Before affixing my critical goggles in place, I will say from the beginning: Redwood has been one of the most refreshing titles to hit our table in months. Christophe Raimbault’s (Colt Express) design takes the occasional monotony of board game acquisition by the ears and tosses it out on the doorstep with style. I do not know what inspired him to reassign the mechanics of a wargame for use with nature photography, but it just works. Redwood utilizes templates—components of specific shape and size—both for movement and a wholly different sort of shooting, creating a fairly immersive experience. Refreshing. It’s refreshing. 

Sing as you raise your bow

The game is an exercise in spatial estimation. Players select two templates under a strict look-but-don’t-touch restriction, one a ribbon for movement, the other a range-finder for their camera lens. The rules make no explicit prohibition of the ol’ thumb-and-forefinger measurement, but exploiting that technicality saps the game of its most thrilling anticipations. Redwood’s distinct pleasure is in the success and failure of the eyes—and only the eyes—in predicting possibilities. 

Having committed to the template, players then employ their selections, first moving the photographer into place, then capturing the moment, which is occasionally only the shattered dream of the intended moment, on…

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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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We’ve talked about Cascadia many times before, from our review of of the Cascadia base game, to our review of the Cascadia: Landmarks expansion, our inclusion of Cascadia in a list of games you can easily play with kids and a humorous list of games which include bears. But I don’t think any of us expected Cascadia to get “the dice game” treatment.

That’s right; this newest member of the family (technically two newest members) is a reimagining of Cascadia as a roll and write game. But let me reassure you that Cascadia: Rolling Hills, and Cascadia: Rolling Rivers aren’t just some money grab. While they do share the same DNA, they’re totally new games.

Let’s dive in and find out what makes these two new entries tick. Note that while my main focus in this review is on Cascadia: Rolling Hills, I do talk about both games.

Cascadia: Rolling Overview

As the name implies, these are dice games built atop the Cascadia framework: the animals and habitats we’ve come to know and love, as well as the hex based layout of the countryside. Over the course of 20 rounds you’ll roll dice to gain various animal and nature token symbols. These symbols allow you…

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More really is more. Like, a LOT more.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Challengers! Beach Cup (2023, 1 More Time Games) is not a sequel to 2022’s Challengers!, a game that for many people was the best party game they played two years ago. The game was nominated for a number of awards, and won the As D’or award (the “Initiated” category) in 2023 from the French games convention Festival International des Jeux.

Challengers! Beach Cup is a standaquel, or a sequalone, or an expandalone, depending on your point of view—a standalone sequel to the original game, which requires none of the components from the core game and is played almost identically to the first game.

As such, I’m not covering much about the rules here…for that, please take a look at my previous review of the base game. I’m here to tell you which version of the game you should own, although if you happen to have lots of 16-player game nights, you should just go ahead and pick up both games!!

Here’s What’s New

The first change is a minor one, but I absolutely love it. Between rounds, there are sometimes choices to pick new cards from a lower-powered deck or a…

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MLEM is a push-your-luck game with straightforward rules. Every round, each player loads one of their cats onto a rocket ship, starting with the commander for that mission and moving clockwise around the table. The choice of cat matters, since each has a unique power, but we’ll come back to that.

[caption id="attachment_295630" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Full team present and accounted for.[/caption]

Once the rocket is fully manned, the commander gets rolling. The mission starts with six dice, rolled all at once. The results are grouped by value—all the twos together, all the threes, and so on—and the commander decides which groups get used to move the rocket forward. There are a few things to keep in mind here.

The first: the rocket moves the sum of the values of the used dice. If the commander uses two ones and a three, the rocket moves five spaces. The second: used dice are removed from the pool for the rest of the mission, and in order to use any die showing a given value, you have to use all the dice showing that value. The third and final thing: only the values shown on…

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Agri-cola hits the spot
Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot
Twice as much for a nickel, too
Agri-cola is the drink for you!

— with apologies to the old time radio advertisers for Pepsi Cola. (And, yes, I know it’s pronounced A-grik-a-la, not Ag-ri-cola, but I didn’t learn that for a long while so Ag-ri-cola stuck in my mind.)

My Meeple Mountain friend and colleague, David McMillan, is a huge fan of designer Uwe Rosenberg—so much so he started this series to have reviews of all of Rosenberg’s games here on Meeple Mountain. I’m happy to contribute a review of Agricola to the cause.

[caption id="attachment_295137" align="aligncenter" width="509"] Agricola: My slightly worn box[/caption]

Agricola is the Place to Be

When Agricola was released in 2007, it caused quite the stir. Although not the first board game to use the worker placement mechanic (that honor goes to 1999’s Bus or 1998’s Keydom, depending on who you ask), Agricola was one of the first games to catch the wider public attention.

So, why am I covering a game that’s almost 20 years old? In part because it’s a classic game and, in part, because I think Agricola is still worthy of your time and attention.

Allow me…

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Dear old Grandpa. He’s gone to his reward, leaving us his farm in Stardew Valley. We won’t have long to mourn his passing, though. He’s only given us a year to fulfill four goals and restore the Community Center. It will be a busy four seasons, spent making friends and collecting all the resources we need, all while contending with the evil Joja Corporation.

Knowledge of the video game is not necessary to play or enjoy Stardew Valley The Board Game (known here as SV: B as opposed to the video game, SV: V). The rules, objectives, and gameplay are complete without any previous knowledge. I will say, however, that my first play of the game was made more enjoyable by the one person in the group who had played SV: V. Her running commentary on the objectives, resources, and especially the characters, helped make for a fun evening.

