Publisher Shadowborne Games burst onto the scene in 2022 with their debut hit Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. The sheer enormity of Oathsworn is impressive to say the least, from both a first-time publisher and first-time head designer Jamie Jolly, although the staff is composed of some industry veterans in both the board game and screenwriting industries,  Behemoth in both size and scope, this game comes complete with optional high-quality miniatures, terrain, and even an ‘armory’ of various weapons that can be physically equipped to the character miniatures via a removable push-fit system. Want your hero to swashbuckle two swords at a time? Just pop out their current arms and replace them with the new blades you picked up last session. The armory system and larger-than-life terrain, while completely superfluous, adds to the experience in a fun way. It’s a “they didn’t have to do that” kind of sentiment that you’ll end up seeing throughout the entirety of the game.

[caption id="attachment_310504" align="alignnone" width="1500"] To flail or chop? Decisions, decisions.[/caption]

Into the Woods

Oathsworn is a large campaign game that effectively boils down to two phases: exploration and combat. In a given ‘chapter,’ the formula is the same. Players start with a narrative-driven exploration, making choices throughout, until finally reaching a…

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Slay the Spire is a rogue-like deck-building video game that burst onto the scene in 2019 to great acclaim. Initially launched on Steam, it was an instant critical darling that soon expanded to both console and mobile platforms. While it wasn’t the first deck-building rogue-like game—Dream Quest and Hand of Fate come to mind—it still stands as the pinnacle of the genre that it helped to take mainstream, spawning many imitators but no true challengers to the throne. I’ve personally sunk at least 500 hours across multiple platforms, enthralled by its difficult but addictive gameplay. 

When I heard that a board game version of Slay the Spire was being made, I was a little surprised. Not surprised that people were cashing in on the popularity of a mega-hit and the growing board game hobby. I was surprised because Slay the Spire already feels like a board game in digital form. It has a pretty standard deck-building format. Start with a 10-card deck of basic cards, draw five cards, take actions, repeat and reshuffle as necessary. Throughout the course of the game, you’ll be adding cards to the deck, perhaps removing some of the weaker starting cards, trying to optimize that card deck engine to engineer powerful turns that hopefully translate to winning.

Granted, Slay the Spire super-sizes the format…

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I’m a huge video game junkie, spending nearly 40 years of my life grinding on the Sega Master System and the Atari 5200 as a child before moving up and around the ranks of every system you can think of through to modern-day consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PS5.

I love video games, but I usually don’t like video games ported into other formats. Movies based on video games? Usually, no thanks. TV shows based on video games? This is a growing category, and one that is getting better (Fallout and The Last of Us were worth it), but it still has a tough legacy to overcome. Board games based on video games? My experiences with board game adaptations of video games have been almost universally atrocious.

Frostpunk: The Board Game? My group thought it was terrible. Fallout: The Board Game? No…just, no. This War of Mine: The Board Game? I’m in the minority on this, but by the time I found myself going through the 18th different deck of cards to find out if my character’s fate was sealed or not, I wanted to chuck This War of Mine out the window. I did a demo of Call of Duty: The Board Game last year and it was a massive disappointment. I wanted…

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As I was packing up the 20-pound box of bits following my fifth session of The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, the new cooperative tabletop adventure game from Chip Theory Games based on The Elder Scrolls video game, a feeling of sadness began to set in.

I was getting that Voidfall feeling. A game this heavy (both literally and strategically) was going to be exceptionally hard to get back to the table, and the life of a tabletop media member can be a bit rough, at least in the “first-world problems” sense…you are always working hard to invest in a new property, only to move on to the next behemoth.

Make no mistake: The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a behemoth.

Beasts, Not Beast Mode

The Elder Scrolls Online—the massive video game world, created by the team at Bethesda Softworks—is an investment. Chip Theory spared no expense in its attempt to bring a slice of that world to life in a board game. In board game form, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era almost scared me away despite the fact that I raised my hand desperately seeking to cover it for our site. (Does “desperately” seem too strong a word? The…

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Saddle up your horses, grab your guns, and play your poker hands as we review Western Legends

Western Legends is a 2-6 player sandbox game set in the American West with a variable length set in advance by the players. For those not familiar with the term “sandbox,” it’s all about freedom and variety. Imagine all the things you could do in a sandbox: Build a sand castle, bury your feet in the sand, throw some sand in your older brother’s face while he shoves your head into a plastic bucket, etc. 

