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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Rebirth is not what you would expect at first glance. That beautiful box, with art from Anna Przybylska and Kate Redesiuk, shows an elaborate castle on a hill, surrounded by vibrant countryside. Stare at it for a moment and you start to notice the little details, the greenhouse and the highland coos, the windmills, the steampunk blimp. Everything about the presentation suggests that Rebirth is some sort of RPG-inspired epic, and a good one at that.

In reality, Rebirth is but a humble tile-layer, though you are still right to assume that it’s pretty good. This is not surprising. Designer Reiner Knizia does many things well, but he does few things better than creating rules that govern the ways in which a group of people can lay tiles upon a flat surface. Here, players take turns adding a single tile to the board, gaining points and bonuses as a result.

Turns are simple. All of your tiles sit in a shuffled, facedown pile on the table in front of you. After you play a tile for your turn, you draw in preparation for your next turn. I have grown to love the simplicity of that, the…

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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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Here’s the great thing about games from Keymaster, the publisher who has given us the PARKS games, Caper: Europe, and the upcoming trick-taking game Fuego: you always know a Keymaster game is going to be an exceptional production.

The most recent example of this is their new worker placement game Harvest, designed by Trey Chambers and based on the game of the same name (also designed by Chambers) from 2017 published by the now-defunct Tasty Minstrel Games. I never played the original, but I’m sure of this much: the artwork, the components, and the linen finish on the rulebook of the 2024 version of Harvest is a LOT nicer than the original.

Another sign that Harvest has gotten the Keymaster treatment: the unnecessarily luxurious teach video featuring star content creator Paula Deming. For a game that can be played by two players in less than 30 minutes, the Harvest teach video—well produced, often laugh-out-loud funny, and “hokey”, in the words of one of my review crew members—is somehow 22 minutes long. It’s a show, man! I taught this game live in less than 10 minutes, so I’m not sure how else to explain why the teach video was so long save for the fact that Keymaster cares so much about the look and feel of…

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From the rulebook: “It was our darkest hour. All the warnings, all the screams of the desperates. Nobody wanted to hear them. Until it was almost too late. Until only burned soil was left. We couldn’t save ourselves, but the trees could. As if they knew that their time for action had come. They showed us what mattered. We understood them and connected with them. Now we know what to do and we support them as good (sic) as possible with the little technology that [is] left. But also with a new, more natural technology, the Arbors showed us. We need green energy and oxygen, to turn burned soil into live-giving green. You can find it everywhere in our new and promising world of Overgrown…”

In Planta Nubo, the players tend the sky gardens atop the canopies of the Arbors. Flower beds produce flowers which are harvested, carried away, and turned into the green energy that keeps civilization running. The soil left behind is fertile ground for planting new forestation which, in turn, creates the life-sustaining oxygen the planet so desperately needs. Each element of the system feeds into the next in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Zoomed Out - A Brief Overview of the Layout and Some General Concepts

At its heart, Planta Nubo is an engine-building game governed by…

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Looking at the box, I fully expected Gnome Hollow to be cute—the sort of cute that leads a publisher to take the Gen Con balloon sculpture by the horns and make it all gnome-y. I can’t say I expected it to be as substantial a game, though. As it turns out, there’s a lot going on in there. Sometimes you even lift back the pointy hat to find competitive little thieves behind the rosy cheeks and beards.

Gnomenclature

The path to describing the gameplay of Gnome Hollow is not entirely linear. Every turn is a flow chart complete with if/then statements and cascading consequences (not unlike Mr. Lynch’s flowing review of Riftforce). A relatively simple, cartoony, flowchart by comparison, but a chart nonetheless.

Players add two (or more) hex tiles to the central garden to begin each turn. Tiles are predominantly green with some combination of glittery path and colorful mushroom(s). The great hope is to enclose a glittery path ring to unleash a series of fortunate events. The first is to (potentially) collect every mushroom depicted on the path. The second is to (likely) move a ring marker on the player board from its starting location to a bonus spot—determined by the number of tiles incorporated in the ring—and to receive any subsequent cascading bonuses.

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I was born after the decline of the milkman. I live in a small town where the idea could almost live again. Folks around these parts walk to pick up milk from their organic suppliers, but no one dons the cap and uniform for house calls. I have fond childhood memories of food deliveries, helping the mailman with his daily rounds, and, obviously, the daily passing of the ice cream truck. There’s some nostalgic romance in those aspects of bygone days, I guess.

The whole home delivery scene is appealing as a setting for a game. Milkman, from Dice Hate Me Games, puts players in charge of the whole operation—from farm to front door.

