Ground Control To Ma…
Hey PI-Fans, Wondering what we're unstuffing from the cargo pallets of board games today? Kenneth, PI Games Manager
Lego Monkey? Lego Monkey. – Monkey Palace, That Escalated Quickly – Grab & Game and Command of Nature: Sand & Wind – 10/02/25
Hey PI-Fans, While restocking the shelves, we've taken the opportunity to crack open a couple of newly arrived boxes and load the shelves up with several new titles. First up are a pair of fancy bite sized pieces of fun from both Unstable Games, publisher of Unstable Unicorns and Exploding Kittens Games. Unstable Games' Sand and Wind Expansion for the Command of Nature deck building adds in a pair of additional Elemental Sages, while Exploding Kittens pops out the Grab & Game edition of That Escalated Quickly allowing you to keep the player arranging cooperative game on you in pocket form. The largest box of the trio is Monkey Palace, a family game where players stack Lego bricks (Yes, actual Lego Bricks) to outscore their opponents by pleasing the watching Lego monkey figure through a combination of clever construction and decoration. This is on top of the usual spread of [...]
Store Reloads – Splendor: The Silk Road and UNLOCK! Supernatural Adventures – 05/02/25
Hey PI-Fans, The port CNY backlogs are beginning to ease and several pallets of stuff are beginning to slip through the cracks. While this week's slab of stuff touching down is primarily restocks, there's still a couple of titles that are worth bringing to your attention, specifically The Silk Road expansion for the 2nd edition of Splendor as well as the brand new Supernatural Adventures set for Unlock! Meanwhile, drifting in aboard the tide are reloads of titles like Azul Chocolatier, Azul Mini, Pandemic Legacy, The Crew and HEAT for the discerning gaming looking for a bit more depth in their gaming, while the battered party-game shelf is awash with reloads of sought after titles like Poetry for Neanderthals, I'm a Little Crabby and the delightfully named Let's Hit Each Other With Fake Swords! Also making it back onto the shelves for our ever popular Dungeon Crawler range are titles [...]
Meadow, Dobble and 5211 Reloads – 26/11/24
Hey PI-Fans, It can't be the big ones every week (and by most standards Blood on the Clocktower is plenty big) so this week we've taken a moment to take a look at the ever popular Dobble range. Known as Spot It in the US and Dobble just about anywhere else, in keeping with the idea that you can paste just about anything on a Dobble set, they've done quite a few. From the Classic Dobble, to Animals, DC, Harry Potter and Star Wars Characters, there's now a dearth of Dobble variants for your needs. The icing on the cake however is the Dobble Anarchy Pancakes, a collab between the Dobble crew and the wacky minds at The Exploding Kittens Company. Anarchy Pancakes takes a spin on the original matching formula with the introduction of single image cards which are significantly harder to spot matches with and get rid of [...]
Blood on the Clocktower, Unstable Unicorns Expansions, Unlock Kids – Legend Stories, Apiary – 19/11/24
Hey PI-Fans, It's been a hot minute but the tide of stock, both big and small, continues to roll in. The headliner this time around is the large-scale social deduction game Blood on the Clocktower, a murder mystery game where a group of players must find the demon within their midst before the town falls victim to its predation. The worker-placement game Apiary is an option for those of the more serious bent, with swarms of uplifted bees engaging in space exploration and colonization in order to win the favor of the hive's queen. The lighter end of the scale sees expansions for Unstable Unicorns arrive, with the Nightmares, Adventures and Unicorns of Legend sets ready to bulk out any copy of Unstable Unicorns or the Unstable Unicorns NSFW edition. If you're entertaining a child while the games are underway, Unlock! Kids - Legendary Stories is another tool in the [...]