In Western Legends players have the freedom to head out into the wild, dusty yonder to do pretty much whatever they want to do. Want to be an outlaw? Well then, Annie, get your gun and go rob somebody. Want to be on the side of the law instead and go catch them varmints? Saddle up, sheriff. Maybe you want to live your inner cowboy and herd cattle down the great western trail, or be your best prospector, panning for gold in them thar’ hills. Gamble away your hard-earned bucks at the saloon or entertain yourself at the cabaret. Western Legends lets you do every one of those things and more, all in the pursuit of the all-important Legendary Points.

Once upon a Game in the…

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Updated: December 6, 2024

In my original review of Pagan: Fate of Roanoke, I talked at length about feeling as though I, and the two or three other people who read the rulebook after me, had missed a rule. It seemed far too arduous a process to get tokens out on the board, with games grinding along at a horrendous tempo as a result. I read the rulebook all the way through three different times, and two or three other people read through it in its entirety. None of us were able to identify a missed rule.

Subsequent conversations with other people who've played and enjoyed the game gave me the answer: we had indeed missed a rule. Every time you visit a villager, tokens are distributed to other villagers. I, and everyone I played with, took this to mean that tokens are taken from the visited villager and moved around. It turns out those tokens are taken from the supply and distributed amongst other villagers. Because this rule would make an enormous difference in the experience of the game, and because I will not have the opportunity to revisit the game with the corrected rule in effect, I do not feel comfortable leaving my review as it existed.

If you play Pagan, please note that the distribution of…

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The box for Unreliable Wizard immediately announces its intentions. There’s a lineup of six characters identifiable as the archetypes that populate classic RPGs, each lovingly rendered in 8-bit pixels. The key detail here, the one that shows that Unreliable Wizard designer and artist Kamibayashi knows what he’s about, is the arrow above the wizard’s head. This is no box front. This is a character selection screen.

Your selection, as both the title and the arrow indicate, has been made for you. You are the wizard. Your quest is to defeat the Demon Lord Terra, who waits in the Demon Castle at the far end of the map. In the meantime, you have to make your way across that hexagonal map, moving one space at a time.

Most spaces are there to create the illusion of freedom, to give you the impression that you’re in a wide-open world full of possibilities. They have no other purpose. You enter those spaces, you pay a certain amount of health—travel is exhausting—and you go about your business. Every now and then, though, you encounter a space harboring a monster.

Unreliable Wizard appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

From card games to social deduction, mega games to role-playing adventures, the possibilities of board games might seem endless. However, this wasn’t always the case. In the late 2000s, 'narrative' games were far less common than they are today. The concept of app-integrated storytelling or voice-acted narratives wasn’t even an idea at the time. If you wanted to have your story experience in a board game form, options were scarce, and the most well-known at the time was Tales of the Arabian Nights.

As you can tell from the game’s name, it draws inspiration from the classic “One Thousand and One Nights” as players traverse the lands to seek fortune and glory. Instead of complex mechanics, they are told about their situation through a book and the players decide on their response to the situation. To some players, this was a great game, especially for families that want to tell silly stories. For others, like myself, we found the game to be quite random and nonsensical, often overextending its welcome.

When I heard about Tales of the Arthurian Knights, saying I was interested is downplaying my reaction. I loved the idea of Tales of the Arabian Nights, but I was yearning for something that was a bit more consistent and I was quite curious to see fifteen years’ worth…

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I don’t know what they put in the water at PostCurious, but it’s working. Rita Orlov and her cohort have made a name for themselves over the last few years by publishing a remarkable series of escape rooms, including 2022’s startling The Light in the Mist and this year’s masterful The Morrison Game Factory. In a market dominated by the long-past-their-prime Exit games and the under-appreciated Unlock series, PostCurious distinguishes itself by offering games that push the boundaries of escape room narrative. These are games that stick with you not only as a series of clever and satisfying puzzles, but as stories.

The scope of PostCurious’s narrative ambitions is generally matched by the scale of their games. The Light in the Mist takes 4-5 hours. The Emerald Flame hit around 7-8. I haven’t cracked open my copy of Threads of Fate yet, but the box promises 10+ hours of work. Those are not rookie numbers. The idea of sitting down—over a series of sessions, mind—for that much puzzle can be overwhelming.

