New to Me – February 2026

February was a slow month for new to me games, even with two days of a three-day convention.

Of course, fighting illness off and then actually not playing anything new for the February days of that convention would have something to do with that.

That should change next month.

But for this month, we have a couple of lunch time card games that actually are pretty good, if I do say so myself.

The Cult of the New to Me was pretty happy with me this month.

Not only was one of the games from 2019, but the other one is a revamp/reissue of a game from 2011!

I got the Nod of Appreciation from them.

That made me feel good.

Just wait until next month where all 13 games are from 2024 or 2025.

They’ll be furious!

So, without further ado (all of my ado was destroyed by some hamburger with a machine gun anyway), let’s get started!

Food Fight: Reheated (2025 – Cryptozoic Entertainment) – 2 plays

Designer: Nathaniel Yamaguchi

Artist: Robb Mommaerts

Players: 2-6

Food Fight is an old card game (2011) about getting an army of food to fight over a variety of different meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) that I had never seen on the table, but I had the app for it a long time ago.

I enjoyed it, and have heard good things about it from a friend of mine.

So when I discovered that they had reissued an updated version of the game, Food Fight: Reheated, and I saw that it plays 6 players, I had to jump on it.

There are three battlefield meals that you are fighting over in sequence, and for each battle you are drafting your army.

Each troop has a type, whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner, but you can play the troop on any meal.

Matching the meal type is mainly for tie-breakers.

You’re going to be drafting 8 cards in total for each battle, and some of them will be Support units and not troops.

These Support cards can be played during the battle to help the fight.

Once all of the cards are drafted, you’re going to pick 5 troops to be in your Troop deck, but the deck is shuffled.

Everything else remains in your Reserves (i.e. your hand).

Then players will flip the top card of their Troop deck, execute any Deploy effects, and compare Yumminess (the value in the gold medal in the top right corner).

Yumminess can be modified by troops in your Army (i.e. already-played troops) or Instants that you play.

For example, in the picture above, if you’ve played a Lunch troop, then it will have +4 Yumminess due to the card in your Army.

Whoever wins the skirmish, having the highest Yumminess after all modifiers, gets a Mint and then the next skirmish starts, until all Troop decks are empty.

You will also have one or more Mascots (you get dealt one at the beginning of each Meal), which have powerful effects.

Each Meal may have a round effect as well, or it may just be worth even more points than the ones that do have an effect.

Whoever wins the most mints in a meal also takes the meal card for its points, and all players convert their mints to points.

Of course, most points after three meals wins.

It’s a fun card drafting game with a few questionable cards/images (there’s one I didn’t picture that’s basically a suicide bomber), but overall I really enjoyed it.

Cover Your Kingdom (2019 – Grandpa Beck’s) – 2 plays

Designer: Jeffrey Beck

Artists: David Bock, Apryl Stott

Players: 2-8

I love Cover Your Assets, a quick and cutthroat card game about stealing other people’s cards.

Cover Your Kingdom takes that to the next level, changing from monetary assets to attracting creatures to your kingdom.

This time, your kingdom has two piles.

So you can’t just pile everything together!

Your kingdom is divided into lowlands and highlands, and the creatures you attract have to go in one or the other (some you can choose while others have to go in a specific one).

Of course, if you have at least one set of creatures in your kingdom already, then you can try to steal recruit another pile from a neighbouring kingdom (as long as they have at least two stacks of creatures in their kingdom).

Gameplay is very similar to the Advanced rules in Cover Your Assets.

You get two actions on your turn.

You can discard a card to draw a card, you can lay down a pair of creatures into your kingdom (covering another pair, hopefully), you can add another card to an already-placed stack that’s on top, or you can try to recruit a neighbour’s creatures by playing the same card (or a wild one).

They can defend by also playing the same card or a while, and it can go back and forth until somebody’s out or somebody decides to stop.

There are two types of Wild creature that you can play.

A CerbeRussell Terrier just counts as the creature you’re trying to steal.

However, a Spydra counts as two, and must be countered by two cards (or another Spydra).

There are also hirelings which can let you do things like move a collection to the top or bottom of a stack, or maybe even protect one side of your kingdom for a round.

As with the former game, there can be a lot of laughs in this one when somebody tries to steal with multiple cards, but the defender also has multiple cards.

Or they just have to give up that huge stack of Hentaurs because they can’t defend it.

There are also some advanced rules in this one, which we haven’t played with yet so I’m not going to review the game.

But the basic gameplay is a bit more tactical (but let’s admit it, not much) than its predecessor and it might be considered a slightly better game.

I know you have to think about things just a tad more than before.

I’d definitely keep playing this one as it works perfect for lunches.

There we go. Only two new to me games this month, but next month will have a lot more (it already has one and there’s still a convention to go to!).

What games that were new to you did you play in February?

Let me know in the comments.