The game of Weirdwood Manor begins with a narrative explaining the situation. Lady Weirdwood rules over a magical mansion that stands as the nexus between the mortal realm and the lands of the fae. It is her job (along with her wardens—that would be the players) to keep the forces of evil at bay. However, something has gone wrong and some evil from the Fae Realm has breached the manor and has come to wreak havoc.

The setup is quite interesting. Everything within the game, from the way the manor works to the interesting abilities of the various characters you can play to how the secondary characters (called companions) operate… all serve this theme admirably.

What follows is a look at how the game is set-up and played. If you want to skip this, continue on to my thoughts below. Otherwise, click on the link and check out how the game functions!

[mks_toggle title="Check out the rules to Weirdwood Manor" state="close "]

Setup

Setup is relatively straight forward, even though it is a lot of steps.

First there is the main board setup:

• Assemble the two halves of the manor.
• Place the outer-ring rooms into their ring in a random order.
• Assemble and place the Day Corridor and place it just inside the outer-ring rooms with Day 1…

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There are boundless joys I get from working with Meeple Mountain, and one of those is the opportunity to see a game before it makes it to store shelves. Hedge Mage is a game about making hedge mazes to prevent mages from stealing garden gnomes… while you are in another hedge maze stealing garden gnomes. To say I was intrigued would be an understatement.

I have played a few games of this now (several by myself as I simulated other players in an attempt to get my head around what is going on in this game), a few games with my wife (two-players) and my game group (4 players) and, if I were to bottom line this, I would say: this game needs more time in development.

Setup

When Hedge Mage is set up and ready to play, this image shows what one player might see:

[caption id="attachment_301166" align="aligncenter" width="600"] One Player's Setup[/caption]

So let’s break this down:

• Three gnome ceremony cards are selected at random. This will be one card for each type of gnome (pumpkin, flower, and mushroom).
• On the players’ garden boards, there are spaces that are of a darker color of green. Six of those spaces are numbered. The pumpkin and mushroom gnome ceremony cards have…

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Last fall, my friend and colleague Tom Franklin reviewed the 1997 abstract Quoridor, published by Gigamic. (BGG indicates that Quoridor is based on an older game called Pinko Pallino that has a slightly larger map and different rules.)

I hadn’t played Quoridor before, so I was intrigued by Tom’s review. My experience with abstracts is limited but I have really enjoyed games like SHŌBU and Qawale.

Moving pawns around a small board, with quick play times and easy-to-teach rules, generally works for me, even if I don’t buy abstracts very often. When I went to the Festival International des Jeux recently, my friend Rawan at Gigamic passed me a new game that was a bit of a surprise: Quoridor, but with a major twist.

That twist is front-and-center on the new edition of the box: Pac-Man! Yes, the Pac-Man you remember from your local arcade back in the early 1980s, if you are a person of a certain age. (I am that person.) What, then, does Pac-Man have to do with Quoridor?

Money. Let’s face it—a game called Quoridor might sell well, but a game titled Quoridor Pac-Man is probably going to sell a lot better.

Quoridor’s reskin is still Quoridor, and…

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Board game remakes are having a moment right now. It seems like every publisher is raiding the tombs of titles that have been gathering dust for over a decade and giving them a fresh new look. The 1990s in particular saw a boom in board game releases, with publishers like Avalon Hill putting out many popular games. One such title was Robo Rally, a robot-themed racing game. After lying dormant for years, Renegade Games has resurrected Robo Rally using the services of lawyers and necromancers. They plan to revive several other classic Avalon Hill games in similar fashion, refreshing these titles for a new generation of players.

Robo Rally is a board game that has flown under the radar for many years, but its premise is easily grasped. You and your friends are all robots in a factory. When the workday ends and the humans go home, these robots come alive and decide to have some fun by racing each other around the factory floor after hours by going to checkpoints in a specific order. With lasers, conveyor belts, rotating gears, and bottomless pits littering the makeshift race courses, you can see where the chaos can ensue, assuming OSHA doesn’t get involved.

All of this sounds pretty good until you realize you are all robots. Robots lack human judgment…

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Quoridor exemplifies one of my favorite things about a good abstract game: you can teach it without saying a word. In fact, the rule booklet that comes with my Gigamic Games version is two pages long. One of those pages is simply drawings to illustrate the text and are really all you need to understand how the game is played.

While learning Quoridor might be easy, winning can be another thing.

