Thingstead falls into that strangest category of board games: I don’t have any interest in playing it, I don’t think it’s particularly good, and I’d also believe entirely anyone who said it’s a masterpiece. Scott Almes’s two-player area-control game is doing just enough new and different things that, though I think it works about as well as a hang glider fashioned from Swiss cheese, I could see it being exactly what certain people are looking for.

The area control works across two dimensions. Each turn, you play a card, either to exert pull on one of the four Clans, or to add influence to one of the seven viking Elders around the central ring. Both options net you points come the end of the game, but you may have other motives at any particular time. The Clans also give you either temporary or permanent access to various powers, depending on which Clan card sits at the top of that particular Clan deck. The Elders, meanwhile, serve as the game’s tempo control. If enough influence is placed on enough Elders, the game comes to an end.

You…

The post Thingstead Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Modern Euro-style strategy game design is in full swing.

I know that some of our peers in the media and content creation space have bailed on the concept of medium-weight Euros. These types of strategy games are sometimes getting too complex without matching the elegance that similar games possessed even five years ago. However, 2024 has been a banner year for games that shake up the formula just enough to warrant a second or third look.

A case in point: Men-Nefer (2024, Ludonova), the newest design from German P. Milián, who has given us Bitoku, Bitoku: Resutoran, Sabika, and Bamboo. Bamboo was lighter fare, a game that ultimately proved to be more interesting as a production than a decision space.

Both Bitoku and Sabika proved resilient within my gaming circles, particularly with the turn mechanic of Bitoku and the rondel element of Sabika. I’ve held onto both games because I had so much fun exploring each one, even if I think they will be really hard to table on a consistent basis. You know greatness when you see it, right? For the players in my game-o-sphere, Milián is clearly onto something.

Milián’s success continues with Men-Nefer, a thematic sibling to Sabika, right down to a…

The post Men-Nefer Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I previously reviewed Ancient Knowledge, a solid tableau building card game designed by Rémi Mathieu and published by IELLO, back in 2023. My review group enjoyed the game, although not exactly as written—the base game badly overstayed its welcome, so we found more magic in a house rule that shortened the game from 14 cards in a player’s “Past” to just 10. That brought the game time down from about 30 minutes per player to 15-20 minutes per player, with three-player games wrapping up in about an hour.

And given the near-complete lack of player interaction, that’s where Ancient Knowledge needed to live. With any tableau-building game featuring a boatload of cards (see: Terraforming Mars, Ark Nova, Clank!, etc.), all I need out of an expansion to a game like Ancient Knowledge is quite simple: more cards. Ideally, you sprinkle a new game mechanic, a mini-game board off to the side that expands my options on a turn, or maybe a new game mode if the designers are feeling fancy.

Ancient Knowledge: Heritage arrived on my doorstep, ready to answer some of my needs. I don’t think this expansion has quite enough new/interesting cards for me—between Builder cards and Technology cards, the new additions grow the base game’s decks by 25%—but it does introduce…

The post Ancient Knowledge: Heritage Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The Concept

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, would have been a sight to see. We can only imagine now what they would have looked like. I like to picture lush, green rain forests on top of all the roofs, and vines stretching between the buildings. I picture birds of different varieties, a multitude of colorful insects and flowers, waterfalls and mosses dotting all the great pillars and walls. I imagine it would have been the sort of place one could lose themself in, and that would be perfectly okay.

When Geek Attitude Games introduced Babylon, designed by Olivier Grégoire, and Board Game Geek’s summary was “Build a three-dimensional version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” I knew I had to play this game. When images were released of beautifully flowered tiles stacked on pillars, with fountains, bridges, statues, and stairs, my mouth watered. This game sounded cool and looked cool. I didn’t even have to walk by a table to see the table presence this would have.

[caption id="attachment_310489" align="aligncenter" width="881"] Though, seeing this would definitely make me want to play.[/caption]

The game, as it was summarized, has you building your own 3D Hanging Gardens. To do that, you’ll be selecting flower…

The post Babylon Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The cover art for the new skirmish game Battalion: War of the Ancients (2024, Osprey Games) drew me in. It’s one of the best box covers for a game this year. However, as great as the artwork is, I was even more excited by the designers listed at the top: Paolo Mori and Francesco Sirocchi.

