We here at Meeple Mountain love our cardboard games. Setting out a board with chits, meeple, tiles, resources, cards—heck, even add in some dice, and you have all it takes to make any of us happy campers.

As with most gamers, we also spend time playing some of those same board games online. The number of board gaming sites online, and the quality of their implementations, have made this a viable alternative. At times, it’s even the preferred alternative.

Here are five Meeple Mountaineers and the reasons why they’d rather play some games digitally.

Tom Franklin

Onirim 

Onirim was the first of the Oniverse solo games by designer Shadi Torbey. In Onirim, you’re a Dreamwalker, trying to find all eight of the Oneiric doors before your dream ends. All this plays out with a big deck of over 70 cards featuring the trippy, dreamlike artwork of Élise Plessis. 

To play, shuffle the deck of Dreams, Doors, and Nightmare cards. Deal yourself a starting hand five cards. On a turn, you’ll play a card from your hand, then draw one from the deck. Played cards are placed on the table, in a row from left to right, with the last card played on top. If you play three cards in a…

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Back in 2021, I had the chance to review Dungeon Scrawlers: Heroes of Undermountain from WizKids. Since then, Heroes of Undermountain has consistently stayed in my gaming rotation. It’s fast, it’s kid-friendly, and it’s relatively easy to teach. When I learned about the Heroes of Waterdeep expansion, I had only one question: what could they possibly add to this game?

Complex City

Truth be told, Heroes of Waterdeep is more of a standalone sequel to Heroes of Undermountain. The gameplay is familiar: players simultaneously race and trace their way through identical dry-erase dungeon maps while grabbing treasure, eliminating monsters, and generally scoring points in various D&D-themed ways. (You can find a more thorough explanation of play at the review linked above.)

[caption id="attachment_286979" align="alignnone" width="961"] Several of the new dungeons are based in the city of Waterdeep and have a slightly more urban feel.[/caption]

Of course, this version sports a few new features. The most immediately obvious is the set of cards that come along with the standard double-sided player sheets. There are five character cards, swapping the original game’s sturdy cardboard for dry-erase so that players can track their score across all three rounds. This is a nice quality-of-life addition, though the new cards only include a graphical representation…

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As a fan of tabletop roleplaying games, there’s nothing I like better than introducing new players to the genre. It’s an alchemical process: sitting down together, agreeing to play in a world almost entirely of our creation, and then transmuting those unexpected details and dangling story threads into a powerful cathartic experience. But over and over I hear the same thing from new players: “I don’t know how I could make a character. I’m just really not creative.”

“Poppycock,” I say theatrically. “You already have a thousand characters in your mind. All you need to do is find one.”

As a writer and a former actor, I firmly believe that we’re surrounded by characters. From the stars of the latest Hollywood blockbuster to our own loved ones, inspiration is everywhere. Yet some players remain extremely hesitant, firmly convinced that they could never enjoy an RPG without delivering an award-winning performance backed by meticulous character development. For those players, something else is needed, some way to prove to them that they have the capacity for creation. I’m always on the hunt for new ways to get them out of their own heads and into the game.

Which is why Roll For Your Life, from 3 Much Games, caught my eye. This book promises to…

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For most people skateboarding may seem like a relatively recent fad that only evolved in the 1980s, but it’s actually been around for more than 75 years. The first skateboards of the 1940s and 1950s were homemade inventions, a fusion of roller skates and salvaged wood meant to emulate the feel of surfing with none of the waves. Treated as a niche curiosity for a few decades, skateboards were mostly used for simple stunts. That is, until the infamous Zephyr team and their unorthodox style revolutionized skating forever.

The Zephyr team, known colloquially as the Z-Boys (with apologies to Peggy Oki), was a group of 12 skaters from California who brought a streetwise, surfing-heavy skillset to the sport of skateboarding. They carved along banks the same way that surfers carve along waves. They practiced in empty swimming pools–usually when the unwitting pool owners weren’t home. They showed how to slide the board along railings and copings, launched themselves into the air with unusual aerial moves, and invented outlandish tricks that emphasized personal style in addition to technical ability.

In the following decades, skateboarding became increasingly mainstream while still keeping its countercultural edge. Punk and hip-hop made perfect partners for skateboarding’s energetic audience, and the low requirements for participation helped it spread across the world. Famed Z-Boy Stacy Peralta mentored…

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“I love my bathysphere, The Orpheus, because it carries me far below the surface of the ocean…and hopefully all the way back up!”

