I
adore
Galaxy Trucker. Anniversary Edition will probably be my first big purchase whenever next I get any kind of excess money (so, a while).
Just come back from playing a bunch of new games fresh from Essen!
Spellcaster
is a sort of Magic-the-Gathering-lite for two to four players in two teams (you can play one-v-two as well). Not a collectable money-sink like Magic but one box where you're vying for control of four schools of magic to either earn enough gems to win or to run down your rivals' life to zero. I liked this quite a lot; it's pretty fast-paced and chaotic and you'll spend much of the game
so close
to executing deadly combos but mostly just narrowly foiling each others' setups. All the cards are apparently unique and the teamwork relying on instinct (you can't confer) is a nice challenge.
Castle Crush!
is a construction-and-destruction game where four players build small castles out of wooden pieces of various shapes, trying to make them sturdy enough to protect your King and General figurines while also earning more points for the higher you stack your pieces (and therefore the bigger the risks you're taking of it falling apart). Then you drop a small hammer on each other's castles and get points for the buildings and figurines you knock down as well as the parts that are left standing on yours at the end. There's lots of giggling building your stupid fortresses but sadly it's not quite as satisfying to destroy them as I'd like, partly because you can't really build them big enough for a hilariously massive collapse to be possible. Worth a try but not sure there's enough pure joy in there once the initial amusement has worn off.
7 Red
is a quick, 10-minute card game where, if you aren't winning the game after you play a card for your turn, you immediately lose. On your turn you can play a card for its value, or play one to use its colour to replace the previous colour-based wincon, or both. Easy to pick up and devilishly clever. Should be well worth the small-box price.
Robin
is a set-collecting and trading game that plays up to six which I really enjoyed. You have to be wheeling and dealing to get seven of the same type of card at the end of anyone's turn to win while jostling for position on a board, your position on which determines how good a draw you get at the start of the turn but also how much you risk being bumped back to the bottom of the track as well as each space giving a bonus to a certain type of card. There's a little bit of memory involved in figuring out who's going for what and a few good twists.
Sushi Draft
is a super-simple drafting game that takes about 10 minutes and that's really all there is to say about that. Good introductory game for drafting mechanics, decent filler stuff, I imagine would be pretty good as a cheap app game.
Polish game, name of which I cannot remember because the box was in Polish
GOD DAMMIT I wish I could remember what the title was (there were English rules in the box, at least, not that you'll really need them). It's a storytelling and memory game, like Once Upon a Time in that you have to fit a certain number of elements into your story but you don't interrupt each other, just tell a quick story one by one before reversing direction and telling a second one each. When everyone's done two stories you then start taking turns naming the elements from each other's stories to score them, losing points if you have cards left over that nobody was able to remember. This was the only one that I played twice tonight and could see myself doing it a lot more. It distills some of the better parts of OUAT and you can adjust the difficulty of the memory game to suit the players by changing the number of cards everyone uses per story. I'll post here again when I find out what it's called.