New to Me – April 2025

While April wasn’t a really full month of games, it was surprisingly full of new to me games!

Six new to me games out of the fourteen I played is actually a really good ratio.

I love it when months come together like that.

Of course, it helps when Abi shows up at Sunday game days consistently, as there’s always something new to play! Four of the six were from him.

One day I will get some of my new games to the table too.

However, I love months like this because I always enjoy games that I haven’t played before!

Especially when some of them are actually kind of old.

That keeps the Cult of the New to Me happy too.

Hell, when they saw that one game was from 1999, they were extremely happy!

I need to do more of that, because they were starting to get antsy.

No rebellions on my watch!

Until next month, anyway.

Anyway, without further ado (all of my ado was shipped off to Germany for some evil Nazi ceremony anyway), let’s begin!

In the Shadows: Resistance in France 1943-44 (2025 – GMT Games) – 3 plays

Designers: Daniel Bullock, Joe Schmidt

Artist: Not listed on BGG

Players: 1-2

In the Shadows is a fantastic 2-player game about the disparate French Resistance cells fighting the German occupation in World War II.

I’d tell you more about it, but why not just go read the review?

Bus (1999 – Splotter or Capstone Games) – 1 play

Designers: Jeroen Doumen, Joris Wiersinga

Artists: Herman Haverkort, Tamara Jannink, Daan van Paridon, Thijs van Paridon, Joris Wiersinga

Players: 3-5

Bus may be the first Splotter game I’ve ever played.

They’re just so damned intimidating, since they’re famous for the “if you can’t lose on the first turn, why have a first turn?” comment (or something like that).

That kind of thing has kept me away from the longer games (if you can lose on the first turn, why should I spend 5 hours playing this?), but Bus actually isn’t that long, and I don’t know if it follows that maxim anyway.

Instead, it’s a game about building bus routes and delivering passengers to the locations they want to get to.

And it’s very cool!

Maybe not my type of game, but still very cool.

The game has a really unique action selection mechanism where you have 20 actions in the game.

That’s right. IN THE GAME.

Each round, you can do as many actions as you want (though really they start to have diminishing returns, to the point where nothing will happen if you do it).

However, if you run out of actions, you can’t do anything else the rest of the game, so you really want to ration them as well as you can.

But not too much, because the game ends when only one player has actions left, so you may not want to be that person!

The map just shows a lot of locations with streets branching all over the place.

There is no sharing of routes (unless you literally cannot place a route), so you have to use your actions judiciously to build routes.

Other actions are one person being able add passenger capacity each round, which also adds to the number of routes that all players can build when they take that action.

They can place buildings around the board, add passengers to the two bus depots (the blue depots in the top right and lower left corners of the board).

Or they can send passengers to where they want to go!

The destination location type changes each round but you know what it will be.

Unless somebody takes the action to stop time passing, which means that the location type won’t change and will be the same as last round.

That costs them a point, but it can be very strategic to do that!

You get points for getting passengers to where they want to go each round.

The game is fun and very thinky.

It might be a bit too much for me to enjoy too often, but I wouldn’t turn it down if others want to play it.

Moon Colony Bloodbath (2025 – Rio Grande Games) – 1 play

Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino

Artist: Franz Vohwinkel

Players: 1-5

Don’t you hate it when you are at some remote location, where you can’t get away, and then everything just starts going wrong until everybody is wiped out?

That’s Moon Colony Bloodbath, a game from the designer of Dominion, though this is not a deckbuilder.

At least not really.

Each player has their own moon base with a bunch of population, and the events deck starts out pretty benign.

There are a couple of work cards and some other minor issues.

But there are also cards that have you add other events into the deck. This event goes on top of the deck, which means that it will be the next one that comes out.

There are two Work cards that let you take an action, like farming or mining (to get food or steel) or maybe build one of your research cards. You could draw more research cards, or maybe add some crates to some of your buildings (which can come in handy for future events).

The idea is to build a bit of an engine if you can, with buildings helping other actions, or just doing really cool things.

Until they break.

A lot of the events (or robots going haywire, which can also be added to the deck) will cause you to lose population.

If you don’t have enough population to spend, you have to destroy a building for its population (the Mine above has 5 population).

The problem becomes that the event deck gets bigger and bigger, but there are still only two Work cards in it. They are not going to come out as often.

Though you can add your own personal perks to the deck, if a card lets you do that.

This game definitely generates a lot of laughs and tension as you are turning over the cards in the event deck and groaning when something comes up that will really hit your colony hard.

However, I did find that it dragged on a bit too long, with massive up and down waves of tension as it feels like the game’s about to be over but then something happens to increase the population, or let you build a building (which essentially adds population too).

I thought the game was going to be over, then it kept going…until I thought it was going to be over, then it kept going…

It did finish in just over an hour, so it didn’t totally overstay its welcome.

But it felt like it did.

Still, I’d play it again. If you can get a good engine going like James did, you will romp to victory.

