MLEM is a push-your-luck game with straightforward rules. Every round, each player loads one of their cats onto a rocket ship, starting with the commander for that mission and moving clockwise around the table. The choice of cat matters, since each has a unique power, but we’ll come back to that.

[caption id="attachment_295630" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Full team present and accounted for.[/caption]

Once the rocket is fully manned, the commander gets rolling. The mission starts with six dice, rolled all at once. The results are grouped by value—all the twos together, all the threes, and so on—and the commander decides which groups get used to move the rocket forward. There are a few things to keep in mind here.

The first: the rocket moves the sum of the values of the used dice. If the commander uses two ones and a three, the rocket moves five spaces. The second: used dice are removed from the pool for the rest of the mission, and in order to use any die showing a given value, you have to use all the dice showing that value. The third and final thing: only the values shown on…

The post MLEM: Space Agency Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Council of Shadows is a 2022 release published by alea (intentionally not capitalized), the strategy games imprint of hobby games and puzzle-producing giant Ravensburger. I got a copy a few months ago and cleared my fall convention haul before getting Council of Shadows to the table.

Part of why I waited, though, was tied to the lack of buzz for this game, which I thought was strange given alea’s pedigree. Over the last two decades, alea has published games such as Puerto Rico, The Castles of Burgundy and The Princes of Florence, amongst dozens of other greats. When Council of Shadows hit the US market in early 2023, I didn’t even know about it until our Ravensburger partners brought the game to my attention.

I got in three plays over the course of just two days, and I mostly like what’s here. Council of Shadows is a bit uneven thanks to its approach, and while it is a game I recommend, I have questions about some of the design choices. Council of Shadows also left some players exasperated by the scoring system, which is both a feature and a bug, depending on your point of view.

All-Knowing

Council of Shadows is a little tricky to…

The post Council of Shadows Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I knew it by the end of my single Cycle demo play of Voidfall during SPIEL 2022: Voidfall was going to be great.

The only question I needed to answer, after backing the Galactic Box deluxe edition of the game and playing it 14 times—once for each of the included factions—was whether this was going to be my favorite game of 2023 or not.

I’ve already written 9,840 words about Voidfall, so if you have specific questions about individual parts of my experience, check out the links at the bottom. In this review, I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts on my Voidfall experience.

1. Voidfall is the best design Mindclash has ever produced. Although I enjoy two of their other designs quite a bit, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion and Anachrony, Voidfall feels incredibly well balanced, deeper than their other games, and is tied to a core that still excites me so many plays into the experience.
2. In terms of the marriage of gameplay to production, Voidfall is the hands-down winner in this category for 2023. If this were a metric tracked by BGG, it would get a perfect score. As a value proposition, Voidfall has no peer. You could play it 100 times and still not…

The post Voidfall Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

In Exoworld Survival, designer Juan Pablo Vargas Seguel has players cooperatively building modules to their off-world colony, while trying to survive the harsh conditions of the planet they’re on. Your goal will be to bring all your production levels for Oxygen, Food, Water, and Energy to a self-sustaining level before running out of emergency supplies.

[caption id="attachment_288694" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Exoworld Survival: The Box[/caption]

Setup

You’ll start each game by choosing one of the eight scenarios (nine with the included expansion scenario) to play. Each milieu has different starting conditions for your four production types and your emergency supplies, as well as settings for the Event Deck and the effects of certain Event cards.

[caption id="attachment_288699" align="aligncenter" width="482"] Top: The recommended first scenario, with a difficulty level of 1 of 3. Bottom: An advanced scenario with a difficulty level of 3.[/caption]

Place the Resource Board on the table. Take each of the colored discs and cubes and match them to their respective places on the Resource Board, based on your chosen scenario.

