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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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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The American Old West, the Western Frontier, the Wild West.

Known by many names, this time of American expansion—its trials and tribulations, its people, and the inevitable conflicts that arose between those people—has long been a backdrop of popular culture. Even as events were transpiring, newspapers and, later, telegrams carried the news far and wide for anyone wanting to hear it. The allure of the West inspired creatives, in the period, of all kinds: writers, artists, musicians, and even filmmakers (the very first Western was an 1899 British film called ‘Kidnapping By Indians’). And, even though the West isn’t so wild anymore and, even though it’s long been thoroughly explored, its allure still calls to us today, even if you aren’t from America. Just take a look at Pioneer Rails. 

Designed by Jeffrey D. Allers (Germany) and Matthew Dunstan (Australia), Pioneer Rails plops its players directly into the middle of the westward expansion. In Pioneer Rails, the players are railroad owners competing to create the best railroads using nothing but some pencils, a pad of paper, and some playing cards.

Game Flow

As you may have surmised, Pioneer Rails is a flip and fill game. At the beginning of the game, each player is given a pencil and a play sheet from the pad. Then, a starting player is…

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Saddle Up

Designer Paul Dennen has won my trust with his design work on Dune: Imperium (and the recently released Dune: Imperium - Uprising), the Clank! games (Clank!, Clank! In Space, and their associated expansions). Publisher Dire Wolf first caught my eye with the digital card game Eternal and has continued to put out fantastic digital implementations of some of my favorite board games. I had to pry myself away from a challenge run of the Root digital adaptation to force myself to finish some work today. So when I heard Dennen was releasing a brand-new game under a new IP, I was immediately intrigued.

Wild Tiled West is, as the name implies, a Wild West-themed polyomino tile-laying game. Players will throw dice and take turns drafting tiles to add to their growing settlements, adding pastures, roads, and buildings to complete towns or fulfill certain scoring conditions. By covering specific grids, players will receive resources that help them buy fancier buildings or take out the ne’er-do-wells lurking among their towns. After four “years” of drafting, players will score up their settlements, and the person with the most points wins!

It may sound straightforward, and that’s because it is. But is that simplicity a strength or a weakness?

Fur-ocious Fun

The first thing to…

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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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I’ve had the chance to meet some of the team at Gamelyn Games at past conventions. I always stop and stare.

How do these guys keep coming up with so many strategy games that basically fit in a handbag?

I’ve had the chance to play Tiny Epic Galaxies and Tiny Epic Quest. Both games were fine; I would give Tiny Epic Galaxies the edge in terms of gameplay, and Tiny Epic Quest the edge in production because all of the tiny meeples can be outfitted with swords and shields. For a game that can be played on an average-sized kitchen counter, the amount of game in the box is a marvel for the Tiny Epic series. Prices are just as fair, with those games costing me about $25 each.

Our Meeple Mountain team is working with Gamelyn to go “back catalog” and review some of the older Tiny Epic games that we have not covered previously for the site. I signed on for Tiny Epic Mechs (a game that I bought personally) and Tiny Epic Western, a review copy sent by the publisher.

After getting a round of plays in summer, I admit that I align very closely with the game’s current ranking on BGG. It’s a fine time, with an easy teach and a serviceable solo…

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boon (n.): a gift; a benefit enjoyed, blessing, advantage, a thing to be thankful for: sometimes without even the notion of giving, but always with that of something one has no claim to, or that might have been absent.

lake (n.): a large body of water entirely surrounded by land; properly, one sufficiently large to form a geographical feature. Or, in some board games, a syllable of misdirection in the title of a game about traveling along a river.

The thematic arc of Boonlake takes place on a normal sized board featuring a river that apparently travels around the region of Boon Lake (not pictured). Each player operates from their own ranch, a holding tank of production sites, inhabitants, cattle, houses, and settlements with ample room for a dozen modernizations that unleash beefy abilities. The game is a concoction of exploring the map, harvesting goodies, creating a tableau of project cards, and establishing fruitful settlements.

The real game of Boonlake, however, takes place on a small board holding seven action tiles. Each tile is a progression of activity that begins with the current player and radiates out to involve everyone at the table. Once a tile is employed, it is placed at the bottom of the board’s track and pushed up to close the gap. In this way, there…

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Coyote is a new bluffing game from publisher Heidelbär Games. It is part of the publisher’s Radiant Culture series, along with Blaze, Spicy, and Anansi, a quadrilogy of card games themed around various mythologies. Coyote is lightly themed around the story of Coyote, a trickster character common to many indigenous North American cultures. The art, from Yupik artist Zona Evon Shroyer, is gorgeous, and as compelling an argument as you’ll find for making board games more diverse. Heidelbär has opted for a lux production, printing the cards with a striking metallic finish. For a small game, this packs a lot of presentational oomph.

The idea of Coyote is simple enough. Each player is dealt one card, which they do not look at, and sets it in the provided base so that all the other players can see it. An additional card is placed face down in the middle of the table, and can only be inspected by players with Peek cards to spend. The cards number from -10 to 20, with two additional special cards. On your turn, you either say a total you believe to be less than the total value of all the cards—keeping in mind that your information will never be perfect since you can never see your own card—or you challenge the previous player.

…

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You’ve probably heard of Steven Aramini. Part of the team that created Circle the Wagons and Sprawlopolis, Aramini has also found individual success with titles like Barker’s Row and Animal Kingdoms. 2022 promises to be another big year for Aramini with a host of upcoming releases: River Wild, Ancient Realms, and Naturopolis (the third installment in the Sprawlopolis line, after Agropolis). Apparently not content with that, Aramini is also launching a new publishing venture under the banner of Write Stuff Games. Aramini’s inaugural game for Write Stuff is Fliptown, a rootin’ tootin’ random-and-write that promises Old West charm with modern sensibilities.

[caption id="attachment_248810" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Trail and Badlands are 2 of the game's locales, where an enterprising ne'er-do-well can build themselves a tidy fortune.[/caption]

Ante Up

The goal of Fliptown is to rack up the most red stars (i.e., victory points). These stars are earned (and lost!) directly during play, though some long-term investments yield silver stars which aren’t tallied until the end of the game. Players will also score a few extra stars for leftover cash and gold, the two economic resources that help pay costs.

Each of the game’s three rounds features five turns plus a few extra bookkeeping steps. A turn consists…

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Back Rulebenders on Kickstarter.

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Buy The Quick and the Undead on Amazon

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