Dear old Grandpa. He’s gone to his reward, leaving us his farm in Stardew Valley. We won’t have long to mourn his passing, though. He’s only given us a year to fulfill four goals and restore the Community Center. It will be a busy four seasons, spent making friends and collecting all the resources we need, all while contending with the evil Joja Corporation.

Knowledge of the video game is not necessary to play or enjoy Stardew Valley The Board Game (known here as SV: B as opposed to the video game, SV: V). The rules, objectives, and gameplay are complete without any previous knowledge. I will say, however, that my first play of the game was made more enjoyable by the one person in the group who had played SV: V. Her running commentary on the objectives, resources, and especially the characters, helped make for a fun evening.

I’ll discuss some differences between the cardboard and video versions of the game at the end of this review.

[caption id="attachment_293787" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Stardew Valley: The Board Game[/caption]

In keeping with the non-confrontational aspects of the video game, SV: B is a cooperative game. To win, players will need to work cooperatively to meet the conditions on all four…

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Guilty Gear is widely considered one of the great 2D fighting franchises in video game history. Though the series has never achieved the cultural prominence of Street Fighter or Tekken, it has long been lauded for its technically exacting gameplay and visual flair. Earlier this year, Level 99 Games announced that they were adapting Guilty Gear: Strive, the most recent title, into a two-person card game.

It’s a sensible marriage. Much as Guilty Gear has been a long-running cult success, Level 99’s Exceed Fighting System has been a niche favorite, beloved by a certain type of board game enthusiast, for most of the last decade. The system has adapted video games before, with entries for Shovel Knight and Dead Cells, but never with this level of ambition. A stonking 20 characters will be included in the final version of Guilty Gear: Strive.

That won’t be available for a while yet, but I spent some time with the demo deck, which includes Sol Badguy (incredible name) and Ky Kiske. The choice of these two characters for the demo should provide longtime Guilty Gear fans with assurance that they’re in good hands. Sol and Ky are the only two characters to have appeared in every installment of the series.

[caption id="attachment_290875" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

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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…

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When a game wins a major tabletop award before you review it, you don’t really have much ground to stand on.

The world already agrees that Dorfromantik: The Board Game (2022, Pegasus Spiele) is at least a very good game, because it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres over the summer.

While there’s always commentary on the games that win this award (in part because there’s always a debate on the shifting sands around the weight of games in this category), time is usually kind to the winners. If you look at the list of winners since CATAN won in 1995, almost every single one is still being celebrated today. This year alone, I’ve been at game nights where we played Just One, Codenames, Pictures, Dominion, Hanabi, Azul, and Kingdomino. Many of these made repeat appearances.

Those are all amazing games. Dorfromantik: The Board Game is no different. That’s because it combines an incredibly simple teach and infinite replayability in a package that can be played solo, multiplayer, campaign-style, and/or as a high-score challenge.

I get it now. Dorfromantik is really good.

Spelling Error

Dorfromantik is a cooperative tile-laying game for 1-6 players, although given the ruleset, I decided to just…

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There are now two expansions for the streamlined 4X game, Northgard: Uncharted Lands, Wilderness and Warchiefs. In this review, I’ll be looking at the Wilderness expansion. (Click here for my review of the Warchiefs expansion.)

In Northgard: Uncharted Lands, (shortened to Northgard for this review) players will add tiles to explore the landscape, add warriors to their clan, move into new territories, and battle rival clans to conquer lands and claim resources for their own. If you’re new to Northgard, I suggest reading my review of the original game, as I won’t be going over the base came components or gameplay in this expansion review.

[caption id="attachment_287555" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The long, narrow Wilderness Expansion box[/caption]

The Wilderness expansion adds eight new Creatures and eleven new tiles—tiles that might spawn specific (very nasty) Creatures. If you play Northgard with the Creatures, this may be the expansion for you.

To reiterate one thing I mentioned in my review of the base game, playing without the Creatures turns Northgard into a race to be the first to build three large buildings in enclosed territories. While this type of race game may appeal to some people, for me, it only increases the luck of the draw with players adding…

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Wouldn’t it be great to find a game that takes many of the best parts of a game you already enjoy, makes it a bit shorter, keeps most of the fancy production elements AND still offers a rich decision space?

