In the fall of 2023 I stumbled across a lightweight card game called Vegetable Stock, originally from the publisher Taiwan Boardgame Design. This is a “market manipulation” game in which players choose cards for their personal “portfolio” and leave cards which may affect the value of said portfolios. Since my love of light card games is well known, but my love of clever puns less so, I immediately ordered a copy and had it shipped from Taiwan. It turns out the game is a delight, and fits perfectly into that light filler game category that I so adore. Now imagine my delight when Arcane Wonders licensed Vegetable Stock for release in North America and handed me a review copy at last year’s Essen SPIEL.

Vegetable Stock is soup-er!

How’d They Get All that Flavor into Vegetable Stock?

A quick note on setup: shuffle the 45 vegetable cards and place the deck in the middle of the table, dealing 1 card per player face up, with 1 additional card. So in a 4 player game you’d deal 5 cards face up. Take the 5 price cards and lay them out, then shuffle the 5 market cards and place them on top of the price cards in descending order: the…

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Given the mind-boggling number of games designed by Dr. Reiner Knizia (sitting at 765 on BGG, as of this writing) it’s no wonder so many consider the German mathematician to be the Board Game GOAT. For the past 40+ years, he’s been creating innovative and accessible games, but what’s always impressed me has been the staying power of some of his earliest titles. The man is no stranger to auction and bidding games, with classics like High Society and Ra to his credit. However, there is a reason that Modern Art, in particular, has been consistently reprinted since  it was originally released back in 1992.

I got 5 on it

In Modern Art, each player is a curator of a world-famous museum, buying and selling paintings by 5 different artists, using 5 different auction rules, until the 5th painting from a single artist is revealed and the round ends. Value is assessed based on the popularity of each artist and money is paid out for every painting purchased that round. Four rounds of this and the museum with the most money wins. Buy low, sell high, and try to grab the best deals. Simple enough, right? Well, this is very much a case of a game with an…

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Regardless of first impressions, however, players will undoubtedly remark in the endgame about the impact of the explosion and the need to be more attentive next time. 

1920 Wall Street (hereafter referred to as 1920) is a card-driven stock trading game. Players travel around a rondel, purchasing cards, changing market values, collecting shares, and exerting themselves to determine the effect of the final explosion, after which total money rules the day. In many ways it’s exactly what a stock game ought to be, with a dash of disruptive historical flavor. 

The end

Two anticipations govern the decision-making in 1920.…

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My very first review for Meeple Mountain covered the 2020 Eagle-Gryphon Games (EGG) release Rococo: Deluxe Edition, based on the original Rococo, released in 2013. Rococo, featuring players taking on the role of dressmakers in late 18th-century France, is great and the deluxe version is gloriously exotic, with some of the most beautiful components EGG has ever produced…which is saying something, since nearly all the EGG games I have tried feature handsome production elements.

I had one major complaint about the Rococo: Deluxe Edition release…here’s the quote from my original review:

“My main issue with Rococo Deluxe? The “Deluxe” part. $110 for a game like this is frankly ridiculous. Why is there not a Rococo Peasant version for, say, $50? I would buy that right now.”

The only reason I don’t own a copy of Rococo: Deluxe Edition is the price. That’s it. So, imagine my surprise when I learned that two of the three original designers of Rococo—Louis and Stefan Malz—built a game in the Rococo universe that is roughly 75% base Rococo, in a package that will retail in the $60 USD range.

You’d buy that, right?

For me, it’s a no-brainer. La Pâtisserie Rococo, the new version of the game available now via crowdfunding, uses most of the framework from the Rococo base game…

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One of the few disappointments I experienced during 2024’s SPIEL event in Essen, Germany happened on the second day of the show.

Despite meeting with our contact at Devir early in the weekend, I still wasn’t fast enough to grab a review copy of The White Castle: Matcha, the new expansion to The White Castle, my #6 game of 2023. At a show where I have sometimes grabbed as many as 50 new games, missing out on just one game shouldn’t have been much of a thing, right?

But I LOVED the base game. I loved the tension in each turn, thanks to the nine-turn structure. I loved the production. I loved the variability in set-up. I liked the solo variant. I loved the player aid on the back of the rulebook, despite the fact that I never really needed it.

Now, I didn’t always love the end-game scores. Depending on die rolls and player count, I sometimes finished a game with less than 40 points, in a game that comes with an “80+” points tracker. (I have never seen a player score more than 75 points in any of my six plays, across all player counts. This gave me a weird feeling: am I playing The White Castle badly? Inefficiently? Flat-out wrong?

I received a…

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Every now and then, I come across a board game design in which the pieces on the board don’t really belong to anyone. It never fails to enchant me. I love building board presence, but there’s something about the impermanence of possession in Pax Pamir, the inability to take ownership for granted, that I find particularly rich. Develop a position all you want; it might play to my advantage. The idea that nothing on the board is yours is antithetical to several decades of board game design. Even in cooperative anti-colonial designs like Spirit Island, you have presence on the board, physical evidence that you, and you in particular, were there.

Though I am hardly an expert, Mac Gerdts’s 2006 release Imperial is the earliest design I know of that fills the board with pieces belonging to no one player. That map of Europe is packed to the gills with the buildings and armies of the Great Nations of Europe, but players aren’t playing as the nations. They are the great barons of capital, manipulating European conflict to their individual advantage. The second version, Imperial 2030, moved things into the (increasingly near) future. For 7 Empires, a new release from publisher PD Verlag, the conflict is moved back a century or two to the age of the Hapsburgs and…

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If you’ve followed some of my previous content, it’s fair to say that I’ve been playing one too many train games…or you might say that I have a healthy respect for train games. I have a couple groups that are going hard on a wide spectrum of these experiences, from lighter “cube rails” games like Ride the Rails through route-building Euros like Nucluem, all the way to proper 18xx games like Railways of the Lost Atlas, 1880: China, and 18Korea, the latter of which was so ridiculous that it’s a borderline 18xx party game!