Magic Maze: Tower and In A Grove – 17/11/24
Hey PI-Fans, It's always the oddest thing isn't it? Always popular as a timed cooperative party game, Magic Maze is a cooperative board game about navigating a mall sold by us, a store a store in the mall. Having made the leap from the now defunct Dude Games to new publisher Sit Down Games, this new printing of Magic Maze has arrived on the scene along with it's spin off sequel Magic Maze Tower which sees the haplessly broke adventures from the original Magic Maze thrown into jail after their failed plot to acquire adventuring gear through larceny. Keeping the unintentional crime theme going is the revised edition of In A Grove by Oink Games, another pocket sized deduction based minigame from the people who brought us Durian, Scout and Dokojong. In this pocket sized deduction game, players have to gauge which of the three suspects in a lineup are [...]
Tiny Epic Cthulhu, Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs and Coffee Rush – 05/11/24
Hey PI-Fans, Halloween's just over, but here at Games @ PI, we're believers that nothing is ever quite too late for Cthulhu. The great folks at Gamelyn have pushed out a brand-new Tiny Epic title, this time taking a teeny tiny swing at making a pocket sized Cthulhu game with the aptly named Tiny Epic Cthulhu and its expansion Cult of Chaos. Keeping with the theme of big games in small boxes comes an all new Gloomhaven title with the portable solo-player outing Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs, letting you take your itty-bitty board game adventure everywhere with you. If the horror and adventure themed games don't mesh well with you or your playgroup and you want something competitive though, there is always Coffee Rush, a comfy little action management set collection game by Korea Boardgame where competing Baristas attempt to rush around their workstations serving customers as fast as possible in [...]
Criminal Capers and To Boldly Go – 03/11/24
Hey PI-Fans, Even as we inch into Novemember and the store prepares to load up for the year end Holiday Rush, the demand for new board games to excite the senses doesn't stop. Sure, we could just celebrate the fact that things like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, Root and Wyrmspan are topped up on the shelves, but if you're here for new possibilities, those don't do as much. Instead, we'll focus on the arrival of CGE's Starship Captains and Wiggles 3D's real-time cooperative investigative game 5-Minute Mystery. Just moments before the Museum of Everything was set to unveil its newest exhibit, the priceless MacGuffin, some criminal snuck in and stole it! Now it's up to you, a team of detectives, to crack the case, find the culprit, and recover the missing MacGuffin. Like a cooperative of Guess Who, 5-Minute Mystery sees a team of players working together to [...]
Warhammer Previews and a… general sneak peek…
Hey PI-Fans, Games Workshop has announced its annual X'Mas Box set waves. We still have no idea what these will be worth but from past experiences, they tend to be incredibly limited. Warhammer 40,000 launches with an Adepta Sororitas, Necron, T'au Empire, Dark Angel and Imperial Knight Battleforce, while Age of Sigmar leads with Maggotkin of Nurgle, Ironjawz, Flesh-Eater Courts and Cities of Sigmar. Give us a shout if you want one. Each Battleforce requires a $100 deposit that counts towards the final price of the box. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoCcIn4Rhx4 https://youtu.be/1BRpuMViUqs On a more intriguing note... The Games At PI game-shelter shelf is live. Come check it out for last-chance-to-buy items, final copies or even random special bundles. The shelf is updated regularly, so pop in and check it out!
See Food (Eat Food) – I’m A Little Crabby, Fishy, Squishy, Crusty & Quirky and Evolution: New World – 17/09/24
Hey PI-Fans, Something running through this week's releases seems to be the theme of edibility. On the lighter side of things are the Exploding Kittens' card game I'm a Little Crabby, and Unstable Games' Fishy, Squishy, Crusty & Quirky. Anyone wanting something slightly more serious can look into Evolution: New World by CrowD games. I'm a Little Crabby is a rebranding of the somewhat more scandalously named You've Got Crabs, though it continues to maintain Exploding Kittens brand of quirkyness. In I'm a Little Crabby, teams of two players secretly agree on a hidden action to signal to the other player that that player has successfully drawn a hand of matching Crab cards. When their teammate notices, they will point at the player and shout "You're a little crabby!" If they’re right, that team gets a point. If they’re wrong, that team loses a point. However if a player [...]