Quoridor is played on a 9x9 grid of 81 raised squares. Surrounding these squares are grooves cut into the wooden board along their edges that isolate each square.

The two players begin by choosing a colored pawn and placing it on the square in the center of the line closest to them. Each player then takes ten of the plain, wooden rectangles that act as fences in the game.

[caption id="attachment_290551" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Quoridor set up and ready to play.[/caption]

Pawns move orthogonally, that is, forward or backward, right or left, from their starting position. Diagonal moves are not allowed (with one exception, covered later). The winner is the first player to get their pawn to any square on the farthest row—that is, the row closest to your opponent.

A few additional rules need to be mentioned here: as…

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Back in 2021, I had the chance to review Dungeon Scrawlers: Heroes of Undermountain from WizKids. Since then, Heroes of Undermountain has consistently stayed in my gaming rotation. It’s fast, it’s kid-friendly, and it’s relatively easy to teach. When I learned about the Heroes of Waterdeep expansion, I had only one question: what could they possibly add to this game?

Complex City

Truth be told, Heroes of Waterdeep is more of a standalone sequel to Heroes of Undermountain. The gameplay is familiar: players simultaneously race and trace their way through identical dry-erase dungeon maps while grabbing treasure, eliminating monsters, and generally scoring points in various D&D-themed ways. (You can find a more thorough explanation of play at the review linked above.)

[caption id="attachment_286979" align="alignnone" width="961"] Several of the new dungeons are based in the city of Waterdeep and have a slightly more urban feel.[/caption]

Of course, this version sports a few new features. The most immediately obvious is the set of cards that come along with the standard double-sided player sheets. There are five character cards, swapping the original game’s sturdy cardboard for dry-erase so that players can track their score across all three rounds. This is a nice quality-of-life addition, though the new cards only include a graphical representation…

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The Ravensburger game Labyrinth first hit shelves in 1986. Yes, the classic family shape-shifting maze game is nearly 40 years old.

But, guess what is just one year older? The Nintendo video game classic Super Mario Bros., featuring all of the classic characters you remember: Mario, Princess Peach, Bowser, and all of those crafty bad guys. Even though I was a SEGA kid growing up, it was hard to deny the magic of the Super Mario games; they were the best platforming games out there.

In anticipation of the Illumination Films release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Ravensburger has reskinned the original Labyrinth to feature all of the video game’s characters. Super Mario Labyrinth is the exact same game as the original, in terms of gameplay.

Our team hadn’t previously covered the original 1986 game so we thought it was a good time to find out: does the gameplay of Labyrinth hold up?

Watch Out, Wario!

Labyrinth’s concept is easy to teach. A 7x7-tile grid makes up the game’s board, representing straightaways, L-shapes, and intersections of a nefarious-looking dungeon. Three arrows on each of the board’s four sides indicate the place where tiles can be pushed off the board. Each player has a pawn and a deck…

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When I read the rules for Mysterious Dungeons­—which took all of thirty seconds—I was not excited to play. I wasn’t against the idea, but there wasn’t anything to get me jazzed. I’m by no means averse to a simple rule set, I prefer them in fact, but this seemed like well-trodden ground.

Here we have a family-weight tile placement game in which players try to create a path through their dungeon that will maximize their treasure haul while minimizing the number of monsters they encounter. Each player gets a player board and 20 titles. Most players set their tiles face-up on the table, but one player shuffles all of their tiles facedown, drawing one at the start of each turn. Everyone else picks up their matching tile and sets it somewhere, anywhere, in the 4 x 4 grid on their individual board.

You repeat this process until the dungeons are full. It’s quick, maybe 15 minutes. There are no adjacency rules, there’s no need to match walls, nothing so complicated. Once all the tiles have been placed, players enter their dungeons through the door, marking the accessible treasures and unavoidable monsters with gold and red tokens respectively. Each monster wipes out two treasures. Whoever has the most gold tokens is the winner.

I’ve played this game before, right? Like.…

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[caption id="attachment_251474" align="aligncenter" width="600"] BurgleBros Intro image[/caption]

During the COVID lockdown, my weekly gaming group moved online. As the months went by, I kept looking longingly at the Burgle Bros. box on my shelf as it slowly collected dust.

Then I discovered Burgle Bros. was on Steam! Could it compete with the tabletop experience?

Set Up

[caption id="attachment_251475" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Burgle Bros Splash screen[/caption]

The main splash screen looked promising. The tiny artwork for the character meeples had not only been used, but increased in size. This gave both the personalities and the special skills of each character a better chance to shine.

