The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.

Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.

In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.

Hermagor: What Is It?

Hermagor is an auction, order fulfillment, and area control game for 2-5 players, designed by Emanuele Ornella and published in the US by Rio Grande Games back in 2006. Players take on the roles of merchants…

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Wait…ANOTHER review of a game in the Horrified series? Yes, it’s true, and by now, we know our Horrified stuff around here—check out our reviews of the base game (Horrified: Universal Monsters), Horrified: American Monsters, and Horrified: Greek Monsters for the evidence, as well as an overview of how these games play if you are new to the series.

Horrified: World of Monsters is my first foray into this series, so I unleashed the newest set of monsters—the Yeti, the Sphinx, the zombie Jiangshi, and Cthulhu—on the best and most reliable gamers in my network, my two kids (ages 10 and 8).

Over the course of three plays, I got all four monsters to the table. In reading the rules from the last two games, nothing has really changed with Horrified: World of Monsters—players work together to defeat monsters before those monsters deal enough “terror” to advance the players past the threshold for defeat (deaths by the players, deaths by the villagers and legend non-playable characters, or the monster deck being exhausted when a player needs to draw a new card).

Everything in the game is dictated by running around the map to pick up items (here in one of three colors) that will be used both to advance a monster’s defeat condition, or to defend players…

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Each of the last 3-4 years, it feels like there’s a tabletop designer or two who is simply everywhere for a few months. (We aren’t counting Reiner Knizia here, since he seems to release or re-release a game every 20 minutes or so. Aaaannnddd…while you were reading this intro, another Knizia design just hit crowdfunding.)

Last year, new games from Simone Luciani seemed to be everywhere–Rats of Wistar, Darwin’s Journey, Nucleum, Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods, and a couple others all hit at the same time. In 2022, you could make the case that Matthew Dunstan was the guy…between Next Station: London, Village Rails, My Shelfie, and The Guild of Merchant Explorers, it felt like I was reading about a new Dunstan game every month or two.

In 2024, I’m hard-pressed to think of another designer who is getting more love than Dani Garcia. Garcia is the designer of Barcelona and that was a big hit for Board & Dice in 2023. Now? I’ve played three Garcia designs in the last four weeks, including Windmill Valley, Daitoshi, and now Neko Syndicate, a “thinky filler” published by Combo Games.

If my first two Garcia experiences are any indication, it seems like the designer enjoys “point salad” scoring experiences wrapped in…

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I’m a pretty big fan of Smartphone Inc. and Furnace, the two most popular designs by Ivan Lashin. Both games do a great job of creating simple systems in a playspace that usually runs its cycle in about an hour, with a variety of interesting decisions along the way.

At SPIEL 2024, I had the chance to pick up a review copy of Neodreams (2024, Hobby World), Lashin’s newest creation. The setting for this game was eerily similar to the setup of Virtual Revolution, the Studio H strategy game set in a near future where the business of hosting virtual worlds for customers. In Neodreams, players take on the roles of CEOs who run dreamcasting corporations, hunting for new clients while trying to score the most points by building a card tableau that features images from their new dreamscapes that feel right at home in a fantasy setting.

The core hobbyists I introduced to Neodreams thought it was average fare. In a world where there are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar games hitting the market each year, even lighter fare such as Castle Combo and its 3x3 tableau-building elements resonated more with the same groups in the same week than Neodreams did. But with my family, the skies opened up a bit more, thanks…

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If you’ve followed some of my previous content, it’s fair to say that I’ve been playing one too many train games…or you might say that I have a healthy respect for train games. I have a couple groups that are going hard on a wide spectrum of these experiences, from lighter “cube rails” games like Ride the Rails through route-building Euros like Nucluem, all the way to proper 18xx games like Railways of the Lost Atlas, 1880: China, and 18Korea, the latter of which was so ridiculous that it’s a borderline 18xx party game!

So, while I won’t profess to being a hardcore train game junkie, I’m pretty close. When Capstone Games launched a crowdfunding campaign for the fourth game in the Iron Rails series, Age of Rail: South Africa, I stayed in touch to ensure I could get a review copy when the game’s fulfillment began this fall.