I’ll discuss some differences between the cardboard and video versions of the game at the end of this review.

[caption id="attachment_293787" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Stardew Valley: The Board Game[/caption]

In keeping with the non-confrontational aspects of the video game, SV: B is a cooperative game. To win, players will need to work cooperatively to meet the conditions on all four…

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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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The Fox Experiment is an intriguing title. Perhaps academic and armchair geneticists perk up at the low-key mention of the fox domestication study that began in the Soviet Union over sixty years ago, but there’s something here for the Average Joe as well. Both story and backstory are fascinating: researchers attempting to breed docility in otherwise wild animals (though not animals from the wild, as it were) and a scientific posture that refused to get on board with Mendelian genetics out of nationalistic loyalty. 

If that doesn’t scream BOARD GAME, I don’t know what does. 

Co-designers Elizabeth Hargrave (Wingspan, Undergrove, Tussie Mussie) and Jeff Fraser (Cartouche) have sought to capture the unusual nature of this story in The Fox Experiment. Players compete as researchers, breeding foxes in search of certain physical traits. As the story goes, the traits in question manifested alongside the same hormonal balances that coincided with the tame foxes. Find the traits and you may have found the friendly fox. 

Players begin by selecting a mom and a dad and letting a few dice fly to see which traits manifest most forcefully. That first round is like the slow ride up the chain. From there, gravity kicks in, sending researchers into a genetic double dip with a loopty-loop tossed in for good measure. 

…

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Overview

From the rules:

“What’s going on in the jungle? For several days now, the peace and quiet of the tropics has been broken repeatedly by loud honking, squeaky tires and screeching brakes! The reason - a jungle taxi competition! The player who can pick up the most passengers by the end of the season will become the Tasmanian Taxi King!

You won’t want to pass up the opportunity to win this title. As a jungle taxi driver, you have to try to collect several animals and use route cards to create the longest possible route for your taxi. But you have to engage in exciting duels with your fellow players in order to collect route cards. The player who collects the most route cards and animals at the end wins the game.”

How To Play

A game of Taxi Wildlife is setup thusly:

The three decks of Route cards are shuffled and placed into facedown stacks according to their card back. One card is drawn from each stack and placed face up next to the stack from which it was drawn. Remove any Duel cards belonging to colors that are not being played. Then, the deck of Duel cards is shuffled and placed face down close by.…

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Sheep, dog, and sheepdog games have had a bumpy ride in the Bell household.

Wilson & Shep was a cute hidden movement game that my kids never latched onto. Good Dog, Bad Zombie was certainly more good than bad. Sheepy Time was OK. Adult games featuring sheep, like Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small or Glen More II: Chronicles, have always landed well, particularly any game that features “sheeple” wooden meeples as a spendable resource.

The newest entry in the sheep/dog/sheepdog category? Wool Gang (2023, Gigamic) is a family-weight card game that landed somewhere in the middle. Wool Gang has a cool box, quick rounds, and great card art by Pauline Berdal. In other words, it’s a solid production.

As a game? Wool Gang (designed by Jérôme Bodin) never crossed the threshold from mildly interesting to above average.

Spin the (Points) Wheel

Wool Gang is a set collection card game for 2-5 players. Once a player crosses 20 points (tracked using a points wheel that displays each player’s current score), that round becomes the final round of the game, and the player with the most points wins.

Each round of Wool Gang plays the same. The entire deck of action cards and sheep…

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From the rulebook: “It’s summertime. Amid the forest lies the glade. Bring your forest to life with creatures, leaves and forest fruits. Create sets of 3 tiles to place a toadstool into the glade. Complete a set of 4 tiles to add a toadstool into your store. Use toadstools in your store for extra actions.”

That’s The Glade in a nutshell (pun totally intended). In this quaint, abstract, tile-laying game from renowned designer Richard Breese (Keyflower, Keyper), the players will be drawing tiles from a bag, adding them to their tile rack, and then placing tiles into their tableau to create sets and score points. And when all is said and done and the last leaf has fallen, the player with the most points wins.

Of course this is a very high-level overview of the game. If you just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we learn how to play The Glade.

Setup

A game of The Glade is set up thusly:

Place the Glade board in the middle of the playing area. Then, each player receives a Forest board (turned to its basic side*) which they place next to the Glade board, abutting…

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In 1984, a team of primatologists went out in search of a legendary ape civilization, thought to exist on an island in the tropics. What they discovered fundamentally altered our understanding of our simian relatives.

The apes were rumored to have advanced arts and architecture. This turned out to be an understatement. The island was volcanic, and the impressive mountain face at its center had been carved by the apes to resemble an ape-ian Mount Rushmore. There was a full system of currency, based around coconuts. What’s more, the apes engaged collectively in a fascinating ritual. Come harvest time, the bananas would be divided amongst the family groups via an elaborate auction.

One of the members of that expedition was a young PhD candidate by the name of Reiner Knizia, who, nearly fifty years later, has paired up with publisher Zoch Verlag to present Reif für die Insel. At last, the larger public can access the notes taken during one of the most important zoological studies of the 20th century.

Is any of that true? Probably not. On the other hand, Reiner Knizia is a doctor, and you probably don’t know what his doctorate is in, so. Who’s to say?

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