In the fall of 2023 I stumbled across a lightweight card game called Vegetable Stock, originally from the publisher Taiwan Boardgame Design. This is a “market manipulation” game in which players choose cards for their personal “portfolio” and leave cards which may affect the value of said portfolios. Since my love of light card games is well known, but my love of clever puns less so, I immediately ordered a copy and had it shipped from Taiwan. It turns out the game is a delight, and fits perfectly into that light filler game category that I so adore. Now imagine my delight when Arcane Wonders licensed Vegetable Stock for release in North America and handed me a review copy at last year’s Essen SPIEL.

Vegetable Stock is soup-er!

How’d They Get All that Flavor into Vegetable Stock?

A quick note on setup: shuffle the 45 vegetable cards and place the deck in the middle of the table, dealing 1 card per player face up, with 1 additional card. So in a 4 player game you’d deal 5 cards face up. Take the 5 price cards and lay them out, then shuffle the 5 market cards and place them on top of the price cards in descending order: the…

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I grew up playing board and card games with family and friends (heavy emphasis on the board game part), but I didn’t have any experience with trick-taking games until I was much older. And so when I was exposed to trick-taking games in my 30s and 40s, I was somewhat confused. Call the number of tricks you want to take? Sloughing cards? Must follow? These were terms and mechanisms I wasn’t familiar with. I’m still not as big a fan as our biggest trick-taker fan Andrew Lynch, who penned our guide to trick-taking games, but I’m solidly in the “deal me in” camp. That’s why I’m really excited to tell you about Jalape-NO! from 25th Century Games.

A Game From the 1900s?

My kids like to joke that I’m so old I’m from the 1900s (which definitely makes me feel ancient). And while Jalape-NO! is also from the 1900s, it’s only just barely—being released in 1998 by the legendary game design duo of Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling.

Overview

Jalape-NO! is a must follow trick-taking game in which players attempt to have the lowest score over a number of rounds. Depending on player count, there will be between 4 and 6 suits, which have card numbers ranging from…

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Fantasy Realms - K. David Ladage

I can remember when I first caught wind of Stonemaier Games releasing Red Rising. I was not familiar with the books series, so that was not a draw. Still, I thought I would give the game a chance. What I found was a game that wanted to be too many things at once. It was muddled and unfocused. However, if you read the various design diary entries over at Stonemaier Games, one of the things you find is that Red Rising was heavily influenced (even based upon) the game Fantasy Realms.

Having played both games, I can say that I enjoy Fantasy Realms significantly more than Red Rising. The deck of cards is smaller and the mechanics are unified (e.g., the game is more focused). The tropes in Fantasy Realms are universal, while in Red Rising I am constantly reminded that I have not read the books.

Perhaps Red Rising could get an expansion that altered things in a way to focus and balance the game (although I am not sure that is even possible). Meanwhile, although I know there exists an expansion for Fantasy Realms, I am uninterested. What the base game does—what it is—requires no embellishment.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★★…

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Fire Tower - Bob Pazehoski, Jr.

I had a chance to sit with this strange little entity recently. Players each respond to, defend against, and aggressively wield the everlasting fire that has ignited in the center of the board. The aim? Survive—and burn your opponents’ towers to the ground, relegating them to participation in the consolation game known as the Shadow of the Forest. Eliminated players participate in the wiles of the forest fire, exacting revenge upon those who wrought their demise. I won’t lie. It’s weird. 

The game is pretty on the table as the orange fire crystals slowly—and then rapidly—spread across the central grid. The play begins quite slowly before launching to a lightning finish. Players put up blockades of a sort, pour water where they are able, redirect the wind to send the fire elsewhere, and unleash chaotic bursts of flame on the way to a bit of a disappointing finish. Fire Tower is incredibly aggressive. Yes, you can simply play defense the whole time and let fate decide, but a significant portion of the deck begs you to issue militaristic commands to the flames in the name of player elimination. 

At heart, Fire Tower is an abstract area control game with bells and whistles attempting to match the…

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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 published 525 pieces; it’s just crazy for an all-volunteer team like ours.

Sneak peek...not only did we publish over 500 articles. We published our 3,000th piece on New Years Eve. But more on that in a few days!

