Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan—published by Mighty Boards, the exceptionally steady producer of games such as Rebirth, Vengeance: Roll & Fight, and Art Society—was a member of my personal top 10 from 2024, the best pure action/RPG board game I tried last year.

That’s because the dice combat is sensational, but more importantly, getting in and out of scenarios takes about an hour apiece. For a busy parent with limited table space, bite-sized combat games are the move, and the Fateforge system was great to squeeze in-between other activities or expand into an entire Saturday night of solo gaming through a full Act of 5-6 missions.

The game’s second print run goes live on crowdfunding soon, a campaign that also includes the new second expansion, Kin of the Wild. To get ready for the new goodies, I wanted to take some time to try the first expansion, Clash of the Immortals. Clash of the Immortals is a 10+ hour adventure featuring seven main missions and a boss fight, with three camp scenes scattered in-between to allow players to explore side quests and shops.

The other main addition with this first expansion is a new playable character called the Enchantress. The Enchantress has an initially complicated upkeep/management system but features powers that frankly felt too…

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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…

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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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Setting everything out on the table, I could feel the excitement bubbling up. It had been a couple of months since I’d played a round of Arcs, 2024’s hottest release. When I finally sat down for my first game of campaign expansion The Blighted Reach, I couldn’t wait to dive back in. I would have told you that I like Arcs without quite tipping over into loving it, but I don’t often feel that sense of anticipation when setting a game up. I was thrilled to be back.

It took a while to get The Blighted Reach to the table because of the animosity several in my gaming group(s) feel towards the base game. The players most likely to show up at 9:00 am on a Sunday to game until 20:00 are also, by and large, the most Arcs-averse. The tweaky, tactile decision space that characterizes the game is a big part of why I like it, but it can rub more intentionally-minded players the wrong way. Arcs isn’t a game that rewards having a plan half as much as it rewards the willingness to ditch your plan and all who sail in her. That isn’t for everybody.

The Blighted Reach is still largely the same game, though it adds just enough small tweaks to the rules 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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I loved last year’s car combat dice-chucking game, Thunder Road: Vendetta, published by Restoration Games. I loved it so much that it ended up being my #4 game of last year.

I backed the “Maximum Chrome” edition of Thunder Road: Vendetta because when you only back one, maybe two games a year, you want to make it something really special. As a result, I dropped a lot of cash to make my dreams come true. I wanted all the fixins, in part because I wanted the extra vehicles that spice up gameplay—I’m a Mad Max movie junkie and I needed to own The Big Rig and the Final Five expansion. Who wouldn’t want to play with a vehicle that looks suspiciously like the truck from The Road Warrior?

I’ve played with all the extras in Maximum Chrome (save for German Engineering, which “Eurofies” the dice-driven action into a more predictable, less chaotic form that screams “not for me”), and I never felt that the base game had any holes. If anything, I want a way to shorten the playtime with a higher player count, as this was the base game’s only weakness.

Tabletop game expansions are a way of life, right? When I learned that Thunder Road: Vendetta–Carnival of Chaos (the fifth expansion to the base game)…

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I like a good challenge, but with the new cooperative expansion to Viticulture, Viticulture World (2022, Stonemaier Games), I was struggling to make it through the first world of the game.

I reached out to a friend who had purchased the game at retail, “Am I crazy, or is Viticulture World surprisingly hard to beat even in the tutorial mission?”

“Dude. So ******** hard,” was the text reply.

Viticulture World is that kind of game. I was getting beaten so badly in my solo plays that I rewatched the official rules video just to make sure I was playing the game correctly. Sadly, I was playing the game correctly, so that led to a different conversation:

Is Viticulture World too difficult?

Bring a Machete (Plus One For a Friend)

In Viticulture World, you are mostly playing the base game of Viticulture (with or without its expansions) with up to five friends, but on the same team.

By “team”, I mean that you are working with other players to each create a prosperous wine business. Everyone is super friendly, and with millions of bottles of wine sold each year, there’s plenty of money to go around. Why not spread the love?

Players take turns like they would in…

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Read our review of PARKS or watch our video review.

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Chronicles of Crime: Noir expands the app-driven 2018 hit with four new scenarios, new components, and a new theme. Dust off your fedora, throw on your trench coat, and don’t forget to take a jorum of skee as you jump into the role of a private detective in post-WWII Hollywood and Los Angeles.

This review assumes the reader is familiar with the Chronicles of Crime base game and only dives into what the Noir expansion introduces to its gameplay. If you’re unfamiliar with Chronicles of Crime, check out our preview to learn how the game works.

