Burial By Ash is a beautiful, spooky game that makes masterful use of social deduction mechanics and the act of blowing out a candle. If you want atmosphere, this one is overflowing with it. Ordinarily, we at Golden Cobra tend to look askance at a game with so many required materials. But in the case of Burial By Ash, the sum is way greater than its parts.

Garden of Pathos is such an excellent, creepy game about being the plants of Baba Yaga’s greenhouse. While you were all once human, you are now trapped in plant-form, when a human intruder breaks into the greenhouse and you have to decide what to do with them. Each plant has “leaves” (post-its) attached to them, representing their memories that the human player may steal or be gifted. The game is beautifully written, requiring players to use their entire bodies as plants. We’re looking forward to being cursed plants!

Julia’s Lost Treasures by first-time freeform game writer Tim Devine is a bittersweet game with the potential to be quite intense. In it you take on the roles of adults who once were in the care of a secretive woman named Julia who has just passed away. Now you have the task of going through some of her belongings in order to find something she has left behind for you, and along the way you discover more about who she really was. Julia’s Lost Treasures is very well written with much care and consideration put into the structure, instructions, and emotional weight.

The Real Ghost Hunters of Sandusky Township is a wonderful and whimsical opportunity to play as ghosts trolling the cast and crew of a ghost hunting show. Ghost players hide while the crew hunts them with flashlights, experiencing surreal hauntings when they're fortunate enough to finally find a genuine paranormal occurance. The crew spends the game either cautiously exploring or playing up their fears following their last absurb experience for the camera. It's looks delightful and refreshing, and if we had our way, Ouija boards would only spell BUTTS.

The people I play games with would tell you this game is directly in the bullseye of My Zone, and they'd be right. Religious themes, eschatology, sitting around a table with candles: I am already wanting to play this game before I even find out what the mechanics are. I love the richness of the setting -- very vivid and evocative -- I will offer the critique that there's really only one "make a decision" play step -- the big one, at the end -- and it's great, but my feeling is that if there were a way to complicate that step a little, it would make the anticipation more delicious.

I am a fan of dance and have had some of the most profound experiences of art watching modern dance -- the use of the body as the central instrument of expression reaches me at a visceral level. I imagine this game as extremely intense, and rewarding; it would demand much of the players, I think the most important step in it is step zero, The player remembers they occupy a body -- it's impossible for me to not bring personal weight to this step: I feel like realistically this would take a good long while, and be essential for the fullness of the game's strength to be experienced. A criticism I'd offer is that there's narrative action, but a lack of narrative structure -- I think some suggested structures would clear a space for people to enter into this more easily. I would like to see more games that explore the space of dance, even if I would be afraid to play them myself.

Absolutely beautifully written game -- you invite the player in & welcome them into the scene you've created. This game feels like it would be very therapeutic! especially if everybody got to take a turn as Medusa. Here, too, I looked for something to complicate the play a little -- some wrinkle that would move the play into a dynamic cause-and-effect place. I think one strength of this game would be seen if multiple players did take turns as Medusa -- the listening-and-reacting dynamic would come into play, and I think that would make things fun.

What a terrific plot -- engaging in that great gaming way that makes you say "let's do this" as soon as you finish reading the set-up. I love the time-limited nature of the dive -- there's not enough time-limiting in games; for me, timers = fun, and I think this game would progress briskly in a really rewarding way. The mechanics are great - but my feeling is that the "what we did with the money" step would be where a lot of the real fun would begin -- the character-building, the skin that the players have in the game. I'd like to play this game with a little more flesh on the characters' bones before they jump into the water.

This one captured my imagination from its title alone - playful, but also a little mysterious. I love the plant cards, and would form tight bonds with them in play: I am a lover of plants. The dynamic whereby the plants can speak to each other & the protagonist can speak to the plants, but the plants can't speak to the protagonist is the game's most fascinating mechanic -- it sort of makes the protagonist a player-character DM whose role is central. Very cool!