It’s still early in 2026, but I think I’ve already played the game that will end the year with the widest array of opinions within my review crew.

Wunderwaffen was one of my targets at SPIEL Essen 2025, so I was eager to get it home and put it in front of my team. I was attracted to the game for a few reasons, chief amongst them the game’s publisher. Ares Games has done great work in steadily tight packages, from the Quartermaster General series to family-friendly fare such as TEDOKU and Builders of Sylvan Dale. Ares’ reprint of the Mega Civilization series, Mega Empires, didn’t hurt the cause.

Wunderwaffen is a fragile system, one that worked wonderfully for some players while landing badly for others. But as a very straightforward game that plays in about an hour at its full player count, it is certainly worth a look, especially for wargame lovers looking for a weeknight game they can table with both hobbyists and casual players.

Nazis, You Say?

Wunderwaffen looks, on the surface, like a one-versus-all wargame for strictly two OR four players. There are four playable factions in the box: Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet…

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I think many of us in the tabletop media space have a particular set of rules when it comes to reviewing games; everyone takes a different approach.

One of my big things is to get my three, maybe four, plays of a review copy with different groups as often as I can, ideally at different player counts. This is especially true with new game properties (expansions are a little easier to cover, and usually I have superfans of a base game who are better equipped to share their thoughts on an expansion if they know the original game).

I played the upcoming Mighty Boards game Yotei (up on crowdfunding now) with three different groups: my review crew on a Monday, then three friends from my Wednesday gaming group, then my nine-year-old on Saturday. That meant three plays with three different groups spread across six days in the same week, thanks to a tighter-than-normal turnaround time to get this review up.

As a result, I had a range of opinions to measure against my own. Here’s the only thing everyone agreed on: the card and token illustrations by Maria Kato are absolutely gorgeous.

But after that?

Please Pass the Potatoes

Yotei is a tableau-building set collection game for 2-4…

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From the rulebook:

“Welcome to Yellowstone Park, the home of many wild animals. Impressive geysers spray their hot fountains into the blue sky. The players go on a trip through the park, which is shown on the game board. Each player has a hand of animal cards with different colors and numbers. During the game the players try to put their cards down as skillfully as possible on the game board to avoid penalty points.”

Yellowstone Park is played on a 7x7 grid laid on top of an illustrated overhead view of the titular park. The rows are numbered from 1 to 7 in ascending order, starting from the lowest row and moving upwards. There is a score track running along the left side of the grid. Each player’s score marker begins at the number 5 spot on this track.

There is also a deck of 56 Animal cards. Each card is one of four colors (red, green, yellow, blue) and one of seven numbers (1 through 7). For each number, there are two copies of that number + color pair (two copies of green 1, for instance). Every card features a cartoonish image of an animal, but these illustrations are unimportant for the purposes of the gameplay.

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The Fox in the Forest predates the contemporary trick-taking craze by a few years. It was an early harbinger of what was to come, of the deluge with which we have subsequently been blessed, and it proved successful. Successful enough that now, almost a decade after its initial release, Joshua Buergel’s two-player trick-taking game is getting the Deluxe treatment.

For those who’ve never played, The Fox in the Forest distinguishes itself from the bulk of trick-takers in two ways. Way the first: all of the odd-numbered cards in this non-traditional deck have special powers that trigger when played. Normally, I try not to get bogged down in the weeds when reviewing a game, but I do think the powers here are illustrative: The 1 in each suit lets you lead the next trick even if you lose, the 3 lets you change the trump suit, the 5 lets you draw one of the cards that weren’t dealt that round before discarding any card from your hand, the 7 is worth a point for whoever wins it, the 9 is always considered a trump card, and the 11 forces your opponent’s highest card in the same suit.

If you are at all familiar with the ebb and flow of trick-taking games, you can imagine well the sorts of shenanigans…

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Wholly Knizia

Dr. Reiner Knizia is a name synonymous with board games. Even if you haven’t heard of him, you’ve likely played one of his designs; according to Gemini, he has created more than 800 games. Whether it’s Ra, The Quest for El Dorado, Samurai, or Huang, he’s everywhere.    We even had a lovely sit-down with him recently to discuss his highly successful career.

