We’ve talked about Cascadia many times before, from our review of of the Cascadia base game, to our review of the Cascadia: Landmarks expansion, our inclusion of Cascadia in a list of games you can easily play with kids and a humorous list of games which include bears. But I don’t think any of us expected Cascadia to get “the dice game” treatment.

That’s right; this newest member of the family (technically two newest members) is a reimagining of Cascadia as a roll and write game. But let me reassure you that Cascadia: Rolling Hills, and Cascadia: Rolling Rivers aren’t just some money grab. While they do share the same DNA, they’re totally new games.

Let’s dive in and find out what makes these two new entries tick. Note that while my main focus in this review is on Cascadia: Rolling Hills, I do talk about both games.

Cascadia: Rolling Overview

As the name implies, these are dice games built atop the Cascadia framework: the animals and habitats we’ve come to know and love, as well as the hex based layout of the countryside. Over the course of 20 rounds you’ll roll dice to gain various animal and nature token symbols. These symbols allow you…

The post Cascadia: Rolling Hills Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The post Royal Punks Game Video Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Land vs Sea Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

When I picked up a copy of Evacuation (2023, Delicious Games) at SPIEL 2023, I had to admit—the thing didn’t look that special.

However, I am a sucker for anything with a big spaceship on the cover, so it had that going for it…and, designer Vladimír Suchý has made a couple games that I’m fond of, including Underwater Cities and the very good Pulsar 2849. Since Suchý crushed it with Pulsar 2849, I figured, hey, the guy seems to like complex space games, right?

On the strength of the review from our friends at ThinkerThemer, I got my copy of Evacuation to the table in recent weeks. Much like the tagline for the old game Mastermind—”Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master”—Evacuation is a straightforward teach, a game that could be taught in about 20 minutes.

But the consequences of the actions across the game’s tight playtime? This is the heaviest Suchý design I’ve played. (BGG seems to agree.)

The World is On Fire (Again)

Evacuation’s approach is straightforward. Our planet is in ruins thanks to rising temperatures, so we’ve got to get everyone off this rock and onto a more habitable planet, stat. (The rulebook’s version of events is much better than that,…

The post Evacuation Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Pocket Farm doesn’t have much in the way of reviews on Board Game Geek. 32 ratings and three comments as of this writing.

The first comment is unintelligible to all but the individual who wrote it.

The second is in Korean, and reads, “Cute. Headache. Short Playtime.” Accurate and succinct, the perfect review.

The third says, simply, “For children.” I get where BGG user G0nzo is coming from. Pocket Farm has a veneer of the adorable. Publisher Mandoo Games and artist DODAM have conspired to create the sort of product that wouldn’t look out of place in a preschool. You see this box and think, “What a cute little game. I could probably play this with my niece, who is 6.” The box says 10+, but you know that can’t be right.

Don’t be fooled by appearances. Pocket Farm is a real brain-burner. The rind may look sweet, but the fruit is tart.

[caption id="attachment_293047" align="alignnone" width="1024"] This man is in pain.[/caption]

Baskets of Berries

Pocket Farm is a card drafting game married to a spatial puzzle. Each round, the starting player reveals a number of cards from the top of the deck equal to the number of players plus one. In a three-player game,…

The post Pocket Farm Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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.

The post Imperial Miners Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Carcassonne Big Box 7 Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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,…

The post Kutná Hora: The City of Silver Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Usually it’s on-brand to chat about my personal relationship with a game. I don’t review them because of their mere existence. There has to be some hook to get my interest, and this hook could be something simple like the genre or an intellectual property that entraps me in nostalgia. I also enjoy formatting my reviews with a top-down approach to get you, the reader, comfortable before diving into details.

But what can I truly say about this game that hasn’t been stated before? Hailing from the 1960s, an era preceding the digital reign of Atari, the imaginative realms of Dungeons and Dragons, and even my own inception by several decades, Acquire stands as a testament to the timeless essence of board gaming. It has served as a wellspring of inspiration for iconic designers like Reiner Knizia and Wolfgang Kramer, sparking the development of renowned games like Big Boss and Tigris & Euphrates.

Even in the nascent days of the internet, the corridors of Usenet echoed with passionate debates on Acquire's intricate strategies and the perpetual question of its game balance. With a game equipped with a rich heritage, am I even allowed to criticize it? Is Acquire the Giovanni’s Room of Board Games?

Decisions, Deals, Dominance

I’ll let that question marinate your mind for a bit, but…

The post Acquire Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

“Good games get reprinted.”

Those four words represent the trend the game industry has been following for the past few years. We’ve witnessed a remake of Reiner Knizia board games within the voting age bracket, such as Ra, Modern Art, Amun-Re, amongst others. In Essen Spiel 2023, a reprint of El Grande was spotted, a 1995 board game that probably doesn’t know what an iPhone is. Even as I am typing out this sentence, my review copies of Robo Rally and Acquire from Renegade Games are sitting in my game bag. Both games are almost old enough to collect a pension check.

These games have become pillars of the industry, inspiring generations of game designers. So it was surprising when it was announced that Wasabi would be reprinted. While not a bad game, Wasabi didn't exactly set the world on fire when it was first released in 2008. Many players felt it was too random, with little ability to develop long-term strategies. Wasabi’s contribution to the industry did show a market for food-centered themes, which was unheard at the time. Sushi Go later solidified that yes, board games focused on food can work and work extremely well.

Of course, this reprint inevitably leads to some questions. Questions like, will there be changes? Are these changes an…

The post Wasabi Board Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Every time I review a Flatout Games title I feel like I need to insert a boilerplate sentence about how much I love their games, how creative and innovative their team is, and just how nice of a group they are. But this time I’ll just say that Nocturne is their newest title, and if you’ve enjoyed Point Salad, Cascadia, Calico, Verdant, and Fit to Print, you should check out Nocturne.

Nocturne Overview

In Nocturne, players take the role of foxes (foxen?) traveling through the woods at night. Throughout Twilight and Moonlight phases, players will place spell tokens onto forest tiles, gather mystical items for their collections and concoctions, and attempt to earn points for completing goals.

Before we jump into the review, let’s clarify a few terms.

• Forest tiles - tiles that are used to layout the “game board”. There are 80 in total, of 8 different types, each with their own variations. The starting board size is based on player count.
• Spell tokens - a set of identically numbered discs players use to claim forest tiles. Players will use fewer tokens at higher player counts.
• Twilight / Moonlight -…

The post Nocturne Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I was a little worried when I pulled The Wolves off the shelf. That’s because The Wolves is published by Pandasaurus Games, who recently released Roller Coaster Rush, one of the worst, if not THE worst, games I’ve played this year.

I’m happy to share that The Wolves put things back on track.

I love area control games, I love great production, and I love games that play in about an hour. After watching a short 10-minute teach video, my review crew was up and running and had the chance to get The Wolves to the table.

It’s not perfect, but it is clever. In fact, I was surprised how many times players have used the word “clever” to describe their experience with The Wolves, and I have to agree.

Clever

The Wolves is an area control game for 2-5 players that plays in about an hour, maybe 75 minutes. The game is round-less, meaning that once play begins, players take turns until the end-game trigger is pulled. In the case of The Wolves, that happens when the third mid-game scoring round takes place.

The action selection system here is, yes, clever. Each player board has six double-sided tiles—one is double-sided with the same terrain type, aligned…

The post The Wolves Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.