Designer Scott Almes is best known for his Tiny Epic _____ series of games, published under his Gamelyn Games label. The Meeple Mountain team has reviewed about five of them, and we’ve generally thought of those games as OK—nothing incredibly special, but nothing incredibly bad either.

Then I reviewed Roller Coaster Rush, another Almes design, and that might have been the worst game I played in 2023. Legitimately terrible. So, based purely on recency bias, I was a little apprehensive when I opened the box for his 2022 release Beer & Bread, published in the US by Capstone Games.

Almost immediately, those fears vanished. Had Beer & Bread hit my table in 2023, I probably would have named it my favorite two-player-only game, just edging out Sky Team. It’s that good.

A Little of This, But Not More of That

My appreciation for Beer & Bread starts with the scoring system. A bit like Between Two Cities, Ark Nova, Tigris & Euphrates, and other classics, Beer & Bread is a race to score points by fulfilling orders on two different sets of cards, beer cards and bread cards. The lower of the two scores ends up as a player’s final score, so a…

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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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Pocket Farm doesn’t have much in the way of reviews on Board Game Geek. 32 ratings and three comments as of this writing.

The first comment is unintelligible to all but the individual who wrote it.

The second is in Korean, and reads, “Cute. Headache. Short Playtime.” Accurate and succinct, the perfect review.

The third says, simply, “For children.” I get where BGG user G0nzo is coming from. Pocket Farm has a veneer of the adorable. Publisher Mandoo Games and artist DODAM have conspired to create the sort of product that wouldn’t look out of place in a preschool. You see this box and think, “What a cute little game. I could probably play this with my niece, who is 6.” The box says 10+, but you know that can’t be right.

Don’t be fooled by appearances. Pocket Farm is a real brain-burner. The rind may look sweet, but the fruit is tart.

[caption id="attachment_293047" align="alignnone" width="1024"] This man is in pain.[/caption]

Baskets of Berries

Pocket Farm is a card drafting game married to a spatial puzzle. Each round, the starting player reveals a number of cards from the top of the deck equal to the number of players plus one. In a three-player game,…

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Horticulture - noun

1. the cultivation of a garden, orchard, or nursery; the cultivation of flowers, fruits, vegetables, or ornamental plants.
2. the science and art of cultivating such plants.
3. a fast-paced game of calling your shot and tending your plot.

In the game of Horticulture, players take on the roles of gardeners competing to build the most beautiful, not to mention highest scoring, garden. In the game, the gardeners are all members of a co-op and they’re forced to plant whatever the other gardeners return with from the local nursery. Sometimes the other gardeners’ choices will work in your favor, easily fitting into your garden plan, but just as often, not fitting into your plans at all.

Overview

Horticulture is a member of the ‘roll and write’ classification of games, although it’s more accurate to call it a ‘flip and fill’. Each player’s garden is created on a sheet of paper as the game progresses. Players take turns drawing two cards from a shared deck of cards, choosing one to keep and one to discard. Each card features two symbols representing one or more of the various types of plants in the game. After a card is selected, the players must add the symbols shown on the card to their garden following some simple…

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To Be (Chicken) or Not To Be (Chicken)

Chicken! does not pretend to be anything other than what it says on the tin. The game comes in a small cylindrical tube adorned with artwork of foxes, chickens, farmers, and eggs. That’s pretty much the whole experience. In the game, players roll dice on each turn and can press their luck to score the most points (see: chickens). The first player to reach 25 points is the winner. It’s a fairly straightforward concept.

On your turn, players are passed some number of dice and must roll them all. You set aside any chickens or foxes you roll, leaving you with some blank dice or eggs. For every egg you roll, you must “hatch” (add) a die to your pool from the middle of the board. You then have the option to reroll all non-chicken, non-fox dice to press your luck. The catch, of course, is that if you ever roll three foxes, the foxes have raided the henhouse, and your turn is over, scoring zero points.

To mitigate this risk, Chicken! offers each player the opportunity to, well, “chicken out.” At the start of your turn, you can take a one-point penalty. If you do, you can reset the dice…

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If Jurassic Park has taught us anything, it’s that dinosaur theme parks are not the safest places. How comforting, then, for the risk-averse to know that they can still get their dino-fix without all that liability by simply moving back a step on the supply chain. At least, I think that’s what’s going on in Tiny Epic Dinosaurs, where nobody gets eaten and the terrible lizards are pure profit.

Sure, they can escape, but we don’t really worry about what happens after that. 

(Light) Rules of the wee ranch

Each player’s ranch card contains a unique grid of ten spaces with a few natural barriers—mountains and water. To begin each round, players collect resources based on the icons visible in empty spaces. Resources—meat, veg, and supplies—are tracked by wee wooden markers on the player mat.

Players then take turns placing their ranch workers. Four of the ranchers are wee meeples, while the lead rancher is more normally sized. Players can select occupied spaces only by placing ranchers of greater “value.” In other words, if a wee rancher is out there, then either two wee ranchers or the lead rancher would suffice to visit the location.

