Games are a conversation. In this case, the conversation starts with someone asking how to split up a bunch of money and ends with someone yelling, “I’m the boss!”

I’m the Boss! Which I’m going to not abbreviate so you have to imagine someone yelling it at you every time you read it, is a negotiation game from the 90s from prolific designer Sid Sackson, who is the creator of Acquire, what I consider to be one of the most important branches in game design. He’s also part of a cute BBC documentary that lives on a weird corner of the internet.

If you like your negotiation games light, filled with regular injections of drama, and wrapped up in a little more than an hour, this is the game for you.

The premise of I’m the Boss! is CORPORATION. We’re all departments in a corporation of some kind, business people doing business things. On a turn, you either try to make a deal on the space you’re on, or you roll the dice, moving the deal marker the number of spaces rolled, and then you try to make a deal at the new location, or you draw three cards and your turn is complete. Once a certain number of deals are completed, the game is over.

[caption…

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We play a lot of games here at Meeple Mountain. Some of them are brand new, not even on shelves yet, and some of them are classics. But no matter who's playing, or what, we all have our favorites. Here's a list of the best games we played this year, including a few games that might surprise you…and no, they're not all from 2023!

Root

Andy Matthews

Last year I joined a gaming group which skewed towards heavier games. This allowed me to indulge myself with games I might not normally play with my other groups…games like Root. This is a “battle royale”, set in a forest, where the players are cute and fuzzy creatures like birds, cats, mice, rabbits, and raccoons. And Leder Games has added many more factions like otters, badgers, moles, rats, and even lizards.

You might say 2023 was the year I went all in on Root. Thanks to a great group and amazing and varied games, I decided to pick up all the expansions. Root is such a satisfying challenge because no two gaming sessions are ever quite the same. While everyone plays within the same basic framework, each faction has their own unique play style and win conditions. This rewards people who play Root more often.…

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Bruxelles 1893: Belle Epoque feels like it comes from an alternate reality–it cleverly subverts many of the tropes of its genre while also feeling like a game sprung from some bizarro science fiction realm. It claims to be set in the “Golden Age of Architecture,” but I’d more describe it as being set in the “Golden Age of Being a Butthead.”

It’s great.

B1893BE, which is what I’ll be calling it going forward, as it sounds sufficiently futuristic, puts you in the gilded shoes of an architect. You have a cadre of sub-architects that you send around the board to do your bidding. At first, it appears to be a classic worker placement game. You’ve got pawns, send them out to do your bidding.

But, there’s more to it than that. One portion of the board is a grid of action spaces, some of which are inactive based on where the first player for the round placed the try square, a little component that makes part of the board inactive using the power of right angles. When you place a worker on a space on the grid, you must put a minimum of a dollar underneath that worker. At the end of the round, the player that put…

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No art exists in a vacuum.

This is one of the wonderful things about it. Art materially blends two things into a single object: individual experience and the work of the collective. The former’s experience, knowledge, and creative juices blend with all the work that has come before, forming a dialectic relationship. Each work of art springs forth from an individual (or sometimes, a group’s) hand while simultaneously containing flashes from all the art that came before it, whether the artist was conscious of this or not.

If you don’t agree, the remainder of what I’m going to write about here probably won’t mean much. If you do, then you’ll likely understand the violence that capitalism and industrialized production does to art.

Board games represent to me one of the last little nuggets of artistic possibility in a world of art with dollar signs attached to it. They’re indisputably trash culture: cheaply produced, quickly forgotten. Partially, this is because many people view board games as toys rather than art, and this allows games to do quite subversive things, both politically and artistically. It also allows for the Century games to spring into being.

Century: Spice Road, Century: A New World, and Century: Eastern Wonders have been in print for several years now, and with the release of the Century:…

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Lost Adventures has a nostalgic charm to it that reminds me of board games I enjoyed as a kid. I don’t get tickled that way often, especially by most contemporary designs. Like the big-on-luck, low on analysis games of yore, this game’s commitment to its own bit is noteworthy.

