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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Inferno: Guelphs and Ghibellines Vie for Tuscany, 1259–1261 is a staggering design. Let’s get that out of the way now. GMT’s Levy & Campaign series has developed a sterling reputation in only three titles for good reason. Each presents two players with a medieval military campaign, waged over a prolonged period of time. What separates the series from a number of its kin? Levy & Campaign keeps an eye keenly focused on the bookkeeping of war, on the costs in money and resources.

While the first volume, Nevsky, took place in Scandinavia, and Almoravid—which, for whatever it’s worth, has probably my favorite GMT cover—covers Muslim-Christian conflict in Spain, Inferno takes place in Tuscany, where Firenze and Siena duke it out for control of the Italian countryside.

Rules

I won’t be going into much detail here. With a game like Inferno, the rules aren’t likely to make or break your interest. If you’re reading this review, you’re probably already interested in the game, and just want to know that your interest isn’t misplaced. It isn’t. If this isn’t your first war game rodeo, you’ll be in good shape. If it is, know that the rules are simultaneously a lot and, frankly, not as bad as they first seem. More on…

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One of the many advantages of getting intellectual property for your board game is leveraging the audience to look at your project. For example, developing games based on well-known franchises like Marvel or Game of Thrones allows you to tap into those brands' existing fanbases. Fans of the IP are likely to take an interest in a related game, even if just to check it out briefly via marketing materials or initial coverage.

Which leads to my confusion about today’s game, The Last Kingdom. Based on an obscure Netflix show, it only made a blip on my radar due to some YouTube hype around it, calling it a “hidden gem” or “game of the year.” After checking them out and realizing that this is an area control drafting game where you can switch allegiances, I had to see this one to the end.

The Last Kingdom throws you a position of power of the political kind. You are a figure of importance during a time when the Saxons and Danes are having a series of cultural exchanges on the battlefield. Like any other board game, your power in this world is measured through victory points.

Based on that description, one can easily assume that this is a Risk-style or “dudes on a map” board game, and they would be…

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Here’s my bold opening: I think Carcassone is only OK.

Carcassonne, released more than 20 years ago, is the quintessential tile-laying classic in the eyes of most people I know, and many of the people who write for our site. Carcassonne won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres in 2001, and has been reimplemented more than a dozen times in various formats for gamers of all shapes and sizes.

But each time I play Carcassonne, I shrug my shoulders. Great design, and I can see the depth; it’s just not something I itch to play regularly. Never, at any point in my gaming life, have I been sitting somewhere when a player shouted:

“Hey everyone! I’m so fired up to play Carcassonne! WHO’S WITH ME!!!!”

When Land vs Sea (2021, Good Games Publishing) hit my table, I immediately noticed similarities with this game and Carcassonne. The two are certainly different enough; Land vs Sea has multiple play formats that distance it from Carcassonne, and I like the simple approach in the two-player version of the game. One player is Land, the other is Sea, and each only scores when tiles are laid that complete pictures featuring their faction.

The two-player version of this game, as my colleague Bob Pazehoski, Jr. agrees, is interesting. The three-player version…

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When people talk about cooperative gaming, Castle Panic almost always enters the conversation. When Castle Panic took the stage in 2009, cooperative gaming wasn’t anything new. Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings was arguably the front-runner, having introduced a whole new era of board gamers to the concept 9 years earlier. But, even that wasn’t the first one. Board games which task the players with working together to reach some common goal have been around as early as the first decade of the 1900s.

Regardless, it didn’t take Castle Panic long to solidify itself as a shining example of what cooperative gaming could, and should, be.

As the name implies, Castle Panic is a castle defense game that places the players squarely in the middle of a monstrous invasion. Sheltered within their fortifications in the middle of the board, the players must work together to eliminate the hordes of oncoming monsters before they are able to tear down everything the players have built. With a little bit of hand management, a healthy dose of teamwork, and a whole lot of prayer, they just might succeed.

