Monikers: Monikers-er - Andrew Lynch

Monikers is a great party game if you’ve got a group that isn’t afraid of getting silly. Monikers-er cranks things up, with a collection of obscure, seemingly impossible cards. All your new favorites are here: Mukbong, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Reiner Knizia. It’s the Monikers set for those who like their word selections eclectic, which I certainly do. The final endorsement: I’d rather play Monikers with just these cards than mix in the base set.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ - No sweat
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Faraway - Andy Matthews

Faraway is a game about journeys—traveling through a magical land called Alula. Over the course of 8 rounds players will play cards in front of themselves in order to arrange resources and scoring conditions for end of game scoring. The catch is that you lay down cards from left to right, but score from right to left after first flipping all the cards face down. This means you have to constantly be thinking in two directions—setting yourself up with difficult scoring cards on the left side, while giving yourself things TO…

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Explore, adventure, and boss battle your way through the fantasy world of Atios through a robust but accessible campaign.  

Kinfire 101

Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall is a campaign game set in the fictional world of Atios. This fantasy world is unique to the game, though both the subtitle and the use of the plural ‘chronicles’ leads me to believe that future games set in this universe may yet be on the horizon. Kinfire Chronicles accommodates 1-4 players. (I will note that all of my plays were solo.) The basic storyline is that you are Seekers, heroes recruited to go on various quests, wielding a special lantern filled with a magical substance known as ‘kinfire.’ Throughout the game you’ll be exploring towns and countryside, adventuring through various encounters, and fighting baddies in “boss battler” style, divided into distinct scenarios which each take a manageable 45-60 minutes.  

The ongoing narrative in Kinfire Chronicles is handled primarily through various decks of cards, specific to the scenario. While the adventure and exploration provides a rich backstory and narrative, the primary focus of a scenario is the boss battle. Players will play cards on their turn from their own personal deck to deal either melee or ranged damage, as well as potentially helping other players on their turn by playing a 'boost' card that…

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Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done - Bob Pazehoski, Jr.

I’ve had my eye on Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done for a long time, so I was pretty excited to get it to the table. The game mechanism of a rondel governed by mancala-style movement is swift and responsive: take an action according to the number of tokens, then redistribute the tokens. The available action points are always in flux, creating tension between preparation and execution in the face of shifting opportunities.

There seem to be two ways to play Crusaders: with kindness and not. It’s easy enough to mind your business and chase your goals with minimal intrusion by others at the table. But it’s also easy to wait in the wings to snipe what another player has started, thwarting their hopes and dashing their dreams. The ideal is probably somewhere between. The colors pop, the components are exceedingly sturdy, the gameplay is quick, and the bit of engine-building can be quite satisfying. I won’t call it the most exciting game ever, but I would say it’s very good and definitely begs further play. 

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Watch our review of Crusaders:…

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Join me as I look at some premium gaming upgrades that can take your table from basic to breathtaking.

War of the Ring is one of my all-time favorite games. Set in the massive world of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, its scale is as grand as its gameplay. Between the map that spans two standard sized game-boards and the slew of plastic miniatures of various characters and factions, War of the Ring is the epitome of table presence. But what if you could amplify that aesthetic appeal even higher, and turn that visual dial up to eleven?

[caption id="attachment_283768" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Gondor's Fabled White Tree[/caption]

Evil Toymaker Studio aims to do just that. They graciously offered for review a full set of their available line of War of the Ring component upgrades. Well, upgrades is a loose term here, as I would consider these particular offerings straight add-ons. Instead of replacing existing components, they provide new 3D elements that exist primarily to enhance the gameplay experience.

[caption id="attachment_283770" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Mountains, Both the Snowy and the Scary Kind.[/caption]

The full set of War of the Ring upgrades include mountainous terrain that fits perfectly atop the printed landscape, stronghold pieces that sit majestically in their…

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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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Wayfarers of the South Tigris - David McMillan

I always get excited when I see a new Shem Phillips game appear. And I especially get excited when that game is one of his <name> of the <compass direction><modifier> series. So, I was ultra-excited to finally get to sit down and play Wayfarers of the South Tigris this past weekend. And, let me tell you, it’s everything I’d hoped it would be and more.