Let’s walk through the content and see what stood out.

401 Written Reviews

2024 was a great year for games, with close to 5,000 titles marked as released in 2024 (according to BoardGameGeek). And while there’s no way that any team could review all of them (or would want to), we managed to review a respectable 141 of them, along with the other 250 games we reviewed which were released in other years.

By traffic, our biggest game review hits of 2024 were Wyrmspan, SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering, Tales of The Arthurian Knights, Andromeda’s Edge, and unsurprisingly our reviews of Arcs and Arcs: The Blighted Reach expansion. All this just proves that even though we regularly publish reviews of lower profile games, it’s generally the most popular releases that get the…

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These are the games that stand out, stand up, and won’t stand aside. Maybe it’s a light card game, or maybe it’s an hours-long space odyssey, the games on this list are our collective favorites that we played in 2024. Please join our team as we celebrate the best that board gaming has to offer.

Tom Franklin

Expeditions

2024 started with Expeditions, the sequel-of-sorts to Scythe. While the game uses similar iconography, that’s about the only thing Expeditions shares with Scythe.

While trying to outscore your opponents, you’ll be exploring new parts of the landscape, defeating the mysterious Corruption that has spread, collecting and using cards—and workers to activate them—to take specific actions. Your turn actions will be governed by a trio of options, only two of which you can take at a time.

In my review back in February I said Expeditions was an early contender for my favorite game of the year. My group played it again last month, and I found I still liked the challenges the game presents. However, there’s a game I found that I liked even better…

Spicy

It turns out I’m a big fan of bluffing games. This came as a surprise, as I hadn’t considered the gaming genre…

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2016 was a much different time for me. I was newly into my love of board games, Meeple Mountain was not even a year old, I’d never heard of Reiner Knizia, and the selection process I used for games was a mix of “did it look good on Tabletop” or “that cover looks really cool”. The latter criteria was what I used to decide on Kickstarting an unknown to me game called Circus Flohcati, by the aforementioned Reiner Knizia. I ended up selling it several years later, unplayed, because the game just never spoke out at me.

Fast forward to this past October when I received a box of games to review from our friends at 25th Century Games. Included were Tasso Banana, Sausage Sizzle, and Circus Flohcati. But this time I was ready: the good Dr. Knizia had become one of my favorite designers, my love of light card games had grown immensely, and it didn’t hurt that the cover and graphic design was still eye-popping!

Let me tell you about Circus Flohcati.

The Greatest Show On Earth a Dog’s Butt

Ahem! A quick reminder that Circus Flohcati is a game about literal fleas in a circus.

In gamer parlance Circus Flohcati is a “light press…

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Ticket to Ride: South Korea - K. David Ladage

One of the beautiful aspects of Ticket to Ride is the versatility of the core rules. Adding elements for new maps is a breeze! They have added tunnels and stations (Europe), stocks (Pennsylvania), passengers (Germany), a tech tree (United Kingdom), and exploitable resources (Heart of Africa). The game has been reimagined for smaller player counts and table footprint (New York, London, etc.), there is a print-and-play version that was created for the COVID crisis (Stay at Home), and they recently added a Legacy Campaign version to the series.. Every time they create a new map/expansion for the game, my friends and I are excited all over again to see what is coming next.

South Korea has a map where the track colors are grouped into districts. There is a district board where players are competing for up to ten points in each of the eight districts. In addition, you have three cards that allow you to add a one-time bonus of +1, +2, and +3 to an action: you can draw +1, +2, or +3 more cards (train cards or tickets) on your turn, you can gain +1, +2, or +3 more status in a district with your play, and…

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Recently I was browsing the Rollacrit website and stumbled across the Messenger Bag of Holding. As someone who loves board game bags in general and messenger type bags in particular I was very intrigued. After scrolling through the photos, I knew I had found a contender for our board game gift guide, as well as for the most stylish and useful game bag we’d ever reviewed. Join me as I walk you through the details of Rollacrit’s Messenger Bag of Holding and tell you why I think this is worth a look.

