Tile-laying fans, here is one for the shelf between Carcassonne and Azul. Slopes of Bordeaux is a new design from Toshiki Sato of Sato Familie, publishing in collaboration with Oink Games, and it asks players to lay down convex pentagonal tiles to score wine cards through pure geometry.
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Find events near youThe game uses fifteen different pentagon shapes (the kind mathematicians only finished cataloguing in 2017), painted in four colours. You draft a tile, place it following the board's constraints, and score whenever a vertex on the grid is fully surrounded by tiles. Complete a "circle" at a vertex and you take the matching wine card. Purple pieces score bonuses when they connect, giving you a reason to pay attention to colour as well as shape. It plays 1-5 in around 30-45 minutes.
Sato has been a quiet mainstay of the Japanese indie scene for years, and teaming up with Oink Games is a smart move. Oink has built its reputation on the kind of small-box designs that travel well abroad, from Deep Sea Adventure and Startups through to Petiquette, which just took home Japan's Golden Box Award (the industry-voted prize equivalent to a national "game of the year"). Their titles tend to punch above their weight at conventions because the rules fit on two pages and the components look great.
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Start organising for freeSlopes of Bordeaux debuts at Game Market Spring 2026 in Tokyo on 23-24 May, and it is the sort of thing that usually creeps into UK shops a few months later via Hachette's steady trickle of Oink localisations. If you like puzzly tile-placement but have played Azul to death, keep an eye out at UK retailers later in the year.
Sources: W. Eric Martin | Oink Games