Raw

Milkman is a dice-chucker. Players each roll their two black dice on every turn. With two possible rerolls, they then make the best of their results and take action. The active player also receives a single roll of four white dice, granting a few extra options and first dibs in selecting customers for the turn.

On the dice, cows produce raw milk that is stored in tanks with limited capacity. Bottles convert an entire tank into whole, skim, or chocolate, stored in refrigeration with its own limits. Cash gives wooden cash tokens. Meeple select…

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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.

…

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I’m the kind of guy that likes to have a lot of 60-minutes-or-less game options in my quiver. That’s because I’m married to a partner who is usually open to games on a Friday night that last for about an hour. After that, you can begin to see the shiftiness setting in. “When can we do something else?” the eyes start saying after the first glass of wine.

Our partners at Devir sent a care package recently that included their 2023 release Bamboo. After reading the rules, I had a good feeling that this would work well for my wife because the playtime looked short (well under an hour for two players) and the rules could be taught in about ten minutes.

I was right on most fronts. Bamboo is a competitive, yet peaceful, tile-laying puzzle designed by Germán P. Milián, the man behind some games that I’ve really enjoyed over the last year or so: Sabika and Bitoku, the latter with the Resutoran expansion. Both of these previous games are much more complex than Bamboo, so I was curious to see how Bamboo would play with a lighter ruleset that could accommodate casual players and strategy gamers looking for an appetizer.

Bamboo’s production is perfectly Devir: exceptional, save for a rulebook that was only…

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Sometimes referred to in the plural as “Las Alpujarras”, the Alpujarra region is located on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Andalusia, Spain. The runoff from the Sierra Nevada’s melting snow provides the southern slopes with an abundance of fertile soil—a perfect place to start a civilization.

To quote the rule book: “During the great Arab Agricultural Revolution [in the 8th to 13th centuries] the hardworking Berber people from North Africa transformed the landscape of the Alpujarras into a world of bounty. With their innovative irrigation and terracing techniques, they brought water to the hillsides to create fertile farmlands.”

Their efforts were so successful, in fact, that multiple wars have been fought for control of the region, the most recent conflict ending in 1942. Thankfully, its days of conflict and strife seem to have passed. Today, Las Alpujarras stands as a beacon for tourists who come to see and experience its natural beauty.

Overview

In the game of Alpujarras, the players take on the roles of fruit tree farmers, working the land and delivering their goods to the surrounding villages. Played on a time track, players will take turns moving their pawns along the path and taking actions in order to place farmers in the fields, irrigate the fields to make them fruitful, harvest…

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Puerto Rico was first released in 2002, and is one of my favorite board games. I’m hardly alone in that. Andreas Seyfarth’s masterful design was the #1-rated board game on BoardGameGeek for five years in the mid-2000s, and it still sits in the top 50 today. It directly inspired Tom Lehmann to design Race for the Galaxy, a fraternal twin of a game and another of the all-time greats. Puerto Rico’s system is so good that even a knock-off constitutes one of the best games ever made.

Despite its considerable laurels, Puerto Rico has fallen out of favor in recent years, particularly as the hobby has (slowly) grown more inclusive. Like many Euro games, particularly of that time, Puerto Rico’s setting prominently features colonialism. Unlike many games of that era, in Puerto Rico, it is hard to ignore. As cultural sensitivities shifted and awareness increased, people grew uncomfortable with playing as Spanish colonial governors assigning brown laborer discs to work in their fields.

In 2022, Alea and Ravensburger announced Puerto Rico 1897, an updated version of the game. The title refers to the year in which Puerto Rico was granted a level of autonomy by the Spanish government. After 400 years of colonial status, Puerto Ricans could form their own parliament, which, among other things, allowed them to make…

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Designer Scott Almes is best known for his Tiny Epic _____ series of games, published under his Gamelyn Games label. The Meeple Mountain team has reviewed about five of them, and we’ve generally thought of those games as OK—nothing incredibly special, but nothing incredibly bad either.

Then I reviewed Roller Coaster Rush, another Almes design, and that might have been the worst game I played in 2023. Legitimately terrible. So, based purely on recency bias, I was a little apprehensive when I opened the box for his 2022 release Beer & Bread, published in the US by Capstone Games.

Almost immediately, those fears vanished. Had Beer & Bread hit my table in 2023, I probably would have named it my favorite two-player-only game, just edging out Sky Team. It’s that good.

A Little of This, But Not More of That

My appreciation for Beer & Bread starts with the scoring system. A bit like Between Two Cities, Ark Nova, Tigris & Euphrates, and other classics, Beer & Bread is a race to score points by fulfilling orders on two different sets of cards, beer cards and bread cards. The lower of the two scores ends up as a player’s final score, so a…

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