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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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During last year’s visit to SPIEL, I struck up conversations with French and French-speaking Canadian partners. What other French conventions should I check out? What are some of the big ones that are also tied to major award presentations in the hobby? And where else can I find an excuse to travel and eat great food?

The most consistent answer: Festival International des Jeux (FIJ), which takes place in the Cannes area of France each February. I started doing some digging on flights and hotels and my media badge was quickly approved, so I set about making arrangements to check out the show.

Upon my arrival at the Nice Côte d’Azur International Airport (it is nice, but it’s also in Nice), I grabbed an Uber and made the 25-minute journey from Nice to Cannes. Most people know Cannes as the host of the international film festival each May where it seems like director Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel) is debuting new movies while movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Penélope Cruz stroll red carpets every year.

In this way, Cannes (pronounced “can”, as in “can of corn”) is pretty nice during the month of February. It’s a swanky town with at least two Ferrari dealerships and fancy retail shops everywhere, but it’s…

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Any time a new game by Vital Lacerda is about to hit, my assorted tabletop gaming networks come alive.

There’s always a big negotiation on the front end. Who’s going to sink $150-$200 for the newest crowdfunding campaign? Are the hardcore collectors going to jump in or wait for someone else to pull the trigger before buying their own copy? As Eagle-Gryphon Games—the publisher of Lacerda’s games in the US—begins to send out shipping notifications, the hype machine ramps up.

Inventions: Evolution of Ideas is the newest Lacerda release, arriving at homes around the world right now. When I got a shipping notification for my review copy, I alerted a couple groups that I’d have my copy in time for game nights the following week.

“I’m innnnnnnnnn,” announced one friend, as creepily as that sequence of extra N’s would indicate.

“I can be at your house within the hour,” said another.

One friend toyed with an existing relationship. “I really want to play this one, but I have Valentine’s Day plans.” It sounded like he was open to bailing on the marriage to get a play in.

New Lacerda games bring out all the fans, and rightfully so. I’ve written six articles on the Portuguese designer’s heavy Euros, covering games such as Kanban EV (as well…

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Here’s how popular the card game Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is—my wife’s parents had heard of it. These are people that don’t play games.

(Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is the second-most popular “dedicated card game” on Amazon. Higher than all the versions of UNO. Higher than Exploding Kittens. Higher than Cards Against Humanity. Higher than Monopoly Deal. Something called “It’s a Date: 40 Scratch-Off Dates” holds the #1 ranking as of January 2024, and I’m pretty sure that’s not even a game.)

Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, for the uninitiated, is a fast-playing card dexterity game that accommodates 2-8 players. Designed by Dave Campbell and published by his Dolphin Hat Games label in 2018, the game has spurned other five-word “hand slappers” in this line including Taco Hat Cake Gift Pizza and a holiday version, Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman.

But the “OG” is all you really need. The rules are simple. The entire deck is dealt to the players face-down, with each card showing a picture and a word, usually one of the five items in that game’s title. On a turn, the active player—keeping one hand behind their back, just like all other players at the table, per my house rules—plays the top card of their personal draw pile into the middle…

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Our partners at Ravensburger / alea made waves a couple years ago with news that a new version of Puerto Rico—the classic action selection, tableau building Eurogame—was coming to the market, with the new game set in a time period after the real-world country’s period of slavery ended in the early 1870s. That’s important, because some players continue to rightly take issue with the original game’s setting and theme.

Yep, you remember. The original game positions players as “colonial governors” tasked with scoring the most points by constructing buildings and working fields via the use of “colonists” that arrive on a “colonist ship.” Those colonists, tasked with erecting buildings and working coffee, tobacco, sugar, indigo and corn plantations, are represented by small brown discs. Goods are shipped to the “new world” via ships that can only hold one type of the game’s five goods at any given time.

Yeah.

I still remember the first time I played Puerto Rico. At my house, a old saying still holds true: “you gotta call a spade a spade.” One look at the situation presented by Puerto Rico and I said the thing all of us were thinking as we read through the rules—this looks like a game about white people using people of color to…

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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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There’s really no getting around it—the theme of Mombasa (2015, eggertspiele) is a little dicey, particularly for gamers who bristle at the idea that clever hand management mechanics have to go hand-in-hand with buying shares in companies trying to colonize parts of 18th-century Africa. My colleague Thomas Wells dove into some of these issues with his write-up on colonialism a few years ago.

So, designers Alexander Pfister (who designed the original game) and Viktor Kobilke took Mombasa and reimagined the game’s theme to a space race aimed at the pursuit of colonizing the moon.

Now we are left with an easier question: what if you took the same great gameplay from Mombasa, repackaged it with the space theme, and asked players for forgiveness that the first game’s theme was legitimately awful? We’re good, right?

Skymines (2022, Pegasus Spiele) plays it smart. This feels exactly like the original game, with all the great programming elements and tough decisions tied to a card recall mechanism that still feels wholly unique. Pfister and Kobilke added a second side of the main map to introduce a more complicated area majority system that affects the share prices of the four major corporations. There’s a solo mode now, a mode that is in the early lead for the best solo…

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More really is more. Like, a LOT more.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Challengers! Beach Cup (2023, 1 More Time Games) is not a sequel to 2022’s Challengers!, a game that for many people was the best party game they played two years ago. The game was nominated for a number of awards, and won the As D’or award (the “Initiated” category) in 2023 from the French games convention Festival International des Jeux.

Challengers! Beach Cup is a standaquel, or a sequalone, or an expandalone, depending on your point of view—a standalone sequel to the original game, which requires none of the components from the core game and is played almost identically to the first game.

As such, I’m not covering much about the rules here…for that, please take a look at my previous review of the base game. I’m here to tell you which version of the game you should own, although if you happen to have lots of 16-player game nights, you should just go ahead and pick up both games!!

Here’s What’s New

The first change is a minor one, but I absolutely love it. Between rounds, there are sometimes choices to pick new cards from a lower-powered deck or a…

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