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Welcome to Three Game Thursday, a regular feature on Let’s Play Games where I pick three games around a shared theme and make a case for each of them. This month the theme chose itself: these are the three games that got played the most at my table in April. Not the newest, not the most impressive, just the ones that kept coming back out.
April turned out to be a very abstract month. Two tiles games and a card game, all light, all fast, all satisfying. Here is why Tacta, Azul, and Bonsai dominated my table.
1. Tacta
Players: 2–6 | Time: 5–15 mins | Tacta Review
Tacta is the newest game on this list and the one I was least expecting to be obsessed with. It is a card game designed by Jason Tremblay and published by The Op Games in 2025, and the core idea is beautifully simple: each player has a hand of cards with shapes along their edges, and you can only connect a card to the growing shared layout if the edge shapes line up perfectly.
You are trying to cover your opponents’ dots while protecting your own. The shared layout grows outward across the table as the game progresses, and the spatial puzzle of where to place next is genuinely absorbing.
What surprised me most was how much it rewards the second and third play. The first game you are mostly figuring out how the edges work. By the third you are thinking two or three cards ahead and trying to angle the layout in directions that suit your hand. It is sneakier than it looks, and it plays in under fifteen minutes, which means you can easily get two or three rounds done in an evening.
| Why it kept coming back out: It packs away into almost nothing, teaches in two minutes, and plays just quickly enough that nobody ever objects to another game. The perfect end-of-evening filler. |
You can buy Tacta on Amazon here
2. Azul
Players: 2–4 | Time: 30–45 mins | Azul Review
Azul needs very little introduction on this blog. It is a tile-drafting and pattern-building game from Plan B Games, first released in 2017, and it has been a staple on our table ever since. You draft coloured tiles from shared factories and arrange them on your personal board, scoring for completed rows, columns, and colour sets.
April was a good month for Azul because we played it with a couple of people who had never tried it before. This is always a pleasure with Azul. The rules take about five minutes to explain, the tiles are satisfying to handle, and the moment it clicks for a new player is consistently one of my favourite things in board gaming.
The quiet tension of watching someone take exactly the tiles you needed, and being forced to pivot, never gets old. After hundreds of plays, I still find myself thinking carefully on every turn. That is the mark of a well-designed game.
| Why it kept coming back out: It is the most reliable gateway game I own. New players get it immediately, experienced players still enjoy it, and it plays in under 45 minutes. It is hard to say no to Azul. |
You can buy Azul on Amazon here
3. Bonsai
Players: 1–4 | Time: 20–40 mins | Bonsai Review
Bonsai is the game I have been meaning to buy for months and have not yet got around to. It is a tile-placement game from daVinci Editrice where you grow a bonsai tree by placing wood, leaf, flower, and fruit tiles on your personal board, trying to meet goal conditions and build the most efficiently beautiful tree you can manage.
What keeps bringing it back to the table is how good it is at two players specifically. The card draft creates genuine competition without any nastiness, the goal tiles give you something to aim at without locking you into a single path, and the whole thing takes about 35 minutes. It is the kind of game you finish and immediately want to play again with a different approach.
I played solo once in April too, using the scenario cards, and it held up well. The Emperor Challenge scenario in particular is a proper puzzle.
| Why it kept coming back out: It is the best two-player game I have played this year, and the trees look genuinely lovely on the table. I need to just buy it. |