As I started to make my way through the instruction manual for Five Peaks, from designer Adam Strzelecki and publisher Trefl, I quickly realized that I’d seen this game before. “Oh,” I said, “this is Concordia.”

At this point in my life, having played so many games over the years that my mind is a free-associating cloud of mechanisms and rules, I often read rulebooks and think of comparative benchmarks. It’s only natural. Despite the rumors, I too am human, and we love patterns. I don’t believe I have become uncharitable about this, though. It isn’t often that I look at a game and think, “Oh, this is [insert title].” The bar for that remains high.

Five Peaks clears it with ease.

It uses the same hand management system as Concordia. Each turn, you play one card from your hand and perform the action shown on the card. These cards allow you to move about the board, or collect resources, or buy new cards from the market. Any cards that you play stay down on the table until you play the card that lets you pick up all your cards.

Five Peaks uses the same resource management system as Concordia. You’re restricted to ten items, represented by the ten slots on your individual board. You have to manage…

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Without a doubt, Namiji would have been the first Kickstarter I ever backed—had I been into that sort of thing at the time. Instead, months later, that honor fell to Marvel United, a far less frustrating venture in the end. I watched the anticipated fishing game from a distance as delay after pandemic-fed delay pushed the eventual release back years from the original projection. I can only hope those who persevered got a badge or a really nice sticker for their troubles.

But here I am, four years later, with a copy of Namiji on my table, the seafaring sequel to the chillest game in a white box, Tokaido. Our family has walked the Tokaido road countless times, often in both directions. We have expanded and deluxified our copy and guarded it with our lives. Well, except for that one piece that my sister’s dog mangled. Consequently, if anyone has a spare purple base ring for the Collector’s Edition minis laying around, drop me a comment and I’ll make you an offer.

When the first copies of Namiji delivered, I had a chance to play a friend’s deluxe version, complete with painted ships and 3D paper boats. I never really doubted that I’d enjoy it; but I hadn’t seen it again until now. It has all the…

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At Meeple Mountain, we’ve been in a bit of a ‘fine’ rut. So many games come through the Meeple Mountain base camp, but few have the crampons to climb all the way to the top. It’s been a barrage of average, plenty of perfectly good, but few that truly stand out. As my colleague Justin argues, perhaps there are simply too many games.

It’s an inauspicious start to a review. Ominous. Unpromising. Discouraging.

I’m not too sure that Roll to the Top: Journeys does much to buck this trend of the tolerable. Except…

Let Me Roll It

A remake of a 2018 release, Roll to the Top: Journeys (just Roll to the Top from hereon) from designers Peter Joustra and Corné van Moorsel is a lovely production. Its gorgeously illustrated boards are inviting, its colourful dice ridiculously playful.

Gameplay is simple. Someone rolls the dice, everyone writes the numbers rolled or sums of those numbers in their grid. You start from the bottom, building up brick-by-brick until a vague silhouette of a famous landmark is complete. Numbers can’t be lower than the numbers directly below them, and no number can be written in a space that isn’t ‘supported’ by the number(s) below it.…

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Navigating the Ruins

In Mayan Curse, players are explorers who have stumbled upon an ancient Mayan temple. The path to the inner temple is divided into several sections, each with a series of tiled rows containing different symbols. It’s a long sprint to get to the end of the temple, but that’s where the most remarkable treasure awaits! Along the way, explorers can pick up Mayan monuments and artifacts (called stelae) that reward them with knowledge, the all-important resource needed to win the game. There is a catch, however: there are three giant boulders precariously perched along the walkways, and as the explorers get further into the temple and make more of a stir, these boulders will inevitably be shaken loose and start rolling towards the entrance of the temple. You must make it out of the door before all three boulders reach the entrance, or else you’re sealed inside the temple forever and automatically lose!

The key to navigating this temple comes from the ancient stone floors. In each round, players will draw three sacred stones from a bag. These stones are decorated with symbols matching the collection of symbols on the temple floor. Players can then make up to three slides, bumping the physical location of the floor tiles around to create a pathway. Then, players spend…

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K3 is the 17th tallest mountain in the world (at just over 26,000 feet). It’s part of a range of mountains collectively known as Gasherbrum, located on the border between Pakistan and China. While not the tallest mountain in the world, the primary massive exposed rock face, nicknamed “Shining Wall,” is thought to have inspired the name of the entire mountain range.

First ascended in 1958, K3 remains a favorite of serious mountain climbers all over the world. And even though playing this game isn’t quite as heart-poundingly exciting as climbing the real thing, I think you’ll agree that it’s still a clever puzzle on its own.

Let me tell you about K3.

K3 Overview

Presented in a square box barely larger than a fist, K3’s simple Swiss-style graphic design will catch your eye. After opening the box and spilling out the mega-sized hexagonal pieces, your attention will be captured as well.

The goal of K3 is to be the last person who can place one of their pieces on the mountain.

All red, yellow, blue, black, and green hexagonal pieces are placed in the bag to set up the game. Draw 9 out and line them up to act as the base of the mountain. Next, each player…

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“SCOTLAND YARD BABY!!!”

My brother and I were texting about an upcoming family beach trip a few years ago; he had secured an updated copy of Scotland Yard at a toy store and he was going to bring it to the beach.

We love Scotland Yard. We played it a bunch as kids with our family and other kids in the neighborhood. The fight was always the same, because everyone knew that playing as Mr. X, the game’s bad guy in the one-versus-many hidden movement experience, was the most fun.

