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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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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Modern Euro-style strategy game design is in full swing.

I know that some of our peers in the media and content creation space have bailed on the concept of medium-weight Euros. These types of strategy games are sometimes getting too complex without matching the elegance that similar games possessed even five years ago. However, 2024 has been a banner year for games that shake up the formula just enough to warrant a second or third look.

A case in point: Men-Nefer (2024, Ludonova), the newest design from German P. Milián, who has given us Bitoku, Bitoku: Resutoran, Sabika, and Bamboo. Bamboo was lighter fare, a game that ultimately proved to be more interesting as a production than a decision space.

Both Bitoku and Sabika proved resilient within my gaming circles, particularly with the turn mechanic of Bitoku and the rondel element of Sabika. I’ve held onto both games because I had so much fun exploring each one, even if I think they will be really hard to table on a consistent basis. You know greatness when you see it, right? For the players in my game-o-sphere, Milián is clearly onto something.

Milián’s success continues with Men-Nefer, a thematic sibling to Sabika, right down to a…

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Another year in the books! Our writing team recently shared an article with our single-favorite games of 2024. However, I played a lot of other games last year…more than 240 different games, in fact!

In the spirit of my roundup of the highs and lows from the games I played in 2022 and 2023, please enjoy a few other awards and my personal top 10 from 2024.

(A note about this article: these winners are based on articles I wrote in 2024, not necessarily games that were released in 2024. Game release dates are pretty fuzzy, between prototypes, crowdfunding pre-production copies, retail releases, second print runs, games that first debuted in another country before I got my hands on them, and/or “deluxified” anniversary versions. Just pretend that everything rated here came out in 2024, because it did…at least, to me.)

With that, let’s jump in, using some of our legacy Diamond Climber award categories and some of my own categories too. Let’s go!!

Favorite Gaming Moment of 2024: Meeting Vital Lacerda and Ian O’Toole, SPIEL 2024

2024 was an amazing year and the quality of games that hit the table was the best year I’ve seen across my four years writing for Meeple Mountain. But…

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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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Concordia- Tom Franklin

After hearing about Concordia for years, I finally bought a copy…and then let it sit on my Shelf o’ Shame for way too long. This is such a great game!

You’re seeking to move around an ancient map, by sail or by foot, building houses in cities that will get you the goods those cities produce. On a turn, you play one of your cards that determine the action you’ll be taking, including a card that allows you to copy someone else’s card or to reclaim all your cards. Resources, places to store those resources, and money are always tight, creating a really fine eurogame puzzle of efficiencies and generating points.

After playing it twice at my weekly game night, I fell into the rabbit hole of Concordia on Steam. I’d still be playing it if I didn’t have this annoying work stuff that gets in my way on a daily basis.

Seriously, if you like Eurogame worker placement games and haven’t tried Concordia yet, you need to play it!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Tom Franklin.
[mm-productlinking id="311776" template="image" include_button="true" width="200"…

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My very first review for Meeple Mountain covered the 2020 Eagle-Gryphon Games (EGG) release Rococo: Deluxe Edition, based on the original Rococo, released in 2013. Rococo, featuring players taking on the role of dressmakers in late 18th-century France, is great and the deluxe version is gloriously exotic, with some of the most beautiful components EGG has ever produced…which is saying something, since nearly all the EGG games I have tried feature handsome production elements.

I had one major complaint about the Rococo: Deluxe Edition release…here’s the quote from my original review:

“My main issue with Rococo Deluxe? The “Deluxe” part. $110 for a game like this is frankly ridiculous. Why is there not a Rococo Peasant version for, say, $50? I would buy that right now.”

The only reason I don’t own a copy of Rococo: Deluxe Edition is the price. That’s it. So, imagine my surprise when I learned that two of the three original designers of Rococo—Louis and Stefan Malz—built a game in the Rococo universe that is roughly 75% base Rococo, in a package that will retail in the $60 USD range.

You’d buy that, right?

For me, it’s a no-brainer. La Pâtisserie Rococo, the new version of the game available now via crowdfunding, uses most of the framework from the Rococo base game…

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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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A few months ago, my wife and I went to a restaurant and sat at the bar. It was raining in Chicago that night, so the bar’s televisions that were set to broadcast a live baseball game were instead showing that channel’s rain delay broadcast—footage of an old Cubs-Reds game from 1987.

The footage was fascinating. In-between pitches, the camera panned wide to shots of fans sitting at the game, watching. Some of our fascination came from looking at fashion from the late 1980s, an article in and of itself based on some of the facial hair alone.

But the part that really snowed me about the game? In the 1980s, people went to sporting events and just…watched the game. No cell phones. No “Jumbotron”...the Cubs didn’t get a video scoreboard until 2015. (Heck, the Cubs didn’t even start playing at night until 1988, if you can believe that!)

Distraction—at least, in the form that I think of it nowadays—was not available in 1987. I think about this a lot now when I teach tabletop games to new players, because distraction is the reason why it is so difficult to teach a complex Euro to new players in 2024. But that extends to every type of game, from family-weight co-op games to trick-takers to Ameritrash dice-chuckers to Voidfall.…

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Fire Tower - Bob Pazehoski, Jr.

I had a chance to sit with this strange little entity recently. Players each respond to, defend against, and aggressively wield the everlasting fire that has ignited in the center of the board. The aim? Survive—and burn your opponents’ towers to the ground, relegating them to participation in the consolation game known as the Shadow of the Forest. Eliminated players participate in the wiles of the forest fire, exacting revenge upon those who wrought their demise. I won’t lie. It’s weird. 

The game is pretty on the table as the orange fire crystals slowly—and then rapidly—spread across the central grid. The play begins quite slowly before launching to a lightning finish. Players put up blockades of a sort, pour water where they are able, redirect the wind to send the fire elsewhere, and unleash chaotic bursts of flame on the way to a bit of a disappointing finish. Fire Tower is incredibly aggressive. Yes, you can simply play defense the whole time and let fate decide, but a significant portion of the deck begs you to issue militaristic commands to the flames in the name of player elimination. 

At heart, Fire Tower is an abstract area control game with bells and whistles attempting to match the…

The post Quick Peaks – Fire Tower, Bower, Dorfromantik: The Board Game, Ultimatch, and The Tragedy of Othello appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.

Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.

In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.

Hermagor: What Is It?

Hermagor is an auction, order fulfillment, and area control game for 2-5 players, designed by Emanuele Ornella and published in the US by Rio Grande Games back in 2006. Players take on the roles of merchants…

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Wait…ANOTHER review of a game in the Horrified series? Yes, it’s true, and by now, we know our Horrified stuff around here—check out our reviews of the base game (Horrified: Universal Monsters), Horrified: American Monsters, and Horrified: Greek Monsters for the evidence, as well as an overview of how these games play if you are new to the series.

Horrified: World of Monsters is my first foray into this series, so I unleashed the newest set of monsters—the Yeti, the Sphinx, the zombie Jiangshi, and Cthulhu—on the best and most reliable gamers in my network, my two kids (ages 10 and 8).

Over the course of three plays, I got all four monsters to the table. In reading the rules from the last two games, nothing has really changed with Horrified: World of Monsters—players work together to defeat monsters before those monsters deal enough “terror” to advance the players past the threshold for defeat (deaths by the players, deaths by the villagers and legend non-playable characters, or the monster deck being exhausted when a player needs to draw a new card).

Everything in the game is dictated by running around the map to pick up items (here in one of three colors) that will be used both to advance a monster’s defeat condition, or to defend players…

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