Mori has made a number of great games—Blitzkrieg! World War II in 20 Minutes (yes, that’s the official name of the game) is my favorite, but I’ve enjoyed single plays of other Mori games, such as Ethnos (and Archeos Society, which I guess is “New Ethnos”) and the two Libertalia games, the “OG” as well as the Stonemaier update from a couple years ago. The thing I have enjoyed most about Mori’s designs: the games are easy to teach and get right into the action, with gameplay durations that match the number printed on the side of the box.

And that’s why I loved Blitzkrieg! Like most people, I did not believe that someone could design a fun head-to-head war game that really could be played in 20 minutes. But Blitzkrieg! was a revelation—it was always over in about 20 minutes. Caesar!—-the follow-up to Blitzkrieg!—was a game I only tried once, but it was also over in about 20 minutes,…

The post Battalion: War of the Ancients Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I love shedding and trick-taking games because of the drama. It comes in stages. There’s the initial, private drama of looking at your hand, picturing the round ahead and how you have to play it. There’s the acute pin prick of each new trick and new card, the anticipation that condenses around the edges of the table as whoever leads throws down. Most delicious of all, those moments when you succeed in pulling off a daring maneuver, those moments when you are able to shake off misfortune before it has the chance to find you.

These games are fun, you know?

They rely to some extent on the chaos of a deck of cards, on the mathematics of distribution. As a result, shedding and trick-taking are notoriously tricky to translate into a two-player format. Sail and Fox in the Forest are basically evergreens at this point, but two-player trick-taking games are still rare. Two-player shedding games, Haggis aside, are almost non-existent. There’s a good reason for that: it’s hard to make shedding interesting when there are only two players. There’s always something of a novelty to even the idea of attempting one. That’s why I was so interested when Thomas Lehmann, designer of Race for the Galaxy and Dice Realms among many others, announced…

The post Chu Han Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

From the rulebook:

“‛RESAFA’ takes place during the 3rd century AD in the area of today’s Middle East. Resafa now lies in ruins in modern-day Syria but at this time it was a fortified desert outpost which flourished as a stop along important caravan routes.

In the game, players represent merchants who are establishing their businesses in Resafa. They build workshops which produce goods, resources and camels. They also build gardens between their workshops which help generate more resources. They visit nearby trading centres to buy and sell goods that they transport using their camel caravans and they can also build trading bases in those locations. Resafa had no local sources of water so it depended heavily on large water tanks to collect the spring and winter rainwaters to make the area habitable. Players also build water tanks and canals to distribute that water where it is needed.”

Overview

In Resafa, players begin the game with a set of cards that they will use to perform actions on their turn or, when flipped 180 degrees, a different set of actions. In addition to the two action icons printed on each card, the tops and bottom edges of the cards have one of four possible colors assigned to them. When a player selects a card for its action, they…

The post Resafa Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Are you a fan of the tabletop classic Pandemic?

The cooperative “firefighting” classic designed by Matt Leacock was first released in 2008, before a number of Pandemic spinoffs and legacy games began to hit the market. I think Pandemic: Legacy Season 1 is the best legacy game I’ve ever played, and after I worked through two different campaigns, I retired. I knew, right after finishing my second campaign, that I loved Pandemic so much that I would never want to play it any other way ever again.

I haven’t played many co-op games that do the Pandemic formula well; even this year, I signed up to try Healthy Heart Hospital because I heard it was a fun take on that format. (Sadly, it was not.) Our partners at Ion Game Design offered a review copy of their Pandemic-style co-op game Sammu-ramat, and I happily raised my hand to cover the game because I am exploring the majority of Ion’s catalog.

Sammu-ramat, designed by Besime Uyanik, takes the event-driven Pandemic format to a new setting and uses a number of different mechanics to concoct its own formula. If you want to put out a variety of different fires in a unique thematic setting that plays in about an hour, I can happily recommend Sammu-ramat as a game…

The post Sammu-ramat Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

From Wikipedia: “In the early 6th century Judah rebelled against Babylon and was destroyed (586 BCE). The royal court and the priests, prophets and scribes were taken into captivity in Babylon. There the exiles blamed their fate on disobedience to God and looked forward to a future when a penitent and purified people would be allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.”