So, while I won’t profess to being a hardcore train game junkie, I’m pretty close. When Capstone Games launched a crowdfunding campaign for the fourth game in the Iron Rails series, Age of Rail: South Africa, I stayed in touch to ensure I could get a review copy when the game’s fulfillment began this fall.

Given my network—and the new game’s breezy 60-minute playtime—I knew it would be easy to get Age of Rail: South Africa to the table quickly, so I got three plays done within a three-week stretch. And because my group is familiar with two other games in the Iron Rails series, Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge, Age of Rail: South Africa was an…

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Monopoly is one of those games that no longer needs an introduction. It is a fair bet that if you are reading this, you were familiar with the game by the time you exited elementary school. Scrabble is not quite as ubiquitous, but it is close. These games are not at all similar. Monopoly is a real estate trading game of cutthroat business transactions intermixed with an exorbitant amount of pure luck, while Scrabble is a game where you are trying to make the most valuable words (crossword style) with the random selection of letters you have and the bonus spaces scattered over the game board. So how do you mix the two?

[caption id="attachment_310351" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A lot being said on the cover of this game. Not much is realized in the game itself.[/caption]

The Mashup

For purposes of this review, I am going to take a Back in the Day approach: I am going to assume that you have at least a cursory knowledge of Monopoly and Scrabble. What I will be describing below is how this game differs as it blends the two games.

The Monopoly Half

In my opinion, Monopoly is not a great game. It is not horrible, by any means, it…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In my Focused on Feld series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2024’s Civolution, his 41st game. This game marks a couple of firsts for Stefan Feld. For one, it’s his first ever collaboration with publisher Deep Print Games. Secondly, Civolution is Stefan Feld’s first foray into the realm of classic science fiction (unless you’re counting 2014’s Aquasphere, in which case it’s his second). Regardless, as you’ll soon see, there’s no arguing that Civolution is his heaviest game to date.

Overview

In Civolution, players take on the roles of deities that are taking the final exam in their Civilization Building 101 class. The exam is being proctored by a highly-developed AI called Agera. Over the course of the game, players will be tasked with things such as exploring the map set before them (populating it and exploiting it for its resources) and developing their civilization to…

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To warm up for a few plays of the recent expansion Nucleum: Australia (2024, Board&Dice), I got the base game to the table to ensure I remembered all the edge case rules around tile placement, network restrictions, end-game scoring, and how to power buildings. I asked two of the guys from my strategy group to join me, and we all committed to watching a teach video to ensure we had all the rules down.

“Nucleum is hard, man,” one player said during the second turn (!!) of our first re-entry play, a reminder of the dozens of times we said that when playing the base game in 2023.

He was right. He is still right. Nucleum IS hard. Of course, that’s the deal when you try to play a lot of hard, heavy strategy games—it’s hard to remember all the rules, it’s hard to build a winning strategy, and it’s really hard to get games like Nucleum to the table. (Oh, to dream of having a neighbor who lives across the street, always looking for a friend or two to play the copy of Voidfall they have already set up in their professional gaming space. If you know anyone like that in Chicago, please call me!)

Nucleum is a tough cookie, but the arc is so satisfying…

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At this stage, I will essentially review anything published by Capstone Games. Clay Ross and his extended network consistently pull in gems that have a certain kind of buzz for the Eurogame design elements I love. Between the “Iron Rail” series of cube rails games, the Terra Mystica family of products, and a little-known zoo simulation game called Ark Nova, Capstone has gotten it right much more often than other publishers.

Stephens (a 2024 release designed by the Portuguese design duo known as Costa & Rȏla) is the latest in a long line of medium-weight Euros with a handsome production, a relatively low playtime, and a simple turn structure and cardboard money chits. (I used the included money for the first of my three review plays before pivoting to poker chips.) It has a novel reset/clean-up system that, in the right hands, leads to snappy play and lots of chances to gather income that will be used to further other in-game goals.

In the wrong hands, this system leads to one of the few problems a Euro design can possess—the ability to actually do everything a game has to offer. Many of these games push hard on finding an ending that ensures that players have the chance to only do some, maybe most, of a…

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Near the end of my first pass of the rules for the new Board&Dice strategy game Windmill Valley, something caught my eye: ”Expert Variant.”

The rules for this lighter-weight game were breezy up to this point, so I was surprised to see that there was a supposedly harder version available to spice things up a bit.

Windmill Valley normally wraps when someone triggers a series of final turns, tied to moving a player’s action wheel a certain number of revolutions. Players finish that round—to ensure everyone has had an equal number of turns—then do one more complete round to give everyone a turn while knowing that this is their final-final turn.

The Expert Variant? No “final-final” turn. Otherwise, no other changes.

I thought this spoke volumes to what I later found to be a very light time at the table. The game’s weight is tied primarily to the sheer number of choices available to a player on their turn, but nothing about each individual action was complex. I thought Windmill Valley could be taught to a core hobbyist gamer (essentially everyone I know) in about 10 minutes.

You can imagine my surprise, then, to find that for a game that plays in about 40 minutes with two players, the sponsored teach video was a whopping THIRTY-FOUR minutes. “You can…

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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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