Whale Riders excited me because it comes from a power duo: Knizia on design and Vincent Dutrait on art. Dutrait’s work has become increasingly easy to spot as I’ve gone deeper into the hobby, and here his contribution is excellent. The thematic art is rich, depicting Indigenous Arctic tribes using handsome whales and other massive sea creatures as mounts. But despite that pedigree, this is not one for the Knizia hall of fame.

Ice Race

In Whale Riders, players take two of five possible actions each turn, moving between ports, buying goods, and completing contracts for money and pearls. Play continues until all the pearls have been purchased from the home area, giving the game a race-like structure from start to finish.

Goods in the market are replenished as they are bought, but new tiles can introduce storms that…

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SHASN: AZADI is a box full of gimmicks. Those gimmicks are equal parts corny and high-minded, clever and ham-fisted. The area majority mechanism that is used to tally points is, frankly, pedestrian and simplistic. But, in spite of it all, the game is ambitious, and I admire games that are high-minded, even when that highmindedness has flaws.

Hegemony this ain’t

And that’s a good thing. AZADI is trying for something explicitly political—it is about the construction of political blocs more than it is about forcing players to accept the roles and bounds of its simulation. From where I sit, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory’s conception of political economy and class is at best misguided and ignorant. AZADI doesn’t presume to gamify and fragment class struggle, casting players as some fake-o thinktank concept of the “middle class” and the “state.” Instead, players are a political ideologue constructing their own ideology out of what will best get them into the big chair. More on this in a moment.

The way you win AZADI is by forming majorities. In the version that I’m reviewing, you have a modular dual-layered map with holes in it for player pieces. Each map tile has a crosshair hole  (volatile area) and a number reading something like 11/21. Players get points for having majorities, which…

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I played a lot of games in 2023. The best of those games, by a sizable margin, was Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, designed by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou and released by the two men under the Hegemonic Project Games banner. A bold effort in almost every way, Hegemony did an excellent job of simulating a real-world environment and mixing that with a number of different gaming systems. The end result now resides on BoardGameGeek’s top 50 all-time games and has hit my table for nearly a dozen plays; as an event game, it’s tough to beat.

Those accolades put a big target on the back of Hegemonic Project Games’ second design, World Order. Varnavas and Vangelis were kind enough to send a review copy in advance of the game’s full release, and it was pretty easy to get the members of my review crew to line up for plays.

I tempered expectations a bit here. I thought Hegemony was a classic example of “lightning in a bottle”, an asymmetric negotiation game that really did play differently from faction to faction, which landed in a January dead zone after working through a big pile of games from the year before. Could Hegemonic Project Games do it again with World Order? My main hope was that…

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Cross Bronx Expressway, GMT’s third release in the Irregular Conflicts series, is not for the weak. It is exceptionally complicated, even by the elevated standards of a COIN title. A frequent refrain amongst the GMT faithful, and an accurate refrain at that, is that the rules aren’t all that complicated once you get over the hump of learning them. Not so here. For my first game, I gathered three of the finest gaming minds in New York City, all of whom had read the rules in advance, and it still took an hour or two to get things started. This is no doubt in part a function of the theme, the civic management of The Bronx across the latter half of the 20th century. It’s easier to keep rules in your head when they don’t use words like “coalition,” “partner organization,” and “Census Round Audit.” You may find yourself scratching your head and wondering why you didn’t go back to school to get an MB(oard game)A.

Work your way past the daunting exterior and you’ll find a game that is a fascinating mix of the exceptionally confrontational and the utterly inscrutable. Cross Bronx Expressway is a hard game to talk about as a game, in part because the gamic elements are relatively slight in view of the whole. Designer…

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REM Racers. A name I didn't expect to hear again. Around this time last year, I reviewed the REM Racers board game, and as the name suggests, it's a racing game, a futuristic one at that. The box art is high-fidelity, the components are fantastic, and all of it would lead you to believe I'm about to gush. Instead, this was one of the least enjoyable gaming experiences I've had in a long, long time. I'm trying to be professional here.

