The best thing about working with the team here at Meeple Mountain: respectful disagreement is quite healthy.

My colleague Andrew Lynch wrote a very balanced review of Bitoku (2021, Devir) a couple years ago, and there are a few elements of his commentary that I agree with. It’s a bear to teach—so much so that I insisted players watch the Game in a Nutshell teach video, which is about 38 minutes long and led by a professional—and the setup is “not nothing”, in the words of the folks at So Very Wrong About Games.

One thing we disagree on: play surfaces. The idea of playing a three-hour board game on my floor is out of the question, not because of the playing, but because of the standing up. I can’t imagine trying to stand up from the floor after sitting cross-legged on the floor for that long!

If you have a dedicated group of Bitoku fans who you can count on to regularly play the game, the turn elements here have the kinds of tension and decision-making I love in heavier Euros. That will also lead to less downtime in a game that can really spike AP (“analysis paralysis”) in the wrong hands. As someone who plays games like Voidfall a dozen times or…

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As a fan of the game Tokaido—a game where one of the things you are trying to do is to create these beautiful panoramas—when it was suggested that I check out the game Four Gardens, where panoramas are the focus, I jumped at the chance! Of course, when an aspect of a game shifts to become the entirety of a game, the mechanics will become a bit more involved. This is as it should be. What is needed, however, is for the process to result in a proper payoff. Does Four Gardens deliver?

Setup

The central feature of Four Gardens is a four-level pagoda that needs to be assembled before you can play. This only takes a few minutes. The instructions are clear, and when you are done (despite the size of this thing), the pagoda stores easily within the box thanks to a fairly well designed insert.

When playing, the pagoda is a presence! It dominates the table in the early game, and there is rarely a moment when the players are not looking this thing over, because the central mechanism of this game is dependent upon this feature. The pagoda is not something that is there just to be there and look pretty (like, for instance, the Evertree in Everdell). The pagoda is a pretty…

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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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I love tableau building games.

Certainly, I love the classics, particularly Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, and Terraforming Mars. Ark Nova is nearly at the top of BGG’s game rankings for the same reason. Any time I can play a game where I can collect a bunch of cards to then play them to the table and trigger a bunch of powers, one-time effects, and end-game scoring bonuses based on set collection, I’m going to play it to see if I like it.

Ancient Knowledge (2023, IELLO) does a lot of things well. This new tableau builder, designed by Rémi Mathieu, keeps things so simple that the game can be taught using only its double-sided, poker card-sized player aid. But with nearly 200 different cards that can be built, Ancient Knowledge has a great variety in its cardplay and its system provides a few ways to win for creative players.

Across three plays (two at three players, one at two players), Ancient Knowledge has proved to be very entertaining. I just wish I didn’t have to house-rule the ending condition.

Goblets Are Gold

Ancient Knowledge is a hand management, card drafting tableau builder for 2-4 players. The game comes with individual and team competitive…

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The clue giver draws five cards from the deck and plays one out on the table. The card is placed either vertically, to indicate that this card and the target card share something in common, or horizontally, to indicate that they are unalike in some way. After the first clue, the rest of the players agree on a single card to remove. After the second clue, they must remove two. After the third, three, and after the fourth, well, you probably get it. The fifth and final clue has to steer the players between one of the two remaining cards. If the last card remaining is the target card, everyone wins!

I’ll note here that while the clue giver does draw a new card to replace each clue, we discovered a fun—and profusely sweaty—variant in which the clue giver is limited to the five cards they drew at the beginning of the game. They have to figure out the best…

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As a red-blooded Canadian masculine man, one would easily assume that the only games I would be interested in reviewing are games about violence like war, hockey, and Tim Hortons takeout. But I'm a simpler man than that. Sometimes good artwork and a few key phrases like "deckbuilder" and "area control" will hook my curiosity like a fish on a line. Admittedly, while this particular game involves tile placement, a genre I don't typically favor, I've come to recognize that in any healthy relationship, there's room for compromise.

Faeries & Magical Creatures presents a straightforward game with a clear storyline. You and your companions are hanging out in a family summer home when you catch a glimpse of a faerie. After this brief magical encounter, you decide to commit the rest of your summer to getting to know these whimsical creatures. Your goal is to build trust with the faeries, call them out when you spot them, and create a garden oasis to attract them.

That sounds like a lot of tasks, but fortunately, this game has an easy ruleset. On your turn, you pick one of five actions. You perform that action, as does everyone else, with the exception that you have the added benefit of playing a card from your hand either before or after your action…

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I ran into another reviewer at SPIEL 2023, and he discussed his meeting with Portal Games about their 2023-2024 lineup.

“I played Imperial Miners during the meeting. Between the teach and playing a full game, it was all done in about 22 minutes.”

Not believing that this was possible—an Imperial Settlers-adjacent game in 20 minutes!!—I made my way to the Portal team to talk shop. Then we dove into the game. We stopped two rounds short of the normal end condition because I botched one of the rules…and that was around the 18-minute mark of our meeting.

Successive plays of Imperial Miners back home yielded similar timing. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get a game to last longer than 30 minutes. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m obsessed with time. I’m a parent who gets limited chances to play a lot of games. As much fun as the act of playing games is, I want maximum fun per minute. One of my favorite gaming highlights from 2021 occurred when I got a group together to play six games in seven hours. All the games were full of rich choices and abundant laughter.

