Plastic Paradise

You’ve probably seen them around your local gaming store. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve probably heard of Warhammer 40,000. But if you’re like me, the entire hobby just seemed daunting. Learning to assemble models from tiny bits, plus having to paint them with such fine detail, not to mention learning a ruleset that, from an outside perspective, seems so detailed and complicated… all of it can seem overwhelming. Still, as someone heavily into most niches of the tabletop hobby, such as RPGs and board games, miniatures games felt like a pretty glaring blind spot for me. 

Luckily, my friendly local gaming store (shout out to Atomic Empire in Durham, North Carolina) regularly hosts Learn to Play Day. Here, I was introduced to Marvel: Crisis Protocol by Atomic Mass Games. The branding alone is what caught my eye. I’m very familiar with Marvel's properties from their prolific status in mainstream media and their omnipresence in the tabletop games space. This meant there was a shortcut for my brain to connect with the game instead of learning a new world of lore and mythology. The models for the game were bright and uniquely posed, letting each stand out in its own iconic way. While the idea of building and assembling these models seemed overwhelming, the gameplay…

The post Marvel: Crisis Protocol Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I’m a sucker for Batman films, but once the net loosens a bit, my experience with the world of Batman becomes a little spottier.

Luckily, it’s essentially impossible now to avoid a run-in with The Caped Crusader and the gallery of misfits that populate Gotham City. There are too many TV shows to count, and while I don’t read comic books, a recent visit to a comics store in Chicago tells me that iterations of the character are exploding even now. The recent film The Flash seemed to feature Michael Keaton’s return as Batman more than The Flash character himself, at least in the previews.

One of our tabletop marketing partners reached out because he had a new copy of The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City ready to ship. I watched the trailer, and had to admit that this looked like a fun activity, even if it was very close to the line of board game versus video game. There are plenty of tabletop elements, all secretly packaged in a handsome black box, but players must use an app to drive the entire gaming experience.

(As of the writing of this article, Panic in Gotham City is only playable on newer iOS devices. That meant I actually couldn’t play this game when I first got it.…

The post The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Sinister Schemes

If you’re already acquainted with the Villainous series of games, the gameplay in Marvel Villainous: Twisted Ambitions will evoke a sense of familiarity. Released as a standalone expansion that can be played with or without the other boxes in the Marvel Villainous series, players select a villain to play and retrieve that villain’s unique player board, villain deck, and villain guide. Each villain also contributes a selection of cards that get added to a communal Fate Deck, where you and your rivals will be drawing iconic Marvel heroes to try to impede your progress. Each villain in the game has their own unique goals to achieve to win. Titania wants to power up to defeat She-Hulk, Doctor Octopus intends to pull off a series of complex schemes that can only be completed in specific circumstances, and Kang the Conqueror wants to break reality by conquering locations in other players’ boards.

On each player’s turn, they move their character’s “mover” piece to a new area on their domain board. Each space on your board has multiple action symbols on it, and you can perform them in any order. The actions are simple: gain power, play a card, activate an ability, relocate an item or ally, vanquish a foe, draw Fate cards to play on your opponents, or…

The post Marvel Villainous: Twisted Ambitions Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The post The Few and Cursed Game Video Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

MIND MGMT, all caps, is a comic by Matt Kindt, published by Dark Horse. Mind MGMT, sporadic caps, is a hidden movement game by Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim, published by Off the Page Games. It’s the little differences that matter in life.

Like many hidden movement games, Mind MGMT is 1-v-all. The hidden participant plays as the Recruiter, attempting to either outlast the ten-round timer without being found or recruit 9 Agents for…some nefarious purpose. I haven’t read the comics, I don’t know the mythology. I assume the Recruiter is the baddie. The hidden mover in a hidden movement game usually is. There’s also the fact that the Recruiter’s minions, the Immortals, have skulls printed on the back of their black wooden pieces. All signs point to Bad Guy.

