Logic & Lore is a game that I knew right from the beginning my wife would love. She is someone who can sit for hours working on sudoku puzzles. So when asked if I would like to delve into this little game, it was an enthusiastic yes!

This small-box game only has a few components. Each player has a set of 12 star cards with ranks from 1 through 9, plus three black holes. There are nine alignment cards, also ranked from 1 through 9. Beyond that, there is a pool of memory tokens (36) with various symbols on them, some meeples for each player (7 per player), and reference cards (3). In the basic game, called the Star Light version, the black holes and the meeples are not used.

Star Light

To set up the basic game, the alignment cards are placed between the players ranked in order from 1 through 9 with the moon-phases face-up. Each player shuffles their star cards and deals them out face-down so that each of their cards is associated with one of the alignment cards. Make sure that the reference cards are on the Star Light side and that the memory tokens are within reach. Randomly choose a player to go first, and you are ready to begin.

Side note: there is…

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Introduction

The good folks over at Durdle Games have a Kickstarter for their new game, Logic & Lore. In addition to wanting to learn more about the game, this seemed like a great time to ask the designers (Darren Reckner and Jason Hager) a few questions about themselves.

So, in Meeple Mountain fashion, here are Six Questions with (and about) Darren Reckner and Jason Hager!

Part I: About Durdle Games

Q1: I am sure you have been asked a thousand times how you met and how Durdle Games came to be. So I am going to skip past that and ask the more important question: As a turtle (Jason) and a rabbit (Darren), how do you guys manage to not get on each other's nerves? Or, assuming you do get on each other's nerves, how do you get past that to work on interesting games?

Darren: What’s interesting about this comparison is that our playstyles and our design styles are actually polar opposite. Jason is a slow player but has a never ending fountain of ideas when it comes to making new games. I am a quick player that needs time to think about design stuff in my down time. Jason can discuss an idea almost entirely in the mind while I need to start writing…

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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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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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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…

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Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on. – Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)

An Alternate History

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has a long and proud history. The one most people are familiar with, beyond the d20 iterations, is the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) line. If asked, I suspect most people familiar with the game would list the history of the game as follows:

• Chainmail: a set of combat rules; proto-role-playing. Primarily a war game.
• Original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D): the original true role-playing game. Heavily rooted in its wargaming past.
• Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D): E. Gary Gygax's magnum opus. The three books which make up this version of the game (Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual) are the focus to which all other games point.
• Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition (AD&D 2e): this is the version of the game designed by the people at E. Gary Gygax's company after they kicked E. Gary Gygax out of it.
• Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition (D&D 3e; d20 System): after Tactical Simulations Rules (TSR) folded and was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, this was the result. The d20 System was the core of those…

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I am not the best Game Master, by any means. I have met and played under many people that put me to shame. That said, I have run multiple entertaining and, in the end, satisfying campaigns. I believe I am pretty darn good at running a role-playing game.

Being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Game Judge, referee, etc.; GM from here on out) is work. Sure, you might be in a session for a few hours, but for each hour that session lasted, I would say a good GM spent an equal amount of time or more preparing things. Unless you are running a purely hack-and-slash game (nothing wrong with that), there are a multitude of things of which the GM needs to keep track, storyline adjustments that need to be made based on the actions of the player characters, and so on. The work of the GM started before the player characters were even conceived! World building is an amazing, rewarding, and fun thing to do. To do it well takes time and effort.

It can be very hard to build and run a world where the players can complete epic quests. It is even harder to do it in such a way that feels organic and gives the players agency.

Fortunately for…

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Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa – David Wood

When I heard Fabio Lopiano, the designer of Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road, was coming out with a new game with co-designer Mandela Fernández-Grandon, I was instantly interested.  While Merv is a medium weight game, Sankoré is on the heavy side.  Don’t get me wrong; the mechanics of the game are straight-forward.  It’s just that there are lots of moving parts to remember and keep track of.  It took me and my gaming group several games to get the hang of it and eliminate mistakes.  That aside, Sankoré is a great optimization puzzle. 

Players work to generate prestige in 4 academic topics:  Astronomy, Law, Theology, and Mathematics. They do so by various means, such as teaching classes, graduating students, completing objective cards, and collecting Sankoré tiles.  However, they also need to manipulate the victory point (VP) value of each of the 4 different types of prestige.  This is done by placing books in the library.  The topic with the most books on a shelf awards 2 VPs per prestige.  One VP per prestige is awarded to the topic with the second most books on each shelf.  Given there are 3 shelves in the library, 9 total…

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Amygdala - Andrew Lynch

It’s been a less-than-stellar month for me and the Kiesling/Kramer design team, but what can you do? Sometimes that happens. Pueblo was an interesting idea that didn’t result in an interesting game, and now we have Amygdala, a resource management and tile-laying game that’s about emotion. Really, it’s an abstract game.