Imperial Miners is fun. It’s not legendary, but it manages both its aspirations and my expectations exceptionally well for a quick tableau builder.

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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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I was drawn to Sirens by, well, I suppose the joke writes itself. The joke also happens to be true in this case. I truly was drawn in by the sirens’ song, the boldly featured bars of notated music at the top of each card in this game. It isn’t every day that a board game can double as an opportunity to practice my sight singing.

From there, I began to take in the gorgeous artwork by Gabi Naftaly, who does remarkable work here. Each card includes a unique painting of ocean waves in burnt umber, an unusual and evocative color choice. These waves bring to mind clay and wine and blood. That’s how you do it.

The premise of Sirens is equally splendid. You and your opponent compete to sing the best song. Inevitably, the quality of your song is measured in points, but I like to think of each point scored as another sailor’s life lost. Sing, my angels of music.

Come Sail Away

Each player starts with a hand of four cards, secretly choosing one to keep. You swap hands, choose a second card…

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I have already written about Spirit Island, designer R. Eric Reuss’s masterful cooperative game. It’s one of my favorites, a densely layered puzzle that rewards repetition. Since publication in 2017, the game has received one substantial expansion, Branch and Claw, and one absolutely gargantuan expansion, Jagged Earth.

Between those three boxes, you have enough gaming content to last you a lifetime. I own all of it, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Nonetheless, ours is not a species known for being content, and so I was filled with glee when publisher Greater Than Games announced last fall that they would be releasing Horizons of Spirit Island. More content good.

More intriguing still: it was announced as a Target exclusive. If ever you’ve needed a sign that board games have broken into the mainstream, this is it.

Smaller, Cheaper, Easier

I will keep this rules summary pretty pared down. If you are new to Spirit Island and you find yourself looking for a more detailed comprehensive summary, you should take a look at my previous review. 

Spirit Island is a cooperative game in which players work together to dispel invading colonists by destroying their settlements and filling them with fear. You spread presence around the island while playing…

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I have a sneaking suspicion that 2020’s Nidavellir is a cash cow for publisher GRRRE Games.

That suspicion has been validated by the fact that many of the people in my gaming groups absolutely adore Nidavellir. Whether you like the game or not, let’s give Nidavellir this much: this might be one of the fastest set collection games ever made. Games clock in at around 30 minutes at the max player count of five, and even less time if you are playing on Board Game Arena (I played a three-player game there recently in just 17 minutes).

Nidavellir is so easy to teach; it’s a family-weight bidding game that has some of the best dwarf artwork ever. (If, you know, dwarf art is your thing.) While I was chatting with the marketing team at GRRRE at SPIEL ‘22, I had the chance to pick up the newest expansion, Nidavellir: Idavoll. Like all good expansions, Idavoll is easy to integrate into the base game and gives veterans a little more to think about as they build up their army.

Whip Out the Manual!

If you have never played the base game, feel free to freshen up on the rules of Nidavellir by watching the recent video review…

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Oriwhatsitnow?

A slight fidget in the chair. Shifty eyes. Feigned calm. Unnaturally cool conversation. These are the telltale signs of a player on the verge of ending the game. 

Every game has a trigger of some sort—an action that declares: this will be your final turn, or perhaps, that was your final turn. A lesser percentage of games forgo the warning signal in favor of simply springing the immediate end. No final turns. Only a sudden winner and an indeterminate number of non-winners.

There is nothing strange about this notion of a race. Classic games often progress with a clear tension and end with a knockout blow. The modern shift toward victory points and the grand reveal has made the soft ending far more common. Every now and then, though, a game goes back to the jaw-busting uppercut conclusion—and with it the elevated heartbeat and excitement of knowing the end is nigh.

The intrigue of the sudden ending is amplified by a bit of secret knowledge. In Catan, as the modern classic example, you’re in the dark regarding the Development cards in hand, so you’re never quite comfortable that the settler in the next chair isn’t wheeling and dealing to steal away the longest road and, subsequently, the game (along with your hopes and dreams). 

Orichalcum, a 4Xish…

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Since Dominion graced us with its presence over ten years ago, every board game company wants an expandable deckbuilder to cash in on this profitable genre. If we stacked all the deckbuilders and expansions to make a tower, it would be one of the tallest structures in the world, although it would still look small compared to a stack of unsold copies of Seafall.

Kamigami Battles: Rise of the Old Ones is another deckbuilder box to add to that tower. It’s about Gods who, for whatever reason, don’t like each other and now want to smack their rivals out of existence. There is no smiting here as they do the battles through card games. In other words, a sexy Yugioh.

Sexy is the right word here, considering this series’ history and lewd art direction. Kamigami Battles: Rise of the Old Ones, now referred to as Kamigami Battles, is the third game in a series.

A dirty history

Originally released in 2012 under the name Kanzume Goddess, the game was notorious for its awkward tin can packaging and, umm…pinup artwork? That’s the best way to describe it.

In 2018, Japanime Games re-released the game in a new package called Kamigami Battles: Battle of the Nine Realms. Despite barely getting media attention and being the subject of ridicule on social media…

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