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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Slay the Spire is a rogue-like deck-building video game that burst onto the scene in 2019 to great acclaim. Initially launched on Steam, it was an instant critical darling that soon expanded to both console and mobile platforms. While it wasn’t the first deck-building rogue-like game—Dream Quest and Hand of Fate come to mind—it still stands as the pinnacle of the genre that it helped to take mainstream, spawning many imitators but no true challengers to the throne. I’ve personally sunk at least 500 hours across multiple platforms, enthralled by its difficult but addictive gameplay. 

When I heard that a board game version of Slay the Spire was being made, I was a little surprised. Not surprised that people were cashing in on the popularity of a mega-hit and the growing board game hobby. I was surprised because Slay the Spire already feels like a board game in digital form. It has a pretty standard deck-building format. Start with a 10-card deck of basic cards, draw five cards, take actions, repeat and reshuffle as necessary. Throughout the course of the game, you’ll be adding cards to the deck, perhaps removing some of the weaker starting cards, trying to optimize that card deck engine to engineer powerful turns that hopefully translate to winning.

Granted, Slay the Spire super-sizes the format…

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Ironwood represents a bit of a departure for Mindclash Games, publisher of such weighty and extended faire as Trickerion, Anachrony, and Voidfall. Ironwood is for two players. It lasts about an hour. It has only one rulebook, and that rulebook would make a lousy doorstop. While Meeple Mountain usually leaves Mindclash releases to Justin Bell—frankly, nobody else has the time to play any of them enough to write a review—Ironwood seemed like a good opportunity to let someone with fewer friends step up to the plate.

The whole of the premise is there in the title. Ironwood is about the clash between industry and nature, between the Na’vi and the Resources Development Administration, between Storm Troopers and Ewoks. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least 1977. The Ironclad and the Woodwalkers, as they’re called, vie for control of a heavily-forested mountain range. Or maybe that’s a heavily-bemountained forest. It’s hard to say.

Ironwood is a card-driven war-game, and specifically intends to be one that new players can approach without fear and that old pros will find engaging. The turn structure is nice and easy. The Woodwalkers play a card and perform the indicated…

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Rebirth is not what you would expect at first glance. That beautiful box, with art from Anna Przybylska and Kate Redesiuk, shows an elaborate castle on a hill, surrounded by vibrant countryside. Stare at it for a moment and you start to notice the little details, the greenhouse and the highland coos, the windmills, the steampunk blimp. Everything about the presentation suggests that Rebirth is some sort of RPG-inspired epic, and a good one at that.

In reality, Rebirth is but a humble tile-layer, though you are still right to assume that it’s pretty good. This is not surprising. Designer Reiner Knizia does many things well, but he does few things better than creating rules that govern the ways in which a group of people can lay tiles upon a flat surface. Here, players take turns adding a single tile to the board, gaining points and bonuses as a result.

Turns are simple. All of your tiles sit in a shuffled, facedown pile on the table in front of you. After you play a tile for your turn, you draw in preparation for your next turn. I have grown to love the simplicity of that, the…

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Let’s call it a disconnect. Mechanically, Loco Momo is occasionally interesting. Thematically, Loco Momo makes no sense whatsoever. Animals find a camera in the woods. Knowing immediately what it is for, they devise a contest whereby the best photographer keeps the camera. They then proceed to—stay with me now—stack themselves in a grid where each animal somehow has a different colored background, adhering to specific and abstractly devised patterns, cooperating perfectly for each opponent’s desires to keep it a fair contest?

I guess that’s one possible story.

Occasionally

The central board features four groups of four tiles. The tiles show one of five possible animals with one of three hued backgrounds. Players select any one animal tile, move it according to its rule, and take all the animals in the landing group with a matching color background. After filling the gap with tiles from the bag, play continues.

Meanwhile, the player manages a 5x5 grid, filling tiles from left to right in the row of their choice as they go. Each row has a rule: all the same, all different, paired with the tile above, etc. The goal for each column is matching the background hue.