If you’ve ever seen a statement like this one on social media, always accompanied by the hashtag #bbbathysphere, chances are good you’re already familiar with Scott Slomiany’s Bargain Basement Bathysphere. This solo roll-and-write campaign game about piloting a ramshackle submersible made waves when it was first released in 2018 as an entry for BoardGameGeek’s solitaire print-and-play contest. Buoyed by its light campaign/legacy elements and a clever social media marketing scheme that gave players an in-game boost for publicly posting their ship’s name, Bargain Basement Bathysphere spanned two dozen individual scenarios and a whopping 60 pages that needed printing. That’s a bit much for your average gamer (and even me) so when WizKids announced in early 2022 that they would be releasing a physical version of Bargain Basement Bathysphere it felt like a great opportunity for the game’s wry, absurd humor and accessible gameplay to reach a wider audience.

[caption id="attachment_270233" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The game's three foldout maps are enticing and provide different challenges to the unwary diver.[/caption]

Splashdown

The retail version of Bargain Basement Bathysphere has been condensed from its original format without sacrificing much of the content.…

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In this review anything that might be considered a spoiler is hidden in a collapsible window. In all other ways, this review is spoiler-free.
Power. Resentment. Wealth. Anger. Deception. Alcohol. Murder.

These are the central ingredients in Dead on the Vine. After a small family gathering, the powerful founder/owner of Llewyn Vineyard, Gail Llewyn, was found dead in her home. It might have been old age…but one family member suspects foul play. That’s where you come in. Can you put the pieces together and figure out who killed Gail Llewyn? 

Uncorking a Mystery

Dead on the Vine is a one-shot mystery about a murdered matriarch and the messy lives of her manipulative family members. Over the course of roughly 3-6 hours players must identify the killer, their method, and their motive in order to finish the game. The box includes everything needed to solve the case. However, those who need a little more help can find a browser-based hint system and additional clues on the website, a link to which is provided alongside the evidence in the box. 

To be clear, there’s already quite a bit of evidence to go through! Dead on the Vine is absolutely bursting with components. The box contains some 20 pieces of evidence, a few of which are multi-part pieces.…

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From 1936 to 1939, as the rise of fascism in Europe was accelerating, Spain was riven by a civil war between the combined leftist forces known as the Republicans and a collection of right-wing groups fighting under the banner of the Nationalists. Led by General Francisco Franco, the Nationalists eventually won the war and solidified their control over the country through misinformation, repression, and brutality. Some of those who opposed Franco’s horrific dictatorship became part of the Maquis: guerilla fighters working to destroy his iron grip on the nation. Using the skills and materiel earned at great cost during the Civil War, the Spanish Maquis fought not only to liberate their own homeland but also to support the neighboring French under the Nazi-backed Vichy government. Their acts of resistance carried on long beyond the end of World War 2, finally dissolving during the 1960s. Resist!, from Salt & Pepper Games, puts the player in control of a Maquis cell during the height of Franco’s reign.

Man on a Mission

During a game of Resist! the player is racing to complete as many clandestine missions as they can manage using their available Maquis agents.

[caption id="attachment_265490" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Each Maquis agent can be played in different ways. Getting the most out of…

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Here at Meeple Mountain we talk a lot about why we play games. Looking over our archives, you’ll find plenty of reasons in articles like: Why I Love Board Games (And Why I Think You Should Too), Why Do We Game – The Expectation of Enjoyment, and Top 6 Reasons Why I Play Games, Explained in the Ten Hundred Most Used Words. We’ve dug into specific niches of gaming, from The Amazing Cognitive Benefits of Puzzle Games to Board Games as Science Communication to Why Play Solo? We’ve explored RPGs and Escapism (The Value of Childlike Imagination) and gotten personal with How Board Games Changed My Life.

Yet we don’t talk much about why and how we review games. My colleague Thomas Wells has an insightful article that separates review from critique in the context of colonialism as a theme, but critique is not what I am after here. I want to examine the basic bedrock of reviews. What even is a game review? Why should we read or watch reviews? What purpose do they serve? Who is the audience? Is it just about free games and Internet clout or is there a deeper meaning to what we do?

These aren’t easy questions to answer, if only because there isn’t really…

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There are few things as ubiquitous as the idea that kids hate vegetables. Brussels sprouts, broccoli, or cabbage: they’re all viewed with suspicion at best and tantrums at worst. The artichoke is a particularly hard sell with its spiky leaves, blandish-bitter taste, and tedious teeth-scraping process. Much as adults might love them, they’re hardly popular with the high-chair-and-booster crowd.

So it makes sense that Gamewright’s Abandon All Artichokes, designed by Emma Larkins, puts that maligned vegetable at the heart of a fast-and-furious “deck-wrecker” where players race to dump their artichokes and get a hand full of wholesome veggies before everyone else!