Lately, it seems like almost every game I loved from five years ago has tried to find that space. Heck, in the last year alone, I’ve seen or played versions of Terra Mystica, Terraforming Mars, Twilight Imperium, Spirit Island, Scythe, Orléans, and Everdell that aimed to be a more streamlined version of the base game.

This year, I’m intentionally driving hard into the past. Why look at so many new games, when there are THOUSANDS of great games from just a few years ago? I recently reviewed Age of Steam, a 21-year-old design. I like Age of Steam quite a bit, but its complexity plus its length at lower player counts are a minor turnoff.

I didn’t even know about Railways of the World (2005, Eagle-Gryphon Games) until the publisher sent a copy for review. Railways, designed by Martin Wallace (Brass: Lancashire) and Glenn Drover (Mosaic: A Story of Civilization), was updated with a 10th anniversary edition in 2015. This newer edition includes maps for the Eastern US…

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I would probably get a good amount of mileage out of talking to a therapist about why I don’t like hidden movement games.

“Hidden movement games?”, Dr. Weschler asks through an unintended sigh.

“We don’t have to talk about this,” I say.

She looks over her glasses. “Clearly we do.”

“One player moves around the board in secret, unseen, while everyone else is trying to find them.”

“Unseen? Do the other players have their eyes closed, or…”

“Usually you have a miniature version of the board and a dry erase marker, maybe a chart. Some sort of log of your movement. Everyone else is out on the board like normal.”

There’s an uncomfortable pause. Dr. Weschler waits. I center my glass of orange juice on the coaster before continuing.

“The hidden player has some sort of goal to accomplish. In Sniper Elite, for example–”

“Oh! I think my daughter has played that,” she interjects. The briefest of shadows crosses her face. “It’s terribly violent, isn’t it?”

“The video game is pretty violent, yeah. Fortunately, it’s hard to carry that sort of thing over to a board game. Fewer cut scenes. I suppose there could be a deck of cards you…

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Your Viking clan finds themselves in uncharted surroundings. The land offers some of the resources you’ll need to survive and grow…but the grass appears to be greener, and resources more plentiful, across the border. Do you have the might to drive a rival clan out of those territories and claim them for your own?

Northgard: Uncharted Lands is a 4X game where you’ll eXplore new territory; eXpand your clan’s holdings by moving into those new areas; eXploit the resources in those areas to feed your clan and build helpful structures; and eXterminate your rival clans through combat that (hopefully) drives them from the lands you wish to conquer. 

At the same time, Northgard: Uncharted Lands (which I’ll shorten to Northgard for the remainder of this review) is also a deckbuilding game where your hand of cards will determine the actions available to you for a given round. If you don’t manage your deck well, it can easily cost you the game.

[caption id="attachment_262748" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Northgard: Uncharted Lands[/caption]

Played over seven Years (rounds), your Viking clan must either end a Year in possession of three closed off territories, each with a large building or, at the end of the seventh Year, have the most fame of any clan. This…

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As evidenced by my appreciation for the Funko Games Marvel Battleworld series, my kids and I love rolling dice to battle evil with cool miniatures in quick, 10-minute games.

It should be no surprise, then, that I walked to my front door one day this fall to find a new series of toy collectibles from Funko on my doorstep. This time, Funko swapped out Marvel and inserted Disney—which, I guess, are the same now, right??—and we have Disney Kingdomania, which arrives in both Super Game Pack (full set of cards, six different miniatures) and Game Ball (two minis and cards) formats.

If you’ve played the Marvel Battleworld games, you’ll be in somewhat familiar territory, but there are some differences here. The main difference? The difficulty, and not in the way you might think.

A Glitch in the Matrix

Disney Kingdomania transports players into an 8-bit video game. Using characters from Disney/Pixar films like Toy Story, Lilo & Stitch, Zootopia, and 101 Dalmatians, one or two players have to fix glitches in the game before it is too late.

