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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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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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this 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 2025’s The Druids of Edora, his 45th game. This marks his first team up with Alea Ravensburger since 2020’s The Castles of Tuscany. Remarkably, in that short time frame, Feld has added an additional 13 titles to his resume.

In The Druids of Edora, players take on the roles of druid clans competing for dominance and prestige against a mystical forest background ripped right out of a high fantasy novel. The forest is dotted with clearings, which contain shrines, and are connected to one another via a network of well-traveled pathways. Using their provisions, players will travel from shrine to shrine where they will perform various actions using their dice. It’s a Stefan Feld game so, it goes almost without saying, virtually everything you do is going to earn you prestige throughout the course of the game.…

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In the Footsteps of Darwin imagines a world where Charles Darwin is still hard at work on the book that would one day make him a household name. To shore up his theory, he has sent the players out into the world to gather additional supporting evidence. The expansion In the Footsteps of Darwin: Correspondence continues this narrative, adding some brand new elements as well as tweaking and refining some elements which already exist. 

What’s New?

Correspondence introduces a whole host of new components and concepts, all of which reside on the new ‘England board’, which sits beside the Journey board during play. The first thing of note is that the Darwin standee is no longer in the hands of the players. Instead, it rests in its own quadrant of the England board. This quadrant is divided into four squares. As players draft tiles featuring the Darwin icon, rather than change ownership of the standee as in the base game, the Darwin standee will shift into the next square in clockwise order, doling out one (or both) of the two new resources that are introduced by the expansion: Envelope and Classification tokens.

During setup, the left side of the England board is populated with a number of face up…

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Here’s a quick recap of Chapters One, Two, and Three:

Someone introduced me to Magic. Someone taught me how to play the wrong way. I sucked. Someone taught me the right rules and how to build a deck. I got good. I went broke. I got out. Then, Commander arrived. I got inspired by a Commander deck my wife bought me for Christmas and decided to build a deck of my own. I identified a potential commander amongst my plethora of cards. I made a few suppositions about what types of cards I might need in my deck. I realized the state of my card collection was in total disarray. So, I decided to get organized, and I did.

With my organizational woes out of the way, I can finally turn my attention to actually creating my deck.

But first, some ground rules.

Magic, as I’ve stated in previous articles in this series, is an absurdly expensive hobby. My intention with this deck is to only use whatever I already have at hand. I feel that, over the course of three decades, I have donated enough to the Magic coffers that I never want to spend another cent on this game ever again. That’s why I’m excited to build this deck. With access to over 8,000…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this 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 2025’s The Sandcastles of Burgundy, his 44th game. The Sandcastles of Burgundy (Sandcastles) stands out from all of Stefan Feld’s other designs in two notable ways. Firstly, this is Feld’s first foray into designing a children’s game. Secondly, this is Feld’s first co-design with his wife Susanne who, as an elementary school teacher, brings her professional experience with children to bear, working with Feld to simplify the game down into the experience it is today.

In Sandcastles, a foreign dignitary, Queen Crab, has announced her intention to come visit your kingdom. As a way to show her gratitude for you being such a gracious host, she has sent ahead some beach-themed decorations from her kingdom and has asked that you decorate your village in preparation for a beach party that she plans to throw when she arrives. Sandcastles…

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If you’ve played the game Pixies and liked it as much as I do, then you’ll be pleased to hear that Pixies has returned, better than ever, with an all-new expansion. Consisting of just 14 new cards, the Pixies: Flower Power expansion introduces even more intriguing mechanics and adorable critters into the mix. Before continuing, if you’re not familiar with how the game is played, I recommend you go check out my review of Pixies so that the rest of this review will make sense. It’s a small game, so it’ll only take you a few minutes.

Each card in this expansion is bi-colored, which means it’s easier than ever to create large color zones. This is the first new change. Beware: the bi-color nature of this expansion comes with a dark side. Many of the cards will score you negative points for having particular colors in your display. Bi-color cards count as two colors, so it’s very easy to get yourself into trouble if you’re not careful.