Given my network—and the new game’s breezy 60-minute playtime—I knew it would be easy to get Age of Rail: South Africa to the table quickly, so I got three plays done within a three-week stretch. And because my group is familiar with two other games in the Iron Rails series, Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge, Age of Rail: South Africa was an…

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Each time I have the chance to pick up a game from our partners at Horrible Guild, I get excited. The Italian publisher has given us countless hits over the years: Railroad Ink, Evergreen, Quicksand, The Great Split, and Dungeon Fighter, to name just a few. It’s a testament to their team that in a world where I gift most of my review copies to other players in my network, I still have three of the games listed above in my collection.

During our visit with the Horrible Guild team at SPIEL 2024, I picked up a review copy of Flower Fields, designed by Luca Bellini and Luca Borsa. Flower Fields is a simple tile-laying game that I played three times over three days—once each at different player counts: solo, two players, and three players. Using a mechanic familiar in many other games, players have a small board to hold tiles in a variety of colors, and must select new tiles from a market to place into their tableau to score points at the end of the game.

Flower Fields doesn’t do anything fancy. My eight-year-old son had the game down by the second round of our first game. It’s a little too easy for my tastes—I scored 103 points in my solo…

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After a few years of slow growth and recovery, PAX Unplugged was back in the spotlight this year in Philadelphia! After being canceled in 2020 due to COVID-19 and seeing slow staggering recovery, this year’s event was back to full form, sprawling all over the Philadelphia Convention Center and taking up three different floors with demos, shows, panels, vendors, and more gaming than you can shake a set of dice at.

This year, Justin Bell joined fellow author Will Hare and his husband, Brock, as they tag teamed the convention. It was a whirlwind! Check out how much gaming they were able to squeeze into two and a half jampacked days with their thoughts below!

Love a Good Learn and Play (Justin)

Beneeta Kaur reached out to see if I had any interest in doing something different during my PAXU trip—a “learn and play” session, where we would teach the game In the Footsteps of Marie Curie to a group of about 50 people. It’s a game system I know well—I’ve played full games of both In the Footsteps of Darwin and In the Footsteps of Marie Curie at conventions over the last two years, and the games are very accessible—so I was thrilled to have the chance to do something different with a friend like Beneeta.

…

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Near the end of my trip to Gen Con 2024, I stopped by the Van Ryder Games booth to chat with AJ Porfirio, Van Ryder’s owner. AJ handed me a review copy of Gateway Island, which screamed “Baby’s First Hobby Game” through and through, from the not-so-subtle title to the blurb on the back of the game’s box right through the time I showed the game to my eight-year-old.

We tried about a quarter of the 21 mini games included in the box. I would argue that the first three games are so short and simple that they don’t really introduce anything to players who have previously played classic board games. Even my eight-year-old was surprised that the first game, Race on the River, was as short as it was.

We skipped to the middle of the collection, in terms of complexity ratings, and tried game #14, Split the Catch. That was fun and an easy way to talk about games that feature a pick-up-and-deliver/order fulfillment mechanic in other games I already own, such as Sand, Age of Steam, and Wasteland Express Delivery Service. And like the other games included in Gateway Island, none take more than maybe 15-20 minutes to play with 2-3 players. (Some…

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To warm up for a few plays of the recent expansion Nucleum: Australia (2024, Board&Dice), I got the base game to the table to ensure I remembered all the edge case rules around tile placement, network restrictions, end-game scoring, and how to power buildings. I asked two of the guys from my strategy group to join me, and we all committed to watching a teach video to ensure we had all the rules down.

“Nucleum is hard, man,” one player said during the second turn (!!) of our first re-entry play, a reminder of the dozens of times we said that when playing the base game in 2023.

He was right. He is still right. Nucleum IS hard. Of course, that’s the deal when you try to play a lot of hard, heavy strategy games—it’s hard to remember all the rules, it’s hard to build a winning strategy, and it’s really hard to get games like Nucleum to the table. (Oh, to dream of having a neighbor who lives across the street, always looking for a friend or two to play the copy of Voidfall they have already set up in their professional gaming space. If you know anyone like that in Chicago, please call me!)

