Button Shy games have a certain set of characteristics: they are eminently portable (18 cards in a plastic wallet sized sleeve), they’re easy to teach (the rules live on a piece of paper smaller than a paperback book page), they have a surprising depth of gameplay. Super Slopes, one of the newest games from the micro-game titan certainly fits those criteria: a ski run packed with yetis, energy drinks, forest hazards, and as many points as you can grab on the way down the mountain. Let’s find out more about Super Slopes.

Super Slopes Overview

In Super Slopes you’ll build your own unique ski run by drawing cards from a shared face up display. After selecting your card you’ll place it onto your map in “bricklaying fashion”, either side of an existing card, or top and bottom offset. After each player has drawn a number of cards—dictated by player count—the game ends and scoring takes place.

Selecting a card

When cards are initially placed into the main display, they’re arranged in descending order (based on the number in the top left corner). You may only select a card whose “leg” connects to the ski run which begins at the topmost card. There are 3 exceptions to this rule, based…

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Although the NBA is my main port of call when it comes to sports passion, I used to be a bigger fan of baseball.

I grew up in Rochester, New York, watching the Rochester Red Wings (a AAA affiliate that fed the Baltimore Orioles at the time) at a podunk field a half-hour from my house. It was great. Cheap tickets and cheaper food, with every seat in the house providing a fantastic view of the field. The best thing about the Red Wings? They played against all of the other teams that were the final farm system stop for the teams I really cared about, like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. It was cool to get a preview of the players who would eventually end up on the biggest stage.

I played baseball from T-ball leagues all the way through high school. Like most prospects, my dreams were make-or-break based on the breaking ball. I was a home run-hitting outfielder and first baseman, and I had the chance to start on my high school team through sophomore year.

Then, during my junior year, it seemed like everyone was throwing curveballs. And, so began the end of those aforementioned dreams. (I’ll always have softball, though. Even though it feels too easy, I love hitting home…

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My favorite sport by a country mile is professional basketball, specifically the National Basketball Association (NBA). And as much as I love the NBA, the NBA playoffs are magic. (And speaking of magic, Magic Johnson was my favorite player growing up and the “Showtime” Lakers of the 1980s are still my favorite stretch of NBA history.)

Another year of great playoff action has recently wrapped up. During the playoffs this year, I worked through a review copy of the game Basketboss (2022, BoardGameTables, the publisher that is now known as AllPlay).

Basketboss is an auction game with minor, draftable player powers that plays in about 45 minutes with 2-5 players. It’s also a hoot for an NBA junkie like me, even someone who also dabbles in the WNBA and follows women’s college hoops.

That’s because all of the available players for each “manager” (you, the gamer) are shadily-named current and former hoopers like Shane Berlin (say it fast and it sounds a lot like some guy named Wilt Chamberlain), Ellis Odman (quite possibly Dennis Rodman), Suzanne Flight (bears a striking resemblance to Sue Bird) and Yanis Anotheroopoh (you may have heard of a gentleman named Giannis Antetokounpo).

In this regard, Basketboss nails the street cred elements of the theme. Is the game any good?

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For most people skateboarding may seem like a relatively recent fad that only evolved in the 1980s, but it’s actually been around for more than 75 years. The first skateboards of the 1940s and 1950s were homemade inventions, a fusion of roller skates and salvaged wood meant to emulate the feel of surfing with none of the waves. Treated as a niche curiosity for a few decades, skateboards were mostly used for simple stunts. That is, until the infamous Zephyr team and their unorthodox style revolutionized skating forever.

The Zephyr team, known colloquially as the Z-Boys (with apologies to Peggy Oki), was a group of 12 skaters from California who brought a streetwise, surfing-heavy skillset to the sport of skateboarding. They carved along banks the same way that surfers carve along waves. They practiced in empty swimming pools–usually when the unwitting pool owners weren’t home. They showed how to slide the board along railings and copings, launched themselves into the air with unusual aerial moves, and invented outlandish tricks that emphasized personal style in addition to technical ability.

