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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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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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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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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Ticket to Ride: South Korea - K. David Ladage

One of the beautiful aspects of Ticket to Ride is the versatility of the core rules. Adding elements for new maps is a breeze! They have added tunnels and stations (Europe), stocks (Pennsylvania), passengers (Germany), a tech tree (United Kingdom), and exploitable resources (Heart of Africa). The game has been reimagined for smaller player counts and table footprint (New York, London, etc.), there is a print-and-play version that was created for the COVID crisis (Stay at Home), and they recently added a Legacy Campaign version to the series.. Every time they create a new map/expansion for the game, my friends and I are excited all over again to see what is coming next.

South Korea has a map where the track colors are grouped into districts. There is a district board where players are competing for up to ten points in each of the eight districts. In addition, you have three cards that allow you to add a one-time bonus of +1, +2, and +3 to an action: you can draw +1, +2, or +3 more cards (train cards or tickets) on your turn, you can gain +1, +2, or +3 more status in a district with your play, and…

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Disclaimer: prior to delving into this project, I contacted Mr. Metcalf via email and made sure he was alright with my doing this. After all, I had backed for one print-n-play copy of this game. It was a short conversation, but we came to an agreement as to how I could move forward with this. If you have plans to do something similar, please reach out to him.

A Good Physical Copy

Print and play is all good, but when it comes to making things like the cards that go into this game, I lack the talent to do it well. Mr. Metcalf had printed and made the cards for me when I got my review copy of the original edition, so that was not an issue.…

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Jump to the bottom of this review for A Special Offer from Tabletone.

TableTone Overview

TableTone packs a punch by making accessible features without overcrowding the screen or overwhelming the user. You can save presets, scenes, set global ambiance, activate effects on a soundboard, and transition the atmosphere of the scene. It's a dynamic setup that lends itself well towards allowing the Gamemaster to make subtle adjustments as the current game situation changes.

When you load up a preset, you are presented with a Location & Situation wheel that features 8 different location sounds on the outside. The inside lists 3 general situations—Relaxed, Suspense, and Action. Each of the situation sounds will adjust the current location track to match the feel that you're going for. Let's say that the party is venturing…

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Messenger Bag of Holding Board Game Bag

At Meeple Mountain we grade all board game bags using the same 4 sets of criteria: Straps, Functionality & Durability, Capacity and Portability, Price & Availability. How did the Messenger Bag of Holding board game bag do against our metrics? Let’s find out…

Straps

The primary strap on the Messenger Bag of Holding is a 2” wide thick nylon strap (think seatbelt thickness and quality) with a lovely smooth texture and d20 printed pattern. It has a comfortable shoulder pad with a mesh covering for breathability and ¼” thick foam padding. It connects to the bag proper via double stitched loops at the…

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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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Isle of Cats Duel - K. David Ladage

There are games that do not really need a two-player adaptation because they play very well at that count. Then there are games that cannot be played at all with two players and, if a couple is going to enjoy the game, it needs one. Isle of Cats falls into the middle of this spectrum: it is a game that can be played at two players, but that player count will not deliver the best experience (to be honest, the base game plays at two players better in the Family mode than the Normal mode).

The Duel version of the game is excellent! It plays very well, offers some good decision space without being a heavy game. My wife and I were able to get into the play quickly, and everything we knew of the original aided in our introduction to this trimmed down version. We might find ourselves playing this more than the original, as good as that is.

If I have a complaint, it would be that the game plays in four rounds, but the mechanic to keep track of those four rounds does not use the ship token and movement as it is handled in the base game. The…

The post Quick Peaks – Isle of Cats Duel, Quacks and Co., Prey, Circus Flohcati, Torii appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Golarian is no stranger to colossal, world-ending events—most of Paizo's published Adventure Paths actually tend to feature one. It must be a constant struggle to be a denizen in the world knowing that without proper heroes Golarion could fall to a Whispering Tyrant or be completely destroyed. In War of Immortals, Paizo tackles the question of what happens when a deity dies, and the ripple effect that such an event presents. It's a book teeming with myth and legend, supplanted with a thrilling story that ties into the novel Pathfinder Godsrain.

Pathfinder War of Immortals Overview

The Godsrain event encompasses the aftermath of Gorum's death in the current Golarion timeline. When this happens, a bloody rain of war descends upon the world, driving everyone into a bloodlust and frenzy for war. Even the deities maneuver for power during this time, dubbed the War of Immortals.

If memory serves, this book might be the first Pathfinder Second Edition publication that is specifically centered around a specific global event. This frame of reference resonates with me much more than generic volumes like Howl of the Wild that are presented as unassociated with any particular set of…

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Everdell Duo - K. David Ladage

My wife and I love Everdell. It is an amazing little engine-builder that has so few flaws that they are hardly worth bringing up. My colleague, Bob Pazehoski, Jr., has taken a deep-dive into the game and the expansions (I highly recommend reading those if you have not before). When the news of a two-player version first came into my view, I knew I would be getting this (add to that the fact that you could also order the larger-format cards for the original and this was a no-brainer). In order to kick the tires and give this thing a test drive, my wife and I dove in, read the rules, and prepared to play. We decided to start with the cooperative game using the first chapter scenario. Our first few actions were awkward as we got used to the things that were a little different from Everdell, but it did not take long before we knew what we were doing. The tactical and strategic choices that have to be made in a cooperative play are interesting and thoughtful! This game is, as Mr. Pazehoski put it in his review, “...a streamlined masterpiece…” ‘nuff said.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ -…

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When people think of high fantasy role playing games, the imagery that often comes to mind is that of a sword-wielding warrior or a wizard blasting spells at a dragon. However there is so much more to see beyond the fantasy viewed through a European lens. Fantasy is a global concept, although it's important that drawing from unfamiliar source material is done considerately through the use of cultural consultants or first-hand experience. Paizo's development of the Tian Xia region has redefined what it means to be respectful to source material while adapting it for their Pathfinder setting.

Tian Xia World Guide Overview

Tian Xia is one of Golarion's massive continents, embraced by the Embaral and Okaiyo Oceans. Most of the familiarity with Pathfinder's setting is dominated by the regions of Avistan, which includes Varisia, Belkzen, and my personal favorite—Galt. It may be a different atmosphere than the settings of many of Paizo's Adventure Paths, but its influence on the world at large is noticeable.

The majority of the Tian Xia World Guide was written by people of Asian descent. Therefore, its pages offer perspectives based on experiences…

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