The other players work together as Rogue Agents, attempting to track down the Recruiter. I assume they are canonically the good guys. Their wooden pieces are painted in fun colors reminiscent of Tropical Skittles. The backs of their heads are filled with dreams. All signs point to Not the Bad Guy.

The turn structure is extremely simple. The Recruiter picks an eligible spot on the board to move to, and moves there. This is done in secret, of course, using a miniature dry-erase version of the main board. Write…

The post Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game.” Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Marvel United was the pledge that started it all. For me personally, Marvel United was the very first game I backed on Kickstarter. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I opened my wallet to a CMON production. I kept hearing about these stretch goal things, not fully realizing they were all going to show up at my door in an oversized box months later. That pledge opened a floodgate of Kickstarter spending that has only recently subsided as I’ve better learned to curate my collection.

Looking beyond myself, though, the first appearance of Marvel United started a different sort of flood. The base game, designed by Eric M. Lang and Andrea Chiarvesio, gave players the opportunity to engage more than 50 Marvel superheroes in cooperative battle against more than two dozen Villains. The two subsequent campaigns have each added as many characters to the fold, resulting in an empire of cash and plastic that has now reached into second, third, and maybe fourth tier Marvel personalities? At this point, publisher CMON simply whispers the name and millions of dollars materialize to produce miniatures of unheard-of characters with little more than a cameo in a two-issue comic arc from the 1980s.

It’s amazing, really.

I only jumped in on that first…

The post Marvel United Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I’ve had the privilege of running through three deckbuilding games (DBG) from Renegade Game Studios this year: GI JOE DBG, My Little Pony: Adventures in Equestria DBG, and now Transformers DBG. Growing up, I watched the cartoons for all three of these properties, although I spent most of my time with GI JOE and Transformers. I loved both of these cartoons so I’m generally inclined to believe that anything featuring the IP from these two franchises should work.

GI JOE DBG was a blast. It was a good game that generated great memories, and building up the deck was fun as I took JOEs on missions to take down COBRA by flying in a Skyhawk or rolling into the mission with a big tank. That game was also tough, so I found myself losing just as often as I was winning.

My Little Pony DBG ended up being just right—not great, not bad, beautiful production, a little too easy to win.

Transformers DBG, unfortunately, fits at the bottom of the pile, by a very large margin. Despite having some Transformers toys here in my house—still, 40 years after purchase!—Renegade and designers Matt Hyra and Dan Blanchett missed on the part that should have been a walk in the park: Transformers DBG never thematically feels like I…

The post Transformers Deck-Building Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

It’s another dark night in Gotham City. You’ve been called to unofficially help Jim Gordon with some cases in need of investigating—investigations he’s been told by his well-bribed superiors to stay away from. Gordon wants you to work with some odd, sketchy characters, but he must know what he’s doing, right? 

In Batman: Everybody Lies, you’ll be playing as one of four characters: reporters Vicky Vale or Warren Spacey, Gotham PD’s Harvey Bullock, or Catwoman. Set against a backdrop of criminals, corruption, and strange substances, this is a story-driven game where you’ll travel around Gotham City following up on clues, gleaning information and seeing where each clue leads you. You’ll end each game by submitting a Final Report to Gordon with your findings. Get them right and you win.

This will be a Spoiler Free review, so expect fewer photos and a shorter section on the gameplay itself.

[caption id="attachment_254396" align="aligncenter" width="491"] The thematic box artwork.[/caption]

The Night is Darkest Just Before the Dawn

Place the game board on the table, placing the round Moon and Bat marker on the Intro space of the Investigation Track. Also place the markers for City Hall, Gotham City Gazette, the Police Headquarters, and Downtown on their spots on the board.

Set…

The post Batman: Everybody Lies Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

When I started writing board game reviews two years ago, I wasn't planning to review cooperative games.

