Hi! My name is Cate. This is my selection of my favorite ten games from last year.

#10. Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River

Katmai is about these bears that you get to put in different places, and they have to survive and catch fish. The bears can compete for territory and food. With the bears your goal is to put them in places to make a pattern to score points. And all the bears have these fun little names that I like, and they’re all real bears from Alaska. I think it is a good game for all nature lovers.

#9. Hot Streak

Hot Streak is a good funny game that kids can play. It’s really funny because the characters fall down while they’re racing. The game is about these silly characters that are mascots for different restaurants or stores, and they’re racing to compete to see which mascot is best. You don’t exactly control the characters. Instead, you have cards you draw to see which one falls, which one is ahead, and which one travels the farthest. You win by voting which mascot you think will win and if that mascot wins you will earn money. There are three main races in Hot Streak and whoever has the most money from voting on their favorite mascot wins the game.

#8. Magical Athlete

Like Hot Streak, Magical Athlete is a racing game. But instead of moves played by cards, the characters walk by rolling a die. We do a big snake draft to see which characters we’re going to get. There’s a very big variety of characters. A normal round is four races. There are also these things on the racing track that can move you up a space, give you a point, or move you backward. There are some characters that have good abilities like an extra roll or moving an extra space, but there are some who are not as good, with defaults such as not being able to land on the finish space unless you get the right roll. It is a good game to play with a big group and see how this silly race turns out.

#7. Thunder Road Vendetta

Thunder Road is about these racing cars. Sometimes they run into difficulties on the road that slow them down or crash them. You play as the cars themselves, and the racetrack is different almost every time. Some racetracks are hard and some are easy; there’s one racer that is a helicopter that flies over the cars and drops bombs on them to slow them down, and there’s a car that’s so long, and that’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. There’s a lot of action and excitement, and cars that have a bad course on the tracks won’t make it through.

#6. Tic Tac Trek

Tic Tac Trek is like Tic Tac Toe, but once you score the game isn’t over. Instead you place a campfire. Oh, and instead of a board that’s just normal Tic Tac Toe, there are tiles you put out. Tiles can be stuff like forests or mountains. It has to touch another of its kind, and it can’t go diagonal. Rivers are rare and can touch anything. They don’t even have to touch other rivers, they can touch anything and anything can touch them. But if a token cannot touch one of its own kind, you can place it anywhere, but if it’s possible to touch a river, then you have to make it touch a river. Scoring isn’t about how many lines you make with the tokens, it’s how many free spaces are around your campfires. That makes it kind of tricky because you might be good at scoring points in Tic Tac Toe, but you might not see your opponent coming to block your free spaces. I like the little campfires and the cool little nature spaces.

#5. Ichor

Ichor is about these battling Greek Gods and Greek Monsters, like a minotaur or Aphrodite. They each have special powers that make them unique, and the goal is to go really far on the board. Whenever you move on a space, you place a token to show that the space is yours. But whenever someone else goes over your tokens, they replace them with one of their own tokens. Whoever places all of their tokens first wins. A lot of special powers can mean jumping over opponents, or blocking them, or mimicking them, so you can place the most tokens. I really like Greek myths so it’s fun to play to see the monsters and gods fighting like that. The game doesn’t end with death or execution, but is just a quick little game about their rivalry.

#4. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

Tidal Blades is this fun game about these characters that are half-people half-animal. They live on floating islands on the ocean. The game is based on what might happen in the future. It has different dimensions, a big world, and monsters to beat, many missions, and portals to different worlds. And it is a really fun game for people who like imaginative things. There is this one big monster at the very end [minor spoiler] that you fight with everybody, whether you are them or not. It just has a lot of character and fun in it. It isn’t only about the heroes’ adventures, it’s also about them relaxing in their hometown and stuff. I really like that it’s this big adventure that people can go on.

#3. Agent Avenue

Agent Avenue is basically this small little board with these small little spaces that the characters go on. Whoever catches the other person’s character wins. There are little cards that show how much you move by. There are even these little mice [in the expansion] that can go either way to catch your rival for you. It has very many tricks and a lot of things that you might not see coming. For your turn, you will put out two cards, one face up and one face down; your rival takes one card and then you take the other. It’s hard because you don’t know which one your rival will take, and some cards can be things that make you win or lose the third time you get it. So whatever cards you pick out for yourself or your rival, they can either defeat you themselves or make it really easy for you to win. I like the little animals that we play as in Agent Avenue and all the twists and turns.

#2. March of the Ants

March of the Ants is about these little ants and you can create your own type of ant with these different cards to see what will be best for you. It is all about taking over territory and finding different dens, finding worm holes, and beating centipedes. The ants in the game must spread popularity, find food, and keep pressing forward and laying eggs to survive. There is a winter in this game and it’s all about how the ants have to survive through it, and how they prepare for it. Whoever has the most points through all the winters in the game wins. I like the different species of ants you can make up, and I just like the game, because that’s normal nature, to learn to survive.

#1. Tag Team

Tag Team is about these different sides that are fighting. You pick two characters and they have these different powers and abilities they can use against your rival. They have hit points, and you have these planned attacks in your deck. New cards have to slide into your deck; you can’t swap your deck’s order. It is hard because you kind of know what attacks are coming, but not exactly, and we each do our attacks at the exact same time, so you can block them or defend yourself, which makes it really tricky but really fun. It makes me feel smart because I always beat my daddy.

Those are my favorite games from last year! Daddy said I couldn’t pick Compile because he didn’t write about it last year, but I have the new Compile, too. It’s my favorite game.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)