The locations serve several purposes:

• Gaining dinosaurs either free-range or via payment…

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boon (n.): a gift; a benefit enjoyed, blessing, advantage, a thing to be thankful for: sometimes without even the notion of giving, but always with that of something one has no claim to, or that might have been absent.

lake (n.): a large body of water entirely surrounded by land; properly, one sufficiently large to form a geographical feature. Or, in some board games, a syllable of misdirection in the title of a game about traveling along a river.

The thematic arc of Boonlake takes place on a normal sized board featuring a river that apparently travels around the region of Boon Lake (not pictured). Each player operates from their own ranch, a holding tank of production sites, inhabitants, cattle, houses, and settlements with ample room for a dozen modernizations that unleash beefy abilities. The game is a concoction of exploring the map, harvesting goodies, creating a tableau of project cards, and establishing fruitful settlements.

The real game of Boonlake, however, takes place on a small board holding seven action tiles. Each tile is a progression of activity that begins with the current player and radiates out to involve everyone at the table. Once a tile is employed, it is placed at the bottom of the board’s track and pushed up to close the gap. In this way, there…

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In 1997, Uwe Rosenberg teamed up with the publisher AMIGO to launch an empire. An empire built on beans.

It wasn’t Rosenberg’s first design effort, but it was his first to get picked up by a publisher, and it was a smash hit. It was so well received, in fact, that it was nominated for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres that same year. If Uwe Rosenberg wasn’t on publishers’ radars at that point, he certainly was now.

There’s no denying that Uwe’s masterpiece Bohnanza is a juggernaut. In the 20+ years since its initial release, Bohnanza has spawned multiple expansions, spin-offs, and rethemes. It’s even been redesigned into different formats: the board game version, Bean Trader, in 2002 and the card and dice version, Würfel Bohnanza (later re-released as Bohnanza: Das Würfelspiel in 2022), in 2012. Surprisingly, Bohnanza hasn’t received the roll and write treatment yet, but if you ask me, it’s just a matter of time.

In Bohnanza, you’re a bean farmer tending to your crops, trying to harvest them when the time is right for the greatest profit. If you’re able to earn more coins than your competitors before the game’s end, you win.

Setup

A game of Bohnanza is set up thusly:

Shuffle all the…

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There’s nothing more appealing than a good map, and few things are as disappointing as a map that doesn’t measure up to its potential. I’m happy to say that DEI lives up to the promise of its very cool map.

It’s incontestable that the battle royale has made a splash in the world of video games, and there have been attempts to replicate the formula into board game form. For the unfamiliar, battle royale games are typically a first-person shooter where a player is dropped into a huge landscape without any weapons or tools, and needs to run around and collect weapons, ammo, and equipment to be able to survive the other players. On top of this, the map is constantly shrinking, bringing players into more and more conflict. These games, in spite of their huge maps, often feel claustrophobic and frantic at the same time, and every decision you make matters.

[caption id="attachment_273660" align="alignnone" width="768"] Opening moves![/caption]

Now, how could a real-time experience like this possibly be translated into board game form? I’m not sure if DEI’s designer, Tommaso Battista, intended for this, but he’s made perhaps the best battle royale-adjacent board game I’ve encountered so far. I think this is in part because the game tightly focuses players on…

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As part of an upcoming entry in our Publisher Profile series, I am playing games in the Red Raven Games catalog. I recently received a review copy of the first game in Red Raven’s “Arzium” series of adventure titles, 2015’s Above and Below. (Near and Far came next, then Now or Never arrived in 2022.)

Now that I’ve played Megaland, Eight-Minute Empire, and Knight Fall, one thing is clear: Red Raven drives the narrative elements and the world building in their games as well as any publisher in the business. I haven’t played Sleeping Gods, but that game rocketed up the BGG Top 100 list at an incredible pace. My colleague Jesse Fletcher loved the game and many of my friends believe Sleeping Gods is the best game Red Raven has ever produced.

Knowing all of this, I was excited to get Above and Below to the table. It’s a dinosaur in game years—eight years old!! It’s tough to get some of my friends to play games that were released even a year ago, so an eight-year-old game took some selling. But I coerced enough people to the table over the last few weeks to get some plays in, and I cobbled together some thoughts on the game below.

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What are the smells of the Peruvian countryside? Fresh air, crisp meadows, growing crops, llamas? That’s right, Llamaland from veteran designer Phil Walker-Harding drops players into the hills and mountains of Peru and asks them to take control of their estate and grow potatoes, corn, and cacao, along with raising the aforementioned livestock. Can you optimize your estate while still giving yourself room to build up and build out?

Llamaland Overview

In Llamaland players earn points throughout the game by harvesting crops found on polyomino tiles which they stack to expand their farms. Sell these crops to local merchants in order to earn points and valuable llamas which you can raise on your land. But be careful, as llama enclosures take up space on your property that you might need later on for landscape tile placement. Players can earn additional points by claiming bonuses for crop cards, distance between llama pens, or even the height of various elements on your farm. You can also hire locals to help you make the most of your farm.

Setting up the Countryside

There’s a lot of stuff in this box, and setting up Llamaland takes a bit of time. You need to stack the double-sided polyomino landscape tiles, set out all the…

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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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