All Decked Out

The goal of Abandon All Artichokes is to be the first player to draw a hand without any Artichoke cards. Each player begins with a deck of 10 Artichoke cards, 5 of which they’ll draw as their starting hand.

[caption id="attachment_255140" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Sure, they look cute and silly now, but you'll get sick of seeing them soon enough![/caption]

On a player’s turn, they’ll take one of the various vegetable cards available in the central Garden Row and add it to their hand. Next they’ll start playing cards from their hand in any order they please, taking the actions indicated on those cards, until they either run…

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Note: Meeple Mountain contributor Art Franz co-designed this game. However, all views expressed are my own.

Tabletop versions of real-world sports are a difficult prospect. There’s a balance to be struck between outright simulation full of crunchy details aimed for hardcore fans and more abstract representation focused on capturing the feel of the sport rather than the specifics.

American football presents a particularly thorny case. Football is ubiquitous in this country, permeating so much of American life that it’s the de facto national sport. (Sorry, baseball, but you’re extremely boring.) While fans of every level can appreciate the sport’s hard-hitting athleticism and unexpected swings of fate, it’s the strategic depth underlying every aspect of play that makes it such a phenomenon. Translating that gridiron greatness to the tabletop is incredibly challenging. The ideal tabletop football game needs to simultaneously be accessible and complex, tactical and strategic, visceral and cerebral all at the same time. Because that’s generally impossible, most games pick a side and stick with it.

Breakaway Football leans very heavily towards the simulation side of things. This is not designed for casual gamers, nor is it designed for casual football fans. If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between a punt and a kickoff, turn back now. It’s about to get heavy.

Xs and…

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I’ve been interested in making games for almost as long as I can remember. My childhood was filled with hastily scribbled rules, half-baked variants for existing games, and endless character designs and stories about different games that I’d never play.

Even as tabletop games started to gain popularity, it never occurred to me that I could actually be a game designer. I didn’t know the first thing about how games were made. In college I experimented with a few handmade prototypes, but I had no idea how to evolve them into something playable, much less something marketable. I spent hours hacking and homebrewing games with no thought that anyone, anywhere, would want to play something I made. On the rare occasion a friend might express interest, I’d sheepishly explain the rules as though I was violating the laws of nature. Game designers weren’t ordinary people; they were names written large across splashy graphics adorning heavy boxes. 

When I started writing for Meeple Mountain, I suddenly gained access to a world I’d thought inaccessible. Publishers and designers were no longer remote mythical creatures. They were human beings who just happened to really love games—people who worked hard to make something that someone else might enjoy. People like me.

I still remember the moment that everything changed. In 2019 I attended an…

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It happens to the best of us: we eat something that disagrees with our stomach. In this case, it’s a Miner and a handful of space crystals. There’s a lot of roughage in that particular meal. But it’s not much easier to be the Miner, suddenly trapped in the belly of the Beast! There’s only two ways out of this situation, and neither one is going to be pretty.

So, You’ve Been Eaten is an asymmetric game where one player is the Beast, using their hand of cards to drive the pace of the game, and the other player is the Miner, rolling and placing dice on their board to push back against the Beast’s digestive machinations.

[caption id="attachment_254198" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Two boards fit together to make up the play space. Each board is double-sided, with a human player side and an AI side.[/caption]

Players interact with each other through the Digestive Tract, an ever-changing column of 7 Stomach cards that lies between the two players. Every Stomach card shows one of four colors of Bacteria; most also show either a Crystal (in one of eight colors) or a Tool which the Miner can use to help escape the Beast. How each player approaches this shared area depends on which role…

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In this review anything that might be considered a spoiler is hidden in a collapsible window with a spoiler alert on it. In all other ways, this review is spoiler-free.

Reagan Skinner is on the loose! The cagey killer has kidnapped several police officers and it’s up to you to free them all before Skinner takes another life.

To do that, you’ll need to decipher the clues that Skinner has left behind to locate the officers, track Skinner down, and put the megalomaniacal mastermind behind bars for good. Luckily, Skinner’s obsession with puzzles means you’ve got a long trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Put together the pieces and you might just crack this case!

Blackbrim: 1876 is an escape room game in two parts; each part includes five or six individual puzzles as well as a “meta-puzzle” that requires combining the other solutions in a new way. In general the first part is easier and can be done in an hour or two, while the second part is a little trickier and will likely take two to three hours. This could vary by group size, skill level, and other factors. Since the game takes place in 1876 and does require some historical knowledge, players are not only allowed but encouraged to use the Internet for help with some…

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