Back in 2010 Matt Leacock was fresh off the release of Pandemic—one of the first, and definitely one of the most successful, cooperative games in the world. I don’t know his motivation, but I think he wanted another cooperative game that was perhaps a bit simpler and more family friendly. And thus Forbidden Island was born. It used a similar framework as Pandemic: multiple, distinct player roles (each with their own special abilities); a card driven system which both advanced the game and provided benefits and penalties to players; and a goal (rescue 4 artifacts and get on the helicopter before the island sank).

Two other  Games in the Forbidden series have been released: the excellent and challenging Forbidden Desert, and the less-than-stellar Forbidden Skies. And now Gamewright Games has released the 4th title in the series, and I’m pleased to tell you that Forbidden Jungle is a return to the formula which made the first two titles so successful.

You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby.

In Forbidden Jungle, 2-5 players attempt to search and conquer an alien jungle landscape in search of four crystals which will powe the portal—which you must also find—escape through. All the while, you must avoid the deadly…

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The city of Recife was quiet. The streets near the prison were empty. Everyone had fled inside. Even the sun sought the cover of the horizon.

Jararaca cleaned the blood off his facão, running the blade across his kerchief. The volantes had put up a good fight, but they were no match for this band of cangaceiros. The dry, harsh deserts of northeastern Brazil do not create soft men. To survive here at all, let alone as an outlaw, you had to be tough.

Tainá put her hand on his shoulder. “Jararaca, we need to go. They’ll be sending more men.”

“Grab what you can from the corpses. We’ll head out into the mountains. They won’t be able to follow us there.”

A História

Cangaceiros has a remarkable capacity for suggesting narrative. The setting, northeastern Brazil during the Cangaço movement at the turn of the 20th century, combines with comic book illustrator Emiliano Mammucari’s superlative art to give the whole enterprise an impeccable sense of character. That box cover is divine. The character cards are full of personality, each feeling like a distinct individual. Even the volantes, who fought against the cangaceiros on behalf of the wealthy land-owners in the region, look cool. It makes sense that my imagination…

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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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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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When I was a kid, pop-up books were rather rudimentary, but even then I was enthralled by the possibilities. Today I am thankful for names like Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda, creatives whose efforts have produced some of the pop-up books that grace our kids’ shelves. Few of these intricate productions survive intact, but that is only due to the vigor with which they are engaged and enjoyed in our home. They are popped until they drop.

It should come as no surprise, then, that The Shivers drew my attention. Described as a “Pop-up Tabletop Mystery Adventure” by the folks at Pop Fiction, this inaugural design from Andy Logan is the sort of box that begs investigation—both of the product itself and within the story it aims to tell. Players work together to solve a mystery via the clues dropped all over the pop-up rooms representing the Shivers family house in Fogmoor. 

Before I ever cracked the shrink on the box, though, I trembled at the other side of the coin. The Shivers is also something of a role playing game. One player assumes the responsibilities of the Storyteller, sitting behind the pop-ups leading and guiding the others through the scenario. The intended experience, then, also involves the other players loosely “becoming" the characters represented on their standees in…

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Look, I’m an easy sell. I’m a sucker for novelty. Tell me you’ve got a legacy game for children, and I’m going to be curious. Legacy games generally cater to adults, which makes sense. They require paying attention to the same thing for an extended period of time. This is not a strength for which children are celebrated. More importantly, the stories are usually only suggested through fragments of information, rather than fleshed out like a storybook.

[caption id="attachment_288322" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The boat during setup.[/caption]

Along Came Pepe

Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy! aims to change all that. Over the course of twenty-five episodes, you follow the adventures of the good capt’n and his anthropomorphic crew, helping them track down seven magic treasures in their quest to stop the evil Captain Goldtooth.

The game itself is a straightforward sliding puzzle. Working together, players move the various crew members of the Melody to their stations. Passing Capt’n Pepe from player to player, the active player moves one crew member one space. That’s it. You keep going until all the crew members are where…

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The toughest thing about reviewing games like Eila and Something Shiny (NorthStar Game Studio) is not giving away parts of a story-driven campaign experience that are best discovered by the players.

So I will do my best to share what I liked most about my experience playing through all of the game’s chapters. (See? I didn’t even tell you how many chapters there are!!)

You’ve probably found this review because you searched for the game’s title; this is quite a niche marketing play by designer Jeffrey CCH and the team behind the game’s release. Most of the people I’ve spoken to think this game is called “Ella and…”, not Eily, as in, rhymes with Reilly.

The game could have just been called “Ella and the ____.” But Mr. CCH decided on Eila and Something Shiny, and that on its own makes the whole shebang a little more interesting.

