Welcome to Louisville!

GAMA Expo is a primarily retailer-based trade show hosted by GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association) and has been in operation for decades. While the last few years have taken place in Reno, Nevada, this year they debuted their new venue in Louisville, Kentucky. This is convenient, not only for me (being from Nashville) but also for a multitude of other attendees. The ease of travel to this new location at the Kentucky International Convention Center was mentioned by many people I spoke with during the event. And the proof is in the pudding: attendance was up by 30% over the previous year for retailers, publishers, manufacturers, and of course media (like myself).

In addition, the new space was much larger than previous years, by tens of thousands of square feet—giving more capacity for vendors, more space for attendees to walk around, and more room for sessions and meetings.

What’s New on the Table?

One of the great things about being a board game media outlet like Meeple Mountain is the chance to see what’s going to be hitting tables over the next year or so. For example, when we attend Essen Spiel, we’re given a glimpse at what might make it to North America the following…

The post Everything is New at GAMA Expo 2024 appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Project GIPF is a series of eight abstract strategy games designed by Kris Burm. Each game features a hexagonal playing area and involves a dwindling of either pieces or playing area mechanic. The way they approach these elements is not only unique, but combines what I feel are the best qualities in most abstracts: simple rules that reveal complex game play. 

If you’ve never heard the games within Project GIPF, GIPF, TAMSK, ZÈRTZ, DVONN, YINSH, PÜNCT, TZAAR, and LYNGK, I encourage you to seek them out, either in cardboard and bakelite or digitally online. They are well worth your time.

Today’s game: GIPF

[caption id="attachment_296563" align="aligncenter" width="500"] GIPF: The box[/caption]

GIPF is the first in a series of abstract strategy games known as the GIPF Project. Designed by Kris Burm and released in 1997, GIPF is one of those wonderful games that can be taught in under a minute, yet need careful study to win.

To win, you need to either capture all three of your opponent’s GIPF pieces or have your opponent unable to make a move. 

Playing GIPF

The playing board is a hexagon, with four intersections along each edge. These extend to an emphasized point just past the white border. Two straight lines come from each…

The post GIPF Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

If you’ve been following along here for the last few years, you know how much I adore one-shot mystery / escape-room games. The Suspects series is right near the top. I’ve had the chance to cover two other games in the series: Suspects–The Macguffin Affair and Suspects: Adele and Neville, Investigative Reporters.

The center of my appreciation for these games starts with the system, detailed in my other reviews. Each mystery takes anywhere from 45-60 minutes to work through, longer if you really want to be sure you gather all the evidence you can before trying to solve the puzzle.

Suspects: Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator (2022, Studio H) is my third Suspects game out of the four published thus far. Designed by Guillaume Montiage (the Kemet games as well as some of the Unlock! one-shot games), each Suspects game is aligned with a style derived from the books of Agatha Christie. This is important, because it usually means that you’ll have to deduce some of the facts in each case based on some “guesstimates”...none of the cases is as cut-and-dry as other mystery games I have tried for reviews here at Meeple Mountain.

That works for many people (including me), but not for everyone. If you are looking for a logic puzzle, games like…

The post Suspects: Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I lead employee engagement for a food & beverage manufacturer when I’m not here talking games. At a recent lunch event, I decided to bring some of the games from my personal collection to the office to spur some laughs while we did yet another round of bland lunch catering.

I put my copy of Just One (2018, Repos Production) at one table, then waited to see if anyone would engage with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see members of our HR department sit at the table, read the short list of instructions, and dive right in.

Within seconds, you could see the magic beginning to form. Players used the (admittedly terrible) dry erase markers to begin following the game’s simple rules, putting one player in the hot seat while all other players used their easel to come up with a clue that hopefully no other player wrote on their dry erase easel.

When the HR team members not currently in the hot seat showed their words to each other, the usual amounts of surprise, cursing, and accusatory gestures took place. Left with only a word or two to come up with the answer, it was great to see the active player struggle to come up with the right word…and when they did, it was high fives…

The post Just One Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Before affixing my critical goggles in place, I will say from the beginning: Redwood has been one of the most refreshing titles to hit our table in months. Christophe Raimbault’s (Colt Express) design takes the occasional monotony of board game acquisition by the ears and tosses it out on the doorstep with style. I do not know what inspired him to reassign the mechanics of a wargame for use with nature photography, but it just works. Redwood utilizes templates—components of specific shape and size—both for movement and a wholly different sort of shooting, creating a fairly immersive experience. Refreshing. It’s refreshing. 