Because of the move & match mechanic, players acquire tiles at different rates,…

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Inferno is one of those games that’s difficult to describe. The setting is “hell” or the Divine Comedy version of it. But it’s not really a game that has much to do with anything biblically inflected. If anything, the game is about going to Hell University to get your PhD in moving different colored pieces around. It’s bureaucratic, aesthetically garish, and completely delightful.

Here goes: in the game, you’re a family in Renaissance Florence, and you’re trying to get a primo spot in the hell hierarchy by shepherding souls through a plinko board into the appropriate layer of hell. Each of the circles of hell (excluding the topmost, Limbo) has a track associated with it. At the end of the game, each track can score between 4 and 20 points depending on how populated the circle is. If there aren’t enough souls in the circle, the track is worth fewer points. Additionally, to score, you have to have position on the track(s) and a diploma piece for that track. So, you need to acquire diplomas, move up on the tracks you want to score, and make sure there’s soul pieces in the corresponding circle.

[caption id="attachment_309465" align="alignnone" width="768"] Pictured: Hell as MLM scheme[/caption]

If it sounds bizarre, it’s because it is.…

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I sat down with my kids recently to try the new family game Little Alchemists from Czech Games Edition. It’s based on the game Alchemists, both of which are designed by Matúš Kotry, with the latter squarely aimed at serious strategy gamers. The family version has cute box art and a bright, screaming “Ages 7+” stamped on the box’s side runners. I was excited to see if my two kids, ages 10 and 8, would lean in or out on this new design.

On their second turn of the game, my 10-year-old turned and looked me in the eyes. “I love this game,” they said.

I score all family-weight/kids games the same way: is it fun for adults, and did my kids want to play it a second time immediately?

How’s this for a recommendation: we played the game five times over the course of a single weekend.

Actually, Let’s Increase Your Screen Time

Little Alchemists is a 2-4 player deduction game that plays in about 30 minutes regardless of player count. It also has a mini campaign/legacy element—there are six unlockable boxes of new modules (think Dorfromantik: The Board Game) that extend the game from a form of “Baby’s First Deduction Game” to “OK, this is a…

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I’m a huge video game junkie, spending nearly 40 years of my life grinding on the Sega Master System and the Atari 5200 as a child before moving up and around the ranks of every system you can think of through to modern-day consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PS5.

I love video games, but I usually don’t like video games ported into other formats. Movies based on video games? Usually, no thanks. TV shows based on video games? This is a growing category, and one that is getting better (Fallout and The Last of Us were worth it), but it still has a tough legacy to overcome. Board games based on video games? My experiences with board game adaptations of video games have been almost universally atrocious.

Frostpunk: The Board Game? My group thought it was terrible. Fallout: The Board Game? No…just, no. This War of Mine: The Board Game? I’m in the minority on this, but by the time I found myself going through the 18th different deck of cards to find out if my character’s fate was sealed or not, I wanted to chuck This War of Mine out the window. I did a demo of Call of Duty: The Board Game last year and it was a massive disappointment. I wanted…

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As I was packing up the 20-pound box of bits following my fifth session of The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, the new cooperative tabletop adventure game from Chip Theory Games based on The Elder Scrolls video game, a feeling of sadness began to set in.

I was getting that Voidfall feeling. A game this heavy (both literally and strategically) was going to be exceptionally hard to get back to the table, and the life of a tabletop media member can be a bit rough, at least in the “first-world problems” sense…you are always working hard to invest in a new property, only to move on to the next behemoth.

Make no mistake: The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a behemoth.