Habitats (2016 – Cwali/AllPlay) – 1 play

Designer: Corné van Moorsel

Artists: Filip Gavril, Daniel Profiri, Dominique Ramsey, Steven Tu

Players: 1-5

Habitats is an older tile-laying game where you are exploring to find new species and new natural areas to form the best nature preserve and get the most points.

Each turn, you’re moving your range rover around one space (and the direction you’re facing matters!) to collect a tile and add it to your preserve.

Some tiles are gates or other terrain tiles.

Others are animals that want certain terrain types next to them (and also their own tile’s terrain counts if it matches what they want).

You’re trying to lay tiles so that all the required terrain types are next to the tiles that want them.

Some of the tiles are tourists or gates or flowers, and you just have to have them in your preserve somewhere.

There are three round goals as well, which will give you more points if you meet them better than the other players do.

Once you’ve completed the three rounds, you’ll total up all the scoring of your tiles and see who wins!

This is a pretty cool game. It’s another one where you kind of have to picture what you’re going to need and where to place it, but it’s more tactical in that when you place a tile, you then have to try to place the appropriate ones around it.

So not as much forward planning, other than trying to meet the goals.

I enjoyed it and would play again, but it’s not something I’m clamoring to play again.

Botanicus (2024 – Hans im Glück) – 1 play

Designers: amuele Tabellini Ferrari, Vieri Masseini

Artists: Marcel Gröber, Franz-Georg Stämmele

Players: 2-4

When there were three of us left and we didn’t want to leave our game day, this game got brought out and it was actually pretty fun!

Though I sucked at it.

In Botanicus, you’re trying to build the best garden over three rounds.

Each player has a garden board and one gardener (in later rounds, you’ll unlock your second one)

Each round, players will choose an action space and take that action, which may be planting some new items, or moving along one of the three tracks.

In addition to planting, some actions actually let you improve previously-planted stuff, which makes them even prettier and more appealing.

You can also move your gardener each turn because you have to move him (or them) adjacent to a place you want to plant something.

Each row has in-game goals that you’re trying to satisfy by having the proper plants installed in your garden on that row, and these will get you points.

But the most important thing to keep in mind is those tracks. They will often give you free actions, and moving all the way on one can give you really lucrative bonuses.

I spent too much time doing a little of everything rather than a lot of a couple things, and I suffered for that.

After three rounds going through the action grid at the bottom of the board, whoever has the most points wins!

This game was pretty good, though it’s not my favourite. It’s on Boardgame Arena so maybe I could try and get better.

Do I want to?

Eh, maybe?

It does have a rather interesting action selection mechanism, where if you choose the better action, often you’re going second or third (or even fourth, though we didn’t play a 4-player game) in the next round. Thankfully, you know what the next round’s actions are, so you can gauge how important it is to do something this round and how important it is to be first next round so you can do what you want.

I definitely enjoyed it.

Would need further plays to determine how much.

Torchlit (2024 – Little Dog Games) – 1 play

Designer: David Spalinski

Artists: Phil Rynda, David Spalinski

Players: 2-5

Torchlit is another trick-taking game with a really cool dungeon exploring mechanic.

We all know that trick-taking games nowadays need a hook, and this one is that abstract dungeon crawl.

This creates a bit of tactical awareness. Do I want to win this trick? Do I just want to match the winner’s number instead?

Or do I want to go low so I can choose which cards go out into the dungeon?

Let me explain.

There are eight rooms (0-7) in the dungeon (the number of rooms may change based on player count) and it loops around if you move further than that.

At the beginning of the round, each player secretly puts one card face-down in front of them. This is your torch, and it’s essentially predicting which dungeon room you will end up in.

It is a trick-taking game, so how does that work?

As usual, there is somebody who leads the trick, but there is no trump suit.

You have to follow suit if you can, but if you can’t, you can play any card you want.

The winner of the trick gets to move one room forward.

If you didn’t follow suit but played the same number as the winner (but in a different colour), you also get to move forward.

The lowest number played (doesn’t matter the colour) then gets to distribute the cards in the trick to the rooms.

Any number of a single colour will automatically go to the room matching the number.

If there are two or more cards of a colour, that person gets to choose which one goes out (the other one is discarded).

Then that player also leads the next trick.

When each player has one card left, they’ll pick up their torch and decide which card they want to play for the final trick.

Your remaining card will go face-down to the room with its number, meaning you dropped your torch in that room.

If you happen to be in that room, great! You get more points.

You also get a point for each card that’s in your final room, including additional points if somebody else’s torch is.

After three rounds, total up the points and whoever has the most is the winner!

This is a really neat twist on the whole trick-taking genre!

I love the strategy and tactics. Do you really want to advance this round? Especially near the end when you are trying to end up in the room where your torch will be.

It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Schadenfreude, but it’s definitely high on my list.

I’d love to play this one again.

There you have it. Six new to me games in April, out of only 14 games played!

I love when that happens.

What new to you games did you play in April?

What do you think of these games? Especially Bus, since I know a lot of people love Splotter games.

Let me know in the comments.