Castle Combo finds the table. I’m not sure I can pinpoint a singular reason. I love Stéphane Escapa’s art—not unlike the style of the current iteration of Mr. Peabody and Sherman, playfully disproportionate and colorful. I also love the simplicity of the turns—buy a card for a 3x3 grid. Far from frivolous, though, this simplicity is coupled with meaningful decisions that come from the interaction of cards within the grid. The playful nature of it all creates a feel-good, but engaging after-school family play. 

Ease

Players select a card from two rows of three, at first restricted by the location of the Messenger token. One spent key could move the Messenger or refresh the current row if the options aren’t quite right. After paying the coin cost, the card enters the grid and triggers an immediate effect. These effects typically provide coins or keys based on any number of conditions. The Messenger might move as the cards are replenished (indicated by the placed card), and play moves on.

In the event that none of the cards are appealing after exercising options with the keys, cards play face-down into the grid and grant coins and keys as a near-sighted boon. After nine turns each, the grids are full and the…

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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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From the rulebook: “Scholars of the South Tigris is set during the height of the Abbasid Caliphate, circa 830 AD. The Caliph has called upon the keenest minds to acquire scientific manuscripts from all over the known world. Players will need to increase their influence in the House of Wisdom, and hire skilled linguists to translate the foreign scrolls into Arabic. In this Golden Age of wisdom and knowledge, be mindful not to neglect one in pursuit of the other”

In Scholars of the South Tigris (Scholars), players will be vying to score the most victory points by the game’s end. Players begin the game with a collection of Action cards and dice. Through the placement of these cards and the assigning of these dice, players will be traveling the world to collect scrolls, hiring translators to translate these scrolls into Arabic, and using the knowledge contained therein to increase their power and improve their standings in the game’s various guilds.

Of course, this is a high-level overview of the game. If you’d like to learn more about how the game is played, read on. Otherwise, feel free to skip to the end to find out what we think of Scholars.

Setup

Scholars is played around a central main board that is broken up into several distinct zones. Along…

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From card games to social deduction, mega games to role-playing adventures, the possibilities of board games might seem endless. However, this wasn’t always the case. In the late 2000s, 'narrative' games were far less common than they are today. The concept of app-integrated storytelling or voice-acted narratives wasn’t even an idea at the time. If you wanted to have your story experience in a board game form, options were scarce, and the most well-known at the time was Tales of the Arabian Nights.

As you can tell from the game’s name, it draws inspiration from the classic “One Thousand and One Nights” as players traverse the lands to seek fortune and glory. Instead of complex mechanics, they are told about their situation through a book and the players decide on their response to the situation. To some players, this was a great game, especially for families that want to tell silly stories. For others, like myself, we found the game to be quite random and nonsensical, often overextending its welcome.

When I heard about Tales of the Arthurian Knights, saying I was interested is downplaying my reaction. I loved the idea of Tales of the Arabian Nights, but I was yearning for something that was a bit more consistent and I was quite curious to see fifteen years’ worth…

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I always want to try out a Vladimír Suchý design, but I’m typically disappointed. His games offer unique mechanics and interesting ideas that draw me in, but his continued emphasis on creating diligently balanced systems often leaves me feeling a little empty. League of Six was his first published design, now receiving a “complete edition” which includes an expansion, but fear not, this is a beige euro through and through — and you know that your boy loves a beige eurogame.

On top of its beige-y-ness, it features a spin on one of my favorite mechanisms, “pay the auctioneer.” It’s an enjoyable game, and though I have some caveats, I’m happy with the time I’ve spent with it, and I find it to be one of Suchý’s more compelling designs. The debut album is often the rawest and, sometimes, the best.

Overview

League of Six casts you as history’s most exciting protagonist — the tax collector. The board has six different towns, each of which has a small track beneath it ranging from 0 to 12. Players place their little horsey meeples first on the “0” space of a town, which represents their bid for the tile that’s available in that town as well as a selection of resources. Other players can then choose to go to another town,…

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I grew up surrounded by pop culture representations of Robin Hood. The 1990’s were a boom time for the Sherwoodian economy, with popular Hollywood adaptations, more enduringly popular Mel Brooks parodies, and the more-or-less permanent availability of Disney’s animated 1973 Robin Hood film on VHS. You too may have formed some of your earliest memories while staring at the McDonald’s toy display during the 1995 Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection campaign. Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day, indeed.

There’s something magical about Robin Hood, isn’t there? Like King Arthur, he exists in that wondrous folkloric pocket between the historic and the fantastic. While the story of Robin Hood doesn’t typically involve sorcery, there is still an aura of magic to the whole affair. Sherwood Forest exists in the real world, yet to set anything there is to invite the same gossamer feelings and suspension of disbelief that come with finding out a story takes place in Neverland. I am instantly drawn in.

