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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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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[caption id="attachment_305381" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Mythalix: The Box[/caption]

Chaos, the primordial Greek God, has returned to destroy Olympus. However, just before the destruction occurs, a portal opens that allows the Gods to escape—a portal that transports them to a hostile new world, rich with power. By taming that power and collecting four of the planet’s essential Elements, one God can reign supreme!

At least, that’s the story the rule book provides to explain what’s going on in Mythalix. To learn more, let’s get this to the table, shall we?

Preparing the Altars

Give each player a random God card, along with the matching double-sided acrylic avatar, stand, and four clear acrylic hexes, known as Strongholds. Place the God token on one of the four Elemental Altars in the far corners of the board. Then take the matching elemental token for that Altar.

[caption id="attachment_305383" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] God Cards, each with their own standard special power (which isn't all that God-like) and an Ultra Power that…

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The triquetra is a triangular figure composed of three interlaced arcs. It’s a symbol that’s been used for thousands of years primarily as a decorative element, but sometimes in a more symbolic fashion, its triple knots infused with some sort of meaning or purpose. Its origins are unknown, but its usage began to become popular around the 4th century B.C.*

In the game of Triqueta, players will be competing against their opponents to create, and draft, rows of differently illustrated animal tokens in an effort to end the game with no more than exactly three of each. As the prefix tri- in the title implies, in the game of Triqueta, three is the magic number. If you end the game with fewer than three of a specific type of animal token, you’ll earn a few points, but not as many as you’d earn if you had three. And, going over three results in a penalty. At the end of the fourth round, the player who has earned the most points wins.

Of course, this is an oversimplification. If you’d like to learn a bit more about the specifics of the gameplay, read on. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section.

* The rule book acknowledges that the terms triqueta and triquetra are interchangeable.

Of Towers,…

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“Yes, but which sylLAble receives the emPHAsis?” I asked. “Is it P’RAM-i-dice, like Paradise with an extra half-beat? PY-ram-i-dice, which begs pronouncing the first syllable as if I were Archimedes? Pyramid-ICE, as if it were a beverage? Or maybe emphasizing every syllable—PIE-RAM-EYE-DICE!”

I guess it’s a good thing when a game offers that sort of conversation before the teach, a conversation that inevitably ends with allowing the eventual winner to select the pronunciation that will live in perpetuity.

Pyramidice is a dice rolling pyramid builder from Ares Games and the mind of Luigi Ferrini, who had a semi-hit a decade back with Stronghold’s The Golden Ages. Rather than building a civilization, players are marking their civilization with pyramids on behalf of the Pharaoh while seeking the favor of the gods—and the occasional sacred cat.

Building blocks

Pyramidice is, in many ways, a procedural affair—add a stone die to the quarry, roll a number of dice determined by available workers, then choose from a list of possibilities until the dice are spent. You might reroll, attain a god card, send a stone die to a pyramid, carry out a god action, discard a die to refresh a card, or discard two dice for a point. As needed, you’ll discard cats to modify dice.

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What is Kingdom Death: Monster?

Kingdom Death: Monster is, more than any other board game I’ve played, difficult to describe. Designed by Adam Poots and published by his miniatures company, Kingdom Death, this game is better described by what it’s not. Kingdom Death: Monster is not a role-playing game, but has some role-playing elements. It isn’t a dungeon crawl, but has some dungeon crawl elements. It’s not a boss battler, but has boss battling elements.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. Kingdom Death: Monster is a little bit of so many things, that it’s sort of a Frankenstein’s Monster. In the game, you’ll be making decisions that affect your character, the group as a whole, and future story events. You’ll be managing resources, crafting and upgrading, fighting, managing your inventory, rolling dice, having random encounters, gathering loot, and much, much more

So what is Kingdom Death: Monster? Let’s dive in and have a bit of a look. DISCLAIMER: This is a campaign-style game. There are some minor spoilers, and some content in this game is definitely for a mature audience. While I’m trying to not mention specifics or get too in depth, just the nature of this game alone makes it difficult to keep everything that follows spoiler free and rated PG, but I’ll do my…

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At Gen Con 2023, I had the chance to sit down with Jay Cormier, the designer of Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game.” His studio, Off the Page Games, had a couple new games coming to market in the months ahead, so he invited our team to join him at a demo table to run through the new offerings.

Jay talks a lot like I do—fast, excitedly, directly. He also has purple hair, which I might have done were it not for the fact that I don’t have hair any more.

Jay showed me two games that night: Corps of Discovery: A Game Set in the World of Manifest Destiny, and Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict. Both games stand out in the same way Mind MGMT did, because the productions are beautiful and based—like all Off the Page Games products—on existing IP from the world of creator-owned comic books.

Harrow County’s world was unknown to me prior to playing the game. According to this Wikipedia page, the stories of Harrow County were first told by creators Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crookborn in 2015, first via prose on Bunn’s personal website before turning into a comic around the same time. The game world is rich, so one must assume that the comic source material…

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Unfortunately for Mindclash Games, they have made some of the best games I’ve ever played.

Let me explain. I’m a big fan of the films directed by British Oscar-winning auteur Christopher Nolan. I’ve been onboard since his first film, Following, and then the bigger splash he made with his second release, Memento. Nolan has certainly gone mainstream since then, with The Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films, Dunkirk, and last year’s award-winning masterpiece, Oppenheimer.

