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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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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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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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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Napoleon’s image has had a rough year or two, huh? Ridley Scott’s 2023 film Napoleon painted the Emperor as a horny buffoon, an accident of history, an egomaniac of little substance. Now along comes Ted Raicer’s I, Napoleon, a solo game which suggests that the very act of being Napoleon was as simple as flipping an endless series of cards, doing what they say, and occasionally rolling a die.

I, Napoleon, published by GMT, has you step into the hat of Napoleon Bonaparte for the quarter of a century between 1793 and 1817, covering the full extent of both his rule and his reign. Every bit of the game is experienced through cards, drawn one at a time from an increasingly large deck. Draw a card. Read its effect. Perhaps you gain some Diplomacy or Glory, resources indexed on a track in the upper left corner of the enormous board. Maybe you lose some, heaven forbid. You might reveal a military campaign, or a new king of Spain, or that rat bastard the Duke of Wellington. For the historical aficionado, the deck is swarming with fun little cameos.

Many cards in the…

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Starmada is a set of rules that allows you to design starships, then (with some miniatures or chits on a hex grid) send them out to reduce other starships to so much space debris. The idea of the game is to be a quick playing, tactical, and universal set of rules for such things. The system for ship design has basic components and myriad add-ons allowing it to simulate just about anything you can think of in a way that ensures that even if you and your friends are simulating different universes, the relative strengths of the ships can be calculated to ensure a fair fight. Want to put a fleet of Star Wars Super Star Destroyers up against a group of Star Trek Borg Cubes or perhaps a few Babylon 5 Vorlon Planet Killers? This game can do that.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Admiralty—the group of volunteers that Daniel Kast (Majestic XII Games) brought together to take Starmada X rules and use them to create a new edition of Starmada a bit over a decade ago. Daniel and the members of the Admiralty were all people that loved many of the previous editions of the game. We each had our thoughts on where the strongest and weakest areas of…

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In SAS: Rogue Regiment, 1-4 players take on the role of Special Air Service operators in the days and weeks following the D-Day landings. Their job is to wreak havoc among the Germans through acts of sabotage, assassination, and other forms of mayhem. They’ll use stealth to infiltrate enemy positions, take out sentries, and avoid enemy patrols to accomplish their missions before they’re discovered. But if they’re spotted, the alarm will be raised, and they’ll find themselves seriously outnumbered as they try to fight their way back to Allied lines.

Game Play

[caption id="attachment_306562" align="alignright" width="219"] Sequence of Play for Stealth and Battle Sections[/caption]

Each mission consists of two sections: the Stealth section and the Battle section. The Stealth section sequence of play is used each turn until the alarm sounds (more on this later). From this point on, the Battle section sequence is used. The two sequences are similar, the main difference being how the Germans operate now that the SAS Team’s presence has been discovered.

During the Stealth section, each SAS Team member uses 4 action points to conduct operations such as movement, climbing, and attacking. If any of the Germans are alerted by spotting or hearing an SAS…

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A Brief History

I do not recall the first time I played this game, but I do recall loving it for years and years. The best sessions of Diplomacy were while I was in the Navy. We had a six-month deployment, so what we would do is handle the game one move per day. Players had a 24-hour window to secretly negotiate and scheme with each other: and scheme they did!

One person (usually me) would collect the orders from each of the players; at a designated time set so we could all be there, we would run through what took place, adjust the board. Everyone would crib down notes on who was where and then disappear for a few hours. Phone calls would take place. People would meet for lunch or midnight rations. And then, within a couple of hours of game time, I would start getting visited by players as they turned in their orders. One game we played on the USS RANGER lasted over two months. Given that two moves in the game is one year, in that game World War I lasted over 30 years.

Diplomacy is a wonderful game... if you have the right people.

[caption id="attachment_306158" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A classic version of the Diplomacy board.…

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In the sea of historical, card-driven war games, the COIN series (short for COunter-INsurgency) from GMT Games has always stood out to me because its subject material is precisely NOT what most others are: large, national superpowers fighting one another in historically well-known and globally impactful (but otherwise covered-to-death in the wargaming space) conflicts. From the Colombian government hunting down Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel (Andean Abyss, Volume I) to Mohandas Gandhi’s civil resistance against colonial rule (Gandhi, Volume IX) to a bloody civil war in Finland (All Bridges Burning, Volume X) the COIN series focuses on smaller guerilla, revolutionary, and civilian fighters and protesters taking on the powerful, ruling parties (as well as one another), using asymmetric powers, variable winning conditions, and an innovative turn structure to produce some of the most compelling war games I’ve ever played.