Players take on one of the characters, then start on a “Nexus” and move around a very small, 10-tile map in order to move patches to the Nexus before glitches…

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I don’t take trips to Vegas but I do consider myself a gambling man.

Elements of push-your-luck experiences in board games are always up my alley, mainly because I don’t really care if I win or lose as much as I like having fun. Hey, it’s not real life, right? Recently I reviewed Monster Munch from HABA and while I thought the game was just OK, the push-your-luck element of Memory woven into the game’s rules made my plays a little more exciting.

I’m working on a profile of Red Raven Games, so I’ve asked the publisher if I could go through some of their older titles. Megaland, a 2018 release from Ryan Laukat and Malorie Laukat, has that nice tension of risk/reward built into every round, in a family-friendly format that had all of us howling each time we wanted to push further on the game’s speed run format.

[caption id="attachment_259228" align="alignnone" width="1125"] That bunny![/caption]

“I’m Gonna Stay in the Dungeon, Daddy”

That phrase was howled by both of my children (ages 8 and 5) as we played Megaland four times in a single day after ripping off the shrink.

That’s because in Megaland, the entire game is built around a dungeon dive (and, it’s the same dungeon,…

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I play a lot of video games.

I came up old school: an Atari 5200, before moving into the classics on Sega platforms like the Master System, the Genesis, the Game Gear, Sega CD, the 32X.

On newer platforms, it has been dizzying to try and keep up with everything, but I’m still trying. I have a PS4 and an Xbox One now, with Playstation Plus and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions keeping me in the fight as I try to play games a few times a month.

When the Meeple Mountain team received notice of a review copy of a game based on one of the side quest games from the video game Assassin’s Creed, I bit. Mind you, I’ve played a couple of the Assassin’s Creed games, but not Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, which features a mini-game you can play in various locations around the game world called Orlog.

Unfortunately, like the Michael Fassbender film based on the game series and the unbelievably terrible name of this game, Orlog: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Dice Game really falls short of expectations. As poor as the gameplay is, the biggest question I’m struggling with is the one that I’m surprised did not occur to the team at Pure Arts (the original designer and publisher of the game):

Why does this game exist…

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If you were to ask me what my childhood was like, I only have three words for you: First person shooter. Since my elementary school days playing Wolfenstein 3D, moving on to Doom, and now barely functioning in Apex Legends, the first-person shooter genre has kept me tied up in a room for years like I’m in a Stephen King novel.

Due to my odd emotional attachment to the genre, it is amusing to see the numerous attempts by board game designers and publishers to translate a first person shooter into a board game. How do you adapt a genre known for its reflexes, spatial awareness, and 3D space into cardboard form? According to the games I’ve played, not very well. Maybe Reload might change my perception.

Keep in mind that this is not a review copy. Initially, I was supposed to get the base game for review, but due to logistics difficulties, it didn’t happen. Someone was selling this game along with the Rumble and Capture the Flag expansion in shrink at a great price, so I dived in.

In the year 20XX…

As for the game's story, it's not exactly detailed. It’s future time and to everyone’s surprise, bread and circuses are still popular. This is a battle royale where the violent, hungry crowd gets their three-course…

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For a good stretch of 2021, everyone was talking about Anno 1800, the board game based on the video game from Ubisoft.

Designed by Martin Wallace (the Brass games, Age of Steam, Tinner’s Trail) and published by KOSMOS (The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Cascadia), Anno 1800 was a hit right out of the gate. This was certainly due, in part, to the pedigree of the team behind the game, but getting a copy of Anno 1800 took months.

Many months, as it turned out. The first two people in my gaming network who got the game paid extra to import their copies from game stores in Europe, and those copies featured German rulebooks!

I wasn’t that desperate, but then shipping woes hit again. After meeting with our friends at KOSMOS at Gen Con last year, KOSMOS put Meeple Mountain on the list to receive a review copy. That copy took a whopping 5 months to arrive.

While it took some time for the game to show up, I’m thankful that it did. Playing Anno 1800 post-hype hasn’t dulled the sheen. It’s still a blast.

The Setup: Hire an Intern

I haven’t played the PC game…

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