Wayfarers is a tableau builder featuring a smattering of worker placement, a pinch of set collection, and a whole heap of card comboing. With artwork by The Mico, Wayfarers wasn’t just a feast for this gamer’s soul, but a feast for the eyes as well. I can’t wait to get it to the table again… and again… and again…

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from David McMillan.

Moesteiro - Bob Pazehoski, Jr.

In Moesteiro, players take up the task of building a Renaissance-era monastery in Portugal. The primary mechanism is a dice queue of sorts. Players draft from their own pool of dice to place them as workers for each of the game’s…

The post First Take Friday – Wayfarers of the South Tigris, Moesteiro, Hoplomachus: Remastered, Isle of Cats, Frosthaven appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Western Legends - David Wood

Howdy partners!  Looking to have fun robbing banks, playing poker, and rustling cattle?  Well Western Legends is the game for you.  In this “sandbox”, old west themed game, players take on the role of some of history’s most famous, and infamous, legends – Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, Doc Holiday, Kit Carson, and others – each with a special ability.  On their turn, players take 3 actions, and those actions will determine whether they become wanted outlaws or a marshal sworn to uphold the law.  Either way players choose to go will give them opportunities to accumulate Legendary Points.  The player with the most LPs at the end of the game wins.

The choices open to players offer many different possibilities for earning LPs:  mining for gold, fighting bandits, arresting outlaws, and even robbing other players.  Turns go quickly, although at higher player counts there is going to be a bit more down time.  In a 2-player game, players must contend with the non-player character, the Man in Black, a nod to the cyborg from the movie WestWorld.. Western Legends allows players to immerse themselves into their roles and is a hoot to play.  So, saddle up and get ready for a rip-roaring time.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ -…

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Imperium: Classics (and its sibling Imperium: Legends) are deck-building civilization-building games with highly asymmetric factions. Read on to see if Imperium constructs a mighty empire, or becomes lost to the annals of time in our review of the Imperium series.

(Note: Imperium: Classics and Imperium: Legends are two versions of the same game, but each with different sets of factions. I will henceforth refer to both collectively as Imperium unless otherwise specified.)

Imperium is a combination deck-building, civilization-building game coming from the design combo of Nigel Buckle and David Turczi. If the name David Turczi sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s well-known for both his complex Euro games like Anachrony, his work on the “T” series (Tekhenu, Tawantinsuyu, etc.) as well as his prolific work in designing solo modes for dozens of other games like Kanban EV, So You’ve Been Eaten, Mosaic: A Story of Civilization, Tiletum and many more.

Although my excitement was high for a seemingly oddball combo of a civ game mixed with a deck-building game, I have to admit that based on Turczi’s design track record, I was more than a little trepidatious going into my first play of Imperium. Ultimately, my love for civilization games, deck-building, and player asymmetry overruled my concerns about complexity. Speaking of complexity, here’s…

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Strike - Justin Bell

Dumb fun, courtesy of dice, dexterity and an arena? Yes, please!

Strike (sometimes known as Strike Dice Game) hit its tenth anniversary this year, and until recently, I had never played it. But on a recent game night, we played it three times in about 20 minutes total, and all I did was laugh.

Strike has rules, but they are brief: chuck a die into a small plastic dice arena, and if it matches any other dice currently in the arena, take them all into your supply. If anyone rolls an X, that die is a strike and is removed from the game. If anyone rolls a die in the arena and all of the dice show the same face, it empties the arena, forcing the next player to roll all of their dice to build a new arena supply (and, usually, hosing them out of a decent number of their own dice). This is a game I’ll play again and again, at least at somebody else’s house!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ - No sweat
Would I play it again?:
★★★★☆ - Would like to play it again

Read more articles from Justin Bell.

