GAMA Expo is a primarily retailer-based trade show hosted by GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association) and has been in operation for decades. While the last few years have taken place in Reno, Nevada, this year they debuted their new venue in Louisville, Kentucky. This is convenient, not only for me (being from Nashville) but also for a multitude of other attendees. The ease of travel to this new location at the Kentucky International Convention Center was mentioned by many people I spoke with during the event. And the proof is in the pudding: attendance was up by 30% over the previous year for retailers, publishers, manufacturers, and of course media (like myself).

In addition, the new space was much larger than previous years, by tens of thousands of square feet—giving more capacity for vendors, more space for attendees to walk around, and more room for sessions and meetings.

What’s New on the Table?

One of the great things about being a board game media outlet like Meeple Mountain is the chance to see what’s going to be hitting tables over the next year or so. For example, when we attend Essen Spiel, we’re given a glimpse at what might make it to North America the following…

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The King of Tokyo Monster Packs are four monsters, each sold separately, that come with some special game-changing bits and pieces. From towers to build and conquer, to extra dice, these monsters add some spice to your King of Tokyo games.

Cthuhlu

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

[caption id="attachment_295782" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Cthulhu Box[/caption]

"A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."
     –from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H. P. Lovecraft

If you’re going to introduce new monsters to The King of Tokyo, where better to start than with The Great Old One, the cosmic entity that is Cthulhu? After all, it existed for eons before any other so-called “mythical creature” ever took to Earth.

King of Tokyo Monster Pack: Cthulhu (known as Cthulhu for the rest of this review) comes with components for both King of Tokyo and King of New York. However, I will only be covering the King of Tokyo components for this review.

Along with the standard Evolution cards, Cthulhu comes with Cultist tiles. Whenever the Cthulhu player rolls four of a kind, they can take a…

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As we were wrapping up a recent all-day gaming event, I decided that we had to get a round of Kingsburg in before we called it a night.

Full disclosure: I love Kingsburg. (I even wrote an article about it.) Have loved it for years. The game is old—17 years old now!!—but it remains a favorite of mine because it does so many things right, and it has dice, and it gives players the chance to gut your neighbor by cutting off their ability to use all of their dice during each placement round.

The base game is enough for me, but expansion content was built over the years. One of the modules, Soldier Tokens, fixes the only major complaint players had about the rules in the base game. When a six-sided die was rolled to determine what all players could add to their reinforcements in the base game, that number would be added to any other battle strength from their completed buildings.

Soldier Tokens takes away the randomness, and in a dice game where so many other things are random, the Soldier Tokens module is an excellent addition to an already-strong foundation.

But there are five other expansions available for the base game. During my most recent play, I decided to add…

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It’s been a long time since I played UNO.

In fact, it wasn’t until I walked into my mom’s house a few weekends ago to find her sitting there playing UNO with my 5-year-old son that I realized just how long it had actually been. That struck me as weird because I can clearly recall UNO being such a central part of my life during my youth. I have vivid memories of sitting around the table with my family, yucking it up, as day turned into night and, occasionally, the other way around. I played it with friends at church. I played it on camping trips with the Boy Scouts. I played it any chance I could get.

To say that I was once UNO obsessed would be underselling it. My love of UNO went much deeper than obsession.

And then, it just kind of faded away. I’m not sure when I stopped playing and I’m not even sure why. In fact, until I saw my son sitting there playing it with my mom, beckoning me to join them, I hadn’t even given any thought to actually playing the game since sometime in the 1980s.

As I sat there playing, it got me thinking that, if any game was ripe for the…

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During last year’s visit to SPIEL, I struck up conversations with French and French-speaking Canadian partners. What other French conventions should I check out? What are some of the big ones that are also tied to major award presentations in the hobby? And where else can I find an excuse to travel and eat great food?

The most consistent answer: Festival International des Jeux (FIJ), which takes place in the Cannes area of France each February. I started doing some digging on flights and hotels and my media badge was quickly approved, so I set about making arrangements to check out the show.

Upon my arrival at the Nice Côte d’Azur International Airport (it is nice, but it’s also in Nice), I grabbed an Uber and made the 25-minute journey from Nice to Cannes. Most people know Cannes as the host of the international film festival each May where it seems like director Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel) is debuting new movies while movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Penélope Cruz stroll red carpets every year.

In this way, Cannes (pronounced “can”, as in “can of corn”) is pretty nice during the month of February. It’s a swanky town with at least two Ferrari dealerships and fancy retail shops everywhere, but it’s…

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Trick-taking games are one of the easier genres to get into when it comes to board games. Most of them are simply a deck of cards, a concept the entire world understands, and the rules are mostly straightforward. While some like Bridge and Cribbage can be more complex, most trick-taking games are easy to learn compared to modern board games.

Modern board game publishers are certainly prone to chasing trends, like deckbuilding, social deduction, roll and writes, and legacy games. Lately, trick-taking games seem to be having a moment. As a reviewer, I appreciate this since the key mechanism is so well-known that I don't need to explain the core gameplay in detail. Just saying a game is a "trick-taking" game conveys the basics of following suit, playing one card, and winning tricks with the highest card.

Which is why the reprinting of The Dwarf King makes perfect business sense. Originally released in 2011, this lightweight card game with simple "Quest tiles" flew under the radar in North America. It's quite accessible with its minimal components—playing cards, Quest tiles, and a thin rulebook. The only thing you’ll need to grab on your own is a scorepad, making this game feel like it was released over ten years ago.