But do you remember Insomnia, back in 2002? I do. Nolan did a lot of press for the film, so I had the chance to see Insomnia at a screening in San Francisco where the director did a Q&A afterwards. The film was only OK. One could tell from the audience’s reaction that, well, Insomnia was no Memento.

I thought back to my experience with Insomnia while doing my three review plays of the game Septima (2023, Mindclash Games). Ultimately, particularly after my second play—a four-player game of the “full” version of the game, after a four-player game of the “basic” game—I realized that I’ve set my Mindclash expectations too high.

Septima is fine, maybe even better than average. Its main issues are not really issues at all, mechanically speaking. It’s wild to run a witch coven, trying to heal patients in a fantasy…

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The best thing about working with the team here at Meeple Mountain: respectful disagreement is quite healthy.

My colleague Andrew Lynch wrote a very balanced review of Bitoku (2021, Devir) a couple years ago, and there are a few elements of his commentary that I agree with. It’s a bear to teach—so much so that I insisted players watch the Game in a Nutshell teach video, which is about 38 minutes long and led by a professional—and the setup is “not nothing”, in the words of the folks at So Very Wrong About Games.

One thing we disagree on: play surfaces. The idea of playing a three-hour board game on my floor is out of the question, not because of the playing, but because of the standing up. I can’t imagine trying to stand up from the floor after sitting cross-legged on the floor for that long!

If you have a dedicated group of Bitoku fans who you can count on to regularly play the game, the turn elements here have the kinds of tension and decision-making I love in heavier Euros. That will also lead to less downtime in a game that can really spike AP (“analysis paralysis”) in the wrong hands. As someone who plays games like Voidfall a dozen times or…

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As a fan of the game Tokaido—a game where one of the things you are trying to do is to create these beautiful panoramas—when it was suggested that I check out the game Four Gardens, where panoramas are the focus, I jumped at the chance! Of course, when an aspect of a game shifts to become the entirety of a game, the mechanics will become a bit more involved. This is as it should be. What is needed, however, is for the process to result in a proper payoff. Does Four Gardens deliver?

Setup

The central feature of Four Gardens is a four-level pagoda that needs to be assembled before you can play. This only takes a few minutes. The instructions are clear, and when you are done (despite the size of this thing), the pagoda stores easily within the box thanks to a fairly well designed insert.

When playing, the pagoda is a presence! It dominates the table in the early game, and there is rarely a moment when the players are not looking this thing over, because the central mechanism of this game is dependent upon this feature. The pagoda is not something that is there just to be there and look pretty (like, for instance, the Evertree in Everdell). The pagoda is a pretty…

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If you have a chance to review any of my previous content, you’ll see a lot of glowing words attached to the reviews of games designed or co-designed by Simone Luciani.

To me, Luciani is gaming royalty. Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar are some of the best games I have ever played. Luciani’s “T” game release with Daniele Tascini, Tiletum, was my pick for the best game of 2022.

With all of that in mind, there was never a doubt that I would play Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods (2023, Cranio Creations), a co-design with Danilo Sabia. Sabia and Luciani also designed Rats of Wistar, which will soon make its way to gamers in the US.

I’m not going to lie to you: Anunnaki didn’t hit it out of the park, to use a baseball reference. It’s not that the game is bad—in fact, it is occasionally interesting, particularly with its action selection mechanism—but it is very likely that my standards for Luciani games have gotten too high. Grand Austria Hotel is the best Euro-style game I have ever played; as a film buff, when you love a film director and that director puts out middling fare, you…

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I love tableau building games.

Certainly, I love the classics, particularly Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, and Terraforming Mars. Ark Nova is nearly at the top of BGG’s game rankings for the same reason. Any time I can play a game where I can collect a bunch of cards to then play them to the table and trigger a bunch of powers, one-time effects, and end-game scoring bonuses based on set collection, I’m going to play it to see if I like it.

Ancient Knowledge (2023, IELLO) does a lot of things well. This new tableau builder, designed by Rémi Mathieu, keeps things so simple that the game can be taught using only its double-sided, poker card-sized player aid. But with nearly 200 different cards that can be built, Ancient Knowledge has a great variety in its cardplay and its system provides a few ways to win for creative players.

Across three plays (two at three players, one at two players), Ancient Knowledge has proved to be very entertaining. I just wish I didn’t have to house-rule the ending condition.

Goblets Are Gold

Ancient Knowledge is a hand management, card drafting tableau builder for 2-4 players. The game comes with individual and team competitive…

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The clue giver draws five cards from the deck and plays one out on the table. The card is placed either vertically, to indicate that this card and the target card share something in common, or horizontally, to indicate that they are unalike in some way. After the first clue, the rest of the players agree on a single card to remove. After the second clue, they must remove two. After the third, three, and after the fourth, well, you probably get it. The fifth and final clue has to steer the players between one of the two remaining cards. If the last card remaining is the target card, everyone wins!

I’ll note here that while the clue giver does draw a new card to replace each clue, we discovered a fun—and profusely sweaty—variant in which the clue giver is limited to the five cards they drew at the beginning of the game. They have to figure out the best…

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