Sing as you raise your bow

The game is an exercise in spatial estimation. Players select two templates under a strict look-but-don’t-touch restriction, one a ribbon for movement, the other a range-finder for their camera lens. The rules make no explicit prohibition of the ol’ thumb-and-forefinger measurement, but exploiting that technicality saps the game of its most thrilling anticipations. Redwood’s distinct pleasure is in the success and failure of the eyes—and only the eyes—in predicting possibilities. 

Having committed to the template, players then employ their selections, first moving the photographer into place, then capturing the moment, which is occasionally only the shattered dream of the intended moment, on…

The post Redwood Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

During my recent trip to TantrumCon, I ran into Jay Bernardo, the marketing manager with Bezier Games. We hit it off, and that led to a six-hour binge featuring games all night and lots of smack talk. (If you have not spent time with Jay, you need to get on that stat…the guy is hilarious.)

Jay also took the time to show me Sandbag, designer and Bezier CEO Ted Alspach’s latest game and what I think is his first trick-taking release. (Bezier has dabbled in trick takers before thanks to the release of the deluxe edition of Cat in the Box.) Jay was kind enough to provide a review copy after our first play, so I got the game in front of my Chicago game groups to see how the game played with other audiences.

During my first play of Sandbag, we got a single rule wrong, so correcting that did make a difference in successive plays. Still, I was surprised that this one was more of a curiosity than an outright hoot like the game’s rules seem to suggest. I don’t think that is a flaw, but the game does have a high rules overhead for such a simple concept and I wonder how this will play with broader audiences when it hits the market…

The post Sandbag Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Doing another series for Final Girl was a no-brainer. The first set of modules in this endlessly customizable survival horror game was a massive success, taking the world of solo board gaming by storm. Our own Justin Bell had nothing but glowing praise when he reviewed the Final Girl base set, and I’m no different.

But a second series brings with it risks. There’s the dreaded sophomore slump, buckling under the pressures of expectations. Could Final Girl add extensions to the house without creating cracks in the foundations?

The Root of All Evil

If you’re looking for a more exhaustive description of Final Girl, I’ll direct you to Justin’s review, but here’s the quick pitch: the entire series is premised around the horror trope of the Final Girl, a female protagonist who manages to survive everything and lead the baddie to their ultimate demise. The roots of the Final Girl can be traced at least as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but the trope wasn’t identified until the late 1980’s.

Final Girl the game puts you in…

The post Final Girl: Series 2 Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The best thing about working with the team here at Meeple Mountain: respectful disagreement is quite healthy.

My colleague Andrew Lynch wrote a very balanced review of Bitoku (2021, Devir) a couple years ago, and there are a few elements of his commentary that I agree with. It’s a bear to teach—so much so that I insisted players watch the Game in a Nutshell teach video, which is about 38 minutes long and led by a professional—and the setup is “not nothing”, in the words of the folks at So Very Wrong About Games.

One thing we disagree on: play surfaces. The idea of playing a three-hour board game on my floor is out of the question, not because of the playing, but because of the standing up. I can’t imagine trying to stand up from the floor after sitting cross-legged on the floor for that long!

If you have a dedicated group of Bitoku fans who you can count on to regularly play the game, the turn elements here have the kinds of tension and decision-making I love in heavier Euros. That will also lead to less downtime in a game that can really spike AP (“analysis paralysis”) in the wrong hands. As someone who plays games like Voidfall a dozen times or…

The post Bitoku: Resutoran Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Logic & Lore is a game that I knew right from the beginning my wife would love. She is someone who can sit for hours working on sudoku puzzles. So when asked if I would like to delve into this little game, it was an enthusiastic yes!

This small-box game only has a few components. Each player has a set of 12 star cards with ranks from 1 through 9, plus three black holes. There are nine alignment cards, also ranked from 1 through 9. Beyond that, there is a pool of memory tokens (36) with various symbols on them, some meeples for each player (7 per player), and reference cards (3). In the basic game, called the Star Light version, the black holes and the meeples are not used.