John Company: Second Edition - Andrew…

The post First Take Friday – Strike, John Company: Second Edition, Flashback: Zombie Kidz, Applejack, Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition is a large-scale 4X civilization building game for 2-4 players that will generally take around 3-4 hours to play. As a quick refresher: the four (e)X’s are explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.

In Clash of Cultures, you will be doing all of these x’s during the course of the game. Starting with one lowly settlement and one lonely settler, you’ll be exploring the randomly set up world via flipping over face-down tiles, expanding your empire by building new settlements, exploiting the lands through collecting resources, and exterminating the other players through dice-driven combat.

The World of Clashing:

Clash of Cultures has a predefined board shape setup based on the number of players, but all of the tiles are random and face-down except for your starting tile,.The multi-hex shapes of the land tiles allow both interesting configurations and relatively equal starting positions. Despite its significant table presence, the map in Clash of Cultures is pretty small for such a large-scale civ game. Personally, I like this aspect because it quickly forces player interaction.

[caption id="attachment_261909" align="alignnone" width="1024"] 3-player game. Still too close for comfort.[/caption]

The Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition also includes some expansion content, which you can opt to play with or without. The rulebook does a…

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What happens when two global superpowers clash without combat? What ideology will infiltrate the intellect of the public populace? Find out in our review of Twilight Struggle.

Important Note: 

Twilight Struggle depicts and utilizes actual events that affected real people. Many of the events described in this game were horrendous displays of the worst of humanity. Many readers may have been personally affected by these events. As with any game depicting actual historical events, it can be easy to forget the atrocities of the past due to the required amount of abstraction necessary to gamify history. Any amount of levity throughout this review should not take away from the gravity of the subject matter. Additionally, I have no intentions to promote ideological or moral superiority for either side represented, nor do I subscribe to the dangerous notion of moral equivalence. It’s important to remember that often when taking a closer look at the history of humanity, we rarely see true “heroes” and “villains.” I believe that Twilight Struggle handles this concept with a great deal of respect, but it is worth remembering that, historically speaking, mankind’s morality is, to say the least, murky. 

Twilight Struggle is a game that attempts to recreate the three historical stages of the Cold War through card-driven area control. However, before we dive into…

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One of the things that I enjoy most in consumable media is whenever the creator is able to immerse me into their world. I want to feel swept away into its universe. Whether it’s escapist fantasy, modern crime, historical fiction, as long as I’m able to put myself there, I’m in. Historically, the most natural medium for this kind of world-building has been books. The 20th Century development of the film industry brought another form of narrative expression. With the ever-improving animation and computing technology, video games have now entered the chat.

“Open-world” is a common term for video games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout that give you hours of open-ended, player-driven gameplay. These are as much about playing around in the game as they are playing the game itself. Given that my love of board games has now dwarfed that of video games, it makes sense that I want to be able to recreate some of the joys I find in video gaming on the tabletop. While establishing a system with set rules and objectives is pretty universal in both analog and digital gaming, the concept of “open-world” is a much more difficult proposition on the table than the screen.…

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“Lord of the Rings” is one of the biggest franchises from here to the Misty Mountains, with five significantly sized books, six even more significantly sized movies, an upcoming television series that is sure to be some amount of significance, and multiple generations of influence in the world of “high fantasy”. When I heard there was a board game described as “Tolkien-in-a-box,” I knew it had some pretty big hobbit-sized shoes to fill. (If hobbits wore shoes, that is.) Does War of the Ring soar like the Great Eagles and capture the epic struggle between good and evil? Does it crash and burn in the fires of Mount Doom? Or does it land somewhere in the middle-earth? Read on for our review of War of the Ring, 2nd Edition.

War of the Ring is a game of area control, “troops on a map,” dice combat, hidden movement, hand management, and timely card play. If that sounds like a lot to you, that’s because well, it is. This game is massive, not only in its scope but its size. I have a decent sized game table and it consumed most of it. Like any self-respecting grandiose game it has loads of plastic miniatures to shuffle around, as well as custom…

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