New to Me – July 2026

July had no conventions or anything, but yet it somehow managed to almost have as many new to me games as June did.

The fact that all of these were shorter games, unlike last month, made things a bit different though.

I’ve now played 40 new to me games this year, so I am kind of slacking.

In 2025, I played 84 new to me games, so my pace is falling behind.

I need a new convention where new to me games come out!

Or I need to buy some more (don’t tell my wife that).

The Cult of the New to Me was extremely happy this month, though, and has actually been quite satisfied with my behaviour lately.

Two of these three games are from the ancient times!

Well, the 2004 one, the version I have was actually published in 2024, but still.

Even the most recent game was published in 2024.

That’s two whole years!

That game’s almost an adult now, in game years.

That means no leadership coup this month, but who knows what next month will bring?

Cult leaders have to watch their backs.

Without further ado (all of my ado was stolen in The Great Rat Mob War of 2016 anyway), let’s begin!

Don’t forget that you can click on a picture to expand it.

Ratzia (2004 – 25th Century Games) – 3 plays

Designer: Reiner Knizia

Artists: Ivan Iserte, Michael Menzel, Sarah “Freedz” Conlon

Players: 2-5

Ratzia (formerly known as Razzia) is a card game version of the classic Knizia auction game Ra.

While it’s certainly not as good as that one, it’s pretty good in its own right and will definitely be somewhat of a staple of our lunch time games at work.

However, I won’t blather on about it because I’ve reviewed it!

You can find out more there.

Up or Down (2024 – Capstone Games) – 1 play

Designers: Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer

Artists: Marek Bláha, Kwanchai Moriya, Jina Rueter

Players: 2-6

Remember The Game?

That game where you are cooperatively playing cards to move two stacks upwards from 1 to 100 and two stacks downward from 100 to 1?

Up or Down has a couple of small samplings of those mechanics but in a competitive game where players are managing three elevator shafts in their building.

Players will always have 3 cards in their hand and there will be four cards placed in sequence out on the table in a rough circle.

Turns are simple.

You play one of your three cards into the space between the two numbers that surround it.

So in the above picture, if you played a 60, it would go between the 55 and the 70.

You then take one of those cards and add it to one of your three elevator shafts, replacing it with the card you played.

Shafts have to go in numeric sequence either ascending (1-126) or descending (126-1)

If you can’t play a card to any of your shafts (or don’t want to for some reason), you have to scrap one of your shafts into your discard pile and those cards will be worth 1 point each.

Otherwise, at the end of the game, each shaft is worth a fair number of points, scored by multiplying the number of cards of the colour you have the most of (so the centre shaft would be 4 because of the red cards) by the number of cards in total in the shaft (so 6).

That shaft would get you 24 points.

Thus, it pays to try to get as much of one colour as you can in each shaft, but you also want to make sure you can get a lot of cards into it.

The game ends when all players are out of cards (you draw from either the face-down or face-up pile once you’ve played a card).

This is a fairly quick game (around 45 minutes or so) and it’s very, very, VERY tactical in nature, as you never know what cards are going to be on the table when it’s your turn.

That, and if you draw from the face-down pile, you don’t know what you are going to get.

I really enjoyed it, but I understand that it can be way too random for some people.

If I can get it played at work (it didn’t go over the greatest at our Sunday game day), then a review of that will be coming shortly after that.

Rumble Nation (2017 – Hobby Japan) – 1 play

Designer: Yogi Shinichi (与儀新一)

Artists: Toru Kageyama, Yogi Shinichi (与儀新一), ヤマモトマサアキ（Yamamoto Masaaki)

Players: 2-4

Rumble Nation is a short area control game about the civil war in Japan during the Sengoku era.

The board is divided into regions and each region is randomly assigned a number from 2-12.

Each player also drafts one of the available Daimyos which will give them a one-time powerful action to use when their Daimyo has been placed on the board.

Finally, there are tactic cards equal to the number of players that will also let you do a one-time action to move some of your troops around (or destroy some of your opponents’).

You can only play a tactic card once during the game, so you take it to show that not only can nobody do that tactic anymore, but that you’ve already done one so can’t do another.

Otherwise, you roll your three dice and this will determine where (and how many) you can place soldiers on this turn.

One of those soldiers can be your Daimyo, who counts as two soldiers for the area control and will allow you to do your Daimyo action.

You split your dice into a pair and a single die.

The single die determines how many soldiers you place (using the formula in the picture above) and the pair determines which region they will go in.

So you do have some choices!

As area control, you are basically wanting to have the most soldiers in the province to earn that number of points (2-12).

Second place gets half of that total.

Regions are scored at the end of the game in sequence, starting with the 2 region, which is where some of the strategy (or at least tactics) comes in.

Since they’re scored in sequence, you would score region 3 before the other regions in the above picture.

Black, who wins region 3, will be able to reinforce all adjacent regions with two more soldiers (white mercenary soldiers, I guess?).

However, the caveat to that is the adjacent region has to have your own soldiers in it already.

So black would reinforce region 6 but not region 12.

This can be quite valuable, because it can get you more points!

With the two reinforcements, black would now get 2nd place in region 6 rather than yellow.

Which brings up the other consideration.

Whoever runs out of soldiers first gets the first tie-breaker for any tied regions. The second player gets second tie-breaker, etc.

So if yellow had the tie-breaker over black, those reinforcements would be very valuable for black because they wouldn’t get 2nd place otherwise.

The tactics and Daimyo actions are the only way to move troops around the board, so you can only do that at most two times in the game.

Otherwise, it’s all determined by your dice rolls and reinforcement.

Which is way too random for some people, but you do get one reroll (you have to take the second roll if you do that).

I enjoy this game for what it is. It’s a 20-30 minutes area control dice game with a few tactical considerations.

If I manage to get a third play of this game in, I’ll do a full review, which might happen.

It plays 4 players and it’s a fast game, so it might make the end of a game day again (if James isn’t there, as he really didn’t like it at all).

So we’ll see?

There you go. A small number of new to me games, and they’re all basically fillers or lunch time games!

What new to you games did you play in July?

Let me know in the comments.