Playing a game that made me feel like I was in a meeting where everyone spoke different languages never appealed to me. However, I wanted to see if the cooperative genre had changed for the better, so I gave it another shot. For whatever reason, most of the games I ended up reviewing were of the Asian variety, with games such as Debtzilla and Testament. Today’s game, Tokyo Sidekick, is joining that circle.

As you can probably tell based on the name, Tokyo Sidekick is about Superheroes, and the plot doesn’t stray too far from expectations. Incidents have flooded the city as if Noah's Ark was on its way. Regular Villians and Supervillians are ravaging the locals with the big Menace pulling the strings.

How are you going to solve this problem? Like most problems in life, with violence. You and your friends will form a violence committee by handpicking Superheroes and their Sidekicks, with every one of them having their little power to toy around with.

Enough with the prologue, we have a city to save.

Time to get big

And this city is represented by a giant board that might as well have its own postal code. Each…

The post Tokyo Sidekick Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Then Plantopia just might be the game for you.

In Plantopia, Origame brings the artwork of @daylightpotato to life through a card game of horticultural proportions. Two to five hopeful gardeners set out to cultivate their plots by planting, growing, and evolving their puntastic herbage in a delightful strategic race. Along the way, players attempt to predict and influence the weather in order to achieve their goals. In the end, Plantopia is a game of tree-cognition and cactics.

Setup & Gameplay

The aim of the game is to harvest the most magical rainbow leaves from a garden of quippy plants before any one player introduces their fourth treevolved species to their garden. Additional endgame scoring bonuses will lend a hand in achieving total victory.

At the outset, Players shuffle the 102 plant cards and deal 6 to each gardener. Each player also receives 5 garden plot cards where the magic will (hopefully)…

The post Plantopia Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

For those unfamiliar, the Rising series is a cooperative game using a variety of popular intellectual properties. The first one was Thanos Rising, based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, followed by other licenses like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and...Spongebob? Okay, sure, why not.

Even though I am not the biggest fan of cooperative games, this grabbed my attention because I like Batman, and according to the community, this is the hardest version out of the series. As for the long game title, it is a lengthy story. To sum it up, this is an alternative universe where Batman kills the Joker and gets exposed to toxins. This toxin transforms Bruce Wayne, gradually ripping pieces of his mind and body. As a result of this shift, this is a Batman with Bruce Wayne's intellect combined with Joker's lack of values.

Since comics love the silly multi-universe nonsense, the story of this game follows the same direction. The Batman Who Laughs seeks to conquer the Prime Universe, and he is bringing his party bus full of villains along for the ride. You and your friends will lead their own team of heroes to stop this threat by defeating villains and recruiting heroes until The Batman Who Laughs shows up for the final showdown.

The Batman Who Laughs Rising Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

When I heard it announced that Dark Horse Comics was joining Studio 71 Games to follow up with a Kickstarter game campaign, it sounded right up my alley - the kind of alley where siblings suddenly drop from the sky in varying years of the early 1960s.

[caption id="attachment_216960" align="alignnone" width="1024"] I could’ve gone for a game that handled cross-species blood transfusions, tell-all memoirs of a jaded, less-than-super sibling, and blowing up the moon. This is not that game.[/caption]

Plays up to six players? Perfect! Co-op? Even better, as that leads to less fights in our house! Art done by the creators? Ideal! Maybe even worthy of remembering my Kickstarter password!

Is it a cash grab?…

The post The Umbrella Academy Game Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

It wasn’t just nostalgia that reeled me in. The “Shuffle” portion of the title refers to everyone’s personal deck of cards. There are eight drivers in this game, each with their own deck. At the start of the game, you will pick two drivers and merge their decks together. Each driver has a unique passive ability, and you need to select one of them for your main driver, although they can be switched at a later time.

Based on that description, some of you will immediately think of the video game Mario Kart. You are right, this is the card version of Mario Kart. Each character has their own quirks and tools to mess with the…

The post Shuffle Grand Prix Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.