I’m calling this out because the entire experience—like its title and the designer’s three-initial credited last name—is just a little different than you are expecting. The cover—and really, the entire game—has cutesy art courtesy of a host of illustrators led by Roxy Dai. But, the story is one that I’ll frame as “not always cutesy.”

Option A

Eila and Something Shiny…

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An RPG-style game with a dope app, treasure, and a playspace that accommodates seven players all made for a curious property that I knew I had to try. This was especially true because I knew how good the app would be if it came from Plaid Hat Games.

That’s because I had the chance to play Forgotten Waters, another Plaid Hat Games production in the “Crossroads” line (somewhat similar to Dead of Winter, in that there’s loads of story), in the early days of the pandemic. Forgotten Waters featured pirates, over-the-top humor, a wire-bound booklet that served as the worker-placement game board, and Mad Libs-style score sheets that required players to come up with funny names for their characters.

Forgotten Waters is more show than tell. By that, I mean that I sat back and laughed heartily at the fantastic voice acting and the witty jokes told by the game’s app-driven narrator, but I rarely took meaningful actions during the first couple scenarios of that game.

[caption id="attachment_286510" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The artwork on many of the location book pages is pretty slick[/caption]

Freelancers: A Crossroads Game (2023, Plaid Hat Games) is the next game in the Crossroads line, and it doesn’t stray very far from the Forgotten Waters-style of…

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The bear in the Toblerone logo. We’ve all seen the bear, right? (Not to mention the letters for its hometown of Berne hidden in the chocolate’s name) Or the arrow in the FedEx logo—I can’t look at a FedEx truck without first seeing the arrow. The Pittsburgh Zoo, a frequent stop over the past forty years (maybe not as much for you as for me?), has employed similar effect in “hiding” a gorilla, lioness, and several dolphins in the white space of its remarkable tree logo. 

As far as artistic vehicles go, logos are a simple way of demonstrating the use of negative space. More than the mere employment of white space, negative space is the portion of a creation that exists by its non-existence. It is found in the paint that was left unbrushed or the stone that was cut away. In the case of branding materials, logos often employ negative space to maximize the impact of a mark that must, by nature, speak a large message from within the smallest of footprints. Hence, when you only have room for a mountain, you tuck a bear inside that mountain. Stealthy. 

Recently I have been exploring a late prototype of Peacemakers: Horrors of War, a revamped   scenario-based cooperative game from Sami Laasko and Snowdale design. Like its predecessor…

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“I am Adam, Prince of Eternia, Defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull…and this is Cringer.” 

I can’t tell you how many Saturday mornings (and, eventually, syndicated afternoons) began with that line. I also can’t tell you how many dollars my parents must have spent outfitting my childhood with everything the He-Man marketing machine could churn out. Ah, there’s nothing like the smell of cartoons developed specifically as 22-minute advertisements—two glorious 65-episode seasons that, despite the lackluster animation, somehow survived years of airtime.

How fitting, then, to have Adam, Prince of Eternia, introduce Masters of the Universe: Clash for Eternia with nearly the same sentence. The nostalgia kick that began before I tore the shrink only continued as I took my first peek into the rulebook.

Masters of the Universe (MotU from here on out) is a tactical one-versus-all skirmish game from Michael Shinall, Leo Almeida, and the publishing team at CMON. Players take up their favorite heroes and baddies from the beloved 80s cartoon universe to engage a series of standalone Scenarios.

Regardless of my affinity for the deep dive into trademarked waters, it is the Power System—the mechanisms that form the backbone of the game experience—that really shines with MotU. Mark my words, this is not the last you’ll hear of the Power System. I can all…

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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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There’s not much left to say about the game that hasn’t been said before. The gameplay is stellar. The story is engaging. The various classes and their abilities are inspired. It’s a fun game if you can get past its biggest hurdle. And I’m not talking about the game play.

I’m talking about its size.

Gloomhaven is a massive, sprawling, table-hogging affair. It’s so large and unwieldy that it pretty much requires one to rush out and buy a third-party organizer to keep it all neat and, well, organized.

Frosthaven promised to be even bigger. Before I even hit that “back this project” button on Kickstarter, I already knew I was going to need a storage solution. Gloomhaven had taught me that lesson and I’d taken it to heart.

But which insert to buy? There were two on offer at the time of the campaign, the LaserOX FrostBox and the Folded Space FS-FROST insert. The LaserOx insert (cost: around 120 USD) is fully wooden with all the bells and whistles you’d expect: trays for the player components, boxes for the various chits and tokens and such, boxes for all the cards, etc. Some of the components are even laser-engraved to add a bit of extra thematic flair. And while that all sounds great, my experience…

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