For many years, my dear friend and former roommate had a cat named Eilonwy. He —this may confuse some of you, but I promise that Eilonwy was a “he”—was a wonderful cat, with many admirable qualities, but he could not be left unsupervised with water. He could not be left supervised with water, for that matter. Any vessel containing water that was left on a surface he could reach would soon find itself right off. Had they ever met, Eilonwy would have provided Sir Isaac Newton with many an opportunity to raise his eyebrows, tilt his head slightly, and mutter, “See?”. We lost many a glass and many a mug in this way.

It was never malicious. He wasn’t making a statement, it wasn’t some sort of anti-Narcissus performance piece. Eilonwy simply could not help but bat at the surface of the water, and to do so with such vigor that its container would edge closer and closer to disaster. It became a part of the rhythm of the household: the occasional crash, the frantic dash of startled paws, a shouted, “Damnit, Eilonwy!”

The post Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I spent a measurable percentage of my childhood doing puzzles. If we were in the car, I was probably doing a puzzle. Visiting one of my mom’s adult friends? I was doing a puzzle. A long flight? Oh, you better believe there were puzzles, though they were interrupted by bouts of reading. A short flight, though, that was puzzles all the way up and all the way down. The puzzles could take many forms, be they crosswords, logic puzzles, or ThinkFun (née Binary Arts) toys, but they were a consistent mainstay of how I spent my time.

That’s still true today. I adore a good puzzle. Sign me up for an escape room. I spent much of the first year or so of COVID getting into advanced forms of Sudoku. For months now, I’ve been dutifully starting each day with Clues by Sam. When Blaž Gracar’s LOK hit a couple of years ago, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it, and my excitement was well-rewarded. That puzzle book was like nothing else I’d ever seen. The puzzles were satisfying…

The post Workworkwork Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Mechanics are the engine of board game design. While many are straightforward and use limited or similar ideas to support the gameplay, more and more modern games are fusing together seemingly disparate mechanics in an attempt to create something fresh. In some instances, these mechanics wind up fitting together perfectly (the good), in others, the concept looks interesting but the execution just falls flat (the bad), and sometimes, it can feel like jamming two incorrect puzzle pieces into each other (the ugly). Today, K. David Ladage and Joseph Buszek each look at three games trying to mix it up, with varying results.

K. David Ladage

The Good—7 Wonders Duel (with both expansions)

Set Collection + Tug of War + Sudden Death + Once-per-game Powers + etc. = Awesome!

The first article in this series was The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Two Player Adaptations. I said that a good example of such an adaptation was 7 Wonders Duel. I was confident in my choice as I am in good company: my colleague, Justin Bell, agrees. I pointed out that one of the things that makes this game so amazing is the understanding that, with the shift from three plus players to just two, the game…

The post The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly – Mixing Mechanics appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Canal Houses (2025, Gigamic) joins an almost unsustainably long list of quick card games where players must place a card into a tableau to build something. Maybe it’s a pipeline. Maybe it’s a community of cute animals. Maybe it’s a series of buildings in a race to place your 12th card before another player.

Canal Houses is based on the 2024 release Grachtenpand and builds on games released both before (The Red Cathedral) and after (Tenby) 2024, where players have to build buildings by laying cards representing bottom, middle, and roof levels to score points in a Dutch waterfront setting. Canal Houses accomplishes this by asking players to manage a hand of three cards, then adding a fourth from one of the available house component types (storefront, windows, roof) to then play one of those four cards into an ever-expanding tableau. After playing one of those four cards, each player has to pass their remaining three cards to the player on their left.

Each storefront and roof card has a scoring condition that is usually tied to features on the window cards. As long as the building meets that requirement, it will trigger points at the end of the game. One storefront might be worth four points, as long as a player can add at…

The post Canal Houses Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

If you do even a little digging into my review portfolio, you’ll see how much I respect the work of Simone Luciani. So, anything he touches is a game I will happily get to the table.

Echoes of Time (2025, Cranio Creations) is a co-design between Luciani and Roberto Pellei. It’s a very straightforward tableau builder that asks players to draw and play cards in a fashion similar to the IELLO game Ancient Knowledge from a couple years ago. Using the San Juan concept of paying for everything using only the other cards from hand, Echoes of Time is so straightforward that I only needed one pass of the rulebook before getting the game to the table.

Echoes of Time is the solution for players who like more punishing games with tricky scoring conditions (even the Luciani release MESOS seems to fit here) mixed with unclaimed tableau artifacts like the “Places of Power” from Res Arcana. If you’ve ever wondered “is there a more interactive, possibly mean version of Ancient Knowledge that plays in about 45 minutes?”, then run out and buy a copy of Echoes of Time right now.

That is, if you are comfortable with a healthy dose of unbalanced cards. Let me explain.

