcher and the batter by asking the pitcher to set up a shell game, then asking the batter to guess where the pearl is.
That pearl is located under one of four covers, aligned with each of the four bases around a tiny cardboard baseball diamond complete with cute wooden meeples representing the pitcher, hitter, and runners for each team. During an inning’s setup, the pitcher uses three out tokens and a hit token under four white covers, which are aligned with each base. Then the batter has to flip a cover to see if it has the hit token. If it doesn’t, that’s one out for the offense. If the batting player finds the hit token, they put a runner on the associated base, or depending on the number of outs and current runners on base, push runners across the plate to score runs. The pitcher then sets up another round of the shell game until the batter generates three outs, resulting in players switching roles.
Hits & Outs is a mind game, which reminds me of my time playing baseball in high school…most of my at-bats were turned into a guessing game tied to what pitch I’m about to get from the guy on the mound. In the board game Hits & Outs, more often than not, players won’t get hits nor will they score runs. (Your odds always start out at a 75% fail rate, which aligns nicely with normal team batting averages in the majors.) My son won our first game 1-0, and that was only because he guessed right in the second inning when I hid the hit token next to home plate, resulting in an automatic home run. Hits & Outs does commit one major sin: with two outs, runners don’t automatically try to run the bases when the batter gets a hit. Everyone who has played baseball knows that runners always move on contact with two outs…which might mean the game was not designed by a person who understands the game. Hardcore baseball fans need not apply!
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★☆☆ – Wouldn’t suggest it, but would happily play it
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Will Hare
For someone with severe astrophobia, I somehow wind up playing just about every single space-themed game on the market. And they usually become some of my favorites, such as Arcs and Eclipse, which is hilarious with the context that I once walked out of the film Interstellar to calm myself down from a phobia-related panic attack. The brain is a strange thing. Early January, to celebrate my birthday I hosted a board game day where we broke out the old-school classic Battlestar Galactica and finished the evening with SETI.
Every time I play SETI, I find a new thing to be impressed by. It has an immaculate table presence, with its cool, uniquely-shaped board fitting together just perfectly. The galaxy map is the centerpiece, and the triple-layered rotating orbital board in the middle not only meshes beautifully well with the mechanics, but is just a joy to behold. The tech upgrades sit just right on your playerboard, the data discs are a cool translucent blue that gives them an alien vibe, and the art on the cards is vivid and gorgeous. I am a sucker for shiny, pretty things.
But that’s not all SETI has to offer. It takes a bunch of disparate mechanics (area control, economy-building, hand management, endgame bonuses, and more) and meshes them all together in a way that flows so smoothly, it’s easy to forget how much density there is here. This is not a light game, and yet the five rounds always sail by so fast that I’m both shocked and sad it’s over by the end. There are so many variations on strategy that you can play a ton of times and not feel like you’re replaying the same game all over again. For me, this is the game that Terraforming Mars wishes it was.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★★★ – Will definitely play it again
Read more articles from Will Hare.
CODO Berlin 63 – Andrew Lynch
It’s an odd thing, to spend an entire game telling yourself, “This should be better than this,” but that’s the CODO Berlin 63 experience to a T. It’s an update on Stratego, a game that is absolutely ripe for updating, but it isn’t enough of one. It just feels like I’m playing Slightly More Involved Stratego, though I do want to emphasize the “Slightly.” The bluffing isn’t particularly compelling, the game plods along without highs or lows, and then one of you wins. CODO Berlin 63 is one of the flattest gaming experiences I’ve ever had. But again, the strangest part of all of this is that I spend the entire time swearing up and down to myself (and others) that this game must be better than it is. But it isn’t. It’s exactly as good as it is, which isn’t very. If you need a Stratego in your life, I’d rather play this than that, but only just.
Ease of entry?
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?
★☆☆☆☆ – Would play again but will cry about it
Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.
Bohnanza – Andy Matthews
Uwe Rosenberg’s Bohnanza has been kicking around the board gaming world so long (1997) that it could rent a car in the United States. Yet for some reason I’ve always looked down my nose at this bean-themed card game. Perhaps because of its age, perhaps because of the artwork, or maybe just because I’ve never had the chance to play. But last night all that changed when a member of my gaming group mentioned he had a copy, and did we want to play.
In Bohnanza players attempt to earn the most coins by collecting, planting, and harvesting crops of bean cards. Each of the almost dozen different types of beans earn different amounts of coins based on how many of that card you have planted. Players plant cards from their hand, and negotiate for beans from a face up display in order to wrangle larger and larger crops of beans, which earn you more money.
The first 30 minutes or so was a bit rough as each of us figured out how much the cards were worth to us. Negotiations began very one-sided (with one member of our group not wanting to give anything of value away, but in turn wanting lots). But by the end we realized that even though you might give something of value away, it balanced out if you in turn got something of equal value. But because the game has lots of “micro-transactions”, it can be tough to determine the value of a trade. We actually found there were a number of times we just gave cards away because it was advantageous to clear cards out of the way for other cards.
All in all this is a surprisingly sophisticated game, especially when you realize this was Uwe Rosenberg’s first published title. I’m not saying I’d want to play it often, but I’m glad I got the chance to play this classic title.
Check out David’s review of Bohnanza for the full details.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★☆☆ – Wouldn’t suggest it, but would happily play it
