7. Flip Over Frog

Not every game needs to be filled with minis and lavish grandiose production. Flip Over Frog from GOTTA2 is light 15-minute kids’ game that was a delight to play and lose. Flip Over Frog is a memory area control game, and for as light as it is, there are some surprisingly tough decisions to be made. Players have a hand of cards and place one card in the garden. Their card will flip over certain adjacent cards. The twist is that each square in this 4x4 grid can hold two cards, so players will have to remember what’s on the opposite side of each square to ensure they have the majority of face-up cards by the end of the game. It’s even more interesting because nobody knows who is who, so sometimes you’ll be furious at the fish player only to find that nobody was the fish player. Flip Over Frog is a solid game and works great with kids. It’s also available on Nintendo Switch (or will be soon). I got a chance to play with several kids and with the man himself, Yanagawa Kazutaka. If you have never met Kazu, then you’re in for a treat. His energy is infectious, his laughter delightful, and his smile is 100% charm. Flip Over Frog isn’t a revolutionary game, but it perfectly represents the joy of finding those diamonds in the rough and vast sand dunes of Japanese doujin game publishers. Every year there are a crazy number of games published in Japan, and it’s always an adventure playing through them all to find those lost gems. Flip Over Frog is easily one of them.