Vibe with Others to Brick Sculptures, Offer Advice, and Get Engaged | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Vibes is a self-published game for 3-9 players from Xoe Allred of Lunarpunk Games that’s currently available only through the publisher. Here’s how to get your vibe on:

In mid-March 2025, Cardboard Edison interviewed Allred and others with Lunarpunk about their focus on “unranked games”, that is designs in which any number of players can win or in which winning is only one of the outcomes that players can pursue.

▪️ Please be sure not to confuse Vibes with Vibes, a 2025 release from Nigerian publisher Gidi Games in which the active player picks a song that meets the criteria on a drawn card, then sings the song “while mentioning at least three words of the song”. The next player needs to continue the song by singing the next three words and so on, with a player who kills the vibes by not singing being eliminated from the game, after which a new round begins.

As someone who listens primarily to vocal-free electronica, I cannot imagine successfully playing a game like this. Do people really have that many songs in mind that they can identify from only three words?! Perhaps the game description leaves out details that would help players identify the songs being sung.

Also, I think it would be appropriate for at least a dozen more games to be released with the exact same name as the two above. Very on trend and self-fulfilling, as it were, with The Vibe being another 2025 release in this vein.

▪️ In 2015, Luca Bellini‘s party game Brick Party was released by Italian publisher Post Scriptum and licensed in a handful of countries.

A decade later, the design will be re-released with the bricks that everyone was thinking about while playing that earlier game — LEGO bricks, that is — with Brick Like This! being the second title from the Asmodee studio Dotted Games, following 2024’s Monkey Palace. Here’s the briefest of gameplay descriptions:

In Brick Party, a new rule was revealed each round — say, the builders couldn’t use their thumbs or the describers had to sit with their backs to the builders so that they couldn’t offer advice based on what they see — but it’s not clear whether that chaos has carried over into the new release.

▪️ For a different type of partnering experience, you could try Love Is Blind: Find Your Match, the second game from Spin Master based on the Netflix reality series Love Is Blind following 2021’s Love Is Blind: The Party Game. Here’s an overview of this 2-6 player game:

I’m not sure whether this qualifies as a game or not given that “engagement” is not clearly a win (or loss) condition — only a status between two individuals. Also, I’m baffled as to how this works with only two players. Perhaps you play to discover whether you’re right for one another?

▪️ Do kids today still read comic strips? From my in-house sample size of one, I’d say “No”, but even if they do, kids don’t have much money, so I’d wager Cryptozoic Entertainment is instead aiming for nostalgia-driven purchases of Peanuts: The Doctor Is In, a party game for 3-8 players due out on July 23, 2025, that uses individual panels of Charles Schulz’s comic strip as gameplay elements: