King of Tokyo: Origins is a dice-chucking game that pits monster against monster in the age-old battle for Japan’s biggest city. The winner will either be the first person who reaches 20 points, or be the last monster standing.

Set Up

All players take a cut-out of a monster and sets it in the plastic stand. They then take the accompanying monster’s score tracker, setting the wheel in the upper left (Points) to zero and the wheel in the lower right (Health) to 10. 

[caption id="attachment_295759" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo: Origins[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_295760" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Mechamster and Cosmic Joe[/caption]

Set the board on the table in reach of all players—or don’t. The board only has a circle for the attacking monster to stand in. That’s all. Simply placing your monster in the middle of the table will have the same effect.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to purchase these to gain either a temporary or permanent bonus. Place three cards face-up and the remaining cards to the side.

[caption id="attachment_295762" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of cards[/caption]

Randomly choose a starting player and…

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Return to the beleaguered city of Tokyo—now with the addition of Tokyo Bay—as our monsters slug it out once again for domination and to claim victory. 

If you’re new to King of Tokyo, I went over the setup and gameplay in my recent review of King of Tokyo: Origins. (Known from here as KoT: O) That game comes with four monsters, each lacking in special abilities and rendering them disappointingly interchangeable. King of Tokyo: Monster Box (KoT: MB), a fully stand-alone game, solves that problem in a big way. 

Let’s start with some of the basics, though. 

[caption id="attachment_295770" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo Monster Box box[/caption]

KoT:MB comes with its own big deck of monster cards. 

[caption id="attachment_295771" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of the many Monster cards in the box[/caption]

From my games, these can be mixed in with the KoT:O cards if you want even more options.

KoT:MB also comes with two sets of dice, one in black & green and one in orange & black. The orange set was initially included in the King of Tokyo Halloween expansion. There is no difference between these sets of dice. If…

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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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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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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In my Focused on Feld series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2023’s Cuzco, his 38th game.

The sixth game in Queen Games’s Stefan Feld City Collection, Cuzco is a reimplementation of 2013’s Bora Bora. Bora Bora took place in a Polynesian setting replete with beaches, tribesmen, and women wearing hula skirts. Cuzco hearkens back to an earlier age: the age of the Incas. In Cuzco, the players are messengers, running all over the empire, delivering important information on behalf of the Sapa Inca (the emperor). Like Bora Bora, almost everything you do in Cuzco is going to earn you points, and the person with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Aside from the dramatic shift in theme, there isn’t much to distinguish…

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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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If there’s dice in a game, you know I’m at least gonna listen to the pitch. Then if you tell me there’s also tile laying, you’ll have my full attention—which is why I’m here telling you about Dice Manor from Arcane Wonders.

Dice Manor is a lightweight dice game in which players attempt to build out their best home, room by room. Over the course of 4 rounds players will roll their dice and use the results to bid on each of 6 available rooms that round, compete for advertising dollars, or give tours of their manor to potential customers. At the end of the game, players earn points for those tours, for having diversity in the types of rooms in the house, and for having the most paint choices.

Can you wind up with the most valuable home after all is said and done? Let’s take a look at a sample round to see how to play.

Dice Manor Game Play Overview

Dice Manor uses a dice rolling system similar to that of Las Vegas or Dice Age: The Hunt: roll all your dice, then group them by pip value. Once you’ve got your groups, then you select a single value (all the 2s, all the…

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I’m going to make a new law.

It’s a simple one. The more complex and longer the game is, the higher the chance there will be a dice version of it in the future.

We've already seen popular, complex board games simplified into quicker, more random dice games, perhaps to appeal to a wider audience. The epic scifi 4X game Twilight Imperium was condensed into a simpler dice-based version more reminiscent of an April Fools' joke without a punchline. Nations, an already lengthy civilization game, underwent a similar transformation. Now here we are with Terraforming Mars, an intricate 3+ hour strategic card game and engine builder that has now been distilled down into a stripped down dice game.

And like the previous versions of Terraforming Mars, the story is still the same. Players take on the role of CEOs tasked with terraforming Mars by raising its oxygen levels, temperature, and ocean coverage along three tracks. Where this dice version differs is that only two of these parameters need to be maxed out to trigger the end of the game, streamlining playtime to the advertised 45 minutes - a rarity among board games. So while veteran fans will recognize the essential experience of racing to make Mars habitable, it has been pared down to its most basic bones, shedding complexity…

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There’s something about the cover for At the Office, a new release from designer Reiner Knizia and Polish publisher Trefl, that’s deeply evocative. Artist Michał Ambrzykowski perfectly captures the essence of an anonymous mug from a workplace break room. Look at the cover for more than a moment, and you realize that mug is inside a coffee dispenser. I can hear the sound the machine makes when you press the button to brew and dispense the coffee. I can smell it. I’m there, in my khakis, spacing out while I wait for the process to finish.

When you open the box, you find the standard accoutrement for a roll & write. There’s a manual, of course, four pencils, five dice, and a pad of double-sided player sheets. Each side shows the same pyramid of office employees. They appear to have coordinated for portrait day, as each group is wearing a uniquely colored t-shirt. There’s a fifth group, a multicolored cohort of five bespectacled workers, that overlaps the color groups.

On your turn, roll the five dice. Four of them correspond to the colors of the employee shirts. The fifth, a white die, knows no master. You take any colored die you want,…

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I think I might be done with heavier games? “Done” is doing a lot of work here. I’m in the middle of a love affair with Barrage. I would play The War of the Ring right now if you asked, and it is 4:30 am. It's just that I’ve noticed over the last several months that my tastes have made a hard turn towards abstracts and party games.

Those are certainly the areas where I’m finding the most joy, and the most memorable play experiences. I picked up a copy of That’s Not a Hat! (Justin’s rating is a solid 1 star lower than my own) recently, and I can’t get enough of it. People cry with laughter over the course of its 10-to-15 minutes. A recent game of Pan t’es mort, a simple and silly push-your-luck game, was wondrous (About three quarters of a star lower than I’d rate it, if Meeple Mountain allowed for quarter-point shenanigans). Yesterday afternoon, I had one of my most reliably heavy-leaning gaming friends over for four or five hours, thinking we might crack into Inferno from GMT.

Instead, we played Carcassonne: The Castle, which I tried for the first time two days ago and was eager to show him. We got in two games of Mindbug, a round…

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At Meeple Mountain, we’ve been in a bit of a ‘fine’ rut. So many games come through the Meeple Mountain base camp, but few have the crampons to climb all the way to the top. It’s been a barrage of average, plenty of perfectly good, but few that truly stand out. As my colleague Justin argues, perhaps there are simply too many games.

It’s an inauspicious start to a review. Ominous. Unpromising. Discouraging.

I’m not too sure that Roll to the Top: Journeys does much to buck this trend of the tolerable. Except…

Let Me Roll It

A remake of a 2018 release, Roll to the Top: Journeys (just Roll to the Top from hereon) from designers Peter Joustra and Corné van Moorsel is a lovely production. Its gorgeously illustrated boards are inviting, its colourful dice ridiculously playful.

Gameplay is simple. Someone rolls the dice, everyone writes the numbers rolled or sums of those numbers in their grid. You start from the bottom, building up brick-by-brick until a vague silhouette of a famous landmark is complete. Numbers can’t be lower than the numbers directly below them, and no number can be written in a space that isn’t ‘supported’ by the number(s) below it.…

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