Doing another series for Final Girl was a no-brainer. The first set of modules in this endlessly customizable survival horror game was a massive success, taking the world of solo board gaming by storm. Our own Justin Bell had nothing but glowing praise when he reviewed the Final Girl base set, and I’m no different.

But a second series brings with it risks. There’s the dreaded sophomore slump, buckling under the pressures of expectations. Could Final Girl add extensions to the house without creating cracks in the foundations?

The Root of All Evil

If you’re looking for a more exhaustive description of Final Girl, I’ll direct you to Justin’s review, but here’s the quick pitch: the entire series is premised around the horror trope of the Final Girl, a female protagonist who manages to survive everything and lead the baddie to their ultimate demise. The roots of the Final Girl can be traced at least as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but the trope wasn’t identified until the late 1980’s.

Final Girl the game puts you in…

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Vienna - David McMillan

This past weekend, I finally got my copy of Vienna to the table. Vienna, for those not in the know, is the 5th game in the much-lauded (and also highly criticized) Stefan Feld City Collection from Queen Games. Reimplementing La Isla, which I reviewed as part of my Focused on Feld series, Vienna plops the players down right smack dab in the middle of Austria during the early 1950s. World War II has ended, but the Cold War is just getting started. Espionage is the name of the game.

Vienna comes with two modes of play: the basic mode—which plays almost exactly like La Isla— and an advanced mode that introduces a whole lot of new elements. I got to play the basic mode. A few mistakes were made, but I enjoyed the experience overall, and I feel like that was the consensus among the other players at the table as well. I’m really excited to get it to the table again so that I can dig into the new material.

Keep an eye out for my upcoming review!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles…

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Senjutsu is a skirmish game for 1-4 players, set in feudal Japan during the civil war that followed the fall of the Ashikaga Shogunate. Each player takes on the role of a samurai protecting their Daimyo, but the narrative doesn’t make its presence known. This is Street Fighter in three dimensions. Another name for that might be Tekken. Players battle it out, trying to be the last man—hey, that’s what’s in the box—standing.

Mechanically, Senjutsu is a card game with heavily customizable decks. At the beginning of each session, both players construct a deck that corresponds to their chosen character. The flexibility of the system is tremendous. Each character has a set of special cards only they can use, on top of a large stack of general cards that can be used by anybody. This portion of the game reminds me of Sakura Arms, a dueling game in which players select characters and choose cards from within their supply. Though Sakura Arms is a bit tidier about how it implements its version of this system, Senjutsu offers a similar promise: the more you play, the better you know the characters and their cards, and the more emotionally satisfying the deck-building portion of setup becomes.

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My first play of Mori was one of the least impressive gaming experiences of recent memory. Not for one moment did it work. All four of us were miserable. The rules were impermeable and the experience was entirely flat.

“I can’t believe I have to play this again,” I grumbled as I took the subway home.

So I Played It Again

The next night, I brought it out for a different group. “This is Mori. I played it last night, and it wasn’t particularly good, but if there’s a group that can find the beauty in a trick-taker, it’s this one.”

Mori is a bit of an odd bird, welding about as much onto a “simple” trick-taker as I think the genre can withstand. We start in familiar territory. There are four suits, each with cards from 0-10. It’s a must-follow game. The highest card in the led suit wins, unless someone has managed to play a trump card.

This brings us to the first wrinkle: the trump suit depends on the led suit. Each suit corresponds to a season, and each season is trumped by the season that comes next. Winter always loses to Spring, which always loses to Summer, and so on.

The winner adds all the cards from the trick to their score pile, then takes…

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Border Reivers: Anglo-Scottish Border Raids, 1513-1603 has a terrific theme. This GMT game for 1-6 players takes place on the border of England and Scotland, and concerns itself with the activities of the border raiders who populated the region. English and Scottish alike, the border reivers stole livestock, nursed grudges, and generally made life for one another difficult.

This is delightful fare for GMT. So fully does Border Reivers commit to its pastoral setting that it comes with sheep and horse meeples. This is GMT-does-Agricola, and it is absolutely charming. Well, I say "charming." There’s an awful lot of pummeling one another for Border Reivers to be charming.