A quick COIN gameplay overview: Using a deck of Event cards, players take actions on their turn (based on the faction initiative on each card) with the resources at their disposal, attempting to reach their unique winning condition. A small number of cards, spaced out and mixed into the Event deck, lead to a “victory check” when flipped up, and if no player has reached their particular winning condition, there is some shuffling of the map, resources, and/or pieces, and…

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I don’t know that I’ve ever played a more divisive game than Arcs. Cole Wehrle's latest design, unquestionably the most-anticipated board game of 2024, won’t even be out at retail for another two months, but seemingly everyone has already played it, and seemingly everyone has an opinion. Most of those opinions are strong.

This is becoming de rigueur for Wehrle releases. While Root and Pax Pamir are consensus classics—even the people who don’t like them wouldn’t generally argue that they’re bad—Oath had a stark divide between fanatics and detractors. You don’t meet many people who think Oath is “fine” and have nothing more to say on the matter. Arcs, from my experience so far, is plowing a similar furrow. For every “I enjoy Arcs, and would happily play it any time” or “Arcs is the greatest board game ever made” you hear, there exists an “I get what it’s trying to do, but I don’t think it does it” or “Oh, I hate Arcs” to balance it out.

It is now my job to not only reconcile these viewpoints, but to assign an objective numerical value to my play experience. It is my job to solve Arcs. Sure. Simple enough.

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I grew up surrounded by pop culture representations of Robin Hood. The 1990’s were a boom time for the Sherwoodian economy, with popular Hollywood adaptations, more enduringly popular Mel Brooks parodies, and the more-or-less permanent availability of Disney’s animated 1973 Robin Hood film on VHS. You too may have formed some of your earliest memories while staring at the McDonald’s toy display during the 1995 Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection campaign. Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day, indeed.

There’s something magical about Robin Hood, isn’t there? Like King Arthur, he exists in that wondrous folkloric pocket between the historic and the fantastic. While the story of Robin Hood doesn’t typically involve sorcery, there is still an aura of magic to the whole affair. Sherwood Forest exists in the real world, yet to set anything there is to invite the same gossamer feelings and suspension of disbelief that come with finding out a story takes place in Neverland. I am instantly drawn in.

Publisher GMT knows what they’ve got on their hands with A Gest of Robin Hood, a two player game that recreates the fight between Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Every production choice makes the most of the story. The cover, which shows Robin Hood and his Merry Men surrounding a fire deep in the forest at night,…

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“Ahh, we’re doing wargames now, eh?”

My buddy Kev and I were messaging each other because I asked him if he would try a two-player-only, card-driven war simulation called Quartermaster General: East Front. “No, but I love games that play in about an hour” was my immediate response, one that originated from the same reason why I raised my hand to try this game in the first place.

(A note about the game’s title: no, I am not sure why the game is called East Front, but not Eastern Front. Whenever I talked about this game, players wanted to call it Eastern Front. It’s not Eastern, it is East! I’m sure this is tied to the historical significance of the conflict, but still—I thought it was hilarious how often people got the name wrong.)

Quartermaster General: East Front (2023, Ares Games) distills the entire conflict of the Axis powers’ attempts to invade the Soviet Union during World War II in 1941 into a 90-minute asymmetric cardplay experience. One player takes on the role of the Allied forces of the Soviet Union, as the Soviets are forced to find ways to delay the onslaught of the Axis side while counterpunching their way through skirmishes throughout the western part of the region. The other player is the Axis, represented here by…

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Over the course of several months, I led a group of six players through the Grand Campaign scenario from Europa Universalis: The Price of Power. For 4-6 hours a day, every other Sunday, we would convene around the gaming table, remind ourselves of where we left off, and get to the business of running the great nations of Europe in the 16th century.

All six players were acquainted with Europa Universalis IV (EUIV), the massive computer game that served as source material for this massive board game. Several of them had put thousands of hours into exploring its nooks and crannies. This isn't, I am told, unusual. EUIV is the type of game that consumes lives. It is one of PC gaming's largest sandboxes. “I mean, it's a Paradox game,” people would say over and over, the developer's name considered enough of an explanation.

The first EU computer game, released back in 2000, was itself adapted from a 1993 board game of the same name. Given that, a modern board game adaptation feels inevitable. It also feels ludicrous. The Price of Power…

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