I’ve played 186 games of Forest Shuffle this year. I like it a lot. Here are some new games I’ve played during the past few months.

Fishing. Friedemann Friese’s latest curious trick-taking game is a lot of fun. This is an evolving game with a lovely ebb and flow to it. The game starts simple. You play a normal game of trick-taking and score a point for every card you win. After the round ends, you shuffle the cards you’ve won and draw your next hand from those.

But what if you don’t have enough cards, or haven’t won any cards at all? No worries: you get to draw from the deck, aka the ocean. The ocean has bigger fish in it. It’s a layered deck where the cards get better the deeper you dive. So, if you don’t win any tricks in the first deal, you won’t get points, but you’ll dominate the next round.

There’s some luck involved, especially with the trump cards. You can get big cards from the ocean, but if someone has better trumps, they’ll still beat you. But it’s fine: Fishing is still a fun ride. Sometimes it gets slightly boring when you win a lot and know you can’t get any new cards for the rest of the game. In any case, Fishing has more interesting rounds than Stich-Meister, Friese’s earlier wacky trick-taker, which was more unbalanced.

Tea Garden. Tomáš Holek made a splash in Spiel this year, as a debut designer with three well-appreciated designs. Tea Garden piqued my interest, as a tea enthusiast. A friend bought the game, played it once and was ready to discard it right away. I requested a chance to try the game, and bought it from him after that.

I’m not sure it’s that good, but I wanted to give Tea Garden a chance – to get a second brew out of it. It’s a card-driven game with deck-building, and has Lost Ruins of Arnak vibes to it. No worker placement, though, but it’s a similar optimization puzzle. Here the flow of cards is even faster: all the cards you buy can be used immediately. Given this is a five-round game, that makes sense.

Tea Garden has a bunch of subsystems. The main operation is to build tea gardens to generate tea leaves, which are then used to buy more powerful cards and to score points from tea caravans. There’s a river to navigate, tea studies to attend to and an emperor to serve. You can’t do everything, so you have to prioritize.

With four players, the game easily takes 90 minutes. We play a two-player game in about 30 minutes. Both are interesting experiences, but I prefer the fast two-player game – this doesn’t need to be a 90-minute game, as it’s mostly solitary optimization. The fourth player doesn’t add much to the game except time.

Hamlet: The Village Building Game. A friend bought this recently. I’ve played this twice. The first time was a disaster: I don’t know what I was thinking, but clearly not the game, as I didn’t get any extra actions. I don’t think there’s a game where you can get extra actions and you can play a reasonable game without getting any. The second time I got an extra action as soon as possible, and the game was a much better experience.

Hamlet is a nice resource production and delivery game, with some light production logistics and a shared environment: nobody owns the production buildings, everybody can use them. The game looks pretty nice, and despite the initial sour experience, I’m looking forward to future plays. My friend also has the expansion, which I haven’t tried yet.

The Gang. Co-op texas hold’em poker? Why not! The Gang removes all betting and bluffing from poker. Instead, on every betting round, players take poker chips that suggest the rank of their hand compared to the other players. After the final betting round, the last chips must match the hand ranking perfectly. If the players can do this three times without failure, they win.

It’s all very simple and if the players have any familiarity with poker, you can teach this in seconds. However, poker experience is not required: even players with a vague understanding of how poker works can figure out the game (probably the hardest case is when you have a mixed group).

This is a great low-level intro game, and a good purchase if you need a game like that. I taught this to my casual game group and we ended up playing eleven games in a row.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. A pure impulse purchase. A friend whose taste I trust enough raved about the game. I cast aside my doubts over the length of the game (an hour per player, if not more), and bought it. I’ve so far played this once, but I can already tell it’s challenging 18 India as my personal game of the year.

Players hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence by sending probes and scanning the space. You can also develop tech to help in this process. Everything is fuelled by three basic resources: cards, credits and energy. Gaining income is crucial, and you never have enough resources.

In a sense, SETI also feels like Arnak, especially the early game: you have very little and need to spin it up to get a lot. There are many ways to do that. The game looks gorgeous and despite being fairly complex, is reasonably easy to teach. The rule book is excellent.

What comes to the length of the game, we played our first game with Nooa in 83 minutes. That’s about the 40 minutes per player the box promises, and we can likely play faster. I assume this is a 60-minute game for us eventually. At the same, I can see how this can be much longer in my game group, and I’ll know I’ll be avoiding the four-player game unless I know the players are fast.