In the following decades, skateboarding became increasingly mainstream while still keeping its countercultural edge. Punk and hip-hop made perfect partners for skateboarding’s energetic audience, and the low requirements for participation helped it spread across the world. Famed Z-Boy Stacy Peralta mentored…

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Tennis is a fun game with a rich, centuries-old tradition. Conceptually simple, easy to learn, and hard to master, tennis has already been transported to the tabletop in the form of Ping Pong. But can the “sport of kings” serve up big fun as a card game?

Overview

Game! Set! Match! is a lightweight, 2-4 player card game for ages 13+ with a playing time of 30-45 minutes. Players will choose between identical red or blue decks and play both their cards and tokens (in the shape of tennis balls) to gain momentum throughout each mini game. The player who takes 6 mini games first is declared the overall winner.

How To Play

Game! Set! Match! is delightfully simple to setup and play. Like most centuries-old sports, tennis has unintuitive scoring terms, with points scoring “Love,” 15, 30, 40, and sometimes “Deuce.” (There are multiple theories on how these terms originated.) Fear not, because Game! Set! Match! has tracks that smoothly manage scoring regardless of your tennis background.

The board features a central Momentum track shaped like a tennis stadium with numbered spaces 0-19. During each mini game, two colored tokens (1 red & 1 blue) start at “0” and race…

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I was born and raised in Connecticut, only son to the youngest daughter of a man who made a modest fortune working as an executive for a local utility company. My grandfather, my mother, and I had season tickets for the Candlewood Playhouse, a regional theater that played host to touring productions of no insignificant quality. I briefly attended Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in Massachusetts. I own, or rather I have owned over the course of my life, many polo shirts.

What I mean to say, dear reader, is that I have played golf.

Is it my first choice of activity? No. I’d rather be watching a movie, reading a book, riding my bike, or playing a board game. My parents enjoy it, though, and it’s nice to spend a few distraction-free hours with them. In some ways, I think golf serves for them the same purpose that board games do for me: it’s an activity that gets everyone off their phones and into the present moment. While it can be difficult to get my parents to sit down for a game together, Seabrook Studios and designer Ryan Boucher have attempted to bridge our very specific gap by releasing a second edition of 18 Holes, a hand-management golf game.

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Years ago, SEGA put out a soccer management video game called Football Manager. The game was similar to the Franchise mode in the Madden franchise of video games, where players could focus more on how a team plays each game than the playing of the sport itself. I recently downloaded the 2022 Xbox version of Football Manager and the amount of things to think about was dizzying, maybe even too intense for what I was looking for in a video game experience.

Months ago, I read up on a board game version of these video games that was coming to tabletop. In time for the World Cup, Eleven: Football Manager Board Game (2022, Portal Games) has arrived. Eleven is the most thematic game to hit my table in months, and has some of the things I loved most about The Networks (2016, Formal Ferret Games) without the tongue-in-cheek approach.

Eleven is a game about soccer (or football, if you’re living anywhere outside of the US). It’s about the economics of managing a soccer club, putting the right players on the field, board room decisions and even getting sponsors for your team. There are a lot of fiddly bits to the process here, but this is the closest I have ever seen to a game about the business of…

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The skiing season has started and the Skull Canyon Ski Resort has re-opened. Join skiers and snowboarders from all over the world in being the first to travel ski runs with names like Black Magic, Fortress, Gold Spike, Whiskey Jack, and Sunshine Express. Over the course of 3 days you’ll collect Slope cards and use them to ski these runs and earn points, fame, and XXX, all while avoiding the yeti who lies in wait. After the day is over, head to the lodge for evening activities where you’ll earn valuable upgrades and find out what the next day has in store.

Skull Canyon Ski Fest Game Overview

In Skull Canyon Ski Fest, 2-4 players compete to have the most points at the end of 3 days. You’ll move your player piece around the board: upwards by traveling on the red ski lift routes, and downwards by way of the color coded “run” routes (green, blue, black; each with increasing difficulty). The higher the difficulty, the harder it is to complete, but the more points and fame you’ll receive.

Phase 1: Skiing

On your turn, you can perform one of three actions

• Take slope cards - Take…

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Note: Meeple Mountain contributor Art Franz co-designed this game. However, all views expressed are my own.

