Meet MahJong (2023, ThinkFun) is a tricky proposition, and not because it requires four players to share the experience.

It’s because Meet MahJong looks like it belongs to someone’s grandparents. I know this because I couldn’t get my kids, game groups, or wife to play it on its own. But when my wife’s parents came to town, they were VERY excited to whip out Meet MahJong, and that’s ultimately the right call because we had a fantastic time.

Meet MahJong, designed by Cara Weiss with development provided by Sen-Foong Lim (Mind MGMT and Belfort, amongst other games we spoke to Sen about years ago), is a game intended to introduce players to MahJong with not one but two games in the box: Chinese MahJong (the version you might already know), and American MahJong, featuring the “Charleston” tile draft format and a simplified scoring method.

The Old Days

I started in the Chinese version of MahJong on Windows PC platforms a billion years ago. I would play it once or twice a week, and loved it. I still have no idea what any of the symbols on any of the tiles mean, but that didn’t matter to me. I just liked the way that big mountain of…

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Undergrove, the latest title from Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, is on its way to crowdfunding in the coming days. Players take up the role of douglas fir trees attempting to spread their seedlings about a mushroom forest replete with elemental resources.

The game itself is a tile-laying, area and resource management affair in which players are cooperatively building the game’s engine in the form of the forest floor and then determining the most fruitful ways to exploit the fungi for dendrological gains.

Remember this is a late prototype, so the descriptions here are only relevant to the pre-campaign conversation. My aim is to give you a basic understanding and point out the way the game feels at this moment in the process. 

Gameplay

Undergrove takes place on an expanding map of mushroom tiles with scalloped corners. These scalloped corners leave cutouts to place seedling discs. The seedlings then have access to lay roots on each of the four adjoining tiles, gaining access to their abilities and, hopefully, their victory points. During the game, the seedlings absorb carbon from the mushrooms, growing to eventually become small trees.

For the most part, the abilities on the mushroom tiles allow for the exchange of resources and the expedition of this absorption…

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Mystic Market is a light set collection and price manipulation game with a lovely magical theme. Over the course of the game players will collect such fanciful ingredients as dragon scales, kraken tentacles, and phoenix tears, in order to buy and sell them, or to concoct potions with them. But pay attention, because as each ingredient is sold, it’s value decreases which could tank your next turn. The player with the most money at the end of the game is the most successful potioner.

Mystic Market Overview

Setup for Mystic Market is straightforward.

Players each get 5 coins, 4 Ingredient cards, and 1 Reference card. Then lay out 5 ingredient cards face up to form the market.

Mix up the 6 Supply Shift cards, select 3 of them and add them to the deck of ingredient cards. Shuffle well, then set this deck as the draw deck for the market. Shuffle the Potion cards as well.

Set the initial value of each ingredient on the Value Track according to the rules.

A Turn of Mystic Market

Since the Ingredient cards are at the heart of the game, before we talk about a turn, let’s examine the cards themselves.

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Dear publishers: I will happily play any of your small box, 15-minute gaming experiences because the world can never have enough games like this. Plus, they are perfect for starting or ending any of my review crew gaming experiences between plays.

With that as a primer, let’s talk about Linkto, a 15-minute trivia game that comes in two different flavors: Linkto Travel, and Linkto Food. (I believe these games were available in other countries a few years ago, but they are making their way to US shores for the first time now.)

There are 50 different picture cards in each box, along with 49 question cards with five different prompts on each question card, which represent the game’s difficulty levels. That leaves just one leftover picture card; after sorting through all of the picture cards and matching each one with a prompt/question card, that leftover card is matched up with an answer key to determine if you’ve solved that game’s level or not.

Limited, In Almost Every Way

Each Linkto game is the same in a few ways, which will either make it shine for you or not.

Each of the games has a very handsome price point, about $10 USD at most major tabletop online retailers. Each…

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This is Not A Game

Since we are a board gaming family, it has been on my mind that my kids should learn some classic fundamental games that have withstood the test of time. I wanted to teach critical thinking skills and strategies in game play, and there came a point in my parenting journey that I decided to teach my kids to play chess. But how? It does not stand out as bright and colorful. What is the point in moving the pieces around like so?

