[caption id="attachment_310585" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Festival, the Box[/caption]

Festival is a game for 2-4 players where you’re placing firework tiles, each in one of four different colors on your player board, to have them match the patterns shown on objective scoring cards. Have the highest score at the end and you’re the winner!  Festival is a quick, colorful game, but is it worth playing? Read on to find out.

Lighting the Fuse

You’ll start by giving each player a player board in one of the game’s four colors. Each side represents a famous world city, so choose your favorite and place it in front of you.

[caption id="attachment_310581" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Yellow Australia side and Red Paris side[/caption]

Then take the 7-point scoring card for your color and choose one of the two patterns, one on each side, that you think you’ll be able to replicate most easily. Place it to the left of your board. 

[caption id="attachment_310582" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Blue (London) board, with the Blue 7 point card and two objective cards[/caption]

Each player then…

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I’d like to take a moment to address the uncomfortable prosody of the title. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is, at the very least, guilty of dropping a “The,” is it not? There’s something about the way “Trick-Taking Game” is thrown in there, with a lack of propriety that brings nothing to mind so much as the words “Cheese Product,” that feels off. The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game feels better.

I’m Not Stalling, You’re Stalling

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a cooperative card game, very much in the same spirit as The Crew. Designer Bryan Bornmueller seems to have drawn particular inspiration from the second installment, Mission Deep Sea, which has a wider variety of mission types than The Quest for Planet Nine. Each chapter of Fellowship provides the players with a variety of characters to choose from, each of whom has a specific victory condition that must be met in order for the team to succeed.

In Chapter 1, for example, the players are presented with a choice of Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Pippin. Frodo needs to win a specified number of Ring cards, one…

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Since our very first post, we’ve been laser focused on publishing high-quality board game related content: whether it’s written or video. We craft and discuss, parenthesize, spellcheck, and edit until we’re happy with it. And this year we published 525 pieces; it’s just crazy for an all-volunteer team like ours.

Sneak peek...not only did we publish over 500 articles. We published our 3,000th piece on New Years Eve. But more on that in a few days!

Let’s walk through the content and see what stood out.

401 Written Reviews

2024 was a great year for games, with close to 5,000 titles marked as released in 2024 (according to BoardGameGeek). And while there’s no way that any team could review all of them (or would want to), we managed to review a respectable 141 of them, along with the other 250 games we reviewed which were released in other years.

By traffic, our biggest game review hits of 2024 were Wyrmspan, SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering, Tales of The Arthurian Knights, Andromeda’s Edge, and unsurprisingly our reviews of Arcs and Arcs: The Blighted Reach expansion. All this just proves that even though we regularly publish reviews of lower profile games, it’s generally the most popular releases that get the…

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Publisher Shadowborne Games burst onto the scene in 2022 with their debut hit Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. The sheer enormity of Oathsworn is impressive to say the least, from both a first-time publisher and first-time head designer Jamie Jolly, although the staff is composed of some industry veterans in both the board game and screenwriting industries,  Behemoth in both size and scope, this game comes complete with optional high-quality miniatures, terrain, and even an ‘armory’ of various weapons that can be physically equipped to the character miniatures via a removable push-fit system. Want your hero to swashbuckle two swords at a time? Just pop out their current arms and replace them with the new blades you picked up last session. The armory system and larger-than-life terrain, while completely superfluous, adds to the experience in a fun way. It’s a “they didn’t have to do that” kind of sentiment that you’ll end up seeing throughout the entirety of the game.

[caption id="attachment_310504" align="alignnone" width="1500"] To flail or chop? Decisions, decisions.[/caption]

Into the Woods

Oathsworn is a large campaign game that effectively boils down to two phases: exploration and combat. In a given ‘chapter,’ the formula is the same. Players start with a narrative-driven exploration, making choices throughout, until finally reaching a…

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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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These are the games that stand out, stand up, and won’t stand aside. Maybe it’s a light card game, or maybe it’s an hours-long space odyssey, the games on this list are our collective favorites that we played in 2024. Please join our team as we celebrate the best that board gaming has to offer.