While I’m not much of an Indiana Jones guy, Lost Adventures ticks all the requisite boxes: a race against other unsavory adventurers to find clues to some esoteric mystery; an evil Nazi-adjacent organization that’s chasing you around a map; and, finally, a series of challenges that will test your moral character and greed. Here’s how it works:

Players move around a point-to-point map that cross-references locations with cards set around the perimeter of the board. Each card gives you pieces of information about the challenges you’ll face in the temple in the second half of the game. Also, each card has cubes assigned to it that represent how many “clue points” you need to take a peek at it. Each player starts with two cards in a tableau in front of them. The cards have red symbols and blue symbols. I’ll get to the former in a minute, but the latter gives you clue points when you search for clues. This is done with a fairly simple mechanism. If you…

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Admittedly, my tastes bend toward austere-looking games with a brown color palette, so I’m naturally predisposed to like a game that features tan, olive, brown, beige, ochre, and a smattering of puce. That said, this sucker has quite a lot going on under the hood.

This game is a reimplementation of one of the earliest published designs of Acchittocca (the design team of Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Stefano Luperto, and Antonio Tinto–collectively responsible for Alma Mater, Egizia: Shifting Sands, and several other games in loose collaboration), Leonardo da Vinci. Codex Leicester has one more designer thrown in the mix for good measure, Changhyun Baek.

I haven’t played the original game, so you won’t find any comparing and contrasting here, though there are significant differences between this version of the game and the original, or at least that’s the sense I get from reading the original game’s rules.

But here’s a thousand-foot summary. Codex Leicester is a worker placement game with a high degree of interaction. Players start with a single workshop, which can be upgraded with various bits and bobs to make it more powerful, and they can also add a second workshop as the game moves forward.

[caption id="attachment_287152" align="alignnone" width="1125"] Workshops in action.[/caption]

What do you do…

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It is unfortunate when I find myself writing an overview or a buyer’s guide. Basically, my job here is to say what a thing does and whether you should buy it. Part of what makes games is that like many art forms, novel and creative ideas built from brute mechanisms become more than the sum of their parts. One of the great pleasures of the hobby is finding something that does this.

This is unfortunately not the case with Great Western Trail: New Zealand (NZ). It is an assemblage of Great Western Trail parts. It’s a bricolage, in the most derivative sense.

[caption id="attachment_287156" align="alignnone" width="1125"] Where I want this version of the game to stay, mostly.[/caption]

Where I found the previous entry in the trilogy of games, Argentina, to be an interesting iteration on the system that improves and adds more depth while still maintaining the competitive edge of the original game, NZ opts to simultaneously make the game more mechanically complex and opaque. You’re also in New Zealand, if that’s your bag.

I’m going to assume some familiarity with the system, but I’ll hit a few overview points as I go.

Let’s start with the deck. Great Western Trail is one of the few game systems where I find…

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Planet Unknown does what it says on the tin, and it also manages to sidestep some of the pitfalls of the polyomino-puzzle genre. The game also got me thinking about the lie of reasonably predictable play (more on that in a bit).

The premise of PU *snicker* is that you’ve all found a planet suitable for life, and you’re going to explore it and put tiles on it to develop it. You also have a little rover you need to drive around with and pick up doo-dads. Everyone has a planet mat and a player board with a series of tracks on it, both of which can be asymmetric if so desired. I recommend playing with the asymmetry from the jump, as it adds fun wrinkles to the overall experience.

[caption id="attachment_284690" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The beginning of my planet.[/caption]

Draft kings

PU promises simultaneous play, which it delivers. All of the puzzle pieces sit in a lazy susan that the first player rotates around until they have a selection of two tiles they like, and then everyone else picks one of the two tiles that’s in front of their triangular player marker. Players place their tiles, and then the first player cycles, so everyone gets a crack at a piece they…

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Deep State or Deep Sleep?

A game called Deep State promises machinations, intrigue, and skulduggery. The actual Deep State is a drafting game that feels as onerous as the bureaucracies you’re attempting to overthrow.

The game presents you with two areas to manipulate: First, four mats, each functionally serving as a track to advance on that grants powers and endgame points; Second, a row of cards (scaled to player count) which players place workers (“agents” in game parlance) to claim for their individual tableau. In a 3-player game, there are 8 Objective cards available, and each game round, the leftmost 3 are available for players to attempt to claim. There are some additional rules for 5 players that I won’t cover here.

