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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Setting everything out on the table, I could feel the excitement bubbling up. It had been a couple of months since I’d played a round of Arcs, 2024’s hottest release. When I finally sat down for my first game of campaign expansion The Blighted Reach, I couldn’t wait to dive back in. I would have told you that I like Arcs without quite tipping over into loving it, but I don’t often feel that sense of anticipation when setting a game up. I was thrilled to be back.

It took a while to get The Blighted Reach to the table because of the animosity several in my gaming group(s) feel towards the base game. The players most likely to show up at 9:00 am on a Sunday to game until 20:00 are also, by and large, the most Arcs-averse. The tweaky, tactile decision space that characterizes the game is a big part of why I like it, but it can rub more intentionally-minded players the wrong way. Arcs isn’t a game that rewards having a plan half as much as it rewards the willingness to ditch your plan and all who sail in her. That isn’t for everybody.

The Blighted Reach is still largely the same game, though it adds just enough small tweaks to the rules to…

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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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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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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…

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I love shedding and trick-taking games because of the drama. It comes in stages. There’s the initial, private drama of looking at your hand, picturing the round ahead and how you have to play it. There’s the acute pin prick of each new trick and new card, the anticipation that condenses around the edges of the table as whoever leads throws down. Most delicious of all, those moments when you succeed in pulling off a daring maneuver, those moments when you are able to shake off misfortune before it has the chance to find you.

These games are fun, you know?

They rely to some extent on the chaos of a deck of cards, on the mathematics of distribution. As a result, shedding and trick-taking are notoriously tricky to translate into a two-player format. Sail and Fox in the Forest are basically evergreens at this point, but two-player trick-taking games are still rare. Two-player shedding games, Haggis aside, are almost non-existent. There’s a good reason for that: it’s hard to make shedding interesting when there are only two players. There’s always something of a novelty to even the idea of attempting one. That’s why I was so interested when Thomas Lehmann, designer of Race for the Galaxy and Dice Realms among many others, announced…

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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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XOK, pronounced “shock,” is a two-player abstract game from recently acquired Helvetiq imprint Steffen Spiele. The Steffen Spiele logo is a thing of joy. There is no surer indicator of a game’s qualities than that little three-by-three grid. Whatever the particulars of the game, it’s going to be made of wood, it’s going to be abstract, it’s going to be for two players, and it’s going to have straightforward rules.

That is all certainly true of XOK, in which you and your opponent attempt to build an uninterrupted school of ten fish on a surprisingly tiny board. Seriously, every time I set XOK up, I am struck anew by the petite play space. It must have something to do with how substantial the box feels. Thanks to its black coloring, this travel-friendly box seems larger than it actually is, so that little blue cloth mat, covered in hexagons, isn’t what I expect. Neither, to be fair, are the adorable fish. The sharks, beefy hexagons with slots cut out to represent their mouths, are a bit hexagonal to be evocative to many, but they’re a dead ringer for Whale Sharks if you ask me.

XOK Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I don’t like trading card games (TCGs). I don’t generally like the gameplay, which I find joyless. I don’t like the business model, which is inherently and increasingly predatory (“It’s heroin for children,” a customer said to me just today). I don’t like that serious engagement with competitive play requires a significant and material financial investment. If you want to dedicate yourself to chess, you only need a chess board and a whole lot of time. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on pieces.

Though I am far from the only person with these misgivings, they are clearly irrelevant. Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon, the two TCGs that have dominated and defined the space for the last three decades, are billion-dollar industries. They are the behemoths forming the top of the jungle canopy, but they are far from the only trees in the forest. Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Flesh & Blood all have solid—if comparatively minute—followings, and every year, sapling after sapling pops up, hoping to get even a sliver of whatever sunlight the canopy lets through.

2023 saw the release of Lorcana, which uses characters from throughout the Disney Animation cannon. Earlier this year, Star Wars: Unlimited came out. Whether either game becomes a staple remains to be seen. Initial sales for both were incredibly strong, but…

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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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For a modern audience, the witch trials that took place in the American colonies in the latter half of the 1600s seem to have hinged on the question of whether or not witches were real. The people who participated in them don’t seem to have much questioned that idea. Witches were real, alright. The question, as they saw it, was narrower: are there witches here?

Obviously, many people felt there were. Witchcraft!, a new solo game from designers David Thompson, Roger Tankersley, and Trevor Benjamin, joins the colonists in presupposing the existence of witches. They’re definitely here. No doubt about it, witchcraft is a-happening. Instead, the game asks, what if the witches were good?

As the witches of Wildegrens, yours is a solemn task. The town is under assault from black magics unknown. Demons walk the streets, lurk in the forests, and stalk the graveyard. Your coven is the only thing standing between the people of this colony and certain death. You’d think the populace would be grateful, but no. They suspect you of witchcraft—or, rather, of witchcraft!—and have brought you to trial. Your goal is to fend off the demons just long enough to prove to your fellow villagers that you mean them no harm, and to convince two of the three jurists of your innocence.

Witchcraft! Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

High Rise Penguins, from publisher Alley Cat Games, is the new English edition of Yura Yura Penguin, a nichely-beloved dexterity game from designer Yabuchi Ryoko. The idea is simple: Players take turns playing cards Uno-style onto an ever-growing iceberg condo. If you empty your hand, you win. If the condo falls on your turn, you lose. If the condo ever reaches the point of being completed—good luck with that—then everyone wins.

Each card forces the following player to do something. Maybe you have to add the next level to the apartment block, or draw cards, or place some ice crystals into the apartments. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get to help move one of the adorable little wooden penguin meeples into their new apartment. Those are the moments when the structure is most vulnerable, but the sense of peril is balanced out by the rush of endorphins that comes with touching one of the penguins. They are very cute.

Maybe a…

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