Tom Franklin

Expeditions

2024 started with Expeditions, the sequel-of-sorts to Scythe. While the game uses similar iconography, that’s about the only thing Expeditions shares with Scythe.

While trying to outscore your opponents, you’ll be exploring new parts of the landscape, defeating the mysterious Corruption that has spread, collecting and using cards—and workers to activate them—to take specific actions. Your turn actions will be governed by a trio of options, only two of which you can take at a time.

In my review back in February I said Expeditions was an early contender for my favorite game of the year. My group played it again last month, and I found I still liked the challenges the game presents. However, there’s a game I found that I liked even better…

Spicy

It turns out I’m a big fan of bluffing games. This came as a surprise, as I hadn’t considered the gaming genre…

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The Concept

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, would have been a sight to see. We can only imagine now what they would have looked like. I like to picture lush, green rain forests on top of all the roofs, and vines stretching between the buildings. I picture birds of different varieties, a multitude of colorful insects and flowers, waterfalls and mosses dotting all the great pillars and walls. I imagine it would have been the sort of place one could lose themself in, and that would be perfectly okay.

When Geek Attitude Games introduced Babylon, designed by Olivier Grégoire, and Board Game Geek’s summary was “Build a three-dimensional version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” I knew I had to play this game. When images were released of beautifully flowered tiles stacked on pillars, with fountains, bridges, statues, and stairs, my mouth watered. This game sounded cool and looked cool. I didn’t even have to walk by a table to see the table presence this would have.

[caption id="attachment_310489" align="aligncenter" width="881"] Though, seeing this would definitely make me want to play.[/caption]

The game, as it was summarized, has you building your own 3D Hanging Gardens. To do that, you’ll be selecting flower…

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2016 was a much different time for me. I was newly into my love of board games, Meeple Mountain was not even a year old, I’d never heard of Reiner Knizia, and the selection process I used for games was a mix of “did it look good on Tabletop” or “that cover looks really cool”. The latter criteria was what I used to decide on Kickstarting an unknown to me game called Circus Flohcati, by the aforementioned Reiner Knizia. I ended up selling it several years later, unplayed, because the game just never spoke out at me.

Fast forward to this past October when I received a box of games to review from our friends at 25th Century Games. Included were Tasso Banana, Sausage Sizzle, and Circus Flohcati. But this time I was ready: the good Dr. Knizia had become one of my favorite designers, my love of light card games had grown immensely, and it didn’t hurt that the cover and graphic design was still eye-popping!

Let me tell you about Circus Flohcati.

The Greatest Show On Earth a Dog’s Butt

Ahem! A quick reminder that Circus Flohcati is a game about literal fleas in a circus.

In gamer parlance Circus Flohcati is a “light press…

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Not So Neighborly is a 2-4 player party game that lets players live out the fantasy of terrorizing their neighbors over petty grievances—like putting the garbage bins too close to the driveway. The goal is simple: play cards to score 10 points while dodging dog poop, casual arson, and general pettiness. On each turn, a player either plays or draws a card, and then passes the turn to the next player.

The Cards and Gameplay

Scoring cards represent various neighborhood buildings, each worth 1-3 points. Along the way, players might draw mundane action cards, which allow them to skip an opponent’s turn, steal cards, or force discards. Then, there are the attack cards, the real chaos-makers. If you don’t enjoy “take-that” mechanics or prefer not to alienate your family before the next holiday gathering, I suggest you stop reading now and pick up Machi Koro instead. It’s likely to provide a far more enjoyable experience.

Attack cards are instant turmoil, designed to raze a neighbor’s carefully built plans. Imagine: just as a player envisions a serene neighborhood, they smell smoke—because their house is on fire. Or perhaps they wake up to find someone (or something) has left an unpleasant surprise on their porch, negating the ongoing power of…

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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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