[caption id="attachment_288697" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

The post Exoworld Survival Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall (2022, Arcane Wonders) is a board game based on the video game of the same name. The video game (available on PC and all major consoles) is a 4X-style civilization game; as a part of the Age of Wonders series, Planetfall is the space exploration version of that video game family. I’m told the scale is grand—I have not played the video game—and Planetfall does things that all the great “civ” games do in letting players lead empires into space combat, conduct diplomacy with other species, customize leaders and units, and do a whole bunch of other things that strike me as being epic.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall (the board game) is so incredibly stripped down that it must be applauded for its simplicity. The tabletop version of Planetfall is a 20-to-40-minute card drafting game with Euro-style milestone scoring and small bonuses for each playable faction if they draft certain types of cards.

“The cover looks pretty epic,” my wife joked before our first two-player game. And, the cover DOES look pretty epic—the cover seems to portray a game that looks like it’s going to be Mass Effect for tabletop.

It isn’t that, but I think Planetfall nails what it is trying to achieve. I’m not sure that’s a game you will be…

The post Age of Wonders: Planetfall Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

What is Gaia Project?

Gaia Project is the sequel to the highly successful Terra Mystica. But whereas Terra Mystica had a fantasy theme, Gaia Project takes place in outer space in the far future of the “Terra Mystica universe.” Players try to settle and terraform new worlds, advance their technology, create multi-planet federations, and achieve in- and end-game objectives. The player who accumulates the most Victory Points (VPs) by the end of the sixth-round wins.

[caption id="attachment_284595" align="aligncenter" width="533"] Set up for a 3-player game.[/caption]

Each round of Gaia Project is played in 4 phases. During the Income Phase, players look at their Faction Board, Round Booster tile, tech tiles, and position of their Player Tokens on the Research Board. Wherever they see the palm-up hand symbol they gain those resources. In the Gaia Phase players complete any Gaiaforming operations they may have started the previous turn. The Actions Phase is the heart of the game where players take turns performing one main action. Once a player passes, they turn in their Round Booster tile and take one of the other available tiles. The first player to take the Pass action also takes the first player token. Finally, the Clean-Up Phase resets everything for the next round.

Mechanics and Features

…

The post Gaia Project Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Planet Unknown does what it says on the tin, and it also manages to sidestep some of the pitfalls of the polyomino-puzzle genre. The game also got me thinking about the lie of reasonably predictable play (more on that in a bit).

The premise of PU *snicker* is that you’ve all found a planet suitable for life, and you’re going to explore it and put tiles on it to develop it. You also have a little rover you need to drive around with and pick up doo-dads. Everyone has a planet mat and a player board with a series of tracks on it, both of which can be asymmetric if so desired. I recommend playing with the asymmetry from the jump, as it adds fun wrinkles to the overall experience.

[caption id="attachment_284690" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The beginning of my planet.[/caption]

Draft kings

PU promises simultaneous play, which it delivers. All of the puzzle pieces sit in a lazy susan that the first player rotates around until they have a selection of two tiles they like, and then everyone else picks one of the two tiles that’s in front of their triangular player marker. Players place their tiles, and then the first player cycles, so everyone gets a crack at a piece they…

The post Planet Unknown Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

On the last day of my visit to Essen last year, I had the chance to play a full game of Space Expatriate, an upcoming title from Taras Tomyshch and Ihor Chulinda and the al-Khwarizmi Games label. Taras was kind enough to teach me the game—the beauty of going to SPIEL is that the designers are usually in attendance to show off their creations—and I had a broad sense of what was happening while getting smoked in that first play.

I had a tough time getting Space Expatriate back to the table, in part because I prioritize games that are finalized and/or set with market dates when a game will hit retail. Fast forward to the spring, when Taras posted a Publisher Diary on BGG detailing his experience last fall; it was a reminder that I needed to revisit the game to see how my opinions changed outside of the SPIEL environment.

News on the game has been light. However, I take the privilege of covering review copies seriously and Space Expatriate was one of the last review copies on my shelf. I put the game through its paces with two different groups to see how it lands with gamers in my circles. The question I asked after every play—would you play it again?

The answers told…

The post Space Expatriate Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Expanding Your Horizons

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (henceforth simply referred to as Eclipse) retools the original space-faring 4X game. For many people in the hobby, the words “space” and “4X” are synonymous with Twilight Imperium, the de facto king of the genre. Rather than aiming for a full day or weekend of politicking and gaming, Eclipse condenses the interstellar 4X experience down to a few hours of tight, fraught conquest.

