Saddle Up

Designer Paul Dennen has won my trust with his design work on Dune: Imperium (and the recently released Dune: Imperium - Uprising), the Clank! games (Clank!, Clank! In Space, and their associated expansions). Publisher Dire Wolf first caught my eye with the digital card game Eternal and has continued to put out fantastic digital implementations of some of my favorite board games. I had to pry myself away from a challenge run of the Root digital adaptation to force myself to finish some work today. So when I heard Dennen was releasing a brand-new game under a new IP, I was immediately intrigued.

Wild Tiled West is, as the name implies, a Wild West-themed polyomino tile-laying game. Players will throw dice and take turns drafting tiles to add to their growing settlements, adding pastures, roads, and buildings to complete towns or fulfill certain scoring conditions. By covering specific grids, players will receive resources that help them buy fancier buildings or take out the ne’er-do-wells lurking among their towns. After four “years” of drafting, players will score up their settlements, and the person with the most points wins!

It may sound straightforward, and that’s because it is. But is that simplicity a strength or a weakness?

Fur-ocious Fun

The first thing to…

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Let Freedom Ring

Monopoly tends to be a hot-button board game to discuss. Most people grew up with at least one copy floating around somewhere between their family and extended family, and it has remained ubiquitous since its release. There are hundreds of special versions and variations of the game. Famously, Monopoly originated as The Landlord’s Game, designed by American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie. The game wasn’t intended to be a solid bit of game mechanics as much as it was intended to be a statement piece in support of an economic philosophy known as Georgism.

I am not a smart man. If you ask me how the economy works, most times, I would stare at you like a deer in the headlights, grunt, and shrug. But this bit of context is important because Freedom Rings is similar to Monopoly in so many ways. It wears its influence on its sleeve. It’s just that this game happens to be based on a different economic philosophy, taking influence from Stephen Taft’s 2015 book A True Free Market: Conversations on Gaining Liberty and Justice Through Economics. It’s unclear how involved Stephen was in the creation of the game itself, as there are no credits listed on the box or in the rulebook (other than the artist), but the opening…

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Tales from the Tavern

A group of evil monsters has stolen all the drinks in the land of Barcadia, and now it’s up to your merry band of adventurers to brave the dungeon and recover all the drinks. Or… something like that. Heroes of Barcadia is less about the narrative and more about the laughs and, of course, the drinks. What exactly is it, then?

Well, it’s a dungeon-crawling game for 2-6 players (or up to 8 with the expansion), but unlike many dungeon-crawlers, you’re in direct competition. These other heroes are not your allies; they are your rivals! After all, what good is recovering the lost hoard of stolen drinks if it’s not you getting all the glory? You’ll take turns exploring the dungeon to find power-ups and slay monsters. Once you have three power-ups, you can try to take on the final boss and recover the drink hoard.

As a game, it’s… pretty basic. Heroes of Barcadia keeps the gameplay dead simple. There’s very little room for strategy. The rooms you uncover, the power-ups you get, and the dice you roll to fight the monsters are all random. You have little control over your destiny here. It is less of a game and more of a classed-up, shiny new way to have fun with your friends and…

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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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Will Hare

I have a lot of personal affection for TantrumCon. It was my first step beyond tiny local gaming conventions, and the miniature painting class I took there is what jump-started my newest obsession for 2023: collecting, assembling, and painting minis. It was also my first time trying Blood on the Clocktower, which was my favorite game I played in 2023. As soon as we left last year, Brock (my husband, who says hello) and I were ecstatic to come back again.

The new venue felt double the size of last year’s venue, and TantrumCon filled it out well. There were two gigantic ballrooms for playing games, an entire hallway dedicated to games of Werewolf, a separate hallway for Crokinole, a lobby area for hands-on game demos with designers, and catered meals, a huge step up over last year’s food options. The new venue also allowed some attractions to have dedicated spaces by converting meeting rooms and boardrooms into the miniature painting studio, game library, TTRPG dungeon, and more. The whole event breathed a lot easier in the new space, which is great because it felt like more people were present this year. As the event grows each year, it’ll fill out this new space very well.

…

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War of the Woods

Let’s set the stage. The longstanding oligarchal Eyrie Dynasty (a flock of birds) has fallen apart due to infighting and internal strife, leaving a power vacuum in the Woodland. The nefarious Marquise de Cat has seized power and begun chopping it down for fun and profit. But enough is enough…the denizens of the forest lived under the oppressive Eyrie but are now seeing a different kind of oppression from the Marquisate. They’ve joined forces to form the Woodland Alliance, hellbent on taking back the Woodland. Of course, war means a boost to the economy, and the Vagabonds skulk around the forest, wheeling and dealing with all sides to turn a quick profit.

In Root, players will take control of one of the four adorable factions vying for control of the Woodland in a race to score 30 victory points. These factions are brought to life by the impressive artwork by Kyle Ferrin but take inspiration from real-world historical entities. Cole Wehrle made those influences obvious during his wonderful designer diaries. Throwing a cutesy woodland critter coat of paint over everything makes the theme easier to digest, for sure, and adds a whimsical charm to the game. But at its core, the game is an examination of power structures and systems of control that exist…

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Welcome (Back) to Arrakis

I wrote a glowing review of the original Dune: Imperium earlier this year. To say that I was enamored with it would be an understatement. The game has risen in the ranks to claim its spot among my top board games of all time, and I jump at the chance to introduce new players to it. I even snagged the new digital version on Steam and have already sunk about 20 hours into the challenges and weekly scenario modes there. This is all coming from someone who isn’t that taken by the world of the original Frank Herbert novels and has seen the Denis Villeneuve film a grand total of once.