[caption id="attachment_328324" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Image credit: BGG User @rainalyn[/caption]

The second big change is that, during end-of-round scoring, face down cards are worth five points apiece, and there are even some cards that will earn you extra spirals for having face…

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Here’s a quick recap of Let's Build a Magic Deck - Parts One and Two:

Someone introduced me to Magic. Someone taught me how to play the wrong way. I sucked. Someone taught me the right rules and how to build a deck. I got good. I went broke. I got out. Then, Commander arrived. I got inspired by a Commander deck my wife bought me for Christmas and decided to build a deck of my own. I identified a potential commander amongst my plethora of cards. I made a few suppositions about what types of cards I might need in my deck. I realized the state of my card collection was in total disarray. So, I decided to get organized.

To that end, the first thing I did was to hop onto Amazon to pick up a few trading card storage boxes. Examining the myriad plastic baggies full of cards that were in my bin of cards, I gauged that I had around 2,000 loose cards that needed a home. After looking over multiple options, I finally settled upon these storage boxes.

I liked these because they looked rugged and durable. Plus, they’re reasonably priced. 800 cards per box seemed like it should be sufficient. I…

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Here’s a quick recap of Let’s Build A Magic Deck - Part One:

Someone introduced me to Magic. Someone taught me how to play the wrong way. I sucked. Someone taught me the right rules and how to build a deck. I got good. I went broke. I got out. Then Commander arrived.

I suppose now is a good time to talk about Commander: what it is and what it means for me.

Part Two: What A Mess

Where I Extoll the Virtues of the Commander Format

As mentioned in the previous entry in this series, a standard Magic deck is composed of 60 cards—consisting of cards from very specific blocks—with no more than four copies of a single card in the deck. Each player begins a game with 20 hit points, and the players win by reducing their opponents’ health to 0. There’s nothing wrong with this mode of play. It’s the way I played Magic for decades. But, it’s costly since entire sets of cards are constantly being rotated out, and new sets are being rotated in. This means you have to constantly buy more cards if you want to compete.

The Commander format changes a lot of things. Firstly, in Commander, your deck is composed of 100 unique cards (minus basic lands, which you can…

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This past Christmas, my wife bought me a pre-constructed Magic: the Gathering Commander deck, which is set in the Doctor Who universe. Doctor Who appears within Magic: the Gathering as a part of an initiative called ‘Universes Beyond’. This series, based on various IPs, features other settings such as Lord of the Rings, Avatar: the Last Airbender, and Fallout (to name a few).

It was an unexpected, but welcome, gift to say the least. I haven’t played Magic: the Gathering in years (I’ve never played the Commander format), but I do love me some Doctor Who. So, I wasted no time tearing into it to check out the cards, and I have to say: I’m in love. From the artwork to the card mechanics to the flair text, the theme oozes from every card. It’s exactly what you’d want from a Doctor Who themed Magic: the Gathering set.

As I sat there reading the cards and trying to understand how the deck worked, I felt something long dormant began reawakening in me: the desire to play. And, as I sat there reading over the cards, it became apparent to me that I’ve been out of the game for far too long. Unfamiliar keywords, command zones, color identities… my eyes crossed trying to parse everything. Magic is an ever-evolving game and…

The post Let’s Build a Magic Deck – Part One: Getting Started appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Released in 2024, the movie Flow follows the adventures of a mismatched group of animals as they try to navigate, and survive, a massive flood of apocalyptic proportions. Flow, the cooperative board game (released in 2025) is heavily inspired by this narrative. In the game, players work against the clock, placing tiles to create a pathway for the animals trapped on the edges of the game board to reach the safety of the boat in the middle. Each time the one-minute timer runs out, dice are rolled and, depending on the results, a number of tiles are washed away by the rising flood waters, forcing the players to start again. If the players are able to create pathways for all four animals, they win. But, if the tiles run out before that occurs, they lose.

Overview

The game board is divided into a 7x7 grid. Each corner features the image of one of the four animals the players are trying to save, and each image has the beginning of two pathways connected to it. The center row and column are highlighted in a different color than the other empty squares of the grid. During setup, the boat tile is placed in the center of the board where these stripes intersect. The boat tile is double-sided. One side features an…

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