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…

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When was the last time you opened a game and were impressed with the components, like really blown away. Voidfall perhaps? Gloomhaven? Just about any game from Eagle-Gryphon games these days? So imagine my surprise and delight when I opened World Wonders, from Arcane Wonders–a $50 game with oodles of production value (at least in my opinion). Over 20 incredible wooden “wonders” (called monuments in the game, but each different and each with an impressive level of detail), dozens of cardboard tiles, a well designed and thought out insert, and an excellent rulebook–really one of the best I’ve read in quite some time.

But how does it play?

World Wonders Overview

In World Wonders, 1-5 players attempt to raise up their city / civilization, increasing their population, gathering resources, and most importantly…building monuments. The game ends after the tenth round, or when one player raises their population to twelve, although in my experience these two things usually happen very close together.

World Wonders is packed full of things you can do on your turn, which means that there’s always something useful to accomplish. Each player starts the game with 7 coins, and 0 each population, wheat, pottery, and engineering, marking them on their personal player board. Over…

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Vienna - David McMillan

This past weekend, I finally got my copy of Vienna to the table. Vienna, for those not in the know, is the 5th game in the much-lauded (and also highly criticized) Stefan Feld City Collection from Queen Games. Reimplementing La Isla, which I reviewed as part of my Focused on Feld series, Vienna plops the players down right smack dab in the middle of Austria during the early 1950s. World War II has ended, but the Cold War is just getting started. Espionage is the name of the game.

Vienna comes with two modes of play: the basic mode—which plays almost exactly like La Isla— and an advanced mode that introduces a whole lot of new elements. I got to play the basic mode. A few mistakes were made, but I enjoyed the experience overall, and I feel like that was the consensus among the other players at the table as well. I’m really excited to get it to the table again so that I can dig into the new material.

Keep an eye out for my upcoming review!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles…

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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…

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Monikers: Monikers-er - Andrew Lynch

Monikers is a great party game if you’ve got a group that isn’t afraid of getting silly. Monikers-er cranks things up, with a collection of obscure, seemingly impossible cards. All your new favorites are here: Mukbong, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Reiner Knizia. It’s the Monikers set for those who like their word selections eclectic, which I certainly do. The final endorsement: I’d rather play Monikers with just these cards than mix in the base set.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ - No sweat
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Faraway - Andy Matthews

Faraway is a game about journeys—traveling through a magical land called Alula. Over the course of 8 rounds players will play cards in front of themselves in order to arrange resources and scoring conditions for end of game scoring. The catch is that you lay down cards from left to right, but score from right to left after first flipping all the cards face down. This means you have to constantly be thinking in two directions—setting yourself up with difficult scoring cards on the left side, while giving yourself things TO…

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Back in 2020 we reviewed Cascadia, a deceptively simple tile laying and tableau building game from Flatout Games, who were coming off back to back successes with Calico and Point Salad. Since that time Cascadia won the Spiel des Jahres in 2022, and landed solidly in the top 100 games on hobby site BoardGameGeek. So it should come as no surprise that publisher AEG and developer Flatout Games are doubling down on their investment and releasing Cascadia: Landmarks, along with two new standalone roll and write games called Cascadia: Rolling Rivers and Cascadia: Rolling Hills—each exploring and celebrating a specific habitat in that area.

But it’s Cascadia: Landmarks we’re talking about today. Since it’s an expansion for the base game, I won’t be covering standard gameplay (you can read my review of Cascadia here), and instead I’ll just be talking about what the expansion brings to your table.

Cascadia: Landmarks Overview

One of the things I liked best about Cascadia was the variety, the input randomization. When setting up the game, you selected (or chose at random) one card for each different animal (elk, bear, fox, salmon, and hawk) and used that one for scoring. This meant that your focus could be noticeably…

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Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa – David Wood

When I heard Fabio Lopiano, the designer of Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road, was coming out with a new game with co-designer Mandela Fernández-Grandon, I was instantly interested.  While Merv is a medium weight game, Sankoré is on the heavy side.  Don’t get me wrong; the mechanics of the game are straight-forward.  It’s just that there are lots of moving parts to remember and keep track of.  It took me and my gaming group several games to get the hang of it and eliminate mistakes.  That aside, Sankoré is a great optimization puzzle. 

Players work to generate prestige in 4 academic topics:  Astronomy, Law, Theology, and Mathematics. They do so by various means, such as teaching classes, graduating students, completing objective cards, and collecting Sankoré tiles.  However, they also need to manipulate the victory point (VP) value of each of the 4 different types of prestige.  This is done by placing books in the library.  The topic with the most books on a shelf awards 2 VPs per prestige.  One VP per prestige is awarded to the topic with the second most books on each shelf.  Given there are 3 shelves in the library, 9 total…

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Back in 2010 Matt Leacock was fresh off the release of Pandemic—one of the first, and definitely one of the most successful, cooperative games in the world. I don’t know his motivation, but I think he wanted another cooperative game that was perhaps a bit simpler and more family friendly. And thus Forbidden Island was born. It used a similar framework as Pandemic: multiple, distinct player roles (each with their own special abilities); a card driven system which both advanced the game and provided benefits and penalties to players; and a goal (rescue 4 artifacts and get on the helicopter before the island sank).