In this two-part series, we’ll be taking a look at the Castle Panic: Big Box Second Edition (2E). In the first part, I will be discussing the base game, how it plays, and what…

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If you know me, you know I’m a fan of Carcassonne. I talked about the base game at length with Andrew Holmes, and many of the early expansions were the basis for my earliest reviews posted on Boardgamegeek. I recently had a chance to sit down to play and review Mists Over Carcassonne. Heck, I even reviewed My First Carcassonne.

My Carcassonne journey has been a pretty good one, but there’s always been one thing I’ve regretted. Back in 2012, six mini-expansions were released for the game, each containing a single tile for a seventh expansion. Life circumstances, coupled with the FLGS I frequented closing its doors, conspired to prevent me from acquiring them at the time. Before I knew it, the opportunity was gone. The aftermarket prices on Ebay and the GeekMarket were obscene. Those six mini-expansions were seemingly forever out of my reach.

And then Carcassonne Big Box 4 came along later that year and changed all of that. Ever since then, I’ve longed to get my hands on one of the Big Boxes, but the price was always just slightly too high for me to justify the purchase, considering I already had everything else in the box. But eleven years later, my copy of Carcassonne has expanded beyond the limits of…

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During my Gen Con meeting with the team at Czech Games Edition, our friend and marketing contact Nathan walked me through the upcoming game Kutná Hora: The City of Silver.

The cover art was…less than breathtaking. Still, Nathan’s brief dive into the rules and walkthrough of how turns worked had me excited. And I love economic games, particularly gems like Brick & Mortar, Power Grid, and Stockpile where prices can change from round to round.

Kutná Hora has a dynamic market at its core, so that was all I needed to get on board. Across plays at two and three players, only one question now remains:

Should I only play Kutná Hora with the full four-player count?

What’s Mine is Mine is That Part of the Mine

Kutná Hora is a 2-4 player area control, hand management, city building, and market manipulation game that plays in about 30 minutes per player. Set in the 13th and 14th century, players must build the real-life city of Kutná Hora (about 30 miles east of Prague) from scratch, including building up its industry and mining the silver and ore deposits located in and below the city. As leaders of a selection of three of the city’s six guilds,…

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“Wait, you have NOT played Disney Villainous?”

A surprising number of interactions over the last few years at a game night here or an event at a gaming cafe there have ended with this statement, as if I’ve been living in a board game cave for the last five years. (A cave without Disney Villainous, apparently.)

And, I get it…Disney Villainous (2018, Ravensburger) is popular for a reason. The concept is brilliant—players take on the roles of the evil characters from a number of Disney’s classic films, taking actions to complete a unique win condition while other players get the chance to play “Fate” cards from an opponent’s personal Fate deck, messing with their plans. The best part: each villain’s Fate deck is made up of heroes and items from that villain’s movie, such as Robin Hood for the Prince John Fate deck.

The game is considered a classic, and it’s doing well enough in sales to have spawned a boatload of expansions. But the original isn’t perfect—the main issue I always heard from other players is that it’s a game that takes a little too long to play.

Ravensburger has tweaked some of the original format for a new title, Disney Villainous: Introduction to Evil. It’s only available at Target, and like other Target exclusives such as…

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There are now two expansions for the streamlined 4X game, Northgard: Uncharted Lands, Wilderness and Warchiefs. In this review, I’ll be looking at the Wilderness expansion. (Click here for my review of the Warchiefs expansion.)

In Northgard: Uncharted Lands, (shortened to Northgard for this review) players will add tiles to explore the landscape, add warriors to their clan, move into new territories, and battle rival clans to conquer lands and claim resources for their own. If you’re new to Northgard, I suggest reading my review of the original game, as I won’t be going over the base came components or gameplay in this expansion review.

[caption id="attachment_287555" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The long, narrow Wilderness Expansion box[/caption]

The Wilderness expansion adds eight new Creatures and eleven new tiles—tiles that might spawn specific (very nasty) Creatures. If you play Northgard with the Creatures, this may be the expansion for you.

To reiterate one thing I mentioned in my review of the base game, playing without the Creatures turns Northgard into a race to be the first to build three large buildings in enclosed territories. While this type of race game may appeal to some people, for me, it only increases the luck of the draw with players adding…

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What is Kingmaker?