Sheer Madness

Each of the three rounds is divided into four seasons. During the summer, players draft cards to build alliances, gain resources, and lay traps that can be sprung during subsequent seasons. Autumn involves bookkeeping, when players check that they’re not holding too many cards or in possession of too many horses. Winter is the most involved season, when all of the attacking occurs, so we’ll come back to that in a moment. Spring is a maintenance phase, resetting for the next…

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I love old paintings and illustrations of fruit, like the kind you find in botany textbooks from the  late 1800s. The attention to detail is astonishing, the gradations of shade and form, the imperfections. The card art for Pies drew me right in, lovingly rendered in an identical style. I found myself falling into the cards as I rifled through them. These cards build a world with a distinct pastoral feel, a book spine covered in dust.

Then I came to the dog, and the pie tokens with Pi carved into them, and I started to worry. They didn’t feel aesthetically consistent. I found myself thinking about the old writing maxim, “You don’t put a hat on a hat.”

Pies is allegedly a trick-taking game, and it’s marketed as such, but that is categorically incorrect. There are no suits, there is no pressure to follow, there are no trumps. It shows none of the defining characteristics of the genre. This is an auction game, themed around gathering fruits and recipes to turn into pies.

Each player, one at a time, puts a card from their hand into the middle of the table. Then, from highest card to lowest, each gets to pick any one…

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I would have told you that Decrypto had been out for way longer than five years. Like Just One, Decrypto arrived in 2018, out of the blue, and immediately established itself as a go-to word game. To think there was a year in which we received Decrypto and Just One. The heart quickens. We had no idea how good we had it.

To celebrate five years of success, Scorpion Masqué has released a 5th anniversary edition, spicing up the classic—board gaming has a short memory—with 440 new words. Does it change the game in any appreciable way? No, this is still very much the Decrypto people know and love. It does freshen things up a bit, though, for those who’ve put their copy of the original release through its paces.

It takes a round or two to get used to Decrypto’s structure, and it’s difficult to describe in absence of the game in front of you. What I’m trying to tell you is, what I describe may not sound fun. I assure you, it is.

The players are divided into two teams, each of which has four secret words that everyone on the team can see. Each round, one player on each team (the “Encryptor”) has a secret three digit code that they need their teammates to guess.…

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I love an archival project. Publisher Eagle-Gryphon Games went through the notes of legendary designer Sid Sackson, creator of Acquire and Can’t Stop amongst others, and selected four of what he considered his best unpublished games. The results are here, in the two volumes of The Sackson Legacy Collection, which combine those four unpublished games with new printings of two Sackson obscurities.

There is no publisher I would rather have do a project like this. Eagle-Gryphon’s production is always exemplary, luxuriant without being fussy. With Eagle-Gryphon’s typical thick box stock and vibrant colors, these are games that would look good on a bookshelf. I suspect that’s exactly what the team had in mind. All they’re missing, as far as I’m concerned, is a spine number.

I love a spine number.

Blue

The blue volume includes three previously unpublished titles: I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game, Banana Blitz, and Scope.

I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game is a negotiation game inspired by Sackson’s own I’m the Boss!. Players take turns rolling dice, attempting to move to the top of various Expertise tracks while jockeying to negotiate different deals. Any time a player earns enough stars to be the Boss, they…

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Monikers: Monikers-er - Andrew Lynch

Monikers is a great party game if you’ve got a group that isn’t afraid of getting silly. Monikers-er cranks things up, with a collection of obscure, seemingly impossible cards. All your new favorites are here: Mukbong, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Reiner Knizia. It’s the Monikers set for those who like their word selections eclectic, which I certainly do. The final endorsement: I’d rather play Monikers with just these cards than mix in the base set.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ - No sweat
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Faraway - Andy Matthews

Faraway is a game about journeys—traveling through a magical land called Alula. Over the course of 8 rounds players will play cards in front of themselves in order to arrange resources and scoring conditions for end of game scoring. The catch is that you lay down cards from left to right, but score from right to left after first flipping all the cards face down. This means you have to constantly be thinking in two directions—setting yourself up with difficult scoring cards on the left side, while giving yourself things TO…

