by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Rob Sparks' Tinderblox has been a continued success for Alley Cat Games since its debut in 2020, so the publisher has a couple of new teensy games on its release schedule, including Barbecubes, a co-design by Sparks and Kuly Heer.

The appeal of the game is pretty straightforward:
In this co-operative game, players place "bbq pieces" on the fire and stack them in a particular configuration before taking them off the fire to plate up.

The game gets progressively more difficult the more cards you choose to play with.
Heer lays down some meat
▪️ A second new title coming in Alley Cat's "tin" series is Tic Tac Trek from Brett J. Gilbert and Trevor Benjamin.


As for what you do in the game, the Instagram post teasing this release says only "What kind of game do you think this is?", so you are free to speculate on the meaning of these bits.

▪️ In my January 2025 post about titles coming this year from German publisher HUCH!, I overlooked a trio of tiny titles (7x5x5 cm) that debuted from Swiss publisher Naivina, which was founded in 2024 by game designer Tobia Botta. (The Naivina logo is at right.)

HUCH! is bringing these games to the German market, so let's get to them, starting with Meteo, a 2-5 player design:
In Meteo, players try to find the best weather conditions for last-minute holidays.

To set up, lay out six face-up weather cards (worth +2 to -2), then place one of six color cards at random face down under each weather card. Each player secretly looks at one face-down card.


Shuffle the deck with sky cards in the six colors. Reveal sky cards one by one face up next to one another on the table. When 2-5 sky cards have been revealed, any player can shout "Off I go", collecting all of the cards present as they take off on a vacation. As a reward, they get to peek at another face-down color card. If no one has claimed the cards after five have been revealed, the weekend has arrived, and all of those cards are discarded before a new week begins.

Each player can claim cards at most three times. When all players have done so or the deck is empty, the game ends. Everyone tallies their score after revealing the face-down color cards to determine how much each sky card is worth. Whoever scores the most wins.
▪️ Blue Penguin is similarly for 2-5 players:
In Blue Penguin, each player tries to attract the cutest penguins, and the smaller they are, the cuter they are. The problem is that little penguins always follow the bigger ones.

To set up, place the color cards on the table in this order: blue (1-12), purple (13-24), red (25-36), orange (37-48), yellow (49-60), then place the corresponding cuteness value cards under the colors in this order: 2, 1, 0, -1, -2. Deal each player two penguin cards from the deck as their hand; penguin cards go from 1-60.


The start player in the round plays a penguin card face up, then each other player does so in turn, with everyone refilling their hand to two cards after playing. Whoever plays the highest card collects all of the penguins, then leads the next round. (In a two-player game, each player plays two cards before a winner is determined.) Continue additional rounds until all of the penguin cards have been played. Each player then calculates their score based on the color of the cards they collected. Whoever has the mots cuteness points wins.

As a variant, you can shuffle the cuteness value cards and lay them out in a random order.
▪️ Finally, we hit Wool Street, which is also for 2-5 players and which has only a skimpy description for now:
In Wool Street, you buy, sell, and trade colorful woolen goods in order to end up with the trendiest items in your wardrobe and lose as little as possible on the stock market. Analyze the market in order to act cleverly at the right time!

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