What a curious beast this is.

Wolffdesigna’s Trick Shot has a reputation as the greatest hockey-themed board game out there. BGG lists 275 titles, so that’s not as hilariously specific a statement as it may read to most of us, myself included. Many of its fans argue that it is, in fact, the single greatest sports board game. I can see why. During those moments when everything clicks, when the puck is shooting back and forth and skaters are ramming into one another, when plays are coming together, you feel, no bones about it, like you are watching a game of hockey.

Trick Shot achieves much of this through simplicity. On your turn, you pick one of your players and have them move, pass the puck, or attempt to shoot a goal. Then, you roll a die. You have a five-in-six chance of success. If you fail, your turn ends. If you succeed, you pick a different player and have them move, pass the puck, or attempt to shoot a goal. Then, you roll two dice. You have a 25–in–36 chance of success. If you succeed, etc. You get the idea.

This is a push-your-luck game, which strikes me now as the perfect format for a sports theme. The emotional effect of rolling more and more dice and getting…

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[caption id="attachment_310938" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Nonaga: The (Small) Box[/caption]

As my colleague Andrew Lynch points out in his review of XOK, we here at Meeple Mountain have an appreciation for games published by Steffen Spiele. We know their games are going to have good quality components and a clever set of rules. That their games come in small boxes means they can be carried around easily and (mostly) set up in small spaces.

Nonaga is no exception. Between setting up the components and going over the few rules, you’ll be playing a minute after you open the box.

Set It Up and Play

Arrange the 19 discs in a hexagonal shape with four discs per side. You’ll each choose a color, then arrange your three pieces at opposite corners of the hex, with each player’s pieces forming a triangle.

[caption id="attachment_310936" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Nonaga Setup[/caption]

When you take your turn, you’ll first move one of your pieces along a straight line until you come to the end of that row of discs.

[caption id="attachment_310942" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Moving a piece[/caption]

Then, you’ll take a disc that can be freely removed from…

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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 recently took my second trip into Rolling Realms land, with a multi-night spin through the 12 latest realms conceived for Rolling Realms Redux (2024, Stonemaier Games).

It’s a system that I enjoyed the first time around, especially after I realized that inviting friends to join me was a mistake. The first Rolling Realms could be played with an infinite number of players, as long as everyone had a deck of the Realms to write on, because everyone shares the same die roll.

Rolling Realms was conceived by Stonemaier head Jamey Stegmaier as a way to connect gamers via Facebook Live during the height of the pandemic. Rolling Realms Redux, then, is somewhat interesting as an anti-pandemic tool: now I only play games in person, instead of only playing them through a web browser.

To ensure I showed this to at least one of my game groups, I gathered members of my review crew for a four-player game of Rolling Realms Redux. Everyone, separately, enjoyed themselves—the Rolling Realms system is an interesting puzzle, no matter what Realms are in play.

But it’s weird to sit at a table with other players and basically not talk at all, right?

Pivot to Solo

Rolling Realms Redux (designed by both Stegmeier…

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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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[caption id="attachment_310952" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Passo: The Box[/caption]

PASSO one in a series of small box abstract games from Steffan Spiele. We here at Meeple Mountain have an appreciation for these games, as they combine good quality components with simple rules and a clever twist. Let’s see if PASSO keeps up this tradition.

Setup

Players will choose to play either red or black and take the 5 wooden disks in their color.

Then take the 25 tiles and create a 5x5 square grid, leaving a gap between the tiles.

Each player will then place their 5 discs along the back row closest to them. 

[caption id="attachment_310953" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Passo setup[/caption]

And that’s it.

Playing the Game 

On a turn, you’ll move one of your discs, either orthogonally or diagonally. Moves can either be made forward into the board, horizontally, or backwards towards yourself. When you do so, you can land either on an empty tile or on a tile with no more than two other pieces (yours or your opponent’s) on it. 

When you move from a tile that becomes unoccupied after your move, you’ll remove it from the game. However, if you move a disc from the top of a stack of…

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Shedding games for two players are a difficult breed. I’ve written about this before, in my review of Thomas Lehmann’s admirable-but-middling Chu Han. There’s something about shedding—a family of traditional card games about playing cards in ever-escalating sets—that refuses to shine in the two-player format.

My diagnosis is that fewer players means less tension. Consider Tichu, which is exclusively a game for four. When I meld, I have to sit through the agonizing possibility that any of three other players—including my teammate—might muck up my plans. Every play is followed by a series of three tensions and (hopefully) three releases. There’s a wonderful arc to that. In Haggis, which is primarily for two, you don’t get the same dramatic build. My opponent either beats my set or they don’t. That’s less interesting. A shedding game for two, I believe, has to exceed that limitation.

I don’t mean to say that two-person shedding can’t be done well. I’m sure it’s possible. While a small handful of designers have put a good deal of energy into cracking the formula, it’s not as though our best scientists have been working on this problem for decades. Unlike its close cousin trick-taking, shedding is a relatively ancillary genre within hobby gaming, so there’s little market reward to encourage experiments along the lines of…

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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 2006’s Rum & Pirates, his 2nd game. Rum & Pirates is notable as Feld’s first ever collaboration with publisher alea.