Star Light

To set up the basic game, the alignment cards are placed between the players ranked in order from 1 through 9 with the moon-phases face-up. Each player shuffles their star cards and deals them out face-down so that each of their cards is associated with one of the alignment cards. Make sure that the reference cards are on the Star Light side and that the memory tokens are within reach. Randomly choose a player to go first, and you are ready to begin.

Side note: there is…

The post Logic & Lore Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Introduction

The good folks over at Durdle Games have a Kickstarter for their new game, Logic & Lore. In addition to wanting to learn more about the game, this seemed like a great time to ask the designers (Darren Reckner and Jason Hager) a few questions about themselves.

So, in Meeple Mountain fashion, here are Six Questions with (and about) Darren Reckner and Jason Hager!

Part I: About Durdle Games

Q1: I am sure you have been asked a thousand times how you met and how Durdle Games came to be. So I am going to skip past that and ask the more important question: As a turtle (Jason) and a rabbit (Darren), how do you guys manage to not get on each other's nerves? Or, assuming you do get on each other's nerves, how do you get past that to work on interesting games?

Darren: What’s interesting about this comparison is that our playstyles and our design styles are actually polar opposite. Jason is a slow player but has a never ending fountain of ideas when it comes to making new games. I am a quick player that needs time to think about design stuff in my down time. Jason can discuss an idea almost entirely in the mind while I need to start writing…

The post Interview with Darren Reckner and Jason Hager (Logic & Lore) appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I was alarmed by the text on the back of the game box for Tanuki (2024, Synapses Games): “Do you have what it takes to win in this no holds barred take that game?”

The front of the box features a cute, furry tanuki (raccoon dog, per the box) running away from other characters towards the viewer. I’m not sure what the cover image is trying to convey—should I run away from this game??—but I like a good take that game. However, I was afraid to see if this would work with my kids, particularly my son, who abhors competitive games where players can be robbed (see exhibit 147: Berried Treasure).

I opened my review copy and quickly read the rulesheet. In Tanuki, designed by Cole Smith, players begin the game with a face-up Gardener card and a face-up Samurai card in their Garden (play area). A second Gardener card is also in the Garden, face down, waiting for the game’s second half to open before being revealed by an event card buried in the draw deck.

The Gardener cards score bamboo (points) each turn they remain in a player’s Garden. Samurai protect all Gardener cards, an important distinction because Tanuki is all about stealing cards and…

The post Tanuki Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The King of Tokyo Monster Packs are four monsters, each sold separately, that come with some special game-changing bits and pieces. From towers to build and conquer, to extra dice, these monsters add some spice to your King of Tokyo games.

Cthuhlu

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

[caption id="attachment_295782" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Cthulhu Box[/caption]

"A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."
     –from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H. P. Lovecraft

If you’re going to introduce new monsters to The King of Tokyo, where better to start than with The Great Old One, the cosmic entity that is Cthulhu? After all, it existed for eons before any other so-called “mythical creature” ever took to Earth.

King of Tokyo Monster Pack: Cthulhu (known as Cthulhu for the rest of this review) comes with components for both King of Tokyo and King of New York. However, I will only be covering the King of Tokyo components for this review.

Along with the standard Evolution cards, Cthulhu comes with Cultist tiles. Whenever the Cthulhu player rolls four of a kind, they can take a…

The post King of Tokyo Monster Packs appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

As we were wrapping up a recent all-day gaming event, I decided that we had to get a round of Kingsburg in before we called it a night.

Full disclosure: I love Kingsburg. (I even wrote an article about it.) Have loved it for years. The game is old—17 years old now!!—but it remains a favorite of mine because it does so many things right, and it has dice, and it gives players the chance to gut your neighbor by cutting off their ability to use all of their dice during each placement round.

The base game is enough for me, but expansion content was built over the years. One of the modules, Soldier Tokens, fixes the only major complaint players had about the rules in the base game. When a six-sided die was rolled to determine what all players could add to their reinforcements in the base game, that number would be added to any other battle strength from their completed buildings.

Soldier Tokens takes away the randomness, and in a dice game where so many other things are random, the Soldier Tokens module is an excellent addition to an already-strong foundation.

But there are five other expansions available for the base game. During my most recent play, I decided to add…

The post The Board Game Soapbox: Dear Event Cards, Die appeared first on Meeple Mountain.