Happy spring folks! It only seems like yesterday that I was knee-deep in cold weather and snow. Well, it was actually a month ago but who’s counting? Yes, I know this post about Granite Game Summit in New Hampshire is super delayed, but a personal project of mine has been taking up SO MUCH OF MY TIME. That will be revealed in a few months, I promise. 

Anyway, Chris and I went to G2S, as it is also called, on March 5-8, 2026, back when temps were still in the high-30s. It’s a wonderful laid-back convention that we love going to every year, and this year G2S celebrated its 10th anniversary! There were so many game giveaways! We arrived Wednesday night from Boston Logan and spent that night just chilling with friends and settling in. 

Thursday

We started Thursday morning with French Toast. It’s a fun word-association party game where one alien is trying to make the group guess a word but they only know one word at the start of the game: french toast. The others have 6 rounds to guess that word. At the start of each round, the alien places a clue card along a spectrum to indicate the clue is similar or dissimilar to the word. Players then start saying words, and the main alien keeps saying french toast until one of the other players says a word that gets warmer to the main word. Then the main alien starts saying the new word and hopefully future words start warmer and warmer, until everyone else solves the main word. Super fun – we played it a bunch during the convention! 

Next up was Up or Down, a puzzly game about building or descending elevators, trying to place as many cards of the same color in a column as possible. You have a hand of cards, and on your turn, you place a card into the middle next to its surrounding numbers in order. Each card has a color and number value and there are six cards in the middle. You then pick a card next to that card you just placed, and it goes into your tableau in front of you, where you can only have 3 columns of ascending or descending numbers. At the end, each column scores points for the number of cards in it multiplied by the number of cards of your largest color group. Been playing this a lot on Board Game Arena.

I then taught Neko Syndicate, another crunchy puzzle! I reviewed this game on Episode 169 of The Five By, and it is actually one of my top 10 games of 2025. You are rival cat clans trying to have the best sushi empire to take over as the big boss when he dies. What I love about this game is that you’re creating a one-way action path of cards so that you can deliver fish to various locations in the city, so if you suddenly realize that you shouldn’t have placed the rice-making action so far down on your tech tree — and now you have to wait until the next round to deliver nigiri — well that’s your fault.

We then wanted to be fancy before dinner, so we played Obsession. This is another game I play frequently on Board Game Arena. It’s so thematic and strategic! Players are various Victorian England families and they want to increase their reputation and throw the best parties. They do this by inviting guests, including some unsavory ones, while managing the service staff to accommodate those people. Service staff need a rest though so they aren’t always immediately available for the next round, so you have to be strategic about which party you throw when and who gets added to the guest list. 

And then it was dinner time and our annual Peking duck outing. Always a good time, and always so much yummy food. I also highly recommend ordering a scorpion bowl. You’re welcome.

The best part of dinner is that it’s walking distance from the hotel – this desert-dwelling lady braved the sprinkling of snow!

After dinner, I learned how to play Hong Kong style Mahjong. I grew up in a Filipino household, where mahjong parties were a significant part of my childhood, so I know how to play Filipino mahjong. I had never played Hong Kong-style before, so it was great learning the new rules and how the other tiles that we Filipinos don’t use in our game are used. We don’t use the dragon and wind tiles. The general gist of mahjong is to complete a hand of tiles, by collecting one pair of tiles and the rest are runs of threes or three of a kind. There are three suits in mahjong, ball, stick and characters, numbered from 1-9. In Hong Kong-style mahjong, players win when their 14 tiles are complete with one pair and 4 sets of three tiles. In Filipino style mahjong, your hand is 17 tiles. Thanks, Suzi, for teaching us this game!

The last game of the day was Le Plateau. It’s been a month since I was at G2s, and I still cannot stop thinking about this game. Part route-builder, part auction bidding, this game plays out in a fixed number of rounds where you’re trying to win tricks, and those face cards collected in that trick are covered with your team’s tokens on the board in order to build the route formation you bid on at the start of the game. THIS GAME IS SUCH A TRIP! The game plays with a French tarot deck, and based on the bidding round at the start of the game, you can dictate whether you think your hand is good enough to go solo, or pair up into teams (which member of your team gets revealed when you call out a suit after bidding). And based on where the bid falls on this intricate bidding chart, that determines which formation you’re working toward. Lastly, this gorgeous wooden board, amirite? 

Friday

We started Friday morning with Fallout Shelter: The Board Game. Chris spotted this in the G2S library and was curious about it. Chris has played the video game, and I haven’t, but we both enjoy watching the TV show. It’s your basic worker placement, resource gathering game, where you’re building out your vault, avoiding getting sick and battling threats like infestations. This game was much better than we anticipated, as we were expecting a hokey game with a run-of-the-mill IP slapped on it, but it played out like a solid mid-weight euro. I also loved that it came in a metal lunchbox tin. Alas, the game is out of print, which is unfortunate! 

After another game of La Plateau (by this time I had to play it again as I was obsessed!), a big group of us played Magical Athlete, an absurdly charming race game where crazy characters like a banana, big baby or a flip flop. Each character has a downside and upside, and players draft three characters to participate in three different races to collect VPs to win. It’s chaotic and colorful, and you’ll never know which character will make run away with it. 

We then played another racing game – this time in a velodrome. Spokes is a cycling game in which you can replace a spoke on the main track with one on your player board in order to speed through a path of spokes in the same matching color. The game takes place over through rotations and the winner who crosses the finish line first wins the game. Each player has a player board that has a rondel with different color spokes, and on your turn, you move through the rondel 1, 2 or 3 spaces and pick the spoke you just passed and that is replaced on the board for you to make your move through it. 

