I recently took my second trip into Rolling Realms land, with a multi-night spin through the 12 latest realms conceived for Rolling Realms Redux (2024, Stonemaier Games).

It’s a system that I enjoyed the first time around, especially after I realized that inviting friends to join me was a mistake. The first Rolling Realms could be played with an infinite number of players, as long as everyone had a deck of the Realms to write on, because everyone shares the same die roll.

Rolling Realms was conceived by Stonemaier head Jamey Stegmaier as a way to connect gamers via Facebook Live during the height of the pandemic. Rolling Realms Redux, then, is somewhat interesting as an anti-pandemic tool: now I only play games in person, instead of only playing them through a web browser.

To ensure I showed this to at least one of my game groups, I gathered members of my review crew for a four-player game of Rolling Realms Redux. Everyone, separately, enjoyed themselves—the Rolling Realms system is an interesting puzzle, no matter what Realms are in play.

But it’s weird to sit at a table with other players and basically not talk at all, right?

Pivot to Solo

Rolling Realms Redux (designed by both Stegmeier…

The post Rolling Realms Redux Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

My diagnosis is that fewer players means less tension. Consider Tichu, which is exclusively a game for four. When I meld, I have to sit through the agonizing possibility that any of three other players—including my teammate—might muck up my plans. Every play is followed by a series of three tensions and (hopefully) three releases. There’s a wonderful arc to that. In Haggis, which is primarily for two, you don’t get the same dramatic build. My opponent either beats my set or they don’t. That’s less interesting. A shedding game for two, I believe, has to exceed that limitation.

I don’t mean to say that two-person shedding can’t be done well. I’m sure it’s possible. While a small handful of designers have put a good deal of energy into cracking the formula, it’s not as though our best scientists have been working on this problem for decades. Unlike its close cousin trick-taking, shedding is a relatively ancillary genre within hobby gaming, so there’s little market reward to encourage experiments along the lines of…

The post Greasy Spoon, Dickory, and Lepidoptery: A Study in Two-Person Shedding Games appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game, Complica, was released in a magazine in 1985 (although he’d self-published games before then as well).

Since then Knizia has designed and published over 800 games, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.

To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

This time: The Letter ‘C’.

C – Carcassonne: The Castle (2003)

A recent interview with Knizia suggests that he steers clear of games by other designers partly to avoid compromising his own creativity and partly because he hasn't much time around playtesting his own designs.

Sometimes, however, he looks up from his drawers of works-in-progress (expanded from 40 to 80 during the pandemic) to take a reading of the tabletop weather. The results are games that employ mechanisms of the moment whilst feeling distinctly Knizian at the same time. For instance:

• The Quest for El Dorado is Knizia’s take on…

The post The Reiner Knizia Alphabet – The Letter ‘C’ appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Another year in the books! Our writing team recently shared an article with our single-favorite games of 2024. However, I played a lot of other games last year…more than 240 different games, in fact!

In the spirit of my roundup of the highs and lows from the games I played in 2022 and 2023, please enjoy a few other awards and my personal top 10 from 2024.

(A note about this article: these winners are based on articles I wrote in 2024, not necessarily games that were released in 2024. Game release dates are pretty fuzzy, between prototypes, crowdfunding pre-production copies, retail releases, second print runs, games that first debuted in another country before I got my hands on them, and/or “deluxified” anniversary versions. Just pretend that everything rated here came out in 2024, because it did…at least, to me.)

With that, let’s jump in, using some of our legacy Diamond Climber award categories and some of my own categories too. Let’s go!!

Favorite Gaming Moment of 2024: Meeting Vital Lacerda and Ian O’Toole, SPIEL 2024

2024 was an amazing year and the quality of games that hit the table was the best year I’ve seen across my four years writing for Meeple Mountain. But…

The post Justin’s Highs and Lows for 2024! appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Concordia- Tom Franklin

After hearing about Concordia for years, I finally bought a copy…and then let it sit on my Shelf o’ Shame for way too long. This is such a great game!

You’re seeking to move around an ancient map, by sail or by foot, building houses in cities that will get you the goods those cities produce. On a turn, you play one of your cards that determine the action you’ll be taking, including a card that allows you to copy someone else’s card or to reclaim all your cards. Resources, places to store those resources, and money are always tight, creating a really fine eurogame puzzle of efficiencies and generating points.

After playing it twice at my weekly game night, I fell into the rabbit hole of Concordia on Steam. I’d still be playing it if I didn’t have this annoying work stuff that gets in my way on a daily basis.

Seriously, if you like Eurogame worker placement games and haven’t tried Concordia yet, you need to play it!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Tom Franklin.
[mm-productlinking id="311776" template="image" include_button="true" width="200"…

The post Quick Peaks – Concordia, Spotlight, Cosmic Encounter Duel, Moon River, and Undergrove appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game Complica was released in 1985 in a magazine (although he’d self-published games before then as well). Over the last 40 years, Knizia has designed and published over 800 games, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.

