"It's like Machi Koro, but it fixes the broken part!"

"Wait -- which broken part?"

It's factory building -- in spaaace! It's your job to upgrade your ships and build your base into the best base it can be, but there's a catch; you've got competition. Try to achieve ultimate victory before your comrades, but be careful: as you gather resources, so do they.

Compete with others to build molecular compounds in Compounded! Compounded is a competitive, set collection game, in which players race to acquire victory points and improve their labs along the way. As the game progresses, players get new abilities, expand their laboratory board, and even forge alliances with each other.

Have you ever wanted the power and control that comes with developing your own television network? Compete against four other players in The Networks, the game all about scheduled programming. In The Networks, you'll collect episodes of shows, ads, and television personalities, all with the goal of devleoping out your station and making it the best in the business. You start with "three terrible public access TV shows" and are able to build your viewership over time, but you also need to worry about potentially losing your budget. 

Sentient is one of those games that can be nearly impossible for me to get other people to play. A mathematics-fueled strategy game with strong aesthetics, Sentient looks a good deal more complex than it is, prompting many players to quit before they begin. Like many strategy games, Sentient is simple in terms of rules, and more complex in terms of strategy (though not by a lot).

It seems as though every time I complain about a well-known, popular game, I find myself defending a lesser known game that has the very same complaints. That's merely an observation -- I'm certainly not going to stop. The first step, after all, is self-awareness. Fantahzee is a dice-driven game with an excruciatingly twee name, in which players compete to create the best band of heroes. Through a combination of dice rolling and card drawing, players defeat enemies and rack up victory points.

At this point, I'm sure nearly everyone who has wanted to play Exploding Kittens has played Exploding Kittens. I played the game initially when it first came out on Kickstarter and wasn't impressed -- but, since then, it's been pulled out at nearly every game-related party I've attended. Exploding Kittens ushered in a swath of similar card games, as comic book artists realized that really, all you need to make a deck-based game is some art and a Kickstarter. So, though I'm technically reviewing Exploding Kittens, in reality I'm reviewing this entire genre of games.

Thanos Rising is the most okayish game that I've ever been angry about. A cooperative game for up to four players, Thanos Rising gives players the chance to build a team out of the heroes that they know and love -- all while fighting back tide after tide of villains. As players progress, Thanos assembles his gauntlet stone by stone... and if he manages to put it together, the players (and, well, the universe) lose. It's a compelling theme for a game and there's a decent game somewhere underneath, but a litany of strange design and component decisions hobble it.