Familiar…

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Yep, you remember. The original game positions players as “colonial governors” tasked with scoring the most points by constructing buildings and working fields via the use of “colonists” that arrive on a “colonist ship.” Those colonists, tasked with erecting buildings and working coffee, tobacco, sugar, indigo and corn plantations, are represented by small brown discs. Goods are shipped to the “new world” via ships that can only hold one type of the game’s five goods at any given time.

Yeah.

I still remember the first time I played Puerto Rico. At my house, a old saying still holds true: “you gotta call a spade a spade.” One look at the situation presented by Puerto Rico and I said the thing all of us were thinking as we read through the rules—this looks like a game about white people using people of color to…

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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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Imagine being several hundred feet underwater, trapped in a hollow metal tube, with nothing but your wits and training at your disposal if you hope to survive. One wrong move and the only evidence of your failure will be some bubbles on the surface of the water, there for a few moments before fading into obscurity. Few things sound more terrifying.

The thrill and excitement of the experience of stalking prey through the unknown using only science, technology, and good old-fashioned intuition is not an easy thing to capture in board game form. Many games have tried it, some succeed better than others. Let’s take a look at three such games in today’s Step Ladder: “Blind in the Water”.

Battleship > Steam Torpedo > Captain Sonar

Battleship

Originally designed as a pen and paper game at the end of World War I, Battleship wouldn’t become the board game it is today until 1967. While the game has undergone some aesthetic and component changes over the ensuing decades, it’s still largely the same game now as it was back in the era when humans were first walking on the moon. The approachable theme combined with the simple mechanics have turned Battleship into a mainstay of many household gaming closets worldwide.

Briefly,…

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Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on. – Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)

An Alternate History

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has a long and proud history. The one most people are familiar with, beyond the d20 iterations, is the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) line. If asked, I suspect most people familiar with the game would list the history of the game as follows:

• Chainmail: a set of combat rules; proto-role-playing. Primarily a war game.
• Original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D): the original true role-playing game. Heavily rooted in its wargaming past.
• Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D): E. Gary Gygax's magnum opus. The three books which make up this version of the game (Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual) are the focus to which all other games point.
• Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition (AD&D 2e): this is the version of the game designed by the people at E. Gary Gygax's company after they kicked E. Gary Gygax out of it.
• Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition (D&D 3e; d20 System): after Tactical Simulations Rules (TSR) folded and was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, this was the result. The d20 System was the core of those…

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Back in 2020 we reviewed Cascadia, a deceptively simple tile laying and tableau building game from Flatout Games, who were coming off back to back successes with Calico and Point Salad. Since that time Cascadia won the Spiel des Jahres in 2022, and landed solidly in the top 100 games on hobby site BoardGameGeek. So it should come as no surprise that publisher AEG and developer Flatout Games are doubling down on their investment and releasing Cascadia: Landmarks, along with two new standalone roll and write games called Cascadia: Rolling Rivers and Cascadia: Rolling Hills—each exploring and celebrating a specific habitat in that area.

But it’s Cascadia: Landmarks we’re talking about today. Since it’s an expansion for the base game, I won’t be covering standard gameplay (you can read my review of Cascadia here), and instead I’ll just be talking about what the expansion brings to your table.

Cascadia: Landmarks Overview

One of the things I liked best about Cascadia was the variety, the input randomization. When setting up the game, you selected (or chose at random) one card for each different animal (elk, bear, fox, salmon, and hawk) and used that one for scoring. This meant that your focus could be noticeably…

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Oliver Roeder has an interesting background. After completing a Ph.D. in economics focusing on game theory, he became a writer for FiveThirtyEight.com, the ABC News website that looks at American politics. (538 being the total number of officials in the Electoral College that decides the winner of the Presidency) While there, Roeder wrote about crossword puzzles, Chess, and was the editor of their weekly online puzzle.

He recently took a new job with The Financial Times, leading the paper’s Data Journalism team. There he’s written about Fantasy Football, Backgammon, and Poker.

In between those jobs, he received a grant to write Seven Games, (W.W. Norton, 2022) a book about, you guessed it, seven games. The book’s subtitle, “A Human History”, is misleading, but only slightly so. 

Roeder provides a brief history of each of the seven games he covers (Checkers, Chess, Go, Backgammon, Poker, Scrabble, and Contract Bridge) and then focuses in on a single person, someone who became obsessed with the game—and had the programming skills to create a computer program capable of playing the game. And beating human opponents.

Just as each of these seven games provides a different set of mechanics and decision spaces, each of the programmers discussed had to improvise a new way of creating…

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Being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Game Judge, referee, etc.; GM from here on out) is work. Sure, you might be in a session for a few hours, but for each hour that session lasted, I would say a good GM spent an equal amount of time or more preparing things. Unless you are running a purely hack-and-slash game (nothing wrong with that), there are a multitude of things of which the GM needs to keep track, storyline adjustments that need to be made based on the actions of the player characters, and so on. The work of the GM started before the player characters were even conceived! World building is an amazing, rewarding, and fun thing to do. To do it well takes time and effort.

It can be very hard to build and run a world where the players can complete epic quests. It is even harder to do it in such a way that feels organic and gives the players agency.

Fortunately for…

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