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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In the futuristic world of Fjerograd, the Elder Gamestormer is seeking an apprentice, and it could be you! Are you able to conjure a game the world will never forget?

Overview

Gamestormers is a 3-6 player game for ages 9+ that clocks in at 45-60 minutes. In Gamestormers, your goal is to collect Character, Item, Mechanic, and Storyline cards to construct a narrative for a new game. Players score victory points from card values, card alignment, arena tokens, and end game voting. The player with the most victory points after 5 rounds wins.

How To Play

[caption id="attachment_274877" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Notebook Playmat for your tableau building pleasure[/caption]

Each player begins with 3-4 dry erase cards, a dry erase marker, an instruction card, and a Notebook Playmat, which is the tableau where the cards of your emerging game narrative are stored. There are separate decks for Characters, Mechanics, Items, and Storylines, all combining to make up your tableau. The goal is to fill your Notebook Playmat with cards that both complement each other and create a compelling game narrative.

Game cards consist of five genres: Civilizations, Fantasy, High Seas, Sci Fi, and Horror. Players can choose whether to acquire a single genre of items, mechanics, and storylines to tell a traditional story, or…

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Tennis is a fun game with a rich, centuries-old tradition. Conceptually simple, easy to learn, and hard to master, tennis has already been transported to the tabletop in the form of Ping Pong. But can the “sport of kings” serve up big fun as a card game?

Overview

Game! Set! Match! is a lightweight, 2-4 player card game for ages 13+ with a playing time of 30-45 minutes. Players will choose between identical red or blue decks and play both their cards and tokens (in the shape of tennis balls) to gain momentum throughout each mini game. The player who takes 6 mini games first is declared the overall winner.

How To Play

Game! Set! Match! is delightfully simple to setup and play. Like most centuries-old sports, tennis has unintuitive scoring terms, with points scoring “Love,” 15, 30, 40, and sometimes “Deuce.” (There are multiple theories on how these terms originated.) Fear not, because Game! Set! Match! has tracks that smoothly manage scoring regardless of your tennis background.

The board features a central Momentum track shaped like a tennis stadium with numbered spaces 0-19. During each mini game, two colored tokens (1 red & 1 blue) start at “0” and race…

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Overview

Decades ago, while completing my Master’s degree in Fiction Writing, I would spend days in the library getting lost in the academic shelves of literary criticism and essays on craft. I have been designing games since 2016 and am a partner in Uplink Underground Games, publisher of my game Breakaway Football (and its 11 expansions). When I saw Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design by Gordon Calleja, I recognized the most delightful merging of my passions. I had to review it.

Unboxed seeks to deconstruct every aspect of a game–its design, the way it demands the player's attention, the rules, the interactions during play, even the physicality of the product itself–to uncover how the gaming experience is created. While the book is exhaustive in its attention to the theoretical, it balances that purely intellectual pursuit against a rich mosaic of interview questions and answers from rock star game designers, publishers, and reviewers. The result is a thicket of thoughts not easily traversed but certainly worth exploring.

Scope

Each chapter tackles a central focus of the game experience. At first, Calleja explores “delving into the nature of play” to understand how the game interaction is structured. A central focus of the book…

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Intrepid Overview

Commander’s Log: The meteor shower prediction was worse than we thought. Our multinational crew took the forecast better than expected. The German was stoic, the Russian fatalistic, and the American a bit too cavalier. We barely had time to prepare, but all is not lost. If we think fast and pull together, we will survive. 

In Intrepid (2-4 players, cooperative, 90 min) you play the roles of astronauts from different nations serving on the International Space Station who must keep the spacecraft (and themselves) alive during a deadly meteor shower. The theme evokes international cooperation, interstellar tech, and intense problem solving. When you take in all the gadgets, the four system panels, and the asymmetric special abilities for each different country, Intrepid reveals itself to be a delightfully immersive experience.

Setup & Game Play

Even though Intrepid plays between 2 and 4 players, the game setup requires that all four stations – Climate, Nutrition, Oxygen, and Power – are active. Because of the prolonged COVID-19 quarantine, I was only able to play the game with 2 players while the other player remotely participated on video chat. We each controlled two nations. I can also confirm that, while there is a lot…

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The horde is at the gates! The greatness of Rome, her culture, and her people are in peril! Can you fight off the invasion, build strategic alliances, and preserve Rome for all eternity?

Pandemic: Fall of Rome is a standalone 1-5 player co-op game that represents a delightful twist on traditional Pandemic. Playing in just 45-60 minutes, Pandemic: Fall of Rome immerses players in both the geography and the historical challenge of staving off advancing “barbarian” tribes as Rome declines.

How To Win

Pandemic: Fall of Rome requires you to defend Rome from her enemies either by forging alliances or by eliminating all of a faction’s units from the map, all before the Rome slips to the bottom of the Decline track.

How To Play

Many of the same mechanisms you have grown to love in the original Pandemic game are alive and well in Pandemic: Fall of Rome. An “invasion deck” spreads the invaders across the map. Players take four actions per turn and draw from a common City Deck to collect color-coded province cards. Instead of curing disease with the colored cards, you are forging alliances with advancing tribes. The mechanism of set collection to achieve victory conditions is virtually unchanged.

But despite the similarities to original…

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If you have ever mused, “There ought to be a game about X…” then you have dipped a toe into game design. In most ways, “Design,” creating a game concept that did not exist before, is the easy part. Once you get over the paralysis of having too many choices (“There are HOW MANY game mechanisms?”) and fight off the unconscious bias of re-skinning existing games (“It’s Dead of Winter, but in space….”), then you can get to work creating the shell of something new and exciting.

“Development” is creating a tangible product, something that fulfills the intent of your design. So when your game features a deck of poker cards that houses the game’s randomness, development is making that set of cards. And re-making it when the design inevitably breaks. Development is not more important than design, but it is decidedly more challenging because you must both persevere and innovate while watching your design break, gasp for air, and break again.

I am part of the publisher Uplink Underground Games. Before I started making tabletop games, I had little appreciation for the difference between “design” and “development.” I now recognize that the two are separate and distinct, just like writer and editor, or architect and site foreman. But since indie board game designers often serve as their own…

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Whether born in a flash of genius or cultivated over seasons, many great game ideas never make it to the table. Why? Oddly, the creative process cracks open the door for doubt and fear. Agonizing over foolish questions like “Is the idea good enough?” or “Am I skilled enough to pull this off?” can undercut the joy of game design.

But when excitement overpowers dread, creative expression is possible! Today we are going to shut the door on doubt and fear so we can focus our creative process on quickly converting that spark of an idea into a playable prototype. Let’s make a game!

Define the Core Experience

Take your spark of an idea and, before you apply mechanisms or start “designing,” think about people playing your future, completed game. What do you want them to feel? How many are there? How do they interact with each other? How long should the game take to play? Defining the core experience is a grounding process that can allow the spark to announce what it wants to be.

For example, let’s assume we are designing a game about Tennis. Is this a thinky, 2-hour Euro game or a brief filler-style experience? I am thinking we design a light, family style game, two players competing head to head, where the interactions are shot-by-shot,…

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