New Game Round-up: Noshing on Sushi, Building Walls, and Fighting for Treasure

Sushi Go Party! is a party platter of mega maki, super sashimi, and endless edamame. You still earn points by picking winning sushi combos, but now you can customize each game by choosing à la carte from a menu of more than twenty delectable dishes. What's more, up to eight players can join in on the sushi-feast. Let the good times roll!

Brix brings a new dimension to tic-tac-toe, with players building a wall of X and O bricks by stacking their pieces on top of each other. The first player to align four of their symbol or color in a row wins the game.

In more detail, the bricks are effectively two cubes pushed together, with half the brick being orange and the other half blue; when an orange face shows an X, the blue face shows an O and vice versa. Each turn the active player adds one brick to the wall either vertically or horizontally, with each new brick connecting to existing bricks on at least one face and at most eight symbols in a horizontal row. If no one has won by the time that all bricks are in the wall, then on their turn players remove one brick and place it in a new location; if you knock the wall over on your turn, you lose.

The winning condition can be changed depending on how challenging you want the game to be: (1) Connecting four squares of your color OR four of your symbol; (2) Connecting four squares of your color AND four of your symbol; or (3) Connecting four squares of any color AND four of any symbol.

Land your crew on the island of SOL, a highly colorful but forgotten island in the Atlantic Ocean, then pit your skills against another team to find and (more importantly) leave the island with the treasure of the God of the Sun.

In SOL, players divide into two teams: adventurers vs. conquistadors, with each team having three or four characters. Each character has movement, fighting, and search skills; inventory for two or three items; and a unique special ability for use in the advanced game.

On a turn, all of the characters on one team act first, one after another, then the opposite team goes. During your turn, use your action points to move your character and search on the island. If you meet someone from the other team, you can fight them, whether to steal the treasure or simply to set them back. When you search, you might find move and fight tokens to save for the future; flags that let you claim a dock on the island to make it easier to leave; or clues to the treasure. The clue tokens let you play cards, and those cards determine where the treasure will be found — ideally in a spot more advantageous for you than the other team.

Once the final clue has been found, the treasure is up for grabs, with a team needing to having one of its characters possess it on a dock to which they have access at the start of their turn. Thus, holding it isn't enough as the other team can possibly steal it away on their turn.