In the hubbub of Airecon in March 2023 my attention was drawn by the convention centre spotlights glinting off large, polished spheres, lined up like sleeping warriors ready to be awoken. The background noise seemed to fade away as our focus narrowed on this curio and we sat down to play. ‘Come’ said the host, with a knowing calm that suggested he had been expecting us, ‘Sit. And listen.’ A few minutes was enough to etch this game into my memory – no mean feat amongst thousands of others that weekend. Adding to the mystery was the fact I could not seem to find the game for months after – I was starting to think it had all been a dream, when a contact handed me a parcel with the unmistakable clack of marbles within…

Do not use a canon to kill a mosquito

Senryaku’s box is efficiently packaged – a simple card sleeve just about covers the dignity of the game structure itself, which comprises the playing board with shallow wells in a 7 x 6 grid, plus the base. Each player lines up seven spheres, including a monarch (let’s be equal…

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Is perfection possible? Probably not. Regardless of the context, it seems the best you can hope for is to feel equipped to pursue perfection, aware that you’ll never attain it. It’s not for everyone. The better you get at anything, the more your skill improves, the more obvious smaller mistakes become. This is part of why I’m fascinated by Olympic athletes. You seek perfection and forever know that you could have done better. It must take a remarkably self-assured person.

The Seaweed Is Always Greener

Undersea Explorer is a charming, simple game. The cards, filled with wonderfully realized illustrations of fish, get spread out in the middle of the table. They’re meant to overlap, to obscure what lies in the deep. One player, it doesn’t matter who, rolls the four dice. Each is the same color as one of the four types of fish. Your goal is to collect as many of each fish as indicated by the corresponding die. Easier said than done. The fish come in various quantities and combinations. It’s rarely one fish per card.

Once the dice are rolled, it’s a free-for-all. With one…

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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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I am an unabashedly huge fanboy of everything Pandasaurus Games puts their name on. I love all the Dinosaur Island games, with Dinosaur Island Rawr ‘n Write being my favorite roll-and-write game of 2021. Wildstyle was one of the ten best games I played in 2022. Wild Space still hits the table and is one of my favorite light games of the last five years. Sea Salt & Paper is being distributed by Pandasaurus in the US and has maybe the best card art of the games I have reviewed for Meeple Mountain (my copy came from Bombyx at SPIEL last year).

Our team has enjoyed most of the Pandasaurus Games products we’ve gotten to cover, too. District Noir is apparently one of the best games of the year. Aurum isn’t far behind, and After Us also comes highly recommended. The Mind is a light filler classic, and The Loop went over well too.

As much fun as I’ve had with all these games, the consistent theme of Pandasaurus has always been quality production. The artwork has been spectacular, with maybe the loudest (in terms of color) boxes on my shelves; Pandasaurus typically makes covers that are the opposite of the beige, boring Eurofare I see in…

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Back in 2021, I had the chance to review Dungeon Scrawlers: Heroes of Undermountain from WizKids. Since then, Heroes of Undermountain has consistently stayed in my gaming rotation. It’s fast, it’s kid-friendly, and it’s relatively easy to teach. When I learned about the Heroes of Waterdeep expansion, I had only one question: what could they possibly add to this game?

Complex City

Truth be told, Heroes of Waterdeep is more of a standalone sequel to Heroes of Undermountain. The gameplay is familiar: players simultaneously race and trace their way through identical dry-erase dungeon maps while grabbing treasure, eliminating monsters, and generally scoring points in various D&D-themed ways. (You can find a more thorough explanation of play at the review linked above.)

[caption id="attachment_286979" align="alignnone" width="961"] Several of the new dungeons are based in the city of Waterdeep and have a slightly more urban feel.[/caption]

Of course, this version sports a few new features. The most immediately obvious is the set of cards that come along with the standard double-sided player sheets. There are five character cards, swapping the original game’s sturdy cardboard for dry-erase so that players can track their score across all three rounds. This is a nice quality-of-life addition, though the new cards only include a graphical representation…

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It’s not everyday that I feel I know everything there is to know about a game in the time it takes for the pizza to arrive at my table, but that is the case for Reiner Knizia’s Viking See-Saw. Even less common is believing a game has revealed all of its secrets in fifteen minutes and still being wholly pleased with it.