It is with that in mind that PostCurious has started Ministry of Lost Things, a series of more modest offerings. Designed with a less-seasoned audience in mind, Case 1: Lint Condition takes about two hours when all is said and done, spread out over five chapters,…

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Generally speaking, I am not an RPG guy.

From time to time, I can be tricked into Gloomhaven-like gaming experiences. While games like Gloomhaven feature some elements typical in a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, the main focus is on the combat and the loot, not the storytelling.

Don’t get me wrong—I love good storytelling, especially in my visual arts, like TV and film. But in my board games, I want action. If I only get an hour or two to play a game every night, I wanna get in there!

As long as we are speaking broadly, I’m also not a tabletop campaign guy.

Maybe you’ve experienced this, too—it is getting harder and harder to get people to come over to play the same game 12-15 times. (Sometimes, it’s hard to get people to play the same game twice, am I right?) If anything, post-COVID life killed the ability to do campaign games. During COVID, we found another couple or two to “bubble up” and play campaign games, or my wife and I did two-player games on our own, because no one had anything else to do.

But when the world opened back up, getting a weekly run of games like Clank! Legacy—Acquisitions Inc. became almost impossible in my circles. Who is coming out…

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The year is 2013. It’s October or November, skirting the edge of winter in Connecticut. The time is approximately 11:24 pm. I’ve just come back from a game night at my friend Namita’s apartment, where I played Pandemic for the first time. I’m sitting in my garden apartment, perched on the bamboo-and-denim sofa I found a few months earlier at a local thrift store. I hold a Playstation 3 controller in my hands, having decided to knock out one level of Shadow of the Colossus before bed. There is a three-quarters eaten bowl of Annie’s White Cheddar on the table in front of me. It won’t be there for long.

A knock at the door.

Unexpected. I don’t know many people in the area, and I certainly don’t know anyone who would be out and about at this hour. Save for the glow of the TV, all of my lights are off. The blinds are drawn. I briefly consider pretending I am asleep.

Another knock.

I get up slowly and raise a single slat to peek outside, where I see two severe-looking individuals in suits.

A third and final knock.

Worried about a noise complaint, I open the apartment door.

“Andrew Lynch,” one of them says, more a statement than a question.

“Yes?”

“We need you to come with…

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In Maps of Misterra, you’re playing as explorers, mapping out the island’s landscapes—landscapes that might change from turn to turn, say Mountains become Forests. That’s because there’s a difference between terrain types that are ‘confirmed’ and what your sponsor has said they want to see on your map. Score the most points at the end of the game and you’ll be the winner.

If that sounds a bit confusing, stay with me. The mists will part as we get the game to the table.

[caption id="attachment_305395" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Maps of Misterra: The Box[/caption]

Cartographers At the Ready

You’ll place the large central board in the middle of the table, then hand each player their own smaller version of the map. Depending on the player count, a number of Forests will be placed, full-color side up. (More on this soon.)

[caption id="attachment_305401" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] A 3 or 4 player game ready to be played.[/caption]

Each player will also get a Cartographer of their choice and three Claim tokens in their matching color.

At the top of the board, place the four stacks of terrain tiles full-color side down. Then shuffle the…

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Pencil erasers. You know the sort, the molded 3D variety that were never intended to erase. They were more like elementary school status symbols, beacons of personality that wagged in the air as you filled in bubbles with your Ticonderoga No. 2. Truth be told, they were a bit of a nuisance for how they threw your pencil out of balance, but they looked so cool.

Finally, someone has made a game with erasers as player markers—minus the hole necessary to properly top a pencil. It was the artwork that first drew me in as I listed Kyoto No Neko among my most anticipated list for GenCon 2024. Even as I tore into the shrink to check out the illustrations, though, I had to pause to admire the kitties made of the stuff of erasers. Endearing, they are.

In fact, everything about Kyoto No Neko has a charming look. The square board is flanked on all sides by stair-stepped player-specific territories to create a unique overall shape. The finished grid is an overhead map of the city: rooftops, terraces, and roadways for kitty travel. Cute little kitty paw tokens are scattered about, face-down and waiting to be discovered.

Feline It Out

The whole of the game is a series of skill checks. Every token requires one of several…

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