Play takes place in rounds, with each player taking an action. There is another phase that occurs once all the Objective cards have been claimed. The first player token, known as the Supervisor, travels around to each player in clockwise fashion after a round is complete. Each player takes one action. The Supervisor receives two agents from their pool (which starts with 3) but their actions are limited to tying to claim an Objective card or accomplishing a single big contract, called a Covert Operation, which requires…

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There’s nothing more appealing than a good map, and few things are as disappointing as a map that doesn’t measure up to its potential. I’m happy to say that DEI lives up to the promise of its very cool map.

It’s incontestable that the battle royale has made a splash in the world of video games, and there have been attempts to replicate the formula into board game form. For the unfamiliar, battle royale games are typically a first-person shooter where a player is dropped into a huge landscape without any weapons or tools, and needs to run around and collect weapons, ammo, and equipment to be able to survive the other players. On top of this, the map is constantly shrinking, bringing players into more and more conflict. These games, in spite of their huge maps, often feel claustrophobic and frantic at the same time, and every decision you make matters.

[caption id="attachment_273660" align="alignnone" width="768"] Opening moves![/caption]

Now, how could a real-time experience like this possibly be translated into board game form? I’m not sure if DEI’s designer, Tommaso Battista, intended for this, but he’s made perhaps the best battle royale-adjacent board game I’ve encountered so far. I think this is in part because the game tightly focuses players on…

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I’ve been on a roll lately, writing about new editions and implementations of games. Galactic Renaissance is very much in the same mold. While it is not a reimplementation of Inis (a titanic achievement in game design), it seems to be part of a “political trilogy” or expansion of the concepts laid down in that game.

Because of this little bit of information, I’m torn about which critical frame to adopt.

Evaluated as a design by itself, compared to the similar field of games about using patterns to score points, I’d say it’s a perfectly serviceable contract-fulfillment eurogame.

Evaluated against its sibling and predecessor, Galactic Renaissance very calculatedly accepts all of the wrong critiques and complaints about its precursor design, resulting in something that is essentially an intellectualized game of whack-a-mole.

I’ll start by evaluating Galactic Renaissance on its own merits.

The game is a deckbuilder of sorts, more in the Concordia or Faiyum slowly-add-cards-deck-management school than the Dominion buy-cards-from-a-big-market school.

[caption id="attachment_271384" align="alignnone" width="768"] Welcome to the universe.[/caption]

Each player starts with a deck of the same cards, plus one additional “specialist” card, which is usually a variant of the starting “core team” with additional features. On their…

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The big question with any reimplementation, second edition, or reprint with rules changes is always the same—why?

There is the obvious answer—to make money. I find this to be a pretty lousy reason to do anything art-related, and it’s not my job nor do I have much interest in shilling for publishers. They have marketing teams for that.

Games appeal to me as an art form because they are not inert in the way that other forms can be. The interpretation of a book can change throughout time, it can undergo translation, it can get sequels, but the text itself does not change.

Games require us to bring them to life, and, when we bring them to life, unexpected things can happen, often things that are not intended. Players often discover strategies or behaviors within a game that upset or destroy the system the game is attempting to model for them or create dominant strategies that make features of the game untenable or uninteresting. Sometimes they find something divergent or unique that enhances the experience.

At the time I’m drafting this, according to BoardGameGeek stats, the original version of Great Western Trail has had 125,210 total plays, and the second edition has seen 17,739. That’s a lot of people playing a game. There are world championships (which…

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I’ve overheard several people describe Endless Winter: Paleoamericans (EW) as a collection of minigames, or a series of different mechanisms bolted together. I think quite the opposite. It is a quintessentially modern hobbyist game that has clearly seen meticulous development and playtesting, and a game where there are many pathways to victory. It is one of the cleaner designs I’ve played in recent memory—in fact, I find it a bit too clean, a bit too smooth. 

The premise of EW is that you’re managing a tribe of cave people (I’m no scientist, but this game has no pretensions towards any kind of historical or scientific fidelity), and you wanna grow that tribe, build camps, and probably lay down some big flat megalith stones. 

[caption id="attachment_266131" align="aligncenter" width="768"] A two-player contest.[/caption]

It’s easy to see why people would describe the game as a mishmash of mechanisms. There’s a shared random hex tile board where you place camps to try and capitalize on scoring opportunities; a separate board where you build a little stacking tile puzzle; a market for buying fancy power cards; a market for adding people to your deck; a set collection puzzle with animal cards; deckbuilding; worker placement; and, TWO tracks. It’s basically the greatest hits of eurogames from the past…

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