Back in 2020 I swooned over Village Green, a delightfully constricting game of card placement and fluid scoring designed by Peer Sylvester and published by Osprey Games. 

Fast forward to 2023 and Osprey are back with Village Rails, designed by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert. It’s a sequel, of sorts. Like its sibling, Village Rails provides players with the puzzley experience of creating a grid of symbol-splattered cards with scoring cards around the edge, all wrapped up in a tidy and tiny package.

It’s good: compelling, compact and cranium-caressing. Worthy of the ‘Village’ name. And yet the experience it provides is markedly different and whilst I like it quite a bit, there is no swoon.

All aboard

The goal of Village Rails is points, tracked on gorgeous scoring dials shaped like old-fashioned train tickets. They’re a delightful highlight of an excellent production.

On each of your turns you take a ‘tracks’ card and add it to your expanding 3 x 4 grid. These cards have two train tracks traversing them, with a track entering or leaving each of the card’s sides. By the end of the game you have…

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Voidfall – David Wood

Man, oh man, was I ever excited to have this baby show up on my doorstep, and it did not disappoint.  Touted as a Euro 4X space game, Voidfall is a beast both in terms of table space and complexity, but it was so worth it.  The core mechanic is playing Focus cards to take actions.  Each card has 3 actions listed on it, but players can normally only take 2 of them.  The number of Focus cards that can be played each cycle varies, so players will have to plan out their strategy each cycle by selecting which cards they will play, and just as importantly, the order they will play them.  IMO, it’s this planning feature that makes the game shine. 

The game comes with a bunch of scenarios (solo, co-op, and competitive) of varying complexity, including a solo tutorial that helps new players navigate the learning curve.  There’s a bunch of iconography players will need to become familiar with, but after a while it becomes second nature.  Combat is simple and completely deterministic.  In fact, there’s an app you can download that automatically determines the outcome for you.  And because each game is limited to 3 cycles, this a 4X that doesn’t out stay its welcome. 

…

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Pyramido is a handsome game. Colourful tiles, playful icons, bold wooden markers, a vertical build, the tempting façade of tabletop satisfaction. It's a charming way to spend half an hour or so. 

It's also simple to play; a pyramid complex this is not. On your turn you’ll take a domino tile, placing it into your personal pyramid and sometimes placing one of those cute wooden markers on top. There are four rounds to the game and during each you’ll build another layer of your pyramid, starting with 10 dominoes (creating a 5x4 grid of half-domino squares) and in the final round capping your pyramid with a single domino.

[caption id="attachment_291531" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The first layer of a pyramid. Please note: The wonderful playmats that feature as a background to the images in this review are not included with the game.[/caption]

At the end of each round you score your 5x4 grid from above. Some dominos have icons on one or both halves and you’re trying to create areas with lots of icons in each of the six colours. However, you can only score an area if you’ve placed a scoring marker in it during the round. Points are awarded for the number of icons in each marked area, with a bonus…

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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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Upgrade sets covered: Grand Austria Hotel, Taverns of Tiefenthal, Concordia, Wingspan, Viticulture, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, Everdell, Little Town

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a tabletop game in possession of some good cubes, must be in want of an upgrade.  

A clichéd opening perhaps, but the fact remains: when we board gamers fall in love with a game, we want to make our experience with that game the best it can be. Begone common cubes, dull discs and other mundane markers of misery and in their place give us custom counters, pretty pieces and magnificent miniatures!

BoardGameSet is an EU based company creating board game accessories and upgrades, aiming to make unique and beautiful pieces to create the best board game experience.

BoardGameSet kindly provided the Meeple Mountain team with some examples of their work and Justin Bell, Bob Pazehoski, Jr. and Andrew Holmes were lucky enough to try them out. Find out our thoughts below!

Grand Austria Hotel Upgrade Pack (Justin)

I’m a BIG fan of Grand Austria Hotel, to the point where I bought the deluxe edition of the game at SPIEL 2022, right down to the totally unnecessary extra…

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Frosthaven is one of the most anticipated games of 2023, sequel to the absurdly successful Gloomhaven and its little sibling Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. With over 100 scenarios in the Frosthaven campaign, branching pathways and hundreds of secrets to discover, reviewing this iceberg of a game requires more than just a single person.

