Flashpoint: South China Sea, a two-player game from designer Harold Buchanan and publisher GMT Games, is themed around the political tensions between China and the United States of America in the South China Sea. Fundamentally, it is a straightforward area control game, with players taking turns to manipulate economic, diplomatic, and military influence in Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Think of it as tug-of-war on an international scale.

Players take turns playing a card from their hands for one of its four different effects. This is standard stuff for Card Driven Games (CDGs), a family of designs especially popular in wargaming circles. Flashpoint is an especially approachable entry in the CDG canon, so let’s take a moment to get up to speed those who aren’t familiar with CDGs.

Card Driven Games

CDGs are designed around multi-use cards that depict individuals and events related to the game’s setting. The most famous example is almost certainly Cold War favorite Twilight Struggle, which includes cards such…

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My new “friend” Rawan took it easy on me.

Rawan, one of the marketing reps from the team at Gigamic, asked if I wanted to try the new abstract puzzle game Qawale while standing with me at their booth at SPIEL ‘22. It was clear that I was in trouble right after I accepted Rawan’s offer to play.

Qawale is a two-player-only game that is so quick, it becomes perfect as a glass-of-wine activity with a partner while waiting for dinner to cool. A game that rewards creativity, Qawale’s quick eight-round playtime makes it shockingly easy to get to the table.

Stack Those Rocks

The teach for Qawale is so simple that it is shown in full on the bottom of the box.

On a 4x4 grid, each corner has a stack of two tan stones. Each player has eight stones in their own color. On a turn, a player must take one of their stones, stack it onto any number of other stones on a single space (so, you can’t start a new turn on a blank space), then move the stack orthogonally, dropping off the bottom stone each space along the way. Get four of your stones in an orthogonal or diagonal line, and you win.…

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How often do you get to experience the thrill of discovering a great game? It’s an incredible feeling when you do, whether the game is a new release or a classic, but there’s something especially electrifying about finding one that’s hot off the presses. “I get to tell people about this,” you realize. “I get to proselytize.” It doesn’t happen often. Even at the frankly absurd rate that I, a reviewer of prodigious output, play new games, it doesn’t happen often. I have reviewed around fifteen new releases in six months for Meeple Mountain, and I haven’t played a single one that I thought was great.

Enter Radlands, the new two-player release from first-time designer Daniel Piechnick—a former member of the Magic: The Gathering stable—and publisher Roxley. It is, as you may have surmised, great.

Well, Don’t Waste Your Time Waiting

[caption id="attachment_242516" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The colors don't come across in this photo, but they're really something.[/caption]

The moment the game hits the table, you can’t help but notice the striking design work from Lina CossetteI, Damien Mammoliti, and Manny Trembly. The card backs in the main deck feature an anonymous Punk in…

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Sharp (adj.) ‘shärp

1. (of an object) with an edge or point able to cut another object.
2. (of a sound) loud, sudden, and piercing.
3. (of a board game) highly tactical, presenting myriad options with only a few that will not lead to ruin.

How sharp do you like your games? If board games were wit, how would you rate your preference on a scale from garden slug to Winston Churchill? If board games were knives, where would you fall on the spectrum between a butterfly trainer, its dull blade used to practice throwing tricks, and a freshly-sharpened chef’s knife fashioned from Aikido steel? If board games were cheese, would you like them aged a mild three-to-six months, or would you rather they had two or three years’ experience before you take a bite? For those who lean towards the sharper end, let me introduce you to Mindbug, quite possibly the sharpest game I have ever played.

Mindbug is a two-player card game with some serious design pedigree: alongside first-time designers Christian Kudahl and Marvin Hegen are Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, and Skaff Elias, one of Garfield’s co-conspirators since the early days of Wizards of the Coast. The rules are about as simple as it gets: each player is…

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Finding games that are fun and balanced at two players can be a challenge. Many board games offer two player variants to their rules, so that no matter the circumstance, the game will be played. However, these two player variants often cannot provide the same fun feeling at smaller sizes. The Fox in the Forest Duet from Foxtrot games and Renegade publishing is a perfect small package built for two players. This game provides quick and fun experiences that players will want to return to and the use of the trick-taking card mechanic provides the game with a level of tension that may be unexpected from such a small box.

[caption id="attachment_217267" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The art in The Fox in the Forest Duet is simple and stunning, but the adorable foxes should not lead you to believe this game will be as easy as a walk in the forest.[/caption]

Working Together from Home

The Fox in the Forest Duet released in 2020, just before the pandemic went into full swing here in Canada. Throughout the last year and a bit this game has been a great way for my husband and I to…

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The Fox in the Forest is close to the perfect card game, it contains all the elements 'a keeper' game should have; easy set up, easy to teach, gorgeous art and surprising tension that makes groups feel like they could go for one more game.  The theme of this game is what drew me to it many years ago, and the forest theme is extremely popular now (something something urbanization and isolation makes Jack a dull boy). Games like Photosynthesis,  Arboretum and, this year’s Diamond Climber winner for best light game Village Green all use nature to draw their players in. The Fox in the Forest is no exception, using adorable forest animals in a fantasy setting to make a surprisingly tight and competitive game that’s pleasing to the eye.