The post Quick Peaks – Monikers: Monikers-er, Faraway, Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West, Wyrmspan, Western Legends: Showdown appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Sail is a two-player cooperative trick-taking game, a family of design I haven’t seen since 2020’s fair-to-middling The Fox in the Forest Duet. The goal is simple, in theory: get your ship from one end of the board to the other by playing cards that combine well with your partner's. All the while, you have to avoid taking damage from the monstrous kraken, who wants nothing more than to see your magnificent vessel rendered a wreck on the ocean floor.

The mechanism for steering your ship is must-follow trick-taking. At the beginning of each round, once cards are dealt out, each player passes a card to the other. Each card bears an action icon. Pair well the cards you and your partner play, and you’ll get a beneficial action. The possible action combinations are spelled out on the provided player guides, and while they’re quick to pick up, I won’t break them all down here. It’s good to pair helms, which move the boat one space forward diagonally, listing in the direction of the player who took the trick. It’s also critical to pair cannons with kraken tentacles, since that removes potentially damaging cards from the deck.

The kraken…

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My Island, Reiner Knizia’s follow-up to his 2020 legacy tile-layer My City, has some big shoes to fill. Not everyone at Meeple Mountain agrees, and while I do understand why David didn’t care for it, that three-star rating is a travesty. My City is a wonder. I have played the full legacy game twice, with two different sets of players, and it was an absolute joy both times.

[caption id="attachment_296316" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Laura went to Bard.[/caption]

Beachfront Property

My City and My Island share core mechanics. Each player has an identical set of unique tiles. In the case of My City, they were tetromino buildings. For My Island, the tiles are groups of two-to-four hexagons with different terrain types. A central deck of cards, each showing one tile, is shuffled, and each turn is a lightning quick pair of actions: someone reveals the top card, and everyone has to place their copy of that tile on their player board.

It’s hard to explain more than that, because both My City and My Island alter the rules as you play. What you’re trying to accomplish changes from chapter to chapter (8 in total) and even episode to episode (three per chapter). As with…

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Trick-taking is the flavor of the moment in board gaming, there’s no question about it. In part, I am sure, because of the ease of publishing a deck of cards, trick-taking has exploded in the last year and a half, with what seems to be a never-ending torrent of titles coming out every day. For some, that’s a problem. Me, I can’t get enough.

Before we dive into what makes trick-taking games so wonderful, I should make sure everybody knows what we’re talking about here. I’m going to lift from my own work, borrowing the What We Talk About When We Talk About Trick-Taking section from my review of Cat in the Box.

[caption id="attachment_296261" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Pick your poison. (Note: Poison is not a trick-taking game.)[/caption]

What We, etc.

You’ve probably played a trick-taking game at some point. Spades. Hearts. Whist. Contract Bridge. Oh Hell. Tarot during that semester abroad in Paris. If you haven’t, the fundamental idea is pretty simple. I’ll walk you through a hand, focusing on some key vocabulary that will make it easier to explain games on this list.

Josh leads the trick, which means he plays the first card. Let’s say…

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I’m not a tableau guy. I’m not anti-tableau by any means—Race for the Galaxy is one of my favorite games. They’re not a genre I seek out, though. My distaste is mild enough that the realization only came to me recently, after a game of 51st State. My friend Nathan said, “Tableau builders aren’t my thing, but if I were to play one, this is the one I’d play,” and I realized the same was true for me.

It explains a lot. Wingspan? Nah. Everdell? Eh. Terraforming Mars? Best for all involved that I don’t. I think my distaste comes from the fact that I prefer my games streamlined, and running calculus around a bevy of unique cards turn after turn is not streamlined. There’s also some (irrational) part of me that has come to regard an appetite for combos as one of board gaming’s baser instincts, and I’m suspicious of anything that appeals to it.

Look, nobody’s perfect.

This is not meant to yuck your yum. If anything, these realizations have made me more understanding of the popularity of the above-mentioned games. It also has me trying to figure out why I like 51st State so very much.

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