by W. Eric Martin

Hasbro's Avalon Hill gaming brand has been reinventing itself over the past few years, and I'm not sure what it even represents at this point.

Yes, Avalon Hill is still releasing titles that you might expect to see — spinoffs and expansions for HeroQuest, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and the fifth edition of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game — but it's also released a new edition of a thirty-year-old Reiner Knizia design and at the beginning of 2026, it will join the "cozy" trend with the release of Elizabeth Hargrave's Sanibel.

In this 2-4 player game, you walk along the beach picking up shells and other objects, then you turn around and walk back, comparing your collections at game's end. We're competing against one another, but in a non-confrontational way; you stopped to examine the ground for treasures, so I'll leave you to that and keep on going for first dibs at what's next.

To set up, you seed each section of the game board with two tile shapes — diamonds and hexagons — based on the player count, with diamonds featuring coquinas, ceriths, and shark teeth and with hexagons typically featuring bivalves, echinoderms, and snails, although sometimes a hex will show three items normally found on diamonds.

Early turns in a demo game at Gen Con 2025
Players then start walking the beach, with whoever is at the back of the line taking the next turn, Tokaido-style. When you move, you must enter a new section — and you can jump several sections if you wish — then you stop at a footprint showing 1, 2, 2, or 3, with the number indicating how many tiles you can pick up from this section.

To store the tiles, you "drop" them into your personal bag, Tetris-style, so that they fall to the bottom, although as long as an empty space isn't completely enclosed by tiles, you can fit something inside of it. As Hargrave pointed out in a demo game at Gen Con 2025, this bag is three-dimensional after all, so you can imagine fiddling around with your treasures to put them in the right spot.

Once everyone has passed a wave token on the game board, the wave moves down the beach, with new tiles being drawn from the bags to populate each section. Want more shark teeth or a snail previously unseen? Perhaps the wave will fulfill those desires — although that doesn't guarantee you'll get hold of them.

Hargrave takes her turn at Gen Con 2025
One item on the beach that will help you grab what you need are sand crabs, a.k.a. mole crabs or sand fleas. When you pick up a sand crab, you don't add it to your bag, but instead discard it and pick up any other tile on the beach, no matter where it's located.

Why are sand crabs so special? As this 2018 article from Nature points out, evidence of these inch-long creatures exists on beaches everywhere — "They are tiny animals whose burrowing causes millions of small bubbles to appear on the beach as the tide comes in and out" — but it's hard to spot them because of their incredible digging speed:

At the halfway point, instead of vying for the usual 1-2-2-3 items, you place one or two of the special scoring tiles that you received at the start of play, in addition to taking 1-2 sand crab actions.

Rounding the bend
Once you all return to the starting point, picking up 1-2 points as well as one final tile, you compare collections. Most tiles are worth at most 1 point, but they're worth nothing but memories if you haven't gathered them the right way:

▪️ Blue bivalve tiles score only if you have at least two of the listed type.
▪️ Purple echinoderms can't be adjacent to one another.
▪️ Orange snails score only for your largest group and only for each different one you've collected.
▪️ Red coquinas need to be paired and separate from each other pair.
▪️ Brown ceriths score as a group, no matter where they are in your bag.
▪️ Green shark teeth want to be paired in a large group, with players receiving bonus points if they have the most or second most.

These last three items seem harder to make worthwhile, but if you place tiles in your bag that "support" one of the triangular spaces along the edge, you take a free tile from the reserve to fill this space. In my bag below, you can see two coquinas and two ceriths I picked up in this way, all of which were crucial to meeting the scoring thresholds for these types of shells.

Sanibel is due out on January 1, 2026. Thanks to Elizabeth Hargrave for teaching the game at the Gen Con 2025!

Alas, Eric lacks whip