Viking See-Saw is a dexterity stacking game that takes place on a miniature, purple dry-docked boat with a play-convenient fulcrum right at the center. A lone flag extends to the sky from the center to get in everyone’s way. On each side of the flag, three small rectangular cubes—crates—rest in their recessed space, while one additional crate sits on the low side. 

Players receive a hair-tie to corral a collection of metal cubes (brass and aluminum), ball bearings (plastic and steel), a meeple, and an awkward plastic gem. As a turn, players must add one object to the high side of the ship without tipping the boat or dislodging previously placed items. 

Tipping the boat means taking a chest from the center, which serves as the game’s timer. Objects knocked to the table are taken by the offender as a penalty, since the way to win is…

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Moku Tower is, without question or qualification, the most striking review copy I’ve ever received. There’s something here for all the applicable senses (Taste has, lamentably, been yet again neglected by the board game publishing industry).

For the eyes, a veritable cornucopia. The box is handsome. A slight lip separates the top from being flush with the bottom. Inside, there’s an onion-bulb glass timer filled with black sand, a dark wooden base with one cheekily raised corner, and a cloth bag for holding the pieces, which come in a cardboard tube. The pieces themselves, asymmetrical chunks of wood, have varied grains and colors. As you can see from the photographs, to call Moku Tower “photogenic” is to do it a disservice.

Something pictures can’t capture: the smell upon opening the tube is divine. Each piece is made from a different type of wood. The combined scents of ash, birch, camphor, maple, pine, rosewood, sapele, and walnut mingle into an intoxicating blend.

All the while, you experience the tactile joy that sits at the core of this hobby. The box is made of thick board. The timer is heavy for its size. The wooden shapes make you feel like a…

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I would imagine, to a game designer, each of life’s moments presents an opportunity. They simply must for a game like Paku Paku to exist. How else does a disheveled pile of dollhouse dishes end in shouting panda-themed madness? 

Panda, fill thine belly!

Each of the five wooden dice in Paku Paku contains some combination of green smiling pandas, red dish icons, and/or the numbers one and two. At the outset, these dice are passed out one at a time until they are all out. With up to eight players, some may begin empty-handed. In the center of the table are twenty four plain white Barbie dishes (plates, bowls, and cups), a handful of penalty markers, and a Table board. 

One…two…three…Paku Paku! Simultaneously, players begin rolling the dice in front of them. When a number comes up, they roll again. When a smiling panda comes up, that die is passed left. When a red dish comes up, a single dish must be added to the stack in the center of the table board before rolling again. If at any time a player is rolling more than the allotted limit of dice (which changes, depending on the player count) or if they knock over the stack of dishes, someone yells Paku, Stop! The offending player then rolls the dice in…

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Dragon’s Breath follows the exploits of four dragon children who discover a mysterious column of ice filled with brilliant, sparkling stones while out on an adventure one day. Keen to get their whatever-qualifies-as-hands-on-a-dragon on the stones, the young dragons begin trying to melt the ice. But they’re too young and, despite their heroic efforts, they simply cannot melt it. Their dragon breath isn’t hot enough. So, they do what any group of smart dragon children would do, they cajole their father into doing it for them. As the ice melts away, the suspended stones begin falling to the floor and the young dragons begin collecting them in earnest.

Overview

Winner of the 2018 Kinderspiel des Jahres, Dragon’s Breath (a HABA Games production) pits two to four players against one another in a stone collecting free-for-all. The bottom layer of the play area is composed of the game box, which has been segmented into nine compartments. Atop this sits the game board with the four corners removed and several holes punched into its middle. Each corner hovers over a different compartment and these are representative of each child’s personal Dragon cave. Similarly, the holes in the middle hover over a larger compartment which represents the Daddy Dragon’s cave. Each player receives a standee which straddles the corner of the…

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Back FORTIFY on Kickstarter!

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