In Rum & Pirates, the notorious pirate Red Corsair and his crew have made port at their secret pirates’ den somewhere in the Caribbean. After so much time crammed together on a ship, they’re ready to stretch their legs and get up to some good old fashioned cavorting, carousing, and capers. The Captain’s crew are loyal and follow him around wherever he goes, for as long as they’re able to stand. Get enough rum into a man’s belly and the inexorable force of gravity becomes his master.

The gutters in the pirates' den are absolutely littered with drunken sailors.

On their turns, players will move Red Corsair along an open path from one location to…

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The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game, Complica, was released in a magazine in 1985 (although he’d self-published games before then as well).

Since then Knizia has designed and published over 800 games, many of which are critically acclaimed. Put simply, Reiner Knizia is the landscape on which all other modern designers build their houses.

To celebrate Knizia’s career and back catalogue, Meeple Mountain are taking things back to basics to consider the ABC of Reiner Knizia: one game for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

This time: The Letter ‘C’.

C – Carcassonne: The Castle (2003)

A recent interview with Knizia suggests that he steers clear of games by other designers partly to avoid compromising his own creativity and partly because he hasn't much time around playtesting his own designs.

Sometimes, however, he looks up from his drawers of works-in-progress (expanded from 40 to 80 during the pandemic) to take a reading of the tabletop weather. The results are games that employ mechanisms of the moment whilst feeling distinctly Knizian at the same time. For instance:

• The Quest for El Dorado is Knizia’s take on…

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[caption id="attachment_311521" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Revive: The Box[/caption]

Intro

Five thousand years ago, The Devastation took hold of the planet as temperatures dropped. Ice replaced the planet’s once thriving ecosystems. Thick ice. Deep ice. Civilization, or rather, those few surviving tribes, went underground to await The Great Thawing that they hoped would one day come.

Or something like that.

The rule book for Revive is short on backstory—short as in non-existent. With regard to gameplay, however, the narrative is as unclear as it is unnecessary. This is an exploration/deckbuilder/worker placement game, pure and simple. But, does a lack of backstory mean the gameplay wasn’t well-thought out as well? Read on to find out! 

Setup

In Revive, you’re working to rebuild the planet and restore your tribe better than your opponents. When the game ends, you’ll review your progress, tally your scores, and the player with the most points wins. 

Each player will have a slightly asymmetric faction board to represent their tribe. You’ll populate the central area of this board with seven meeple and five scoring tokens. Along the left edge, you’ll place three big buildings and five smaller buildings.

That faction board will fit into the left side of your…

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I never had the chance to play the game My Shelfie (2022, Cranio Creations), but I wanted to try it.

I am always trying to track down the games designed by Phil Walker-Harding, the gifted artist who has given us games such as Sushi Go Party, Super Mega Lucky Box, and Cities. Knowing that Walker-Harding was a co-designer on My Shelfie made it appealing, and that appeal only grew when I learned that Matthew Dunstan (Next Station: London, The Guild of Merchant Explorers) was also involved.

But My Shelfie fell flat for at least one of the folks in my game group, and I never pursued it afterwards. In early 2024, I had a meeting with the team at Cranio Creations to talk about My Shelfie: The Dice Game, loosely based on the original game with a Yahtzee-style approach to gameplay. And there’s a really cute cat on the cover.

Unfortunately, the gameplay in this new iteration of the My Shelfie brand didn’t land with the gamers who sat with me for each play. In fact, my family said it best: they would rather play the “OG”, Yahtzee, over this newer iteration.

You Get Three Rolls

My Shelfie: The Dice Game asks…

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[caption id="attachment_312159" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Einfach Genial 3D: The Box (Ingenious 3D, German edition)[/caption]

Reiner Knizia’s Ingenious was released in 2004 and immediately became one of my favorite games. It’s a game I’ll pull out to introduce people to the idea of modern board games. From the hex-ended dominoes to the long runs of colors on the board, to the quirky scoring mechanism (your lowest scoring color is your final score), Ingenious struck the right balance between the familiar and the new. It has easily lured friends to the table and made them curious for more.

The box for my copy (featured in a photo of my review of the Second Edition of Ingenious) is battered and torn. The tape along the back of the board wore through years ago, meaning we have to keep pushing the two halves of the board together whenever we play. 

It is a well loved game.

In December 2024, Board Game Geek announced a new 3D version of the game. BGG’s blog editor, W. Eric Martin, posted the news, followed by a video review of the game. The catch, however, is Einfach Genial 3D has not been released in the US—and, currently, there are no plans for…

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Thingstead falls into that strangest category of board games: I don’t have any interest in playing it, I don’t think it’s particularly good, and I’d also believe entirely anyone who said it’s a masterpiece. Scott Almes’s two-player area-control game is doing just enough new and different things that, though I think it works about as well as a hang glider fashioned from Swiss cheese, I could see it being exactly what certain people are looking for.

The area control works across two dimensions. Each turn, you play a card, either to exert pull on one of the four Clans, or to add influence to one of the seven viking Elders around the central ring. Both options net you points come the end of the game, but you may have other motives at any particular time. The Clans also give you either temporary or permanent access to various powers, depending on which Clan card sits at the top of that particular Clan deck. The Elders, meanwhile, serve as the game’s tempo control. If enough influence is placed on enough Elders, the game comes to an end.

You…

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