Inferno is one of those games that’s difficult to describe. The setting is “hell” or the Divine Comedy version of it. But it’s not really a game that has much to do with anything biblically inflected. If anything, the game is about going to Hell University to get your PhD in moving different colored pieces around. It’s bureaucratic, aesthetically garish, and completely delightful.

Here goes: in the game, you’re a family in Renaissance Florence, and you’re trying to get a primo spot in the hell hierarchy by shepherding souls through a plinko board into the appropriate layer of hell. Each of the circles of hell (excluding the topmost, Limbo) has a track associated with it. At the end of the game, each track can score between 4 and 20 points depending on how populated the circle is. If there aren’t enough souls in the circle, the track is worth fewer points. Additionally, to score, you have to have position on the track(s) and a diploma piece for that track. So, you need to acquire diplomas, move up on the tracks you want to score, and make sure there’s soul pieces in the corresponding circle.

[caption id="attachment_309465" align="alignnone" width="768"] Pictured: Hell as MLM scheme[/caption]

If it sounds bizarre, it’s because it is.…

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If you’re a eurogame designer, odds are, somewhere in your game there are going to be contracts of some kind. It’s the Mount Rushmore of resource management mechanisms. You gotta have something to do with all those bits and bobs you’re collecting. The exemplars: there are games with bespoke contracts that you acquire for yourself and only you can do (La Granja, Yokohama, Imperial Steam), there are games with contracts that everyone is fighting to complete first (Nucleum / Barrage style), and probably a zillion other ones that I’m forgetting.

But then, there is the fraught category of the positional contract. This style of contract is, funnily enough, more genealogically related to hidden role games than it is the classical euro point-converter.

Hidden figures

It goes like this: there’s a condition that the game state needs to be in, and when it is in that state, you can get points and/or win. In a hidden role game, your team needs to be winning or losing, or the game needs to be in a precarious position for your exciting reveal to clinch a win. You need to conduct the player orchestra to get the necessary conditions for your win. That’s why people keep coming back to games like this, and why games like Clans are still…

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While on its face, Lords of Baseball is a love-letter to the early days of the stick-and-ball, where everything had a sepia-toned luster, in reality, it’s a love letter to something else: rolling dice and consulting charts.

This might sound like a bad thing, but here’s a surprise: I like dice and I like charts. I also like simultaneous play which, for the most part, Lords of Baseball manages to pull off with aplomb.

Cards. Lots of Cards.

The game might be what some would call a CDG (card-driven game), but if you’re looking for something in the vein of Twilight Struggle or COIN, you’re likely going to be disappointed. LoB takes a more loosey-goosey approach to hand and card management.

Basically, it goes like this. You have a player board with your stats. You’ve got a money tracker, a tracker for prospects, a tracker for regular players, a tracker for your GM, Front office, and a few other stats. You add together these stats to determine your team’s quality, which we’ll come back to later.

The game is highly procedural. First, you get dealt “Spring Training” cards (3), plus additional if you have raised your farm system tracker. You can also turn in media tokens to get more cards, but you’re never going to have more than 5 going…

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Don’t tell my erudite friends but skirmish games, in particular, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, got me back into board gaming (even though I find the entirety of the modern Star Wars franchise unbearably boring). I love pushing miniatures around on a grid of some kind and making them shoot each other.

Now, I do love Star Trek, the show about people solving problems with talking, and I’m happy to say that if you’re looking for a highly approachable two-player skirmish game, Star Trek: Away Missions fits the bill. While the way you win can feel slightly disjointed as a game, it often ends up feeling more in the spirit of a Star Trek set piece, where a character has to perform some jargon-filled objective while dodging phaser fire.

Yellow Alert

Away Missions has you selecting your team from amongst Romulans, Klingons, Borg, and Federation factions. For this review, I had access to the starter kits for each. As I understand it, you can get other collections of minis which add characters you can swap in, more cards to build your decks with, and additional options for objectives.

You have a deck of Support Cards, and a deck of Mission Cards. The former contain various pieces of equipment that you…

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I always want to try out a Vladimír Suchý design, but I’m typically disappointed. His games offer unique mechanics and interesting ideas that draw me in, but his continued emphasis on creating diligently balanced systems often leaves me feeling a little empty. League of Six was his first published design, now receiving a “complete edition” which includes an expansion, but fear not, this is a beige euro through and through — and you know that your boy loves a beige eurogame.