So when they announced a card game version, I was a bit taken aback. From what I understand, the original wasn't well-received, and that usually doesn't earn you a spin-off. Then again, card games are cheap, and this one promises a runtime of roughly 20 minutes. Is it an improvement? Is it a good game? Am I going to stop asking questions? Yes.

They Did It Again

The title's a bit of a spoiler: it's a race. Everyone picks a pilot with a unique ability, and the goal is to finish first. But since there's no board or physical race track, the whole thing plays out pretty abstractly. Player positions are tracked by lining up everyone's car card in a row, first place to last. The track is represented by the "curve deck," a series of cards…

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Plastic bricks were a key part of my childhood. I have fond memories of tearing up my hands rummaging through a big tub of bricks that may or may not have actually held the one piece that I was searching for. Over time, my siblings and I developed amazing characters and lore of the hijinks that happened in our brick-world, leading me to naturally want to share that with my kids as they grow up. Epic Brick Adventures is designed to couple the world of bricks with the world of roleplaying games to facilitate creativity and storytelling without any age limitations. Ahead of the Kickstarter, I was able to get a look at the Introductory Guide and the Circus Catastrophe Intro Adventure to see if this game is more than just D&D with bricks.

Epic Brick Adventures: Building You Up

Epic Brick Adventures provides a rules framework for players to use their existing collections of bricks and plastic figures in a roleplaying game setting. Minifigures become MiniHeroes as a Brickmaster leads the players through an adventure of their own devising, serving as the Gamemaster (in conventional parlance).

MiniHeroes have Abilities broken out into Creative, Smarts, Willpower, Sense, Muscle, and Zip with concepts of Gusto and Clutch replacing energy and hit points respectively. Tack on an Occupation and some basic equipment…

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The Last Spell: The Board Game is one of those rare games that I can be unapologetically negative about. Contrary to what you might think reading some of my reviews, while I can be critical, I generally try to understand what the design was attempting to accomplish and if it accomplished that goal.

The Last Spell: The Board Game successfully accomplishes the aim of adapting a video game into a board game at what appears to be a 1:1 level of fidelity. Unfortunately, because of this, there is almost zero reason to play the board game adaptation.

This game is a waste of time.

Is there a good thing, Thomas?

Well, the aesthetics are kinda cool. I guess?

The premise of the game is that some wizards cast a big spell that killed nearly everything in the world, and the remnants group together in small towns bravely defending themselves against the dying of the light or some such thing. There’s purple mist. There’s a pixel art style that is very Dark Super Nintendo. Reminds me a bit of Super Boss Monster, and the text is reasonably easy to read. The miniatures for the player heroes are cool.

Unfortunately, beyond that, everything else is a travesty.

The game is a…

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Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay has, on the surface, everything that makes me typically dismiss the latest eurogame from the assembly line: It’s clearly inspired by Alexander Pfister’s Maracaibo and Boonlake, it has questionably silly cover art, and maybe one of the most generic and forgettable “this is a pirate game” names of all time (honestly, we accidentally called it “Scoundrels of Fortune Bay, Bay of Scoundrels, Founders of Fortune Bay, etc.)

I was surprised to just have a great time with Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay (FoSB). It’s always a treat to be delighted by the mechanical flourishes in a design, and this one has plenty of thoughtful choices that come together in a surprisingly mid-weight package.

We’re pirates, yar, but we’re also homebodies

Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay has an interesting rhythm compared to many games that feature seafaring as a central theme. Instead of sail, sail, sail, you are often sailing 1 or 2 spaces, then you’re doing a bunch of different activities for several rounds, then you might sail another space. The arrangement of the board is the shape of a bay, rather than a large expanse of ocean, and this is reflected in how the game plays. You’re more of a pirate party barge than a terrifying group of cutthroats. These pirates love to hang.

