Build the Tholos of Delphi, Manipulate Espresso Dishes, and Insert Bruno Cathala in Your Collection

Espresso Doppio contains three espresso cups, saucers, and spoons in three colors, and your goal during the game is to place them and move them on the placemat to match the combinations depicted on your task cards.


To set up, shuffle the deck of 16 task cards and give half to each player, each of whom reveals three cards face up. Players take turns placing items one at a time on the placemat, which has room for five settings on it. You can mix or match colors as you wish, but two of the same item (saucer, cup, spoon) can never be on the same setting. On a turn, you take 1-3 actions, with an action consisting of moving any one item from one setting to another or swapping items on one setting for items on another setting. After your actions, you score coffee beans for whatever task cards you can, with some cards scoring multiple times if the conditions are right.

As soon as a player has scored all eight cards, the players swap their decks of task cards, shuffle them, then reveal three task cards and continue playing. Once a player has scored eight cards in the second round of play, the game ends and whoever has collected the most coffee beans wins.

Participate in the construction of the Tholos of Delphi, the temple that marks the center of the universe marked by Zeus and built inside the Sanctuary of Athena Pronaia. As a builder, face your opponent in a duel and achieve the greatest influence within its sacred construction. May the gods be propitious to you!

Tholos is a game of majorities for two players with high interaction. On a turn, you take one of two actions:

—Take stones of one color from the quarry into your workshop, with each workshop holding at most three stones. You can take up to three stones of your color (black/white), up to two neutral stones (gray), or one stone of your opponent (white/black).
—Play any stone from your workshop onto the game board. The board has seven locations, each with a unique power, and each location can have a column of at most five stones. If you place a stone of your color in a location, then you take the special action associated with that location, e.g., moving the top stone of a column to another location, moving a stone from the opponent's workshop to your workshop, placing a second stone from your workshop, or returning a played stone to the quarry.

When all seven columns have five stones on them, the game ends and players receive points for each column where they have more stones than the opponent — but this isn't necessarily a good thing. When you score a column, you receive 1 point for each stone of your color, 3 points for each stone of the opposing color, and -2 points for each neutral stone. each column awards points to the player who has the most stones of their color in that column.


In the advanced mode of Tholos, you place one or more ornament tiles on the game board, each in a different location. Each ornament tile has a power that changes the rules of the game, such as activating the power of a location with gray stones, awarding a column to the player with fewer stones than the opponent, or raising the maximum number of stones in the location's column to seven.

Often, I am asked in an interview what is the game that I prefer among all mine, what is my "best" game. I've always answered with a pirouette, asking the reporter which of his children he preferred. Today my answer will most likely be INSERT. It's most likely not the game that will have the biggest commercial success, but it's what I consider to be "my best game".

INSERT is an abstract strategy game for two players in which you attempt align five rings of your color to win.

To set up, arrange the four 3x3 tiles at random into a 6x6 grid. Each square of the grid has a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal line on it. The first player places one of their rings on any unoccupied space, and the line in that space indicates the direction in which the opponent must place their ring: vertically, horizontally, or diagonally in line with the ring just placed. If the opponent can't place a ring in this direction because each square in this line is occupied, then the opponent can place a ring in any unoccupied square.

If you manage to insert a ring between two rings owned by the opponent — whether by placing your X piece in a space like this O_O or in a space like this OXX_O — then you change those opposing rings to your color.

If the board is full and no one has managed to create a row of five rings in their color, then the player with the largest orthogonally connected group of rings wins.