Each game of Eclipse is fairly simple in structure. Up to six players take control of one of seven different civilizations. These include six distinct civilizations with specific strengths and weaknesses, or the “default” Terran civilization on the back of each species’ board. Each turn, you take one of six actions or pass. Play continues the turn around the table until all players have passed, at which point, the next round begins. At the end of eight rounds, the civilization with the most victory points is declared the winner.

The six actions represent the core paths your civilizations can take to score points. 

Exploring allows you to reveal new tiles in the galaxy and place them in strategic ways to either connect to the larger galaxy or seal yourself off and turtle away, and offers the…

The post Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I’ve been on a roll lately, writing about new editions and implementations of games. Galactic Renaissance is very much in the same mold. While it is not a reimplementation of Inis (a titanic achievement in game design), it seems to be part of a “political trilogy” or expansion of the concepts laid down in that game.

Because of this little bit of information, I’m torn about which critical frame to adopt.

Evaluated as a design by itself, compared to the similar field of games about using patterns to score points, I’d say it’s a perfectly serviceable contract-fulfillment eurogame.

Evaluated against its sibling and predecessor, Galactic Renaissance very calculatedly accepts all of the wrong critiques and complaints about its precursor design, resulting in something that is essentially an intellectualized game of whack-a-mole.

I’ll start by evaluating Galactic Renaissance on its own merits.

The game is a deckbuilder of sorts, more in the Concordia or Faiyum slowly-add-cards-deck-management school than the Dominion buy-cards-from-a-big-market school.

[caption id="attachment_271384" align="alignnone" width="768"] Welcome to the universe.[/caption]

Each player starts with a deck of the same cards, plus one additional “specialist” card, which is usually a variant of the starting “core team” with additional features. On their…

The post Galactic Renaissance Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

“KHANNNNNNNNNN!!!!”

It’s one of my favorite moments from my favorite Star Trek film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; Kirk (William Shatner) is baring his teeth and yelling from the bridge of the Enterprise at his longtime nemesis, Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban, shamefully not nominated for an Oscar for his work here).

Growing up, I was a Star Trek junkie. Not a Trekkie, but certainly a junkie.

You know who else is a Star Trek junkie? Peter B. Hoffgaard, the designer of the new Czech Games Edition title Starship Captains. From the cover art, to the very Enterprise-looking player boards, to easter eggs like a mission called “Roddenberries”, everything about Starship Captains screams “play this if you love Star Trek.” As a junkie, I was thrilled to give this one a spin.

The Bridge

Starship Captains puts players in control of Enterprise-like starships working together in the faction known as the Cooperative (in part because I’m guessing “Federation” was taken!). Recently promoted to the rank of Captain, each player has command of a small crew of specialists from across the universe.

These specialists are your workers, and you will place them in different departments of your ship and your tech board to take actions. (I won’t…

The post Starship Captains Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Many of my reviews here at Meeple Mountain mention the fact that tabletop productions seem to always get one thing wrong: the included currency components.

Sometimes it’s paper money. (That can work, but it’s rare.) Often, cardboard money is included, but the cardboard is too flimsy, or maybe the chits are not large enough, or maybe there isn’t enough of the right denomination.

On occasion, you get a game that does cardboard currency right. Almost all of Vital Lacerda’s games knock this out of the park (with the notable exception of the Réis included with Lisboa), with double-thick cardboard money tokens that have a nice heft to them. Even a game like Tenpenny Parks from Thunderworks Games comes to mind; I have no idea why the money bits in that game are so large and so good, but they are, and they make you feel like a boss whenever you spend money.

Galileo Project (2022, Sorry We Are French) was one of the games I picked up at SPIEL ‘22. The colorful cover art drew me in, and when I was given the box, I was surprised how heavy it was.

Then, I opened it. Inside, a box of “Megacredits” were sitting inside the handsome insert. Opening that small box of Megacredits…

The post Galileo Project Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The post Exploration Game Video Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.