Messenger Bag of Holding Board Game Bag

At Meeple Mountain we grade all board game bags using the same 4 sets of criteria: Straps, Functionality & Durability, Capacity and Portability, Price & Availability. How did the Messenger Bag of Holding board game bag do against our metrics? Let’s find out…

Straps

The primary strap on the Messenger Bag of Holding is a 2” wide thick nylon strap (think seatbelt thickness and quality) with a lovely smooth texture and d20 printed pattern. It has a comfortable shoulder pad with a mesh covering for breathability and ¼” thick foam padding. It connects to the bag proper via double stitched loops at the…

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Isle of Cats Duel - K. David Ladage

There are games that do not really need a two-player adaptation because they play very well at that count. Then there are games that cannot be played at all with two players and, if a couple is going to enjoy the game, it needs one. Isle of Cats falls into the middle of this spectrum: it is a game that can be played at two players, but that player count will not deliver the best experience (to be honest, the base game plays at two players better in the Family mode than the Normal mode).

The Duel version of the game is excellent! It plays very well, offers some good decision space without being a heavy game. My wife and I were able to get into the play quickly, and everything we knew of the original aided in our introduction to this trimmed down version. We might find ourselves playing this more than the original, as good as that is.

If I have a complaint, it would be that the game plays in four rounds, but the mechanic to keep track of those four rounds does not use the ship token and movement as it is handled in the base game. The…

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Everdell Duo - K. David Ladage

My wife and I love Everdell. It is an amazing little engine-builder that has so few flaws that they are hardly worth bringing up. My colleague, Bob Pazehoski, Jr., has taken a deep-dive into the game and the expansions (I highly recommend reading those if you have not before). When the news of a two-player version first came into my view, I knew I would be getting this (add to that the fact that you could also order the larger-format cards for the original and this was a no-brainer). In order to kick the tires and give this thing a test drive, my wife and I dove in, read the rules, and prepared to play. We decided to start with the cooperative game using the first chapter scenario. Our first few actions were awkward as we got used to the things that were a little different from Everdell, but it did not take long before we knew what we were doing. The tactical and strategic choices that have to be made in a cooperative play are interesting and thoughtful! This game is, as Mr. Pazehoski put it in his review, “...a streamlined masterpiece…” ‘nuff said.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ -…

The post Quick Peaks – Everdell Duo, Foundations of Metropolis, Alpina, Brian Boru: High King of Ireland, Pusheen: The Stacking Game appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I love dice games. There’s just something about the feel of grabbing a handful of dice and chucking them across the table. Sure you’ve got to deal with lady luck, but that’s okay for the right game. And 2012’s press your luck dice game Sausage Sizzle, a game from Inka and Markus Brand re-released this year by 25th Century Games, might just be one of those games. Note that in Australia, a “sausage sizzle” is a community barbecue focused on sausages. You learn something new every day, right?

Light on theme, but heavy on fun, Sausage Sizzle has players rolling dice in order to score points for each of 6 Australian animals (echidnas, snakes, crocodiles, kangaroos, quokkas, and platypus).

The game plays out over 6 rounds, which correspond to the number of animals. Each round you’ll be scoring one animal, indicated by the 6 animal scoring tokens that each player has in front of them. On your turn roll all eight dice (4 with numbers 2-5 and a sausage, and 4 with animals), and keep at least 1. After you’ve set aside all 8 dice, you score. But what, dear reader, are you scoring for?

Sausage Sizzle scoring is all about multipliers. You’ll multiply the value of the…

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Giant wooden bananas!

When you see a hand holding one of the bananas, you might think the size is exaggerated, but you’d be wrong. The bananas in Tasso Banana really are that big. Open up the box and you’re immediately struck by the size.

[caption id="attachment_309041" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The Tasso Banana box has a clever origami influence. It folds in on itself and is held closed by magnets![/caption]

These, my friends, are game pieces of substance.

In Tasso Banana your goal is to be the first to get rid of all your bananas by placing them out on the game board. Bananas on the same level can’t touch each other, the table, or one of the included banana leaves, or go outside the boundaries of the playing field (as defined by the game board). A stacked banana can only be stacked on two other bananas, and a banana which already has another banana on top of it can’t support any other bananas. With these rules you’ll wind up with a crazed jumble of gently curving fruit, some stacked on their sides, some arch side up, as if poured out of the…

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