[caption id="attachment_20255" align="aligncenter" width="730"] Many components from Noir (shown with the hat icon) replace the components in the base game. However, you still need the Evidence Category cards, Evidence board, and Special Item cards from Chronicles of Crime. The app is also required to play.[/caption]

Chronicles of Crime: Noir Gameplay

In Chronicles of Crime: Noir, you’re playing a private detective so you don’t work for any police department (unlike in the base game). Unfortunately this means you don’t have the same access to field and medical specialists like you do in Chronicles of Crime. In some Noir scenarios, you might have allies or informants such…

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Ticket to Ride: Japan & Italy is the latest expansion for the Ticket to Ride base game and is the seventh released to date. This review assumes you are already familiar with the original Ticket to Ride rules and will only discuss the changes to its original gameplay. If you’re unfamiliar with Ticket to Ride, head on over to our Ticket to Ride love letter to learn more about how the game’s played.

What’s Included in Ticket to Ride: Japan & Italy

Ticket to Ride: Japan & Italy includes an enormous — eight panels compared to the original six — double-sided board: one side featuring the horizontal map of Japan, the other featuring a vertical map of Italy. In the expansion box, you’ll also find new Destination Ticket cards for both maps, Ferry cards for Italy, and Bullet Train miniatures and Progression markers for Japan.

Since this is an expansion, you need some components from one of the standalone Ticket to Ride games (Ticket to Ride, Ticket to Ride: Europe, etc...) to play either map. These components include the Train Car cards, as well as trains — the number of which depends on the map you’re using — and matching score markers for each player.

[caption id="attachment_21916" align="aligncenter" width="730"]

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Overview

Imperial Settlers, designed by Ignacy Trzewiczek, is a card game of civilization and engine building. Each player selects one of several factions (Romans, Egyptians, Barbarians, Japanese, the Atlanteans, the Aztecs or beginning with this expansion, the Amazons) and uses that faction’s Faction deck in conjunction with a deck of Common cards to produce resources, acquire more cards, build locations, and to score points. The game is played over a total of five rounds and the person who has accumulated the most points at the end of the game wins.

In this multi-article series, I am going to discuss Imperial Settlers and all of its expansions. I’ll tell you how they work, how they change the game, and what I think about them. Since I’ve previously discussed how the game is played, I am just going to discuss what this expansion brings to the game and how it changes it. Of course, it goes without saying that this expansion opens up new possibilities…

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Let’s start with a review of how Starship Samurai is played just so we are all on the same page. If you know that already you can skip this section ( I promise it won’t hurt my feelings).

Starship Samurai is an area control game of sorts for 2-4 players. Each player takes on the role of a powerful intergalactic “clan” vying for greater control of the galaxy.  To do this you will need to gain the trust and loyalty of the smaller clans to expand your influence. So it is time to set off with your mechs and warships to expand your territory (because nothing makes friends faster than a big army). Starship Samurai is played over a series of rounds where each player attempts to gain the most force at various locations by the end of the round. Whoever (has the most force  in a territory at the round end wins that territory and its bonus. These bonuses typically increase a certain clan’s loyalty but can also give victory points (honor) or wealth. Clan loyalty works like a tug of war with each granting higher end of round bonuses depending on how loyal they are.

A Round and a Round We Go

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‘I don’t understand it, Holmes,’ I said, ‘who would bring more cakes to a bakery?’

I watched the great detective looking around the shop. Outside the policemen waited discontentedly but Holmes was adamant that he was not to be disturbed. He stabbed a finger into the icing of one of the introduced confections and sucked it, showing no apparent pleasure. Then he turned, that satisfied look in his eyes that told me he’d solved the case.

‘It’s elementary.’ He said.

Welcome to Meeple Mountain’s review of Masters of Elements, the first large box expansion for Lucky Duck Games’ Vikings Gone Wild. Make sure to read my review of the Vikings Gone Wild base game as well.

[caption id="attachment_9328" align="alignnone" width="730"] The cover art really stands out, selling the potential for excitement contained within.[/caption]

The Cakes Are Not A Lie

Masters of Elements follows two small box expansions (It’s a Kind of Magic and Guild Wars), a 5th player expansion, and the Ragnarok expansion which turns Vikings Gone Wild into a cooperative battle against the undead. It’s an impressive rate of growth for a game released in 2017, demonstrating the huge potential for this series (and possibly its smartphone in-app purchase origins).

Masters of Elements, however, is the first expansion…

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