…

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Panda Spin - Andrew Lynch

There is a lot of promise in the core idea of Panda Spin, a shedding game with upgradeable cards. When/if you pass during a trick, you reclaim all of your played cards and turn them from their weaker side to their stronger side. Theoretically, this should cause hands to ramp ever-upwards as the game progresses and players start playing out massive set after massive set. It should also make the decision of whether or not to play something interesting, a game of chicken in which your desire to empty your hand of cards clashes with your desire for the stronger versions of things.

The reality falls short. Hands last too long. The rules are too clunky to explain to new players, with the juice rather immediately not worth the squeeze. The decisions aren’t particularly interesting. Many of the extra bits and bobs don’t feel like they enrich the game half so much as they complicate it, and therein lies the real rub: why play a somewhat inconveniently complex shedding game when I could either play a divine complex shedding game (like Tichu) or a terrific straightforward shedding game like Jungo or Scout?

Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play…

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This is my first review for Meeple Mountain, so by way of introduction let me tell you that tile-placement games are my favorite. Carcassonne was my introduction to modern hobby games, and it's possible this created a soft spot in my heart for the genre. And if a tile-placement game also has a city-building aspect, as in Warsaw: City of Ruins, Neom, or Suburbia? That's a double win. Throw in a puzzle to be solved and wrap it all in a light- to medium-weight game, and you'll almost always have a hit with me, unless the game is mechanically flawed, bug-ugly, or offensive in some manner.

Enter Timber Town from Alley Cat Games. Timber Town is a two-player game where players are beaver architects competing to construct the best (i.e., highest scoring) town on opposite sides of the riverbank. Your eager beaver builders construct town components (in the form of tiles) upstream and then float them down the river for you to collect and place in your town. As the architect, it’s your job to place the tiles in legal and optimal scoring positions.

The trick is, the river is fast moving and components you (or your opponent) don't choose in a timely manner will fall over the waterfall, lost to you forever. This simulation is…

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I struggled with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Trick-Taking Game. For all the inventiveness on display, as passionate a love letter to trick-taking as it was, Bryan Bornmueller’s commercial triumph left me cold. Too often, I said, that cooperative card game would leave players in the lurch, handing them combinations of characters and cards that were not winnable. Unlike its close cousin The Crew, something like half the hands in TLotR:TFotR-TTG proved unwinnable from the jump, save for an act of providence. I don’t want cooperative games to be easy, but I do want continuous losing to feel like a skill issue rather than RNG.

That’s the long and the short of it, anyway. And for what it’s worth, my criticisms of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - Trick-Taking Game are almost exactly the same as my criticisms of the first game. Critical decisions are made without crucial information. A lot of hands are dead from the jump and there’s nothing you can do about it. A few of the chapters here even sharpen my criticisms. It would be easy to get bogged down in an even more negative review, to dig into all the ways in which I continue to think Bornmueller’s game doesn’t work.

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“I LOVE the style of this artist,” my 12-year-old said while admiring some of the painting cards from the upcoming limited movement and order fulfillment game Concrete Canvas, available on crowdfunding right now.

I had to agree. The art, by real-life street artist Chris RWK, is fantastic, and this style carries into the playable character tokens, the subway tiles used to dictate each player’s movement, and the milk crate player boards used to store paint cans as players move their tokens around New York City in an attempt to tag more locations than their opponents.

Designer David Abelson’s game does a great job of capturing the look and feel of something straight out of Beat Street, or any of the other break-dancing, street jive 80s films I grew up on. Even video games like Jet Grind Radio (or Jet Set Radio, depending on where you grew up) feel like an influence here.

Then the game starts…when Concrete Canvas reveals itself to be the opposite of dynamic.