Beasts, Not Beast Mode

The Elder Scrolls Online—the massive video game world, created by the team at Bethesda Softworks—is an investment. Chip Theory spared no expense in its attempt to bring a slice of that world to life in a board game. In board game form, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era almost scared me away despite the fact that I raised my hand desperately seeking to cover it for our site. (Does “desperately” seem too strong a word? The…

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Updated: December 6, 2024

In my original review of Pagan: Fate of Roanoke, I talked at length about feeling as though I, and the two or three other people who read the rulebook after me, had missed a rule. It seemed far too arduous a process to get tokens out on the board, with games grinding along at a horrendous tempo as a result. I read the rulebook all the way through three different times, and two or three other people read through it in its entirety. None of us were able to identify a missed rule.

Subsequent conversations with other people who've played and enjoyed the game gave me the answer: we had indeed missed a rule. Every time you visit a villager, tokens are distributed to other villagers. I, and everyone I played with, took this to mean that tokens are taken from the visited villager and moved around. It turns out those tokens are taken from the supply and distributed amongst other villagers. Because this rule would make an enormous difference in the experience of the game, and because I will not have the opportunity to revisit the game with the corrected rule in effect, I do not feel comfortable leaving my review as it existed.

If you play Pagan, please note that the distribution of…

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Burning Banners: Rage of the Witch Queen is a beefy box. It would have to be. There are dozens of scenarios and hundreds of tokens, as well as four different full-sized boards. There are two manuals and six player boards. Burning Banners is a production. It feels a bit like an event. It isn’t Twilight Imperium beefy, but it would make a good Reuben.

The quick pitch: old-school hex-and-counter wargaming married to a Dungeons & Dragons-esque fantasy setting. Players control dwarves, orcs, armies of the undead and beplagued, usually in the name of conquest. Spend money to deploy units, move the units, fight with the units. This is the fundamental turn structure of Burning Banners.

There’s more to it than that, of course. It comes with an awfully large manual for that to be everything. There isn’t much more, though, which is to Burning Banners’s credit. Though the rulebook is intimidating—I would argue it is inefficient and in need of an overhaul—the rules themselves are easily grasped. This is not a GMT design. There are few if any dangling edge cases. There are no complex charts to…

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The box for Unreliable Wizard immediately announces its intentions. There’s a lineup of six characters identifiable as the archetypes that populate classic RPGs, each lovingly rendered in 8-bit pixels. The key detail here, the one that shows that Unreliable Wizard designer and artist Kamibayashi knows what he’s about, is the arrow above the wizard’s head. This is no box front. This is a character selection screen.

Your selection, as both the title and the arrow indicate, has been made for you. You are the wizard. Your quest is to defeat the Demon Lord Terra, who waits in the Demon Castle at the far end of the map. In the meantime, you have to make your way across that hexagonal map, moving one space at a time.

Most spaces are there to create the illusion of freedom, to give you the impression that you’re in a wide-open world full of possibilities. They have no other purpose. You enter those spaces, you pay a certain amount of health—travel is exhausting—and you go about your business. Every now and then, though, you encounter a space harboring a monster.

Unreliable Wizard appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Despite reviewing board games for nearly 5 years now and having written over 100 reviews, I never reviewed a campaign game. Time is a bit of a luxury for me, and campaign games have the daring proposal to subject me to hours of my time to get the “full experience” these behemoth boxes offer.

So why on earth am I reviewing this one? The answer is as simple as writing this sentence: I used to play the Monster Hunter video games back in the day. Much like how Nemesis is an unlicensed version of Aliens, Primal: The Awakening is an unlicensed version of Monster Hunter. However, that isn’t the only reason.

Campaign games have always irked me on their design. You see, a game calling itself a "dungeon crawler" or "boss battler," and you think, "That's my jam!" But then you're stuck doing some bean-counting for upgrading a town or playing choose-your-own-adventure in between the good stuff. I'm here to skewer baddies, snatch their loot, beef up my gear, and then go skewer even bigger baddies. I want boss fights to feel like I’m a third monkey rushing towards Noah's Ark because, brother, it is starting to rain.

Taming the Complexity

Fortunately for Primal: The Awakening, the campaign structure is exactly that. Your “prologue” is fighting a creature that…

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