On top of its beige-y-ness, it features a spin on one of my favorite mechanisms, “pay the auctioneer.” It’s an enjoyable game, and though I have some caveats, I’m happy with the time I’ve spent with it, and I find it to be one of Suchý’s more compelling designs. The debut album is often the rawest and, sometimes, the best.

Overview

League of Six casts you as history’s most exciting protagonist — the tax collector. The board has six different towns, each of which has a small track beneath it ranging from 0 to 12. Players place their little horsey meeples first on the “0” space of a town, which represents their bid for the tile that’s available in that town as well as a selection of resources. Other players can then choose to go to another town,…

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When it comes to roll-and-writes, my gold standard is still The Guild of Merchant Explorers (yes, I know it’s not technically a roll-and-write). I think this is primarily because I like maps, and if I’m going to puzzle solitaire style with folks, I like having a little map dotted with features and accomplishments at the end.

I also love public transit, and subway maps are just about the coolest looking map you can get this side of your municipality. Next Station: Tokyo, does a great job being what it intends to be — a subway coloring book that you can relax with.

This is my first review of a game as a solo player. I did not play this game with other players, and because the only thing that really changes is more people in the room with you, I think that’s fine in this case. For review purposes, I actually just played the game four-handed, because I wanted to try the puzzle from several angles.

But, if you’re familiar with the flip-and-write variant of the roll-and-write, you’ll be right at home here. There are four subway lines, each represented by a different colored pencil. When you’ve got that pencil, you’re working on that line (for example, purple)…

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Now that our in-house Arcs expert Andrew Lynch has shared his thoughts on Arcs, we thought it would be fun to have other Meeple Mountain contributors share their thoughts on the latest design from Cole Wehrle, in the form of our Quick Peaks roundups. Since Arcs has spent a stretch as what feels like the only tabletop game out there, let’s see what some of our other writers have to say about the hottest game in the world!

Arcs: That Campaign Was Something Else - Justin Bell

I have played Arcs eight times now—five plays of the base game, and a three-game series of “Acts” known as The Blighted Reach, the Arcs campaign expansion. The campaign is quite an investment, starting with a learning curve that I would describe as significant. The base game rules for Arcs can be taught to almost any gamer in about 15 minutes. The campaign rules might take you 30-40 minutes on their own. I did the five base game plays before trying to learn the campaign…and I was still checking the campaign rulebook by the end of the third and final Act. There are so many new rules that there is literally a second rules booklet that players build during the…

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Thomas Wells

What was your introduction to modern board games?

I grew up in rural Wyoming, so my access to gaming was filtered through my dad, who grew up playing games. I was dropped into Avalon Hill wargames by him when I was about 9 (which was not the most optimal experience--what 9-year-old relates to Afrika Korps?)

Then, later on, I found a group of fellow dorks in high school, and we went in on a web order of Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition. We spent many weekends lasering and war-sunning each other into oblivion. For a long time, I thought that conflict-heavy games were the only types of games there were. There was no FLGS for me growing up, so BoardGameGeek became my portal to a mythical land of cardboard and bits.

What are your feelings on gateway games?

Board gaming has been a very lovely experience for me, and I enjoy games all across the spectrum. As a rabid fan and lover of games, I remind myself often that some people are just not interested in moving through the gateway to more complex stuff. With that in mind, I’ve never had a bad experience introducing someone to a Knizia game. High Society, Lost Cities, The…

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Doggerland is a reminder why certain types of game mechanics stick around—because they work. While this game is not going to blow your socks off with a completely new style of play and unusual mechanics, what it has is certainly enjoyable.

In the game, you’re at the end of the last ice age, around 15,000 years ago, in an area that is now submerged in the good ol’ English Channel. You’ve got a tribe to manage: you’ll need to feed them, hunt game, and make cave paintings. The setting is similar to Endless Winter: Paleoamericans, a game that I reviewed a while back, and if you’re familiar with the “get food to feed your people” style of game, you’ll find a lot familiar here.