Happily, Meeple Mountain is up to the task and today David McMillan, Jesse Fletcher, Will Hare and Andrew Holmes discuss their separate and combined experiences venturing to the frozen outpost of Frosthaven. Before we get onto discussing the game itself though, we’ll just introduce our previous experiences with the series and how we’re each playing through Frosthaven.

David: My first experience with a Gloomhaven was a brief, single excursion on my back porch one warm spring evening a few years back with Jesse, our friend Andrew Plassard (who’d brought along the first edition of the game), and my wife. If I recall correctly, the campaign for the game’s second printing was ongoing on Kickstarter at the time.

While that experience didn’t convince me to pull the trigger on it, it certainly put the thought into my head that, someday, I wanted to…

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Meadow is one of my favourite games of 2021, full of tight mechanics that tell surprisingly powerful narratives about how organisms interact and food webs are constructed. It’s an incredibly relaxing game that can somehow also take up all available space in your brain. If you aren’t familiar with it, check out my review here.

As someone who likes board game expansions, I was excited when Meadow: Downstream was announced and then slightly hesitant when I learned just what it involved – how would all the new stuff impact the gorgeously balanced ecosystem of the base game?

Is this an expansion worth canoe-dling with or is it simply oar-ful? Let’s find out!

A River Runs Through It

Expansions come in many types, from those that slot into an existing system with barely a ripple to those that are an extra tributary joining the main flow. Downstream splashes into that second camp: the core essence of Meadow remains the same, but now there’s an additional board and type of card trickling off the edge.

The river board joins the campfire and main boards in the centre of the table, turning table space into a precious resource. A river winds down the new board to a small market of river cards and each player gains…

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Mystic Vale was published back in 2016, the brainchild of John D. Clair and the first step in Alderac Entertainment Group’s ‘Card Crafting System’. It’s a system that’s won over many with its slick and slidable plastic shineables, but from a wider perspective it also hasn’t been replicated much beyond Clair and AEG (although Canvas does something similar with its transparent painting elements).

Happily, there’s plenty of Mystic Vale to explore. In the years since its release, gamers have seen a spread of seven expansions from big to tiny, as well as three promos, two event kits and one oxymoronic giant storage solution/micro-expansion. Yes indeed, ol’ John D. was a busy boy in the second half of the 2010s.

Yet all has been quiet in the Vale recently.

In fact, the last releases for the system were in 2020 – two expansions and Mystic Vale: Essential Edition – a spruced up edition of the base game bundled with the first three expansions and additional gubbins.

Who knows, perhaps Clair will return to Mystic Vale at some point in the future, perhaps this lull is just a Covid-related blip, perhaps something exciting is waiting just around the next bend of the valley. For the moment, however, Mystic Vale: Essential Edition represents…

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‘Oh, so pretty!’ said Lisa, spotting the stacks of cards on the table.

‘Oh, so shiny!’ said Lisa, picking up the cards in front of her.

‘Oh, so, um… slippery?’ said Lisa, looking down at the cards now scattered around her feet.

-

Welcome to Mystic Vale, where the adjectives ‘pretty’, ‘shiny’ and ‘slippery’ are likely to be the first impressions of most people encountering the game in the wild.

Mystic Vale was published back in 2016, the brainchild of John D. Clair and the first step in Alderac Entertainment Group’s ‘Card Crafting System’. Whilst Dead Reckoning has been making waves recently, Mystic Vale currently remains the strongest of the card crafting games, and yet strangely not one we’ve covered here at Meeple Mountain.

Let’s correct that: Mystic Vale is excellent, but won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

Advancements, Risks and Bouquets of Bindweed

Here at Meeple Mountain we’ve had a lot of fun with ‘-builders’. Not the tea-addled house-raisers but the tabletop genre in which players build customised arrangements of items that when randomised spit out resources, money, points, bonuses and so on. We’ve built decks, bags, dice pools and even dice themselves (with

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2022 was quite a year for trick-taking games.

