Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

At the recent Essen board game fair—the hobby's biggest event—we saw 1,000+ new titles. That meant we also saw our fair share of amazing new games. We also saw plenty of titles that were strange, unusual, and/or poop-focused. These are those games.

Don't let anyone tell you that this isn't board gaming's "Golden Age."

Worst Game Ever

Worst Game Ever is a joke game, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to play for a hot 15 minutes. It throws in every single annoying thing about the hobby and makes a game of it. This is a perfect cooldown after a long session of proper gaming, throwing in cards that let you fudge your dice roles, complain about rules, sanction players for looking at their phones, win extra points when someone else makes a pun, and, like, a million other daft things. It is genuinely hilarious, if not the deepest ludological experience. Also, the rules are in pig Latin.

Little Drop of Poison

A charming game of adorable little rats and weasels determined to poison one another to death. What makes this fun is the juxtaposition of the cute artwork and the sheer bloodthirstiness of the play, which takes no prisoners at all.

Dead Cats

No, not the Oatmeal’s game of exploding kittens. Dead Cats is another game of felicide, this time concerning Erwin Schrödinger, kind of making it a game about feline physics. Cats are brilliant and the uncertainty concept is fun for a small sitting or with non-gamer folks who might not want to play something heavy. Fittingly, no dice are thrown.

Martin Luther: Das Spiel

This is a game that we’re sadly unlikely to see in English, as Martin Luther (the Protestant reformer) is a particular type of German hero. Still, the game, designed to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517, stands as a testimony to the versatility of our hobby. No idea how it plays; we simply loved the concept—and the fact that the game board features a massive picture of his face.

Poop

Incredibly, this wasn’t the only game of human ordure exhibited at Essen this year, and it's yet more proof that the whole gamut of human experience can be reduced to a quick-playing card game. Poop is an Uno-like game where players compete to void their bowels without blocking the toilet. It’s blindingly simple but extremely modular, with various versions easily combined. An adult version exists which turns it into a drinking game, of course.

Nuclear War

A fun little card game of nuclear armageddon, Nuclear War celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with a new design and a glow-in-the-dark box. It’s extremely 1960s in its execution, and it sees two to eight major world powers endeavouring to nuke one another without getting nuked in return. Gallows humour runs through this game, from the artwork to the rules, in which you can gleefully kill tens of millions on a whim.

Unicornus Knights

Manga is underrepresented in Western board games, so it’s nice to branch out and see how cardboard fans from Japan do it. As you’d expect, they do it with androgynous heroes and incongruously cute monsters. Nevertheless Unicornus Knights is a fast-playing cooperative game of medieval questing and random encounters on a modular board, not dissimilar to playing a JRPG on your dining room table.

Hop

Hop romped home with the Ars Technica prize for twee-est game at the entire show, but that’s no bad thing. It’s heavy on the unicorns, rainbows, and clouds, and the game’s massive demonstration area featured assistants wearing pink sparkly unicorn horns. It has a 3D board and nice little minis, but despite the quality of the components, the real fun of the game seems to be throwing a little frisbee at one another, trying to catch it on your horn (or finger) while lying down, with one hand behind your back, over your shoulder, or while someone tries to disrupt you. It looked like a giggle, but it was hella difficult to photograph without seeming like we were taking creepshots of blameless attendants. One for the kids.