In the cardboard game, the advanced character attributes can only be unlocked after winning a game of Burgle Bros. with the standard character traits. Here, however, you can’t cheat. The advanced abilities are clearly locked and inaccessible until you win with them.

…

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“Once upon a time, she was looking for love…Now she’s looking for lunch!”

It’s a funny pitch, right? That’s the text front and center on the box cover of the new game Zombie Princess and the Enchanted Maze, designed by Andrew Beardsley and published by WizKids. The intro in the rulebook is even funnier, so kudos to Beardsley and the writing team at WizKids for coming up with a funny premise, setting the stage with such gusto.

Unfortunately, the good times end there. This is not for lack of a quality production or a smooth rulebook. The reasons for my sadness go a little deeper than that, which is interesting because Zombie Princess and the Enchanted Maze is not that deep at all.

Lay Those Tiles!

In Zombie Princess (let’s go with this shorter title for the rest of the article), players take on the roles of knights from a nearby kingdom who hear the loud, distant scream of a princess. What happened? Is she in trouble? It’s a game, so she must need rescuing!

Each of the 2-4 players in the game will then enter a corner of the Enchanted Maze, where they make another discovery: the princess is now a ZOMBIE princess, so instead of saving her,…

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My friend Jacob was visibly upset. He had just read the manual’s flavor text for the setup of the game Mystic Paths, from R&R Games.

“I mean, what the **** man? Why not just use wooden pawns? Mystic Paths, my a**!!”

He wasn’t wrong. The theme for Mystic Paths is a complete miss, maybe the biggest miss of any game I will review this year—and it’s only January! The box makes Mystic Paths look like a fantasy adventure, when in fact, Mystic Paths is a codeword/clue-driven party game, not unlike the standard bearer for this type of game, the CGE classic Codenames.

And just like Codenames, Mystic Paths is a blast to play, especially if you don’t play it with seasoned hobby gamers looking to solve an intense Suchy/Pfister/Lacerda puzzle. I think the target audience for Mystic Paths is your family, your non-gamer spouse, maybe even your teenagers; with loads of gameplay options in the box, Mystic Paths is a bunch of fun, especially if you play with a group of people who you know personally.

The Theme: It’s Hard to Get Around It

We need to just lay it out there: I have no idea what happened when Mystic Paths was in the development phase and someone came…

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Dungeon Scrawlers: Heroes of Undermountain is one of the latest products to bear the seal of Dungeons & Dragons, that venerable roleplaying game which has become almost synonymous with the idea of a dungeon dive. In RPG parlance, a dungeon dive is when a group of characters enter a monster-filled labyrinth in search of treasure. Dungeon Scrawlers takes that inspiration and turns it instead into a 15-minute race among players to find the best route through a maze, knocking out enemies and grabbing treasure in their quest to be the victor! (To be clear, no experience with RPGs is necessary to play, though you might be interested in reading our article on why you should play an RPG.)

On Your Markers, Get Set, Go!

Dungeon Scrawlers: Heroes of Undermountain is about as easy to learn as any game could be. Each player takes a dry-erase marker and a set of three dungeon maps. There are ten unique maps in total (five double-sided sheets per player) and the group will collectively choose which three to tackle each game. Each map is a round of play, and the player with the best cumulative score at the end of those three rounds is the winner!

When it’s time to start, each…

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You awaken to darkness, an abyss so deep that the flickering light of your candle can barely illuminate the grey walls next to you. Inhuman screeches echo somewhere in the infinite night. With shaking hands you begin to move along the wall, hoping to find a friend...or better yet, a way out of here.

In this tile-laying horror game, up to 5 players take charge of characters trapped in a mysterious labyrinth. The players must place each new tile carefully to avoid the monsters lurking just out of sight, gather the required Keys, and collectively reach the Gate to win.

Night Moves

A game of The Night Cage begins with each of the 4 Prisoners, indicated by variously colored candle meeples, placed anywhere on the game’s 6x6 board. (Note that the 5-player game has 5 characters and uses a larger 7x7 board.) Each character is armed only with a candle. This candle enables them to see their current tile as well as each orthogonally adjacent tile. The first few tiles placed in this way will be, broadly, safe — but that won’t be the case forever.

[caption id="attachment_238915" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Players may place their starting tiles anywhere on the board they like, then add tiles based on their visibility.[/caption]

To escape…

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