After dinner, I played Worst in Show. If there’s a dog in a game, I’m so in! And doubly better that this game has an interesting twist on a trick taking game.

In Worst in Show, when you receive your hand of cards, you cannot adjust them in any way. You then decide which dogs are allowed to misbehave, and you place your bid card to the left of those dogs. When a trick gets played, you can play it like a regular trick taker to make your bid, or if you can play a legal card into the trick, you can send one of your misbehaving dogs into the fray. You gain points for playing all of your cards first, as well as matching your bid and playing all your misbehaving dogs. And of course, the artwork is just adorable. I want to pet them all. THEY’RE ALL GOOD DOGS! 

The last game of the night was another trick taker: LetterTricks, a game I’ve played at a previous G2S. In this game, when you win a trick, you can all the letters played in the trick and hopefully you can spell a long word at the end of the game to gain the most points. I always love a good word game, and this time, I was able to spell out “medical” and won the game. 

Saturday

We started the day with another game of Neko Syndicate. And then we played a board-game edition of Vegetable Stock. This is a fun short market manipulation game where players are drafting, in this game, board games instead of vegetables, and the remaining card on the table will increase the value of that stock. If it goes up too high though, it’ll crash and start back at a low number. After six rounds, players multiply the number of board games you have collected by the final price of that game. The player with the highest score wins! 

We then played Floral, a small card game about planting flowers in your garden and competing for the largest contiguous pattern of the same flowers. You have a hand of 3 cards, and on your turn, you play one of your cards into your garden to expand it and then you may fulfill a task from the center of the table. To do this, you grab a card that has stars on it, and if you’re the person with the biggest garden of that type of flower, you score those star VPs. Then you must place a card from your hand into the center pool, and then draw 2 cards from the deck. The cards are divided into six colorful squares of flowers, and you have to cover at least 2 flower beds when expanding your garden. 

Next up was Ruins, a game I also covered on The Five By in Episode 151. Ruins is another small card ladder-shedding game that includes upgrading cards in the deck for the duration of the game. It’s such an interesting to your typical trick-taking games, and while it comes it a small square box, there are a lot of components that come with it, including card sleeves and transparent cards that you slide into the cards you play to upgrade them. It gives each game a different feel based on how people upgrade their cards.

We then stopped by Designed Alley to play Nathan Fullerton’s prototype Journey to Skyhaven, a game I first played at Origins in 2025. I was excited to see the game’s progress, having enjoyed playing it last time.

It’s a cozy card-driven herding game where you’re using resources and stamina to journey on a hike while keeping your little creatures clean, content and plump for the harvest festival. On your turn, you play cards in front of you in a line, and if you combo the right type of cards in front of each other, they will give you bonuses and/or victory points.

Next up was Can’t Stop, a classic push-your-luck game where you roll dice and move up along tracks of numbers from 2-12 until you can’t make any more legal moves. It’s so very easy to bust in this game because it’s just so fun to keep chucking those four dice on your turn. This game is usually on a hexagon shaped board, like a STOP sign, but this cool version came in this magnetic box that unfolds into the game board. Such clever packaging!

No Thanks was next, another quick fun card game in which you’re trying to make runs of two or more cards, while attempting to end the game with the least amount of points.  Cards are worth their face value, and in a run, only the lowest card will be scored. The round starts with one card face up from the deck, and you can either take that card or say “No Thanks” and place a chip on it. Everyone does the same thing, one at a time, so at a certain point, you either run out of chips or have to take it, or take the card because you hope it’ll fit into one of your runs later, or it’s accumulated so many chips that it’s worth taking that card. Chips are negative 1 point at the end. 

After another quick round of French Toast, I taught a game of Come Sail Away, another game I had covered on The Five By on Episode 170. I honestly did not mean to be playing games I covered from our podcast but it was just easier to jump into a game that I had played before and knew how to teach. Hence, we became cruise companies giving people the best vacation. It’s a mancala-style game where you’re picking up passengers from the pier and placing them in guest cabins, dining rooms, salons, bars, pools, libraries and other amenities, and scoring VPs for happy clients and negative points for disgruntled passengers. 

The event we always attend is Saturday night G2S Trivia Night! We love trivia, and this is always such a fun, chaotic event. Here’s our lovely trivia team. 

Even though we didn’t win, we still had a great time. Being surrounded by friends is is the reason Chris and I travel to G2S for every year. They make the convention worth it, especially fearless leader Kimberly, who is one of the convention’s co-founders. 

Our last night of the convention included an equally chaotic game of Hot Streak. This is such a con gambling game where you’re betting on which mascot will make it to the finish line and also making a bunch of random side bets that include a mascot falling down or if someone finishes in the bottom 2. It’s hilarious as you find yourself screaming and rooting for the hot dog. 

Lastly, we wound down the night with another game of French Toast and then Anomia, a game about yelling the first thing that comes into your head. Players go around flipping a card face up in front of them. Each card has a category and symbol on it. When another player matches the symbol on your card, you have to be the first to yell out a thing from that category on your OPPONENT’S card. It’s so easy to yell something from your card, but those aren’t the rules of the game. It’s fast paced and hysterical, especially when that word never quite leaves your mouth and you just make a weird noise trying.

Then on Sunday, we left Nashua early to get back to Boston Logan Airport, where I saw the most Boston thing I could see. 

The convention went by so quickly in New Hampshire when you’re surrounded by friends. Congrats to Granite Game Summit for 10 years – that’s quite the achievement in the board game sphere! My husband and love supporting this inclusive, chill and friendly convention.

Next up, I will be heading to Washington, D.C., for Circle DC. See you all next time!