Two other  Games in the Forbidden series have been released: the excellent and challenging Forbidden Desert, and the less-than-stellar Forbidden Skies. And now Gamewright Games has released the 4th title in the series, and I’m pleased to tell you that Forbidden Jungle is a return to the formula which made the first two titles so successful.

You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby.

In Forbidden Jungle, 2-5 players attempt to search and conquer an alien jungle landscape in search of four crystals which will powe the portal—which you must also find—escape through. All the while, you must avoid the deadly…

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Voidfall – David Wood

Man, oh man, was I ever excited to have this baby show up on my doorstep, and it did not disappoint.  Touted as a Euro 4X space game, Voidfall is a beast both in terms of table space and complexity, but it was so worth it.  The core mechanic is playing Focus cards to take actions.  Each card has 3 actions listed on it, but players can normally only take 2 of them.  The number of Focus cards that can be played each cycle varies, so players will have to plan out their strategy each cycle by selecting which cards they will play, and just as importantly, the order they will play them.  IMO, it’s this planning feature that makes the game shine. 

The game comes with a bunch of scenarios (solo, co-op, and competitive) of varying complexity, including a solo tutorial that helps new players navigate the learning curve.  There’s a bunch of iconography players will need to become familiar with, but after a while it becomes second nature.  Combat is simple and completely deterministic.  In fact, there’s an app you can download that automatically determines the outcome for you.  And because each game is limited to 3 cycles, this a 4X that doesn’t out stay its welcome. 

…

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The Fox Experiment – David McMillan

Have you ever backed a game on Kickstarter without knowing anything about it solely based on the game’s designer pedigree? This was the mistake I made with The Fox Experiment. I’d meant to read the rulebook. I had every intention of watching some videos. I swear that at least going to the game’s entry on BGG was on my to-do list. Before I knew it, the campaign was over and my pledge had been collected.

Fortunately, some accidents are happy ones.

This past weekend, I finally had a chance to get my copy of The Fox Experiment to the table and it was delightful. That first game was…rough. I quickly learned that there was a vast difference between reading the rules and applying them. After a few rounds, though, things began to fall into place and I was gleefully rolling dice, breeding pups, and fulfilling research projects without a care in the world.

I quite like this game and I look forward to the opportunity to explore its inner workings even further in the future. 

Ease of entry?:
★★☆☆☆ - Not an easy onboard
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again 

Read more articles from David McMillan.

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Since our very first post, we’ve been laser focused on publishing high-quality board game related content: whether it’s written or video. We craft and discuss, parenthesize, spellcheck, and edit until we’re happy with it. And this year we had our biggest published year ever, with 544 published pieces; that’s crazy for an all-volunteer team like ours.

Join me as I reminisce on the past 12 months!

410 Written Reviews

Last year we made it to the top 5 results in searches for “board game reviews”, but now at the end of the year we’re in a solid 3rd place. That’s incredible when you consider that we’re beating out The New York Times, Kotaku, Reddit, Good Housekeeping, and hundreds and thousands of other outlets who cover tabletop games.

We actually reviewed even more games this year than we did last year: 410 compared to 387. And almost 170 of those games were released this year!

By traffic, our biggest game review hits of 2023 were part of our One Shot Mysteries series: Unsolved Case Files Avery & Zoe Gardner and Unsolved Case Files | Jamie Banks. The new release in the Everdell line, Everdell Farshore, also garnered loads of traffic. Unsurprisingly our review of Heat: Pedal to the Metal zoomed to the top of our hit…

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We play a lot of games here at Meeple Mountain. Some of them are brand new, not even on shelves yet, and some of them are classics. But no matter who's playing, or what, we all have our favorites. Here's a list of the best games we played this year, including a few games that might surprise you…and no, they're not all from 2023!

Root

Andy Matthews

Last year I joined a gaming group which skewed towards heavier games. This allowed me to indulge myself with games I might not normally play with my other groups…games like Root. This is a “battle royale”, set in a forest, where the players are cute and fuzzy creatures like birds, cats, mice, rabbits, and raccoons. And Leder Games has added many more factions like otters, badgers, moles, rats, and even lizards.

You might say 2023 was the year I went all in on Root. Thanks to a great group and amazing and varied games, I decided to pick up all the expansions. Root is such a satisfying challenge because no two gaming sessions are ever quite the same. While everyone plays within the same basic framework, each faction has their own unique play style and win conditions. This rewards people who play Root more often.…

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Vabanque - Justin Bell

Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower claimed that Vabanque was his favorite betting/bluffing/gambling game of all time, so I picked up a copy. It sat on my very small shelf of shame for months; thanks to a six-player game night recently, I got Vabanque to the table.

Based on an 18th-century gambling game known as “Faro”, Vabanque plays 3-6 players in about an hour. Over the course of four rounds, players have to add poker chips to various small tables scattered around the play area, adding value to each station along the way. Then, the hook—each player has three action cards that can be played at the same or multiple tables, messing with everyone’s heads during the round. One card is a straight bluff; one is a Raise card, multiplying the value at that table by 1X (meaning that a table with $20K and a Raise card is now worth $40K instead of just $20K). The final card is a Trap card—a player with a Trap card at a table with other player tokens gets paid that table’s value for each opposing token there.

Those Trap cards, the table talk, the mind games, and the betting system were all fantastic. I don’t think this game would be nearly…

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