"If you're going to make a sequel, do it right and make the same damn movie all over again."
-- Joe Bob Briggs, King of the Drive-In Movie

In 2019, Prospero Hall released Horrified, a cooperative game (co-op) that made Meeple Mountain’s Most Anticipated Games of GenCon 2019 list and won two of our Diamond Climber Awards of 2019 (Best Coop Game and Best Thematic Game). In her review, my former Meeple Mountain colleague, Ashley Gariepy, (Hi Smash!) said Horrified was “an incredible cooperative game that is easy to learn and teach and can be enjoyed by gamers and non-gamers alike.”

Let’s see how 2021’s Horrified: American Monsters stacks up against its predecessor, shall we?.

[caption id="attachment_295159" align="aligncenter" width="558"] Horrified: American Monsters[/caption]

How to Play

When I re-read Ashley’s review of Horrified for this review, I realized her descriptions of the setup, gameplay, and challenges were interchangeable with Horrified: American Monsters. If you’re unfamiliar with how Horrified games play, check out Ashley’s very well-written review of the original game and come back to find out more about the American Monsters edition.

The American Monsters

As you may already know (or have just learned from Ashley’s review), the original Horrified featured monsters who appeared…

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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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If you have a chance to review any of my previous content, you’ll see a lot of glowing words attached to the reviews of games designed or co-designed by Simone Luciani.

To me, Luciani is gaming royalty. Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar are some of the best games I have ever played. Luciani’s “T” game release with Daniele Tascini, Tiletum, was my pick for the best game of 2022.

With all of that in mind, there was never a doubt that I would play Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods (2023, Cranio Creations), a co-design with Danilo Sabia. Sabia and Luciani also designed Rats of Wistar, which will soon make its way to gamers in the US.

I’m not going to lie to you: Anunnaki didn’t hit it out of the park, to use a baseball reference. It’s not that the game is bad—in fact, it is occasionally interesting, particularly with its action selection mechanism—but it is very likely that my standards for Luciani games have gotten too high. Grand Austria Hotel is the best Euro-style game I have ever played; as a film buff, when you love a film director and that director puts out middling fare, you…

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Board game remakes are having a moment right now. It seems like every publisher is raiding the tombs of titles that have been gathering dust for over a decade and giving them a fresh new look. The 1990s in particular saw a boom in board game releases, with publishers like Avalon Hill putting out many popular games. One such title was Robo Rally, a robot-themed racing game. After lying dormant for years, Renegade Games has resurrected Robo Rally using the services of lawyers and necromancers. They plan to revive several other classic Avalon Hill games in similar fashion, refreshing these titles for a new generation of players.

Robo Rally is a board game that has flown under the radar for many years, but its premise is easily grasped. You and your friends are all robots in a factory. When the workday ends and the humans go home, these robots come alive and decide to have some fun by racing each other around the factory floor after hours by going to checkpoints in a specific order. With lasers, conveyor belts, rotating gears, and bottomless pits littering the makeshift race courses, you can see where the chaos can ensue, assuming OSHA doesn’t get involved.

All of this sounds pretty good until you realize you are all robots. Robots lack human judgment…

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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…

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Twisted Metal.

The long-time PlayStation video game car combat series is maybe my favorite all-time PS experience. Although I have enjoyed playing through all of the games—Twisted Metal 2 took up so much of my time that I should have gone blind staring at the screen for so long—Twisted Metal: Black is the undisputed best of those games.

But all of the Twisted Metal titles feature the same things: taking on the “character” of a driver whose car is used to murder every other combatant off the map, using weapons that were picked up in the field of play as well as special abilities that could be triggered a few times in each match. The lore was insane with Twisted Metal; save for one or two characters in each game that were ostensibly “good” (former cops, a priest, etc.), everything about the games really was twisted, right down to the game series’ signature character, Sweet Tooth, a demonic-looking clown that drove an ice cream truck that happened to have a missile launcher.

Sweet, indeed.

Thunder Road: Vendetta (2023, Restoration Games) is a take on the 1980s board game Thunder Road, which may have been one of the inspirations for the original Twisted Metal video games. (Because video game adaptations are hot, yes, there is a Twisted Metal TV…

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“I am Adam, Prince of Eternia, Defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull…and this is Cringer.” 

I can’t tell you how many Saturday mornings (and, eventually, syndicated afternoons) began with that line. I also can’t tell you how many dollars my parents must have spent outfitting my childhood with everything the He-Man marketing machine could churn out. Ah, there’s nothing like the smell of cartoons developed specifically as 22-minute advertisements—two glorious 65-episode seasons that, despite the lackluster animation, somehow survived years of airtime.

How fitting, then, to have Adam, Prince of Eternia, introduce Masters of the Universe: Clash for Eternia with nearly the same sentence. The nostalgia kick that began before I tore the shrink only continued as I took my first peek into the rulebook.

Masters of the Universe (MotU from here on out) is a tactical one-versus-all skirmish game from Michael Shinall, Leo Almeida, and the publishing team at CMON. Players take up their favorite heroes and baddies from the beloved 80s cartoon universe to engage a series of standalone Scenarios.

Regardless of my affinity for the deep dive into trademarked waters, it is the Power System—the mechanisms that form the backbone of the game experience—that really shines with MotU. Mark my words, this is not the last you’ll hear of the Power System. I can all…

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