Fuji Flush – Thomas Wells
Fuji Flush is a good time. It’s like super Uno that doesn’t fall into an infinite loop, especially at higher player counts. Basically, you play a card from your hand, and if the turn comes around to you again, and someone hasn’t “flushed” your card, you discard it. Get rid of your hand to win. Flushing is playing a higher card, but if someone plays the same card, your values are added together and you enter a sort of partnership where all same-card values are tougher to flush.
Mainly, it’s an excuse to say flush a lot, but it’s a hoot with a larger count, and is really easy to table and play at the end of a night.
Ease of entry?
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?
★★★★★ – Will definitely play it again
Read more articles from Thomas Wells
Terra Eterna – Kevin Brantley
We at Meeple Mountain always enjoy the chance to cover self-published titles, as they often don’t get the opportunity to be showcased to a larger audience. Terra Eterna is one of those titles, a semi-cooperative RPG focused on exploration and character building.
Unfortunately, the game starts falling apart at the seams almost immediately. At its core, it’s a tile-exploration game that encourages players to build unique character classes and defeat monsters. There are some genuinely interesting ideas here, but getting to them means fighting through one of the most frustrating rulebooks I’ve encountered in quite some time.
The rulebook is atrocious, and it’s maddening how confusing the writing can be. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt that some of this comes from a rough English translation, as the creator is based outside the U.S., but many passages are written as though I’ve already played the game before. It felt less like learning a new game and more like being handed a “rules refresher” that glosses over important details while leaving huge gaps. I spent plenty of time scouring BGG for answers, and many of my questions still went unanswered.
The cards don’t help matters either, constantly introducing terminology that isn’t clearly defined anywhere. And good luck if you run into a fringe case, because chances are the rules won’t provide much help. The whole experience feels half-baked, which is a shame because there are some genuinely neat ideas buried underneath all the confusion.
We struggled just to get through a full game and eventually resorted to improvising whenever the rules failed us. At that point, it becomes difficult to even judge whether you’re playing the game correctly.
Terra Eterna is probably the worst game I’ve played in 2026, and I’d avoid this one entirely, or at least until the rulebook gets a substantial rewrite and polish. There may be a worthwhile game hiding somewhere underneath, but right now, finding it requires far more work than I’m willing to put in.
Ease of entry?
☆☆☆☆☆ – Gave up. The rules actually don’t make sense as written.
Would I play it again?
☆☆☆☆☆ – No chance
Read more articles from Kevin Brantley.
Bring Your Own Book – Justin Bell
The publisher Happy Camper has mostly done me right over the last couple years, including rebranded imports of nana (in the form of Trio) and Hachi Train (Jungo, one of my top ten games of 2025). With Bring Your Own Book—a game that BGG says was first self-published in 2015 before getting editions from Gamewright, among others—Happy Camper continues to mine a global catalog to freshen up titles that are then made available for the masses.
Here, the title is also the game. Players, armed with books from their own collection, read prompts from a deck of cards then run through their books to find something cute, funny, perfectly appropriate, etc. to answer the current prompt for the round. When one player finds a selection in their book that they like, each other player has 60 seconds to find something appropriate. The active player, after hearing each player’s answer, selects the one they deem best for the prompt and awards that player the prompt card…and, to ensure each player gets to use different books, players pass their book to the player on their left after any player earns their second prompt card. Depending on player count, the first to earn 4-5 prompt cards wins.
For our five-player game of Bring Your Own Book, each of us brought different book titles. From Sandra Boynton’s child-friendly board book Fifteen Animals to the 2022 edition of What Color is Your Parachute? to a Marvel-themed cookbook (and who DOESN’T love Hulk-themed appetizers?), we had plenty of wildly different content to choose from when answering prompts such as “a line from a bad online restaurant review.” I think Bring Your Own Book will vary quite widely based on the group, the books, and whether players aim to find the funniest thing (me) or the dirtiest thing or the most appropriate answer to a prompt, so it’s a very challenging game to review; as our colleague Tom Franklin likes to say, “YMMV” (your mileage may vary). And, two players agreed that Bring Your Own Book feels more like an activity than a game, something I could also see being true if played with a family because of the time constraints. I’m sure we’ll play this with family at home, but I still think Bring Your Own Book will have broad appeal for players.
Ease of entry?
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?
★★★★☆ – Would like to play it again
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
Beach Bandits – Andrew Lynch
Beach Bandits is a take-that set collection game in which seagulls compete to collect the best snacks. The art is charming, and the idea of the game is a good one, but the reality doesn’t leave much of an impression. There are worse things you can do with your time than play a quick game in which you are gently rude to your friends and loved ones, but there are also better quick games in that exact space. The best thing Beach Bandits has going for it is a contextual reason to shout “Mine!” every time you snag someone’s hot dog.
Ease of entry?
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.
Stuglandet – Justin Bell
Very cute, log cabin house-shaped game box. Funny box art with people who look like they are going in and out of the house. Easy rules, a rulesheet that doubles as a pre-set version of the game’s four-player standard set-up, and a playtime that wraps up in 15 minutes. The real kicker: house tokens that you roll like dice!
HABA’s new house token dice game Stuglandet has a lot of things going for it. But as a game, it is pretty shallow. Players roll three of their house tokens (from a starting pool of 12); based on how the houses land, players can place their houses on empty plots in a grid aligned to player count. But most of the rolls do something other than let a player place a house, like discarding a rolled house to move another house (your own, or an opponent’s) to a different plot, or replacing a house on the map with your rolled die. Houses that land slanted along their roof do nothing at all. (Stuglandet uses a modified Yahtzee roll format: three rolls, but you can’t hold dice from roll to roll; it’s all or nothing.)
This leads to a lot of “do, undo” turns: my 9-year-old son would roll a house on its side, then use that to move one of my house tokens out of a good scoring position. I would do the same to him. Houses only become permanent when all 3-6 spaces on a tile are full of a single player’s colored homes, which takes a little longer than it should. The end result is a product that looks exceptional and plays quite dry. I tried to get my son to play Stuglandet a second time. “Nah, I’m good,” was his response, made worse by the fact that he still wanted to play games that night, but not Stuglandet. The next day, then the next week, led to a similar series of dashed hopes. I think that’s because he knows what I know.
Ease of entry?
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