If you have kids, you know that theme is everything. You could make kids try really difficult things by putting their favorite character on a box. But how do you get children's buy-in to a "theme-less" abstract strategy game? You reel them in by building up their affection for the chess pieces. You weave a story together that is silly and cute and sometimes ridiculous so that the kids play with the game pieces, very much like they would play with their make-believe toys. That is what Story Time Chess has set out to do with a lot of success.

This is not my first attempt at trying to teach my kids chess. I have an older child who learnt how to…

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Overview

Gamestormers is a 3-6 player game for ages 9+ that clocks in at 45-60 minutes. In Gamestormers, your goal is to collect Character, Item, Mechanic, and Storyline cards to construct a narrative for a new game. Players score victory points from card values, card alignment, arena tokens, and end game voting. The player with the most victory points after 5 rounds wins.

How To Play

[caption id="attachment_274877" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Notebook Playmat for your tableau building pleasure[/caption]

Each player begins with 3-4 dry erase cards, a dry erase marker, an instruction card, and a Notebook Playmat, which is the tableau where the cards of your emerging game narrative are stored. There are separate decks for Characters, Mechanics, Items, and Storylines, all combining to make up your tableau. The goal is to fill your Notebook Playmat with cards that both complement each other and create a compelling game narrative.

Game cards consist of five genres: Civilizations, Fantasy, High Seas, Sci Fi, and Horror. Players can choose whether to acquire a single genre of items, mechanics, and storylines to tell a traditional story, or…

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘loam’ as “a fertile soil of clay and sand containing humus.” It goes on to define the word ‘humus’ as “the organic component of soil, formed by the decomposition of leaves and other plant material by soil microorganisms.”

Loam (coming to Gamefound in May of 2023) is a game about plants using chemical inputs in order to build healthy soils on which to thrive. A fitting title considering the subject matter.

In Loam, players take on the roles of the plants, playing cards from their hands in order to lure the various microorganisms from the soil into their own root systems where these organisms will form communities and, ultimately, score points for the players. Microorganisms added to a player’s root system will boost one to three stats and possibly earn the players special, one-time-use bonus cards with powerful effects.

Points come from having diverse communities and also from maintaining a balance between the three stat tracks. At the end of three rounds of play, players will tally up their final scores to determine the winner.

Of course, this is just a high-level overview of the game. If you think you’ve heard enough and just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read…

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Darwin’s Journey, On the Origin of Species (the game), Darwin’s Choice, Darwinauts... Charles Darwin—world-renowned naturalist, botanist, geologist, author of On the Origin of Species—is a hot commodity in board gaming these days. It’s no wonder either. Darwin's journey on the HMS Beagle, exploring distant lands, chronicling what he’s seeing, and ultimately postulating the theory of evolution by natural selection are all aspects of the Darwin phenomenon that are easily gamified. And these games tend to fall squarely into one of two categories: vaguely historical re-enactments of Darwin’s journey or games that are more about evolution than they are about Darwin himself.

In the Footsteps of Darwin isn’t about either of those things. It’s a game that imagines what comes after. The year is 1856 and Charles Darwin’s adventuring days are long behind. His seminal work On the Origin of Species is still a work in progress. It’s been 20 years since the Beagle’s voyage across the lower half of the globe drew to a close, and Darwin’s eye has turned to the upper half. Not fully satisfied that he's gathered enough evidence to support his theory, he’s tapped a new generation of explorers to gather data about these distant lands for him.

Specifically, he’s chosen you.

The HMS Beagle Sails Again!

In the Footsteps of Darwin is a tile…

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“I can count on your vote, right?”

It was the fourth of five rounds during my first play of Hegemony (2023, Hegemonic Project Games), and as the State faction, I was working another person at the table. Hard.

“I’m not sure you can, actually.” The back and forth went on for a couple minutes. “Now, if we can work out that tax situation, I might be able to give you a little help, but not a lot of help, if you know what I’m saying.”

I did know what he was saying. I also knew I wasn’t gonna help the player out with that “tax situation” later either.

When you’re playing Hegemony as the government—known here in my house as “The Man”—you gotta do you, and “doing you” means taxing the hell out of the people.

Hegemony is one of the best games I’ve played in years. If this doesn’t end the year as my favorite gaming experience, this will be one of the greatest gaming years of my lifetime.