Decades later, this future they looked forward to came to pass.

The game Ezra and Nehemiah chronicles the challenges that the noted priest and scribe, Ezra, and cup-bearer to king Artaxerxes of Persia, Nehemiah, faced as they worked to restore the city of Jerusalem to its former glory and bring the word of the gospel to the people therein. In the game, players will be using their hand of cards and the workers at their disposal to clear away the rubble of the destroyed city, rebuild the walls and the temple, and teach the Torah to the people.

It is worth noting here that, while Ezra and Nehemiah is inspired by biblical events and takes place in the setting of the story, it is not a religious game. It is a meaty, thinky eurogame with a lot of moving parts and interconnected systems. The aim of the game is to earn the most points by…

The post Ezra and Nehemiah Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

“Yes, but which sylLAble receives the emPHAsis?” I asked. “Is it P’RAM-i-dice, like Paradise with an extra half-beat? PY-ram-i-dice, which begs pronouncing the first syllable as if I were Archimedes? Pyramid-ICE, as if it were a beverage? Or maybe emphasizing every syllable—PIE-RAM-EYE-DICE!”

I guess it’s a good thing when a game offers that sort of conversation before the teach, a conversation that inevitably ends with allowing the eventual winner to select the pronunciation that will live in perpetuity.

Pyramidice is a dice rolling pyramid builder from Ares Games and the mind of Luigi Ferrini, who had a semi-hit a decade back with Stronghold’s The Golden Ages. Rather than building a civilization, players are marking their civilization with pyramids on behalf of the Pharaoh while seeking the favor of the gods—and the occasional sacred cat.

Building blocks

Pyramidice is, in many ways, a procedural affair—add a stone die to the quarry, roll a number of dice determined by available workers, then choose from a list of possibilities until the dice are spent. You might reroll, attain a god card, send a stone die to a pyramid, carry out a god action, discard a die to refresh a card, or discard two dice for a point. As needed, you’ll discard cats to modify dice.

The post Pyramidice Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

When the folks at NorthStar Game Studio call, I always answer.

That’s because NorthStar published one of my ten favorite games of 2023, Inheritors, and they also delivered my second-favorite solo game of 2023, Eila and Something Shiny. Both games were designed by Jeffrey CCH, so when NorthStar offered a review copy of their upcoming Gen Con release, Sacred Valley, I jumped at the chance to cover it.

The game arrived quickly, and after opening the box I was greeted by a rulebook printed in a very large typeface, making it very “old man friendly” because my eyesight gets a little worse every year. One pass of the rules and I was golden, and after my first play with the kids, one thing became clear right away—Sacred Valley is family-weight gold. The simple ruleset and limited actions made the game instantly accessible, and my 10-year-old commented that they would play Sacred Valley again right away “if we didn’t need to eat dinner right now.”

So, my kids love Sacred Valley. What did I think of the game? Read on.

There Are Only Four Actions

When you can teach a game from the back of a player screen, you know the teach is gonna be quick.

…

The post Sacred Valley Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Nearly two years ago, I sang the praises of 7 Wonders: Architects as worthy of a place in the Wonder-verse alongside its more mature colleagues, 7 Wonders and 7 Wonders: Duel. I spoke of speed and charm as if it were destined to be a staple family game. 

I still believe all of those things. In fact, 7 Wonders: Architects has remained a steady play in our family and is one of our most-played titles overall. The younger kiddos still adore it (now six and eleven years old), and the teenagers still join us for the experience. 

After demonstrating whole weeks of patience following the release, we grabbed a copy of 7 Wonders: Architects – Medals, the first expansion, from an out-of-town FLGS and brought it to the vacation table. What a great decision. 

Wonder me this…

Medals brings two new Wonders to the table—the Roman Colosseum and the ancient city of Ur. The Colosseum twice allows for the theft of a single card from another player—as tribute—only to then provide a free card from the center as benevolent compensation. Ur brings the game’s beloved Kitty home to roost along with a free card. These mid-game triggers fit the game like a glove without feeling contrived.

More significantly, the titular Medals are a stack of stickered…

The post 7 Wonders: Architects – Medals Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Clash of Galliformes Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.