Canada Plays 2025 – Game Night, What we Played

Each night of Canada Plays 2025, a trade show put on by Asmodee Canada that a few media members were invited to, featured an open games night. A ton of already released, and pre-release, games were available for attendees to try out with friends and colleagues. The room was always full of folks having a great time, trying out some of the greatest games coming from Asmodee Canada, their partners, and others in the board game space! Let’s look at a few of the games we played!

Come Sail Away – In Come Sail Away, players will have a number of tiles in front of them representing various staterooms and lounges onboard a turn-of-the-century ocean liner. On their turn, players will choose one of two passenger cards and place passengers in rooms moving from left to right or right to left (on the card). After the first passenger is placed, subsequent passengers can only be placed in rooms adjacent to the previously placed passenger.

This game requires a bit of strategy since certain colored passengers only want to be in certain rooms. If you mix up the process and are forced to drop a passenger in a room they won’t want to be in, they will become disgruntled and will lose you points at the end of the game.

Come Sail Away is a game I’ve wanted to play ever since I saw Mike Delisio from The Dice Tower rave about it in video after video. We actually received this one from Asmodee Canada to review, so stay tuned for more on this one in the near future!

River Valley Glassworks – We used to review a ton of All-Play games on the website, but that hasn’t been the case in the past few months. River Valley Glassworks is one of the games that we missed out on reviewing, and yes, I understand I could just go buy it.

The problem is, when you have so much to review, buying games isn’t something I have much time for anymore. Regardless, we got the chance to play it this week, and loved the simplicity of hte design. Players are returning stones to the river and collecting stones in an adjacent river tile.

These stones are placed into a player’s glassworks, in columns of the same colour. Some stones are more rare than others, and only your highest two columns score, left to right for ties. Since you also want to complete rows as much as possible, finding a nice balance is much more difficult than you might think. I love how quick this one plays, and the production on the standard retail edition is very good! 

Bomb Busters – Although there was some initial confusion with this game when we first got it to the table, we ended up playing 6 or 7 rounds of this cooperative, bomb defusal game. Each player will have a number of wires in front of them that others cannot see, arranged from lowest value to highest value in a track.

Working together, players will need to snip all the blue and yellow wires, while NOT cutting any red wires. To cut a wire, players will need to identify a number they have on their board, on another player’s board. There is some deduction here as you think through where logically specific numbers could be, and items and other benefits will help. Still, there is a fair amount of challenge here, even in the early stages! I know I wrote earlier that I don’t have a lot of time for personal board game purchases, but this might be one we pick up soon!