[caption id="attachment_271198" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The unemployment line is out of control![/caption]

Class Warfare

Hegemony—a word defined as “leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others”—calls itself “an asymmetric, card-driven board game.” It’s a bit more than that.

…

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My wife is the protester in our family.

She’s the one who took to the streets in her youth, making signs that scream of injustice, banding together with other movements to rise up against “the system.” No arrests yet, but at least she has been angry enough to take the time to raise her voice from time to time.

Me? I’ve always wanted to be that guy, but the couch is usually too comfortable on the day of that protest. There’s always an excuse, which in retrospect always saddens me a bit. Aren’t you riled up by what happened to [insert wronged community here]?

I am! But, not that much. As I’ve gotten older, the juices don’t flow like they once did. Kids show up, the 401(k) becomes the priority, and I’m already late for work.

Luckily, we have board games. And with a game like Bloc by Bloc: Uprising (2022, Out of Order Games) coming my way, I now have the chance to chuck a Molotov at police vans, or lead a mob of prisoners across the city in protest of poor living conditions. Uprising is a stab at a life of insurrection, for those of us who love the idea of a riot without having to actually start one.

The game succeeds at setting the stage and…

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I would need a Wayback to verify, but I believe Compounded was the first modern era board game to enter my collection. Before Ticket to Ride: Europe or New York 1901—even before Catan (obviously I’m a supremely late bloomer). Certainly before Everdell carried me through the tabletop floodgates, there was this little chemistry engine that could.

My wife is a biochemist and we’ve always sought out games with a scientific setting, but I would hardly label this little box a gateway game. I specifically remember wondering what I had gotten us into as I stickered the wooden discs and punched the tiny little diamond-shaped chits. After laboring through that first play, the game sat on our shelf for quite some time while we tried to develop a mental category for what we had experienced.

Compounded is a game, however, that keeps finding its way back to our table. We weren’t ready for its even moderate complexity the first time. After playing some more suitable welcoming games and familiarizing ourselves with modern mechanics, everything started to make sense, but I’m still not sure I’d say we enjoyed the next few attempts. Having now played hundreds more titles and grasped a bit more of gaming and ourselves as gamers, we’ve found the comfort zone and I’ve grown to really…

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Guano, for those not in the gua-know, is the accumulated fecal excrement of birds or bats. High in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate content, it’s prized the world over as a fertilizer. It was also once highly coveted for its use in the production of gunpowder. However, with the introduction of modern day smokeless powders, gunpowder’s use (and, by default, guano’s usage therein) has sharply declined.

But in the Atiwa Range (pronounced “uh-TEA-wuh”), a forest preserve in the southeastern portion of modern day Ghana, guano is desirable for an entirely different reason: the seeds contained therein. For, you see, the Atiwa Range is home to a large number of fruit bats. And they, and their excrement, are key to the forest preserve’s survival. Logging, gold mining, and hunting for bushmeat have put the preserve under a lot of pressure and the lowly fruit bat just might be the key to relieving it. A single fruit bat can travel up to 60 miles a night in its search for fruit to eat. On its way back home, it will excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit over a large swath of ground. Multiply this behavior by 150,000 (the size of a large colony) and you’re talking about reforesting up to 2,000 acres of forest per year. And that’s just…

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Yes, Oceans: Legends of the Deep has flying whales.

No, they aren’t some secret branch of evolution that the government has kept hidden from you.

Yes, they are entirely fictional, fantastical and kinda funny.

Here’s the thing though: Legends of the Deep also features Ahuizotl. The rulebook and some internet searching tell me that Ahuizotl were a water dog from Aztec mythology that lured people to the water’s edge with the sound of a baby crying, grabbing them with a hand at the end of their tail to feast on their eyes, nails and teeth. Alex Shiga’s illustration of them is about as creepy as all that sounds.

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of the Ahuizotl before. I’d also never heard of the Finnish sea monster Iku-Turso, the Hawaiian guardian shark Ka’ahupāhau, the West African orisha spirit Olokun, or the Japanese yōkai Umibōzu. In fact, of the 17 myths and deities included in the expansion (along with seven entirely fictional entities), I knew of a grand total of three.

Much like the base game, then, Legends of the Deep is largely educational, with a few frivolous fabrications chucked in for fun.

It’s a shame that most people initially focussed on those damn flying whales…

Magical Myth-ery…

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