This week Julius introduces us to the game Emerald Skulls.  It's a gambling game for 1 to 6 feisty goblins!

* Emerald Skulls (BGG, Thunderworks Games)

This week Julius talks about Maki Masters, a game about preparing the best sushi recipes by carefully arranging ingredients on the preparation mat.  This is basically a tile laying game in which you are trying to arrange the ingredients to complete recipes.  However, this game brings some really nice looking components, especially if you have the deluxified edition.

This week I tell Julius all about managing a finishing and canning business while trying to keep ecological balance in Conservas.  It's a bag-building game by Scott Almes in which you are catching fish to sell in the market.  While doing this, you need to be careful and not overfish or risk unbalancing the ecosystem and losing the game.

This week we return to Popular Mechanics.  This week we look at games that are sequels to other games.

Honorable mentions

This week Julius shares One Hit Heroes with us.  It's a game about fighting super-villains that are supposedly way more powerful than the heroes.  It's a co-operative game that can be played solo or multi-handed solo.

This week I tell Julius all about the game SpaceCorp, by John Butterfield and published by GMT.  This game is played in three phases in which you explore colonize, the inner Solar System, then the outer Solar System and finally the nearby galaxies.  The game is based on the Galactican series by Ejner Fulsang.

This week Julius tells us about a game as big as a school bus!  Endeavor is a game about exploring the world's oceans solo, cooperatively or competitively.  It's a big game that sounds like lots of fun and very thematic.

This week I talk with Mike & Olga Rimer of Caravel games.  They have been making video game content for years and years in the excellent D.R.O.D. series (Deadly Rooms of Death).  A few years ago, they released a solo puzzle game called Twisty Little Passages. Now they have Time Fenix coming to Kickstarter in a month or so.  We talk about all their games and then have a bit of a chat about tariffs and how they are trying to deal with so much uncertainty.

This week Julius and I talk about dexterity games.  It's not a category you see often when talking about solo games, but there are a few fun ones we've tried (mostly).

This week Julius and I talk about the smaller version of Terraforming Mars.  Well, one of the smaller versions.  The game is the very lovely  love-child of Terraforming Mars & Race for the Galaxy, Ares Expedition.  In this game, you are working to make Mars a habitable planet by managing the temperature & oxygen levels while raising oceans.  The theme is straight out of Terraforming Mars.  However, you do it by choosing actions and playing cards simultaneously, just like Race for the Galaxy.