Kingmaker is a game covering the War of the Roses, the dynastic clash for the throne of England between the houses of York and Lancaster from 1455 to 1487. A remake of the 1974 Avalon Hill classic of the same name, this latest version by publisher Gibsons has a double-sided board and two rulebooks, one for playing Classic Kingmaker, and the other for playing Kingmaker II —a streamlined version of the game. Depending on the version, the game can support up to 5 or 6 players. There is even a solo mode. This review is limited to Kingmaker II.

[caption id="attachment_284878" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Setup for a 3-player game[/caption]

Each player controls a varying number of nobles at the start of the game, along with the troops loyal to those nobles. Nobles can be awarded titles, offices within the English royal court, bishoprics, control of towns and cities, mercenaries, and ships. These are used to fight battles, conduct sieges, and gain control of royal family members from the House of York or Lancaster. An immediate Royalty victory is won when one player controls the only royal family member who has been crowned king. Barring that, a faction controlling a king can win a Prestige Victory under certain conditions.

Game…

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The bear in the Toblerone logo. We’ve all seen the bear, right? (Not to mention the letters for its hometown of Berne hidden in the chocolate’s name) Or the arrow in the FedEx logo—I can’t look at a FedEx truck without first seeing the arrow. The Pittsburgh Zoo, a frequent stop over the past forty years (maybe not as much for you as for me?), has employed similar effect in “hiding” a gorilla, lioness, and several dolphins in the white space of its remarkable tree logo. 

As far as artistic vehicles go, logos are a simple way of demonstrating the use of negative space. More than the mere employment of white space, negative space is the portion of a creation that exists by its non-existence. It is found in the paint that was left unbrushed or the stone that was cut away. In the case of branding materials, logos often employ negative space to maximize the impact of a mark that must, by nature, speak a large message from within the smallest of footprints. Hence, when you only have room for a mountain, you tuck a bear inside that mountain. Stealthy. 

Recently I have been exploring a late prototype of Peacemakers: Horrors of War, a revamped   scenario-based cooperative game from Sami Laasko and Snowdale design. Like its predecessor…

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A 3D map made of stackable boxes. That was the selling point for me on Tiny Epic Tactics. When trying to figure out how much can be accomplished with a fixed box of diminutive proportions, who thinks to include a layer of terrain boxes nested inside the game box? Two-sided terrain boxes? Scott Almes, that’s who. The Gamelyn Games team repeatedly seeks out ways to make you say, “Huh, well I’ll be…” upon opening the next Tiny Epic title. Tactics is no different. 

Tiny Epic Tactics (just Tactics hereafter) is a skirmish game with more modes than you can shake a stick at for one to four players. I’ll provide the most detail for the base competitive mode, but I’ll touch on the others as well. 

Basic Training

The nested boxes are arranged atop a stitched cloth map base to form a 3D realm upon which players battle—mostly for blood and area majorities. The terrain then includes high and low ground, water and bridges, forests and peaks, villages and portals. Oh, and one ballista for that extra panache. 

Players take up a team of four characters—Units, in the game’s parlance—to enter the struggle: Wizard, Beast, Rogue, and Fighter, each represented by a meeple and an identifying card. With…

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I like strange games. I’m not ashamed to say so. I’m not always good at the games I love, and I would not likely nominate them for any sort of award. I see something in them that closely aligns with something in me and I vigilantly hold them tight. Not physically—that would be weird; but definitely in a slightly awkward emotional way. 

Here’s the trouble with loving strange games. They are the hardest ones to get to the table. Sometimes the theme is less accessible or the mechanics a bit out of kilter. Maybe the artistic choices are eclectic and distracting. More than likely they are games whose souls require the sort of connection that is willing to overlook minor faults to find joy in the guts of the thing. The truth is, they are not for everyone. The question, then, is whether there is another person or people in my life for whom the game is also right—or whether I must more seriously consider solo gaming.

Illumination from Eagle-Gryphon Games is the second Alf Seegert title I’ve set out to review. The first, The Road to Canterbury, was for two or three players (read: awkward) who become Chaucer’s (read: inaccessible) corrupt Pardoners, tempting pilgrims toward their death (read; morbid) while simultaneously offering pardons for cash (read: twisted).…

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