To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

This time: The Letter ‘B’.

B – Battle Line (2000)

Knizia’s oeuvre in B-major includes many strong contenders, but it’s 2000’s Battle Line that claims the spot with its tense two-player experience.

In Battle Line, opponents play cards to their side of a line of 9 flags, winning a flag if they have the strongest poker hands of three cards assigned to it. The player who first claims 5 of the 9 flags or 3 flags in a row wins the game. Spicing the mix are tactics cards that mess with the rules, as well as the ability to claim a flag by proving that your opponent can’t…

The post The Reiner Knizia Alphabet – The Letter ‘B’ appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Over the past few years, my tabletop gaming group has really made an effort to try playing other roleplaying games outside of Pathfinder. By being more receptive to other systems, we have found that every game has its role as far as serving as a vessel for storytelling. Some games, like Blades in the Dark, excel at stories centered around heists and ne'er-do-wells. Pathfinder is for groups that want tactical, grid-based combat. And the Arkham Horror RPG, an extension of its universe established in the board gaming world, scratches the itch for 1920's eldritch horror. We've had an opportunity to play with the Arkham Horror RPG Starter Set - Hungering Abyss, and sink our teeth into the system and its world to see how it stacks up against other games.

Arkham Horror RPG Overview

There are two distinct parts of this review—how the Arkham Horror RPG plays as a whole, and discussing if the starter set fulfills its obligations and promise of being a suitable entry point for the game. We'll start with the game, extracting the base rules that are sprinkled throughout the included adventure.

First thing's first, the Arkham Horror RPG is a d6 system, meaning that it uses the standard 6-sided dice that serve as the most common random number generator around. Success of an action…

The post Arkham Horror RPG Starter Set – Hungering Abyss Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The footage was fascinating. In-between pitches, the camera panned wide to shots of fans sitting at the game, watching. Some of our fascination came from looking at fashion from the late 1980s, an article in and of itself based on some of the facial hair alone.

But the part that really snowed me about the game? In the 1980s, people went to sporting events and just…watched the game. No cell phones. No “Jumbotron”...the Cubs didn’t get a video scoreboard until 2015. (Heck, the Cubs didn’t even start playing at night until 1988, if you can believe that!)

Distraction—at least, in the form that I think of it nowadays—was not available in 1987. I think about this a lot now when I teach tabletop games to new players, because distraction is the reason why it is so difficult to teach a complex Euro to new players in 2024. But that extends to every type of game, from family-weight co-op games to trick-takers to Ameritrash dice-chuckers to Voidfall.…

The post Every Game Needs a Player Aid appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Lost Omens Divine Mysteries Overview

Written from the perspective of Yivali—a nosoi psychopomp who is essentially a scribe for Pharasma, Golarion's resident Goddess of Birth and Death—Lost Omens: Divine Mysteries focuses on everything deific in the Pathfinder universe. The level of detail accomplished within these pages is staggering, considering that you won't only be learning about the major, most well-known deities known as the Inner Sea Gods.

The entire first chapter is dedicated to musings and essays on faith and the divine, such as how to worship a dead god or how to ascend to godhood. I won't say that these pages are necessarily common sense—because there are a variety of included historical examples to support the writing—but the meat of the book comes in…

The post Pathfinder Lost Omens Divine Mysteries RPG appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The Crew expounds on ideas seen classically in games like Bridge and Pinochle, with group objectives replacing the partnerships seen in more traditional games. Each mission has a distinct set of objectives, which ramp up in complexity and difficulty through the campaign.

The escalating difficulty makes for a game that is always pushing you to think a little bit harder than the last time you played, with the game starting with very few objectives and ending with considerably more. It requires creative thinking, a good team understanding and improvisational skills.

Trust your team

Just like your best way to communicate might be by playing a card, your team might be playing that way, too. Especially as you play further in the game and you and your teammates have multiple goals, let the goals they select guide you: They know what they have, and they know what they can…

The post Top 6 things I learned playing all 50 missions of The Crew appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Quick Peaks – Fire Tower, Bower, Dorfromantik: The Board Game, Ultimatch, and The Tragedy of Othello appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Over the last 40 years, Knizia has designed and published over 800 games, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.

To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

This time: The Letter ‘A’.

A – Age of War (2014)

But what about 2003’s Amun-Re I hear you ask? Yes, it’s only the first letter of the alphabet and already we’re off to a controversial start. Hear us out though: whilst undoubtedly good and deserving of Alley Cat Games’ recent Amun-Re 20th anniversary edition, Amun-Re isn’t in Knizia’s top 3 auction games. It’s not even his best auction game set in ancient Egypt (I’m looking at you letter 'R'). 

Age of War on the other hand… well, that’s one of Knizia’s strongest small and speedy dice games, which is quite the achievement in a very populous category. A reimplementation of…

The post The Reiner Knizia Alphabet – The Letter ‘A’ appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Meeple Mountain Year in Review – 2024 appeared first on Meeple Mountain.