Publisher GMT knows what they’ve got on their hands with A Gest of Robin Hood, a two player game that recreates the fight between Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Every production choice makes the most of the story. The cover, which shows Robin Hood and his Merry Men surrounding a fire deep in the forest at night,…

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Back in 2018 I reviewed a game called Majesty: For the Realm, a relatively lightweight tableau building game based around the concept of collecting cards to place into your “kingdom”. It was designed by Marc Andrê, fresh off his success with Splendor. Each card was one of 8 different types (Brewery, Mill, Inn, Palace, etc.) and each card provided a different income based on what cards you already had in your town. If you took a Mill card you earned 2 coins; but if you already had one, you earned 4 (2 coins per card), etc. Games were speedy, it was easy to teach, and I really enjoyed playing it. The only downside was that it didn’t seem to get much attention, and quickly went out of print.

So imagine my surprise when, earlier this year, I discovered that it was being reprinted, with dramatically improved artwork, tweaked gameplay, and a new identity.

Let me tell you about Middle Ages.

Middle Ages: the board game; way better than the Black Plague

If you’ve played the original game, skip ahead a bit and I’ll break down the primary differences, otherwise, keep reading and I’ll walk you through the game.

In Middle Ages, much like its predecessor Majesty: For…

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I adore the 2014 bag-building classic Orléans so much that I didn’t feel right “reviewing” it, at least in the traditional sense. My mind has been made up for years, so I filed an article in our Games We Love series.

So, let’s clear the decks on that first: Orléans is amazing, and I won’t accept any argument to the contrary. But I love the base game so much that I really haven’t played the expansions, despite the fact that I bought both the base game and all the available expansions in 2020 through a deal with GameNerdz: $42 for the base game and the three expansions available at the time. That was probably worth at least $125, if not more.

The deal was really good because GameNerdz had a stock of Orléans content published by Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG). TMG lost the license to publish Orléans, so GameNerdz had to push that stock out. For those of us without a life on a Black Friday, this news was solid gold.

Then the box arrived, and I never bothered playing the expansions. Our partners at Capstone Games (the current owner of the rights to publish Orléans products in the US) provided a review copy of the 2023 expansion Orléans: The Plague, so I thought this was…

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I’m always fascinated by the way board games can create a sense of place that extends far beyond their cardboard components.

I’m not talking about narrative-based games that tell a story around a setting or legacy games which build up an environment over a series of sessions. What interests me is how games can build a sense of place through their mechanics alone, without the aid of characterful illustrations or paragraphs of text. Games that feel organic in the fictional communities they create.

For all my love of Carcassonne, and for all that you’re building a landscape of places and people, it never feels populated. Dice City, Machi Koro, Alhambra, Tiny Towns, Quadropolis, Ginkopolis, Sprawopolis and more – they all tackle the subject of building communities, but they never actually feel lived in.

Suburbia does it with the narratives that emerge from tile adjacency impacting population and income. Little Town’s direct geography creates unplanned pockets of industry and production sprouting up amongst the game’s natural features. Santa Monica’s occasional stretches of emptiness or dilapidation create spaces for cliques to congregate. The job roles in Villagers open further avenues for…

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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’s a departure from the norm. Today, I’m not reviewing a game so much as I am reviewing an experience. And, I’m not doing it alone. Recently, Awaken Realms ran a campaign for a The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition (referred to as Special Edition from here on out) reprint, and that’s caused some chatter in the Meeple Mountain Slack channel.

It turns out, I’m not the only one currently in possession of this magnificent version of this magnificent game. Meeple Mountain’s own (and dare I say ‘magnificent’) Andrew Lynch has also got a copy… and we have some thoughts which we’re excited to share…

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Pax Penning, like all the Pax games, has Things on Its Mind. The entire Pax family is concerned with political turbulence and periods of significant change. Your job, from one design to the next, is to ride the waves as best you can. Unlike most games, the pieces on the board in Pax designs do not belong to any one player. You may control them temporarily, but nothing is yours, nothing is mine. It’s all a loose series of associations and temporary partnerships.

Pax Penning is not part of the formal Pax series, which primarily consists of games from designer Phil Eklund and publisher Ion Game Design, but it is clearly made in the same spirit. It earns the title. Players represent the various Houses in the town of Sigtuna, ca. 1000 CE, navigating the political ramifications of changes implemented by the first Christian King of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung. You have to decide whether or not you support him.

The ways in which you answer that question are abstracted enough that it’s easy to forget what you're…

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I played Magic: The Gathering in middle school, back in the days when there was only one format. Standard was all we knew, and we were happy for it. Decks were only sixty cards, and your health started at 20. Not like the kids today, with their Pauper and their Commander formats, their Draft (RIP) and Collector and Set (RIP) Packs, their dizzying metagame that relies on knowledge of thousands and thousands of cards. It’s all too much.

On top of that, there’s the time commitment and the financial commitment, which are even more daunting. Did you know preconstructed decks for Magic cost $50 or $60 now? When I was a youth, they were around $12. For the cost of an upmarket board game, you can now get one (1) deck of Magic cards. Dizzying. All of this is to say, even if one were inclined to dip one’s toes back into those waters, it’s not the most inviting space.

I get what CCGs (collectible card games) offer players, though. I do understand the appeal. The good ones allow for a wealth of strategies. Players can customize their decks to reflect their personalities and interests. You can find a favorite card and build an entire engine around it. That level of ownership over the play experience is a big…

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