Tabletop versions of real-world sports are a difficult prospect. There’s a balance to be struck between outright simulation full of crunchy details aimed for hardcore fans and more abstract representation focused on capturing the feel of the sport rather than the specifics.

American football presents a particularly thorny case. Football is ubiquitous in this country, permeating so much of American life that it’s the de facto national sport. (Sorry, baseball, but you’re extremely boring.) While fans of every level can appreciate the sport’s hard-hitting athleticism and unexpected swings of fate, it’s the strategic depth underlying every aspect of play that makes it such a phenomenon. Translating that gridiron greatness to the tabletop is incredibly challenging. The ideal tabletop football game needs to simultaneously be accessible and complex, tactical and strategic, visceral and cerebral all at the same time. Because that’s generally impossible, most games pick a side and stick with it.

Breakaway Football leans very heavily towards the simulation side of things. This is not designed for casual gamers, nor is it designed for casual football fans. If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between a punt and a kickoff, turn back now. It’s about to get heavy.

Xs and…

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Publisher Pandasaurus Games continue their hot streak of visually striking family titles with Bruno Cathala and Corentin Lebrat’s Trek 12: Himalaya, a roll & write themed around mountaineering. I have grown inordinately fond of Pandasaurus in a relatively short period of time. I’m not the only one, as evidenced by Meeple Mountain’s reviews of Wild Space, That Time You Killed Me, and The Loop. The care they put into every title is evident, and they have a knack for publishing designs that are satisfying, engaging, and approachable.

Trek 12 follows the roll & write formula to a T. Players take turns rolling two dice. The result of each roll is used simultaneously by everyone to add a number to the mountain on their individual player sheets. The first number goes anywhere you want, which is thematically suspect, but let’s assume you’re a wealthy mountaineer with access to a helicopter. All subsequent numbers have to be adjacent to previously filled in circles, with the goal of creating Fixed Lines (adjacent sequential numbers) and Mapped Zones (contiguous areas of the same number). You’ll want to be careful about where you place your numbers, because there’s a penalty for…

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My boy burst into tears.

“MAMA!!!” he screamed at my wife, in full view of my daughter and I. “NO ONE WILL PLAY HERO HOCKEY WITH ME!”

One hour after setting up the new family dexterity game Hero Hockey by Asmodee, everyone in my household had played the game at least twice with my now-despondent, teary-eyed 5-year-old son. And he was annnnngry!

“Listen, son,” began my wife, negotiating with sadness in a way neither my daughter nor I was willing to do. “Let’s play again tomorrow. Mama’s tired!”

I’ll give Hero Hockey this much: my son absolutely loves it. If you point at the box and ask what Hero Hockey is, his eyes light up like your neighbor’s house holiday light show and he will excitedly help unpack the box to play.

And that’s important to note here; even though no one else in my family enjoyed it as much as he did, Hero Hockey is a keeper mainly to ensure that my son doesn’t lose his mind when he finds out we donated our review copy to Goodwill.

Seriously, Here Are All of the Rules

In Hero Hockey, players will choose one of the two unnamed hero avatars in the game…

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And make sure to check out Brody's solo play through of Long Shot: The Dice Game.

And our our unboxing

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Mouthful of a title aside, WWE’s partnership with WizKids brings on a “take that” implementation of a schoolyard classic game. 

Once a year, in WWE, there’s a match called the “Money in the Bank” match. In this match, a briefcase is suspended high above the ring, and a whole cavalcade of competitors fight to make it up a ladder to claim the briefcase and earn a title match of their choice. The match is known for its star-making moments and heartbreaking defeats, which is why it makes a perfect thematic choice for WWE: Headlock, Paper, Scissors.

Climbing the Ladder

The play area for WWE: Headlock, Paper, Scissors is set up to mirror an actual ladder match. The board has areas representing the outside of the ring, the inside of the ring, and the infamous ladder that must be scaled. Each player picks a wrestler to play from a roster of 12 modern-day stars, with each star possessing their own unique “finisher” ability. On each turn, players will count down as they would in a game of Rock, Paper Scissors. (If it floats your boat, the rulebook suggests chanting out loud, “Money! In the! Bank!”) At the same time, all players will throw one of five hand symbols to indicate a technique they wish to use. For example, “Showboat” adds…

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