From the rules:

“You are a winemaker in the heart of Bordeaux, guiding your vineyard from grape to glass. Every good winemaker knows time itself is an ingredient, and patience is as vital as ambition.

This philosophy shapes every decision you make in Bordeaux. Over 13 years (turns), you will assign Workers to Make Wine or Gain Resources, choosing a duration of 1, 2, or 3 years. Longer commitments mean more powerful actions, but it will take longer for that worker to be ready again.

As your wines mature, you chart a curated wine tour, connecting estates and guiding bottles into restaurants and shops where patrons can taste your craft.

When the final year has passed, your legacy is uncorked. Score points for your wines and resources, and discover which winemaker’s careful timing has produced the most celebrated vintage.”

Bordeaux defies easy categorization. There’s no card flipping, no dice rolling, no bag drawing. There’s just you, your available workers, the thing the game allows you to do, and the thing you or your opponents have decided you’ll have the ability to do. If you’re well-positioned, you may be able to do both. But chances are you’ll have to choose between one or the other. Everything you do is in the pursuit of victory points and, after 13 turns, the…

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Aspens is a two-player game of arboreal expansion and domination. Each player is given a bag of trees. On a player’s turn, they will roll the game’s two dice to determine the limitations of their actions. One die controls how many trees each of the players receive from their bags, and the other controls in which direction they are able to expand their holdings. On their turn, a player may expand outwards (filling in more spaces with their own trees), bolster their current holdings (increasing their odds of receiving new trees when the dice are rolled), or some mixture of both. Their goal is to get as many of those trees onto the playing field as they can so that when final calculations are performed at the end of the game, they’ll occupy more real estate than their opponent and thereby win the game.

This, of course, is an oversimplification of the game (although, as you’ll soon see, not much of one). If you’re just interested in what I think about the game, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we talk about how to play Aspens.

Setup

First, assemble the game board. The board is divided into seven segments. When fully assembled, you’ll be left with a vaguely cross-shaped playing area composed…

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“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

That old adage, often spoken in jest with a hapless shrug of the shoulders, speaks to a day that begins like any other day where one ill-fated decision causes everything to fall apart, a veritable misplaced pebble cascading into an avalanche. That cold, bleak, wintry Sunday morning at the cafe was just such a day.

I’d arrived early to open the cafe for the day and my three employees had shown up soon thereafter. It was a Sunday, so expectations were very low. We typically didn’t get much traffic and, usually, I’d have to start sending people home early to save on labor costs. But, you never know how things are going to go. So, you’ve always got to be prepared.

About an hour after opening, a young man walked in with a camera in one hand and a trophy in the other. Upon stepping to the counter, he asked to speak with me, and the story he told me was so unusual that I will never forget it. His name was Ty and he was a Youtuber with a following in the millions. His passion was traveling to various, random cities, visiting their local establishments, and providing them with exposure on his channel. On this particular day, his mission…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way backwards 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 that there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups active on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about Civolution: Acceptance Letter, the much anticipated expansion for 2024’s Civolution, his 41st game.

This expansion includes three modules that can be added together or used separately. I’m not going to explain how the base game is played. This review assumes you already know. If not, you can check out my review of the Civolution base game.

Instead, we’re going to explore the new modules and discuss how they work and what I think about them. It is also my fervent hope that I’ll be able to answer the question you’ve asked yourself that, no doubt, led you here: is this an expansion that I need in my collection?

Module 1: Starting Attribute Chips

Civolution: Acceptance Letter includes six Starting Attribute chips. During setup, whether by random assignment or by drafting them, each player will…

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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 2007’s Notre Dame, his third game. Following the release of Rum & Pirates the year before, this was Stefan Feld’s second game to appear in Alea’s big box series. Even though the game was released in the same year as In the Year of the Dragon, I’m calling this his third game because, numerically, Notre Dame comes before In the Year of the Dragon in the series (numbers 11 and 12, respectively).

In Notre Dame, players take on the roles of noble families in the city of Paris at the end of the 14th century as they vie to become the most prestigious family in the city. Each player begins the game with their own borough, a board which is divided into seven different sectors, and is connected to a central tile which represents the Notre Dame…

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Here at Meeple Mountain, we’ve written a lot about Wingspan. Since its inception in 2019, Elizabeth Hargrave’s Spiel des Jahres winning masterpiece has inspired and captured the hearts of gamers worldwide. I’m not going to go into detail about how to play the game here. If you’re unfamiliar with Wingspan, then I suggest you familiarize yourself with the base game before reading any further.

It’s been four years since the Wingspan: Asia expansion (2022) was released. Unlike that expansion, the subject of this review, Wingspan: Americas is not a standalone expansion. To play Wingspan: Americas, you must have the base game or the Wingspan: Asia expansion in order to do so.

Something Old

Americas introduces a whole host of new birds, each featuring new and interesting abilities. A couple of standouts for me are the White-Throated Magpie-Jay which lets you tuck cards behind its neighbours, replacing the tucked cards with newly drawn ones, or the Firewood-Gatherer which steals eggs from other birds in your tableau and dispenses eggs of its own to other birds in your tableau.

A user on BoardGameGeek has compiled a list of all the new birds and their abilities that you can go check out if you’re interested. Many of these…

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When it comes to modern board gaming, there is no denying the impact that The Settlers of Catan (now just Catan)has had on the hobby, bringing the ideology of modern game design to players around the world in a format that’s approachable, digestible, and easy to learn. While not a perfect game by any means, it’s a game that’s launched an empire. And now, that empire is going portable.

Now, this isn’t Catan’s first foray into portability. 1996 saw the introduction of Catan: the Card Game, a small box, two-player version of the game. In 2002, the Catan: Portable Edition was released, a tiny plastic version of the base game. Then, in 2010, Rivals for Catan was released, another small box, two-player game based in the Catan universe. Each of these has its issues. Aside from the fact that the two-player games are only for two players, once the games are in progress, they turn into sprawling behemoths that take up almost as much (if not more) space than the board game they’re replacing. As for the Portable Edition, when I say it’s tiny, I’m not mincing words. The cards are miniature versions of the already small cards from the regular game. The plastic road pieces are about as long as the average thumbnail is wide.

When I…

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From the rulesheet: “A curse has cast a shadow over the valley, causing the inhabitants to run from the villages and the animals to flee their nests. From the top of a ridge, a mysterious creature named Buh has noticed the desolation and decided to bring the light back. As they stroll through the valley, Buh uses their magic to seek out and restore the light. As darkness recedes, wildlife and the village’s inhabitants begin to return and revel in the sun’s life-giving warmth once again.”

Light Seeker is a two-player strategy game composed of 9 wooden cubes and a single meeple, called the ‘Buh meeple’ (which sort of resembles a cartoon badger). Each wooden cube has a number of dark sides, bright sides, and a couple of half-bright/half-dark sides. At the start of the game, the cubes are arranged into a 3x3 grid, dark sides up. The Buh meeple is placed atop the centermost cube.

On a player’s turn, they will be performing two actions from a list of two possible action types. The same action can be repeated if the player wishes. The two possible actions are ‘slide cube’ or ‘tilt cube’. Sliding involves moving a cube from its current spot to an orthogonally adjacent location without…

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