Mr. X had a little notepad that was covered by a grid. This grid had a few callout spaces that required Mr. X to appear on the board from time to time, aiding the detectives as they used their limited set of tickets to move around London trying to catch Mr. X.

We played Scotland Yard only once during that beach trip, but it was a blast. It’s more accurate to say that it was a blast for my brother and I to play; our extended family was less enamored.

“Playing as a detective is kinda boring, bro.”

“Jeez, this game is long. Mr. X has eight more turns?”

Someone always wants to drop the logic bit into the proceedings, too. “How is it that the cops only…

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boon (n.): a gift; a benefit enjoyed, blessing, advantage, a thing to be thankful for: sometimes without even the notion of giving, but always with that of something one has no claim to, or that might have been absent.

lake (n.): a large body of water entirely surrounded by land; properly, one sufficiently large to form a geographical feature. Or, in some board games, a syllable of misdirection in the title of a game about traveling along a river.

The thematic arc of Boonlake takes place on a normal sized board featuring a river that apparently travels around the region of Boon Lake (not pictured). Each player operates from their own ranch, a holding tank of production sites, inhabitants, cattle, houses, and settlements with ample room for a dozen modernizations that unleash beefy abilities. The game is a concoction of exploring the map, harvesting goodies, creating a tableau of project cards, and establishing fruitful settlements.

The real game of Boonlake, however, takes place on a small board holding seven action tiles. Each tile is a progression of activity that begins with the current player and radiates out to involve everyone at the table. Once a tile is employed, it is placed at the bottom of the board’s track and pushed up to close the gap. In this way, there…

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When it comes to gaming experiences, great gameplay should matter. However, hundreds of games each year lean hard into a different approach: gameplay matters a bit, but production seals the deal.

I’ve played a lot of average games that were elevated by the production; Distilled, Ahoy, Brazil: Imperial, and Starship Captains are recent examples. Theme, high-quality components, and easy-to-teach mechanics all help, and make a game that might otherwise sit on the fence hop firmly onto the side of positivity.

Lisbon Tram 28 (2021, published by MEBO Games and Eagle-Gryphon Games in the US) fits this description. It’s a simple game at its core but I was impressed by how well it was elevated by the handsome look, straightforward rules, and—for reasons that are still not clear to me—a bell that players occasionally use during play to announce that a tram needs to move out of the way.

[caption id="attachment_276736" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The star of the show[/caption]

Bing!

28 (the name that is printed on the box, which is strangely not the name of the game on sites such as BGG) is a family-weight, pick-up-and-deliver, contract fulfillment experience for 2-4 players that plays in about an hour at its full player count.

A love letter…

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Far from the confusion of the typical “chicken or the egg” argument, I know exactly which came first: I sought out the board game before the novel. Then again, I did seek out the board game because I wanted to read the novel. And I did finish the novel before I started the board game. But it was all because of the—

Nevermind. The point is that I wanted to go all in on the solo tabletop adventure at hand. Until recently, I had never read Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. I was familiar with the 1954 Disney classic featuring James Mason as Nemo. At the age of eight I remember enjoying the ride at Disney World. But I can’t say I had ever put myself in the Captain’s shoes. I was probably confused. Both Disney efforts keep Sea as singular in their titles, which makes it sound as if a submarine descended nearly 70,000 miles into the earth—which has a diameter of around 8,000 miles. So I picked up the book to get the story straight and prepare for the game.

[caption id="attachment_276565" align="alignnone" width="1001"] No one writes a good 17-word subtitle anymore...[/caption]

Nemo’s War wins its first battle by getting the name right on the box cover. It…

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One of the best reading experiences I’ve had with my family was the entire corpus of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. We read all thirteen books aloud together over the course of two years. We dove headlong into the Netflix series (which is an excellent adaptation, by the way) as a treat after the arduous journey. 

One of the strange qualities of the Series is in the fact that the first half dozen books or so all feature the exact same plot. Don’t get me wrong, every book bears its own unique alliterative title, disturbing setting, and odd characters, but they all share one repetitive plot. I’ve not attempted a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, but I think some of the twists could be traced almost to the page, so formulaic is the map. 

And yet, I love every word. I love Lemony Snicket’s dry and sarcastic narrative tone, his occasional grammatical lesson, and his general disregard for the fourth wall. I love the way I see the denouement coming every time and I keep coming back for more. Of course, when the formula eventually breaks, the entire series enjoys an invigorating thrust across several more books toward the finish. But what struck me then and still strikes me today is the way the first several episodes maintain their charming…

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All of those qualities should guarantee a slam dunk of a game, right?

Zoom in Barcelona, published by Blue Orange Games, is the game in question. It’s got a bunch of gorgeous cards, an easy-to-navigate board, and a teach so simple you’ll be able to explain the standard version of the game in just five minutes. Blue Orange has really crushed it in the family games department: Paco’s Party. Doodle Quest. Slide Quest. The collection of Kingdomino games, including a recent favorite here at home, Kingdomino Origins.

Each time I play Zoom in Barcelona it feels like empty calories. Or, at least that’s the feeling when I play the game with adults. The plays don’t resonate in any meaningful way. And if this can be believed, the game is too short, especially in its beginner/training/family mode.

But with my kids? Zoom in Barcelona turned into something much more interesting.

Wait; Dragons?

Zoom in Barcelona is a photography…

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