If you like interactive and fast-paced card games that force you to squeeze every strategic and tactical advantage out of a hand of 7 cards I would definitely recommend taking a closer look at this game.

Benjamin "Hadara and Emara" Schwer brought his latest creation to Essen Spiel: Djinn. The box and the game board are not immediately appealing: the box looks rather corny and the game board is especially very beige... Does the gameplay offer enough counterbalance?

In Evenfall players lead a coven of witches. Send them out to discover new places of power to add to your domain (tableau), perform rituals in those places to get an immediate bonus or an additional action spot your witches can visit; recruit specialists that will give you access to powerful abilities or end game scoring conditions just for you – the choice of how to use these specialists is up to you!

If you love tableau building games there is no way around Forest Shuffle this Fall and Winter. Working your way through a big deck of cards to get the best selection of cards that work well together, trying a different combination of forest dwellers with each play is both relaxing and rewarding; but most of all: plain fun.

This is not a multiplayer solitaire game where, as the player playing the insects, you place green cubes representing bees and ladybugs on the tiles and then let them walk around the board happily and peacefully. No. In this game, it's best to think of those green cubes as praying mantises. Who will stop at nothing in this world where a poisonous spider, a bird of prey or a pesky snake lurks behind every corner. Many of the actions you and your opponents do have a direct effect on the world and on the other players.

In this game players build a tableau with 2 rows of 6 action cards. Each turn, the active player rolls two dice which determine which action in each row all players get to activate. Your tableau starts out with basic actions, but as the game progresses you will buy more powerful action cards to be more fitting to your strategy. Most of the action cards give you resources like cows, money and cowboys. But there are also some icons on the cards - if you manage to trigger two cards with the same icon, you get a bonus action!

Turns are simple: you place a tile (but you can’t add a tile to a column that’s complete – that has the number of tiles it needs to have according to the blueprint/the number tile at its bottom), choose to activate the tile’s effect or not, and take a new tile from the market. The fun resides of course in the abilities of the different tiles and how you can use those to manoeuver your tiles into the best position for scoring, or mess up your opponents’ plans.