At Gen Con this year, Dire Wolf Digital announced a “standalone spinoff” for the game titled Dune: Imperium - Uprising. Initially, much of the conversation around the new game was slightly confusing for the gaming community because it wasn’t clear how this would work with the existing Dune: Imperium properties. The publisher quickly clarified that both expansions for the base game can also work with this new spinoff game and that cards from the base game can be mixed and matched. It is an example of making the waters a bit too muddy for my liking. It’s a sequel and a spinoff, but…

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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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Vabanque - Justin Bell

Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower claimed that Vabanque was his favorite betting/bluffing/gambling game of all time, so I picked up a copy. It sat on my very small shelf of shame for months; thanks to a six-player game night recently, I got Vabanque to the table.

Based on an 18th-century gambling game known as “Faro”, Vabanque plays 3-6 players in about an hour. Over the course of four rounds, players have to add poker chips to various small tables scattered around the play area, adding value to each station along the way. Then, the hook—each player has three action cards that can be played at the same or multiple tables, messing with everyone’s heads during the round. One card is a straight bluff; one is a Raise card, multiplying the value at that table by 1X (meaning that a table with $20K and a Raise card is now worth $40K instead of just $20K). The final card is a Trap card—a player with a Trap card at a table with other player tokens gets paid that table’s value for each opposing token there.

Those Trap cards, the table talk, the mind games, and the betting system were all fantastic. I don’t think this game would be nearly…

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Into the Metaverse

If you’re anything like me, you’ve dabbled in the Collectible Card Game (CCG) world at some point. Whether it’s Pokémon, Magic: the Gathering, the newly-released Disney Lorcana, or any number of the hundreds of other CCGs on the market, it’s not uncommon for board game enthusiasts to wind up with a passing interest in CCGs at some point. For those unfamiliar with the typical experience, it goes a little something like this: you buy packs of random cards to rip open in hopes of finding a super rare card, you build a deck of cards from the random cards you open, and you go to tournaments or game nights where you do battle against others with your deck. Of course, that’s only one aspect of the hobby. Some people are collectors who just like to collect everything; others use the hobby to make money by selling individual cards to game stores; and some just like the art and the theme.

Millennium Blades is a hilarious love letter to CCGs and nerd culture at large. The experience is so heavily defined by typical CCG tropes and experiences that I would wager it’s hard to get the whole experience of this game if you've never dabbled in those worlds. This game is explicitly tied to its theme, and…

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Andrew Lynch

I came back from PAX Unplugged two weeks ago, and I already can’t remember anything.

That’s not strictly true. I remember plenty. I don’t remember much that’s going to be of particular interest to you. With Justin absent—apparently conventions in Indianapolis, Essen, and Cannes are enough, genug, assez for him—and Will and Brock new to the convention scene, I was suddenly the old hand. It was my job to treat publishers with weaponized familiarity, treating them like old friends until they remembered that we’ve met before.

Capstone Games had Match of the Century—two plays deep, so far it’s great—and couldn’t keep Wandering Towers in stock. Not only that, they brought back the famed D20 of 2021. At my first PAXU, Capstone had a D20 at their booth. Pay $20, roll the die. You were guaranteed a board game, thought the range of options depended on your result. That first year, I rolled a 12, and walked away with a copy of Curious Cargo. The die, to my vocal chagrin, didn’t make an appearance at last year’s convention, but the external pressure seems to have been sufficient. I was holding out hope for a $20 copy of Clinic, but that wasn’t in the…cards? I rolled a 3, and walked away with a consolation copy of Aleph…

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Navigating the Ruins

In Mayan Curse, players are explorers who have stumbled upon an ancient Mayan temple. The path to the inner temple is divided into several sections, each with a series of tiled rows containing different symbols. It’s a long sprint to get to the end of the temple, but that’s where the most remarkable treasure awaits! Along the way, explorers can pick up Mayan monuments and artifacts (called stelae) that reward them with knowledge, the all-important resource needed to win the game. There is a catch, however: there are three giant boulders precariously perched along the walkways, and as the explorers get further into the temple and make more of a stir, these boulders will inevitably be shaken loose and start rolling towards the entrance of the temple. You must make it out of the door before all three boulders reach the entrance, or else you’re sealed inside the temple forever and automatically lose!

The key to navigating this temple comes from the ancient stone floors. In each round, players will draw three sacred stones from a bag. These stones are decorated with symbols matching the collection of symbols on the temple floor. Players can then make up to three slides, bumping the physical location of the floor tiles around to create a pathway. Then, players spend…

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To Be (Chicken) or Not To Be (Chicken)

Chicken! does not pretend to be anything other than what it says on the tin. The game comes in a small cylindrical tube adorned with artwork of foxes, chickens, farmers, and eggs. That’s pretty much the whole experience. In the game, players roll dice on each turn and can press their luck to score the most points (see: chickens). The first player to reach 25 points is the winner. It’s a fairly straightforward concept.

On your turn, players are passed some number of dice and must roll them all. You set aside any chickens or foxes you roll, leaving you with some blank dice or eggs. For every egg you roll, you must “hatch” (add) a die to your pool from the middle of the board. You then have the option to reroll all non-chicken, non-fox dice to press your luck. The catch, of course, is that if you ever roll three foxes, the foxes have raided the henhouse, and your turn is over, scoring zero points.

To mitigate this risk, Chicken! offers each player the opportunity to, well, “chicken out.” At the start of your turn, you can take a one-point penalty. If you do, you can reset the dice…

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