Bug Council of Backyardia, Ghosts of Christmas, Pumafiosi, Thrones of Valeria, Violet and the Grumpy Nisse, and Wicked & Wise are just some of the latest wave in the genre’s resurgence. Trick-takers never went away but the 2020’s are fast becoming their decade.

A Brief (But Relevant) History of Trick-taking

In a trick-taking game players play cards from their hands in a series of rounds, known as tricks. Generally, the highest value card wins the trick and the winning player or team is determined by the number of tricks won or the value of cards contained within those tricks. The suit of card matters: the first card played in a trick is the lead-suit and subsequent cards need to follow suit if possible to be able to win the trick.

So it has been for centuries, since the genre’s inception in China in the early part of the second millennium, with innovations like trump suits and bidding coming in the 15th and 17th centuries respectively.

These days game designers are taking the basic mechanisms established in old favourites like Whist, Rummy, Hearts and Bridge, and deconstructing them in fascinating ways,…

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Every now and then something lands on my desk that charms me completely. Something irresistibly playful, smart and altogether beautiful. Something I can’t help but pore over, a fidget spinner for the mind.

Let me tell you about 21X.

Algebraic Blackjack

The goal of 21X is to get as close to 21 as possible without going over. Each round you receive two cards, the value of which might be fixed or could be determined by the number of cards you have (N) and/or an integer of your choosing (X).

You might be dealt these cards:

[caption id="attachment_269544" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Your starting cards are -5 and 8X.[/caption]

The total value of these cards is (-5 + 8X), but since you can choose the value of X you have some flexibility. If X is 1 then your total would be 3. If X is 2 then it's 11. With 3 you’re up to 19 and might call ‘Stick’, challenging your opponents to beat your score within a minute. But that leaves you open to someone else reaching 21 in that time so you might instead ‘Twist’ and take another card.

[caption id="attachment_269545" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Your third card is 3N.[/caption]

Since you’ve got three cards, N…

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Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further:

Yes, Oceans: Legends of the Deep has flying whales.

No, they aren’t some secret branch of evolution that the government has kept hidden from you.

Yes, they are entirely fictional, fantastical and kinda funny.

Here’s the thing though: Legends of the Deep also features Ahuizotl. The rulebook and some internet searching tell me that Ahuizotl were a water dog from Aztec mythology that lured people to the water’s edge with the sound of a baby crying, grabbing them with a hand at the end of their tail to feast on their eyes, nails and teeth. Alex Shiga’s illustration of them is about as creepy as all that sounds.

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of the Ahuizotl before. I’d also never heard of the Finnish sea monster Iku-Turso, the Hawaiian guardian shark Ka’ahupāhau, the West African orisha spirit Olokun, or the Japanese yōkai Umibōzu. In fact, of the 17 myths and deities included in the expansion (along with seven entirely fictional entities), I knew of a grand total of three.

Much like the base game, then, Legends of the Deep is largely educational, with a few frivolous fabrications chucked in for fun.

It’s a shame that most people initially focussed on those damn flying whales…

Magical Myth-ery…

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I remember first hearing about Oceans and being a bit chuffed off.

I’m an admirer of the Evolution series, interested in board games with depth and am part-seal myself so you’d think I would have dived straight into Oceans.

But with Evolution: Climate having only just been delivered to Kickstarter backers in late 2016 and Evolution: The Oceans (as it was then) announced in early 2017, it felt as if publisher North Star Games were abandoning Climate before its pledge manager had even cooled. The result was that I viewed the Oceans Kickstarter campaign with bitterness, failing to see Oceans as anything but a cynical attempt to get fans to fork out for another entire game based on the same underlying system.

Shows what I know.

Oceans is, for me, the pinnacle of all branches of the Evolution board game tree.

Setting the Ocean Colour Scene

As with all games in the Evolution series, the goal of Oceans is to create animals that out-compete your opponents’ animals for limited food supplies. Through clever card play you create new species, give your species colourful traits to help them vie for food, and influence the availability of food resources.

However, Oceans deviates from its forebears in some interesting ways, creating an experience…

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