I thought Amygdala was perfectly alright. It didn’t do much for me, but one member of my playgroup enjoyed it tremendously, enough so that he requested it at subsequent game nights. It looks great on the table, especially if you play on the black-and-neon side of the board. I thought the ten-space limit for inventory was a fun restriction, but I’ve seen that before. The tile-laying isn’t dynamic enough for my tastes, and left me wanting a round of Babylonia. I personally wouldn’t recommend Amygdala, it struck me as forgettable, but it seems to have its audience.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★☆☆☆ - Would play again but would rather play something else

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Fractal: Beyond the Void – David Wood

Fractal touts itself as an “an ever-changing, story-driven” 4X legacy…

The post Quick Peaks – Amygdala, Fractal: Beyond the Void, Orion Duel, Sequitur, Pax Pamir appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Bin’Fa (a.k.a., Hexagony) is a unique creation. It has the basic trappings of an old-school wargame: armies moving across a battlefield attacking one another in a quest for supremacy. It has rules for things like supplies and terrain; over the years it has added rules for generals, weather, and even teleportation (vortexes). But calling it a wargame does not feel right. Bin’Fa is different. It is a contradiction of sorts: as you look deep into its inner workings, it reveals itself to be simultaneously far more, yet significantly less, than the sort of thing one associates with the term wargame.

If it is not a wargame, the question becomes: what is Bin’Fa, exactly?

That question is not easy to answer. Bin’Fa has gone through many iterations over the years. I am fortunate enough to own every published version of the game as well as two copies of a version that was never published (more on that later). Each release has been just a bit different from the last; there have been rules updates between releases of the game that range from exceedingly minor to majorly transformative. Bin’Fa has evolved over time. Still, the core concepts have remained surprisingly stable over the years.

Understanding Bin’Fa – getting to know it and truly appreciating its beauty – means getting to know its…

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It has been said in several Meeple Mountain reviews that, these days, there are trick-taking games aplenty. This is not really surprising; it is a well understood mechanic, having been honed over decades via games like Spades and Hearts well before the modern renaissance of board gaming began. All of this is to say that, if a game is going to center on trick-taking, it will need to use that mechanic in service of something special if it plans to stick around for very long. To this end, these beauties have a few tricks up their sleeves (see what I did there?)!

Before we begin, however, there is one thing that needs to be said: These are two separate products (Tournament at Camelot and Tournament at Avalon – referred to as Camelot and Avalon from this point forward). They are, however, essentially, the same game. The first part of this review discusses Camelot (as it came first); the second part deals with Avalon and what it adds to the basic formula. Even though they are in two different boxes, a review of one is effectively a review of the other.

[caption id="attachment_294464" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Two boxes; effectively one game.[/caption]

Camelot

The game comes with…

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Between Two Cities is a wonderful game that only gets better when you add the elements of the Capitals expansion. Since I have already covered gameplay in the initial review, this article will cover how the expansion adds to, and changes, the base game.

What’s in the Box?

Between Two Cities is an excellent game on its own. This means that my first question when I became aware of the expansion was: what can they add that would make this game more fun? My first thoughts were empty – I really could not think of much I would want to see added to the game.

The main issue was that the mix of the tiles in the base game was good. I mean really good. If you add in more of those tiles, then they would need to be in the same proportions as the base game, which means why bother? If you were to introduce a bunch of new types of tiles, then they would dilute the originals, making each type harder to accumulate and get good scores.

Nothing came to mind for me. Luckily, Stonemaier Games was not relying on me to come up with new ideas! This is what you get with the expansion:

• Landscape Mats
• Civic Building tiles
• District Cards and scoring tiles

…

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Crowdfunding has altered the way many products get to market.

Kickstarter has helped products come to fruition in a wide variety of areas: from comic books to software; from fashion to music (be that concerts or independent albums). It is the go to method of funding for many. More than 250,000 projects have been funded on Kickstarter, with almost $8 billion (with a ‘B’) from over 90 million pledges.

Statistically, tabletop games make up the single largest segment of Kickstarter projects, both in terms of revenue and number of funded campaigns. This market is so large that Gamefound, another crowdfunding platform, was created to handle nothing but this class of product. They boast almost 1,500 projects, over €400 million (over $430 million) in pledges from a million backers. Add in Backerkit, and one can see that crowdfunding and tabletop gaming are working hand-in-hand.

Whole companies have gotten started because of crowdfunding. Stonemaier Games began with a Kickstarter for Viticulture. Stonemaier’s co-founder has written many blog posts detailing how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign; he eventually wrote a book on the topic that is considered by many to be the gold-standard. Crowdfunding can be a great thing! It has given voice to many who did not have the ability to bring their ideas to the…

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