Nucleum is a tough cookie, but the arc is so satisfying…

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Devir has had a year, my friends! Wrapping up a year of covering great games from the Portuguese publishing powerhouse, I had the chance to get one last Devir game to the table: Daitoshi.

Designed by Dani Garcia (Barcelona, Windmill Valley, Neko Syndicate), Daitoshi is the latest in the still-weird-to-me “Kemushi Saga” series of games. These loosely-connected games all have broad themes centered around the environment, silkworms, and a more peaceful, Euro-style approach to outracing opponents to each game’s victory conditions.

While I have had the chance to play a good chunk of the Kemushi games in the series—Sand, Bitoku, Bitoku: Resutoran, and Bamboo—I still don’t have a great feel for the connective tissue that the series seems to want to show off. No matter: the individual games have mostly been great, and Daitoshi is no exception.

Daitoshi has a decent amount of bloat—the game’s official teach video runs for a much-too-long 47 minutes—this for a game that has just five unique worker placement actions and only takes about two hours to play. But turns feel exceptionally fulfilling and the production is beautiful, right down to transportation tokens featuring a worm dragging a bus. (Yes, my friends. this is the first game I’ve ever played with “Worm-Bus” tokens.)

Daitoshi continues the hot…

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The cover art for the new skirmish game Battalion: War of the Ancients (2024, Osprey Games) drew me in. It’s one of the best box covers for a game this year. However, as great as the artwork is, I was even more excited by the designers listed at the top: Paolo Mori and Francesco Sirocchi.

Mori has made a number of great games—Blitzkrieg! World War II in 20 Minutes (yes, that’s the official name of the game) is my favorite, but I’ve enjoyed single plays of other Mori games, such as Ethnos (and Archeos Society, which I guess is “New Ethnos”) and the two Libertalia games, the “OG” as well as the Stonemaier update from a couple years ago. The thing I have enjoyed most about Mori’s designs: the games are easy to teach and get right into the action, with gameplay durations that match the number printed on the side of the box.

And that’s why I loved Blitzkrieg! Like most people, I did not believe that someone could design a fun head-to-head war game that really could be played in 20 minutes. But Blitzkrieg! was a revelation—it was always over in about 20 minutes. Caesar!—-the follow-up to Blitzkrieg!—was a game I only tried once, but it was also over in about 20 minutes,…

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I’ll play any game by the prolific designer Friedemann Friese, the man behind hits such as Power Grid, Fancy Feathers and Findorff. That’s because he is always trying to do something different, as opposed to rehashing some of the things that worked in past designs. I wouldn’t call him a maverick, but I would call him a guy who seems to have a flair for the dramatic, right down to the green hair he sports whenever I see him running around at conventions.

Friese’s latest design is a card game called Fishing (or Fischen, in German), published by his 2-F Spiele label. The best way I can describe Fishing is to call it a trick-taking game, with elements of deckbuilding baked into the design. Over the course of eight rounds, the player who scores the most points wins—earned with a simple metric of one point per card won at the end of each round.

There’s a lot more to it than that, some of which worked well, some of which did not. I tried this game twice with three players—using a different audience for each play—then once at five, with a group separate from the first two groups. Then, I took the extreme step of asking other peers in my space for their opinions of the game.…

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At this stage, I will essentially review anything published by Capstone Games. Clay Ross and his extended network consistently pull in gems that have a certain kind of buzz for the Eurogame design elements I love. Between the “Iron Rail” series of cube rails games, the Terra Mystica family of products, and a little-known zoo simulation game called Ark Nova, Capstone has gotten it right much more often than other publishers.

Stephens (a 2024 release designed by the Portuguese design duo known as Costa & Rȏla) is the latest in a long line of medium-weight Euros with a handsome production, a relatively low playtime, and a simple turn structure and cardboard money chits. (I used the included money for the first of my three review plays before pivoting to poker chips.) It has a novel reset/clean-up system that, in the right hands, leads to snappy play and lots of chances to gather income that will be used to further other in-game goals.

In the wrong hands, this system leads to one of the few problems a Euro design can possess—the ability to actually do everything a game has to offer. Many of these games push hard on finding an ending that ensures that players have the chance to only do some, maybe most, of a…

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