Here is a small box that will earn its keep at a summer game night. Sandcastles, from Pandasaurus Games, is a drafting and tile-laying game for 2 to 6 players that runs about 20 minutes, and the whole thing is about stacking a sandcastle before the tide rolls in.
Stop juggling Meetup, WhatsApp, and spreadsheets. One platform for your gaming group's events, RSVPs, and member management.
See how it worksIt is designed by Alex Cutler, whose Critter Kitchen and A Place for All My Books both trade on the same trick of hiding a proper spatial puzzle inside something that looks like a coffee-table trinket. Everyone starts with a Starter Tile anchoring the bottom centre of an imaginary five by five grid. Over 15 rounds you draft one tile each and slot it into your castle, building outwards and upwards.
The drafting is where it bites. The active player flips tiles from a central stack one at a time, and you either take the tile in front of you or push it to the player on your left and gamble that something better is coming. Once you pass, you cannot go back, so hold out too long and you will be handed whatever is left.
Got a regular group? Create a private community, poll for the best date, vote on games, and let your friends RSVP in one place.
Set up your group for freeScoring pulls in several directions at once, and the pick of them is the birds. They only turn up on sky tiles and climb a Fibonacci-style track, so every extra bird is worth more than the last. Around that sit starfish that pay out for orthogonal pairs of matching colours, windows that score by the row, and flat-scoring shells, shovels and buckets with a majority bonus attached to each. None of it is complicated on its own. Juggling all of it across 15 forced picks is the puzzle.
Asmodee UK has it listed at an RRP of £19.99 for an August release, which puts it comfortably in impulse-buy territory, and Pandasaurus rates it at ages 8 and up. If your group needs a filler that is not another card game, line up a game night and give it a go.
Sources: Pandasaurus Games | Pandasaurus store | Asmodee UK
