Welcome to the October edition of our guide to the world of board games. Every month, we aim to help you find new tabletop treasures. This time we’re expressing our artistic soul, stumbling through foggy valleys, engaging in international espionage and indulging in a spot of upmarket interior design.

Junk Art

2-6 players, 30 minutes

RRP £64.99

A stacking game in the style of Jenga, Junk Art casts players as artists competing to build elaborate sculptures from piles of scrap. But where the original tower-toppler sees players balancing uniform rectangular blocks, this new release from designers Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim comes with an eclectic jumble of wooden shapes: zig-zags, cylinders, half-spheres and curves. This makes for some seriously unstable structures; adding a new component to your pile is tense, and accompanied by the potential for catastrophic collapse.

Every round of the game takes place in one of a selection of cities around the globe, and each comes with its own set of rules and objectives. In some you’ll attempt to build the tallest tower, in others you’ll aim to have the last artwork standing, or to create a single sculpture in collaboration with your fellow artists. In effect, it’s a collection of mini-games, and its publishers encourage players to come up with their own variations to add to the mix.

It all adds up to some fast, silly, sociable fun, and the resulting creations can look quite artistic, like a tottering, three-dimensional Kandinsky. But it comes with a fairly hefty price tag; whether you’re willing to shell out £65 is likely to depend on how much you appreciate the tactile appeal of its pile of wooden bits.

Via Nebula

2-4 players, 45-60 minutes

RRP £34.99

Via Nebula sees players compete to develop buildings in a fog-covered valley. Photograph: Space Cowboys

Named after the Latin word for fog, rather than the giant clouds of space dust, Via Nebula deposits players in a mist-covered valley and challenges them to explore their surroundings. Over the course of the game, you’ll collect resources including wood and stone, using them to construct buildings and earn wealth and prestige in the process.

Things quickly get tricky, though, because you’ll need to open up paths through the valley’s rolling fog to transport resources to your building sites. The routes you create can also be used by your opponents, and if you’re not careful you’ll unwittingly hand them an advantage. Add in a selection of different buildings to construct, each of which grants a different bonus or special ability, and you’ve got a game that’s considerably more cutthroat and strategic than its cartoon artwork suggests. Figuring out your opponents’ intentions, disguising your own and denying opportunities to your rivals will all help you towards victory, and, while there’s little in the way of direct head-to-head competition, the game is packed with subtle, nuanced, passive-aggressive ways to mess with your fellow players.

Designer Martin Wallace is best known for heavy, complex games, but while new players might find some of the terminology in Via Nebula’s rulebook a little intimidating, things really click into place after you’ve played a couple of rounds. Once they have, you’re rewarded with a chin-strokingly cerebral experience that stays fresh and challenging with repeat plays – one of the best games of the year.





Codenames Pictures

2+ players, 10-20 minutes

RRP £15.99

Codenames Pictures puts a graphical spin on 2015’s hit word-based party game. Photograph: Owen Duffy/The Guardian

Party game Codenames divides players into teams of rival spies attempting to identify secret agents from a grid of seemingly innocuous words. One player on each side serves as a spymaster, giving a series of cryptic clues to help their teammates. The clever bit: they do it using word association, employing links between words to nudge their allies towards the right answers.

A spymaster trying to identify the two words “knight” and “square” for instance, could give the clue: “chess, two”. It’s a little bit brainy, a little bit silly and occasionally hilarious, and it’s become a breakout hit, translated into over 30 languages.

This new version, designed by Codenames’ original creator Vlaada Chvátil, swaps words for images. While the game is otherwise unchanged, it gains a new level of challenge thanks to the surreal quality of its pictures: a dragon attacking a radio telescope; a water slide protruding from the leaning tower of Pisa; a writhing mass of tentacles holding a beautifully gift-wrapped present. It’s all decidedly trippy, and it feels like the game exercises a different part of the brain than its wordy predecessor.

Do you need to own both versions? Probably not. But Codenames Pictures offers a subtly different spin on a game that’s rapidly established itself as a modern classic.

Dream Home

2-4 players, 20-30 minutes

RRP £24.99

Dream Home lets players build their ideal house. Photograph: Owen Duffy/The Guardian

Gaming has long had an obsession with the outlandish: dragons, zombies, far-flung alien worlds. Now a new game from designer Klemens Kalicki explores the most improbable of fantasies for the millennial generation: home ownership.

Dream Home hands each player a house-shaped board – a blank canvas on which you’ll design your ideal family residence. Over the course of 12 rounds you’ll add rooms in the form of cards chosen from a communal pool. Different arrangements of rooms grant different scores, and you’ll aim to grab the ones that are beneficial to you while denying useful cards to your opponents.

It’s an interesting concept, and it’s quite satisfying to watch as your house comes together bit-by-bit over the course of the game. But, in terms of complexity, it’s difficult to know exactly who Dream Home is for. Its artwork and seven-plus age rating suggest that it’s a family title, but the scoring system is just a little too complicated for me to feel confident introducing it to younger kids. For families new to gaming, Sushi Go might be a gentler introduction to the card-drafting concept.

There’s also the fact that, while the game’s artwork is gorgeous, it paints a very homogenous picture of suburban aspiration. There are no non-white characters in the rulebook or on any of the cards. With the board gaming hobby becoming increasingly diverse, that seems like a pretty jarring oversight.