Doggerland takes place in 5 phases. The first player walks each player through these phases on their player board, and each one of them is designed to be executed with surgical precision. First, you “program” which is the game’s terminology, and is a bit of a stretch. You’re really just placing your tribe members as workers around on various action spaces, paying a small upfront cost in some cases, nothing in others. You don’t execute the actions until phase 3, hence the programming, but a…

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Terra Mystica is a sort of game design white whale — there have been dozens and dozens of imitators (Barrage, Horizons, Clans of Caledonia) and even when the designers of the original system have attempted to riff on their own design (Gaia Project), it often feels like some ineffable ingredient, some key to the special sauce, is missing.

I’ll tell you what I think that special sauce is in a minute, but I’m talking about Gold West here, and while Terra Mystica might not be the game design that immediately springs to mind, bear with me.

Gold West is a game by J. Alex Kevern, mostly known for Succulent, World’s Fair 1893, Passing Through Petra, and the under-rated Daxu. The game is relatively straightforward. Each turn, you generate resources, then you move on some tracks, buy an endgame scoring condition, and/or fulfill a contract card. After you’ve done that, you build a camp on the board, a settlement if you’ve got more resources, or you “loot,” which is where you gain resources but build nothing on the board.

The resource engine of the game is the defining puzzle of the enterprise. Many people have compared it to a mancala system like the…

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Clash of Galliformes is a bit of a throwback to when area control games contented themselves with being dumb and proud of it. As a dumbo, I appreciate this. I do not demand intricate combat systems with convoluted rules about order of battle, troop deployment, terrain. I’m not here to be a grognard, dammit, I’m a lord of the giant sage grouse kingdom, and I demand blood, not rules overhead!

[caption id="attachment_302380" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Blood for the bird god![/caption]

I don’t like “animals” or “nature” as a setting for a game. Sorry, Dominant Species, I’d rather play as a man than as a bug. Now, if you cast me as a group of humans who have co-evolved with gigantic landfowl and ride them around like horses, now I’m interested. Thomas, the great Quail-lord. I suppose birds are the exception to my no-animals rule.

Them’s fightin’ birds

Anyway, Clash of Galliformes is an area control euro-puzzle hybrid game where you build bird soldiers, march them around a point-to-point map, take over sites, build outposts on them, and try to level up your bird board to get better powers. At the start, you have a single minion, but you expand to develop greater resource production capacity, and you start collecting chits.

The almighty…

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One of my crotchety opinions is that, like racing, the concept of “adventuring” doesn’t often translate well to board games. The latter function as systems that often help us think about other systems, and adventure isn’t really a system, at least, it’s not a feeling or an idea that can be easily transmogrified.

The gold standard for adventure games, in my book, is Mario Papini’s De Vulgari Eloquentia, a game where you wander around Italy collecting books to create a language. While this isn’t exactly swashbuckling, it captures how hard it was to just move around in the early modern era. Crossing an ocean? Forget about it. Every decision in DVE is built around a simple question: you can do it, but do you have the horses? Tension, consequences, and stakes–that’s what an adventure needs.

[caption id="attachment_302375" align="aligncenter" width="768"] A fun cast of player characters.[/caption]

Like DVE, The forthcoming Ultimate Voyage (Final Quest of the Treasure Fleet) is a resource management eurogame that’s got its hiking boots on. Ultimate Voyage continues the trend of not exactly being a game that feels like adventuring, but it does have some novel mechanisms that blend together in new and interesting ways. As far as mapping new horizons for the genre, it makes some interesting,…

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Starship Interstellar has the parts that usually pique my interest in a game. It’s a murderer’s row of absolute bangers: abysmal graphic design, comically overlarge pieces, cubes of every shape, size, and color, and space exploration!

That might sound sarcastic, but my too-cool-for-school brain is almost immediately titillated when I encounter something that looks like a terrible product on its face. It made it to publication, so surely, there must be something to it, right?

I often hit more than I miss with this assessment, but this time it was a dramatic strikeout. My wager that goofy-looking things are often good was dead wrong.

[caption id="attachment_299691" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The table hog when I was teaching myself the game.[/caption]

Starship Cubepusher

Here’s how the game works: There’s a giant map of the solar system with 8 planets that will move around in orbits each round. You have a personal supply of fuel and resources, and a ship that you can load said fuel and resources onto, shooting it out into space to attempt to mine various planets.

Why are you doing this? Well, the sun is going to explode because we mined it too much, and we need to build an ark to escape.

To do that, we must first take Action…

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