[caption id="attachment_217274" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Bask in the warm autumnal glory of The Fox in the Forest’s box art and some of the beautiful renditions of forest animals present in the game.[/caption]

Originally published in 2017 by Renegade Games, The Fox in the Forest is a competitive trick-taking game. The object of the game is to accumulate 21 points by playing cards to win tricks over multiple rounds.…

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I could keep going — the rulebook starts with a three page short story describing the lore — but underneath all its glitter and chrome, Soulgivers is an abstract game at heart. This may be because of its minimalist design or may be a natural consequence of how the game works.

How the Game Works

Soulgivers is a two-player game of tactical movement and deterministic combat. Both players control a team of units called Soulgivers, each with their own unique powers and abilities. Both players are racing to retrieve a piece called the Fragment and bring it back to their home territory. The first team that can get the Fragment all the way home wins. Design-wise, Soulgivers shares a lot of DNA with Capture the Flag.

The game is played on a grid, with the Fragment starting in the center. Each team has two places to enter the board called Portals (blue and orange), which is also where players must bring the Fragment to win. The…

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“Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries, which is most commonly used in first-past-the-post electoral systems. Two principal tactics are used in gerrymandering: "cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).” - Wikipedia

Cakeland’s got a power vacuum and it needs filling (of the berry kind). The blueberry party and the strawberry party will square off in an effort to divide Cakeland between them, each in an effort to guarantee themselves the bigger slice. Will the strawberries come out on top or will the blueberries take the cake? Only one way to tell. It’s time for some Berrymandering!

Mmmm... Berries

In the game of Berrymandering, two players are going to be taking turns slicing up the cake that has been laid out between them. The cake is made up of 36 small square tiles, each illustrated with 1 to 4 blueberries or strawberries. There are also a few mystery tiles that, when flipped, will reveal between 1 or 2 mystery berries apiece (each fruit has an equal number of single and double…

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When I think about quilting, my mind immediately associates it with early America, women sitting around in sewing circles sipping on iced tea, idly passing the time in pleasant company and conversation. I’m sure I’m not the only one. But quilting is much, much older than that. In fact, almost as soon as fabric was invented, people began quilting with it. The earliest known example is a quilted garment depicted on a carved figure of an Egyptian pharaoh dating back to circa 3400 B.C. Mainly functional at its first inception, quilting quickly turned into an art form.

A quilt, by definition, is at least a minimum of three layers of fabric joined together with some kind of needlework. The needle is passed through all three layers in a series of stitches that results in a piece that has a padded appearance. But producing a quilt is much more than that. Like any art form, quilting takes years to master and producing an amazing quilt is a time-consuming labor of love and devotion.

[caption id="attachment_24690" align="alignnone" width="730"] My favorite quilt ever - created by Marty Galbreath (howyouseequilting on Instagram).[/caption]

Overview

Released in 2014, Patchwork quickly took the gaming world by storm. This two-player game…

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Designed by Jon Perry and published by Arcane Wonders, Air, Land, & Sea (AL&S) pits two players against each other as they vie for control of two of the three different theaters of war. The game, divided into a series of rounds called ‘Battles’, consists of eighteen Battle cards with six cards for each theater (the titular Air, Land, and Sea). These are numbered from 1 to 6. In between the players are three Theater Boards: one each for Air, Land, and Sea. At the beginning of each round the players receive six cards apiece and will then take turns playing those cards to the different theaters following specific placement rules.

A card can only be played into the theater to which it belongs OR it can be placed face down into any theater of the player’s choice. Cards played face up provide strength equal to their printed value as well as access to their special abilities. Cards placed face down do not provide anything other than a strength of 2. Once the last player has placed their final card, each theater is scored. The player who has brought the most strength to bear in a theater wins for that theater and if one player has won at least…

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Maybe it was the bold, beautiful images splashed across the cards that made such an impression on me. Perhaps it was the cards themselves, cute little squares crowded together in my hand. Some part of it had to be the cloth playmat that comes with the game, a relatively rare find in this hobby. Or maybe it was the general theme of Mandala, an idyllic promise of creating meditative religious symbols that spoke to my fatigued mind. Whatever drew me in, the first game had me hooked.

Seeing the Pattern

As with many abstract games, the premise of Mandala is simple: a pair of players will commit colored cards from their hand to the board, hoping to score the most points from sets of same-colored cards at the end of the game. The board — that lovely cloth playmat — is divided into halves (“mandalas”) that operate…

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