Up and Down

Concrete Canvas is an order fulfillment, area majority game for 2-4 players. Players will spend most of their turns moving one of their two character tokens through different parts of New York via subway tiles that are adjacent to…

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In Elizabeth Hargrave’s latest game, Sanibel, players take turns walking down the beach and stopping to collect a variety of shells and shark teeth. You’ll score points by dropping these treasures into your bag so they ‘fall’ in alignment with other items already there. Have the most points at the end of the walk, and you win the game.

Setup

To start, unfold and line up the three sections of the board. On the left, place the section with the beach chairs; to the right, place the section with the lighthouse. The section without a special area at either end goes in between these two.

Players then take a token of their chosen color and the corresponding board with a bag printed on it. You’ll place everyone’s tokens in random order in the upper left corner of the central board on the right, just above the beach chairs. Place the Wave token to the far left of the player tokens.

Shuffle the zig-zag-shaped pieces and deal two to each player. These are your Lighthouse tiles and will offer additional scoring opportunities once you reach the Lighthouse midway through the game. Read these carefully, as they may help you determine which shells you want to concentrate on.

Above the shoreline…

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If you're a Gamemaster running Starfinder Second Edition, the Starfinder Alien Core is your de facto manual of monsters. It promises pages upon pages of strange creatures that would feel at home in any sci-fi world. Some are geared more towards horror, others are more techy, and some are there as classics to hit you with a nostalgia bomb. Let's take some time to run through the highlights of the book.

Starfinder Alien Core

Right off the jump you are greeted with the full alphabetized table of contents for every creature featured in Starfinder Alien Core, including visual breaks for each set of letters to prevent the usual wall-of-text layout. Directly afterward is a brief section that describes the different aspects of a creature's statblock, how to play creatures, and making adjustments. I was quite surprised looking back at the Starfinder GM Core that this information was never included. There is more in-depth guidance into custom creature creation, but nothing that lays out the aspects of the statblock as succinctly as this.

Then it's time to dive right into the 200 pages of creatures, typically featuring one on each page. The general flow of information starts with a brief snippet of lore about the creature to set the scene, followed by the creature's statblock. The sidebar also always features…

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From the rulebook: “Shadera is no ordinary world. A great cataclysm has shattered the world of the fairy creatures. Where once there were no borders, an impenetrable veil now divides the home of the gnomes, wolper-squirrels and mermaids into many different Shard Worlds. In order to be able to continue to exchange raw materials, make trade agreements, and visit old friends, the Portal Guild was created — an association of all those magicians who can use their magic to open portals between the worlds.

You are part of this guild: adepts who, after long and thorough training, have come together today to prove their skills. Your master has decided that you will compete against each other in a duel to show that you can gather enough energy to open portals through the veil to the Shard Worlds. The first person to complete 20 tasks will be awarded Shadera’s highest honor, the title of Portal Guard.”

If, having just read all that, you’re crossing your eyes trying to make sense of it, you’re not alone. The story is nonsensical. Somehow, though, it seems appropriate because Portals is a game that defies easy explanation, especially if you try to attach a story to it.

How It Works

Published in 2024, Uwe Rosenberg’s Portals puts the players in the roles of Portal…

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There was a point after my first lap around the South Africa track, one of the two new tracks in Heat: Rocky Roads, when I realized that it might be my favorite track in all of Heat. Nothing else in the extended Heataverse feels quite as rewarding of great play. South Africa isn’t as punishing of poor play or bad luck as España, nor is it a source of the same adrenalized fun that comes with ripping down the straightaways in Italia or Nederlands, but a skilled player in South Africa can do some incredible things. And for the record, I came to this realization while I was getting absolutely walloped.

What is it that makes the track so good? It isn’t the gimmick. The only special rule is that any player who finishes their move on a gravel space has to pay a heat if they have one. If you’re on gravel and you don’t have any heat, it don’t hurt you none. This is a perfectly fine addition to the game, one that will occasionally make you second-guess taking advantage of an opportunity to slipstream, but it doesn’t add so much to the game that it would change the feel of an entire track.

It’s the corners. South Africa is jam-packed with delicious, surprisingly slow corners, and…

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