The post Echoes of Time Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

It’s easy, I think, to take a game like Duel for Cardia for granted, especially if you spend as much time in the board game trenches as I do. Faouzi Boughida and Mathieu Rivero aren’t doing anything exceptional here, by which I mean they aren’t doing anything that stands out if you’re constantly deluged with new game designs. Duel for Cardia isn’t flashy, and it isn’t trying to break new ground. It’s easy to underestimate a game that’s simply doing the work. I think I made this comparison a few years ago, but I will come back to it: Duel for Cardia is the board game equivalent of a good studio picture from back when studios were content to make $35 million on a film with a budget of $10m.

By that I mean, it is competently designed, charming, successful, tense, and you could play it with just about anyone. Both players start with an identical deck of 16 cards, draw a hand of five, and simultaneously reveal one. You can think of this as a lane battler with up to 16 single-card lanes if you want; you wouldn’t be far off the mark. The player who reveals a higher-value card wins a Signet. The player who reveals a lower-value card gets to activate their card’s ability. This process…

The post Duel for Cardia Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I first saw Yokohama at Gen Con in 2024 when it was reprinted with updated art and dual-layered boards. My main turnoff was that it seemed quite fiddly with the smaller meeples and felt generally busy with the various worker placement locations. Enter Yokohama Duel which eliminates those issues and presents a similar gameplay wrapped in a convenient two-player package. The question remained: does it stand on its own merits amidst the evergrowing list of 'duel' games? I aim to find out.

Yokohama Duel Overview

Each player in Yokohama Duel assumes the role of a prominent merchant in the Meiji era of Japan, pushing themselves towards prosperity for themselves and the burgeoning port town. Through the acquisition of goods, fulfillment of orders, adoption of technology, and culturally mindful practices over four rounds, players compete to see who will come out on top.

The core of the game is the placement of 'workers' in the form of Power cards. At the start of the game, each player receives a set of Power cards valued 1 to 4. On their turn, a player selects the lowest remaining Power card in their hand and plays it to an unused location on the board. The value of the card played gives an increasing benefit such as more resources, a higher valued Technology…

The post Yokohama Duel Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post In the Footsteps of Darwin: Correspondence Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

[caption id="attachment_328393" align="alignright" width="263"] Mr. Jackson[/caption]

The Inner Monologue of a Super-Fan

Steve Jackson. {deep breath} This is an interview with Steve Jackson. {fidgets nervously} I am kinda geeking out right now. Collect yourself, David. You can do this. Start by introducing the man. {deep breath}

Wait… Does Steve Jackson need an introduction? I mean, if you speak to the people from my generation of gaming, most assuredly not. But new gamers are discovering these hobbies every day (which means there are 10,000 or so people just discovering him today). Sure, there are going to be those new gamers who started with the insanity that is Munchkin, or who cut their teeth on GURPS—one of the most successful lines of role-playing material ever published—but what about those who do not know Mr. Jackson and his company? I know… I will start by providing two Wikipedia articles: one about the man, and one about his company.

I have gotten to meet Mr. Jackson in person once, at GenCon (he signed my copies of Wizard and Melee). I have had multiple conversations with him online (not that he likely remembers me in any way).…

The post Six Questions with Steve Jackson appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

At this point, it feels impossible to write about The Old King’s Crown without grappling in some way with the sustained level of hype that it has produced over the last year. Pablo Clark’s ambitious entrée into the world of board games, this lane battler on steroids, has made a big splash. How big that splash is, exactly, is hard to measure, but the small board game café where I work gets a call about once every two-to-three weeks asking if we have The Old King’s Crown in stock. This is an ungainly mess of a game, an initially unwelcoming and overwhelming thing. Catan this is not. For The Old King’s Crown to break hobby containment would suggest a Blue Whale has just surfaced.

These are not, in full transparency, my favorite reviews to write. I prefer unexpected surprises to the heavily foreshadowed. If a game has too much momentum behind it when it reaches your door, your only choices are to be bowled over or to step aside and let it pass you by. I don’t want to get caught up in the current of excitement, nor am I interested in writing a reactionary takedown.

Fortunately, life conspired to keep me from playing my review copy of The Old King’s Crown for quite a bit longer than anticipated.…

The post The Old King’s Crown Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Many of us who have been gaming for a while love to spread the joy of our hobby to others. We're not shy about inviting others to our game nights or trying to start up new groups in town. Many times, though, we're met with, "Nah, I'm not interested. I'd rather stay in and watch Netflix."

But then comes the day when someone says, "Yeah, I'd like that," and the person actually shows up at your gathering. You haven't dragged them to your gathering; they've come willingly. They've expressed interest! They are a Potential New Gamer (PNG). Your job now is to not scare them off by giving them a subpar experience. How do you boost the chances that they'll stick with the hobby and maybe become a permanent member of your group?

While everyone responds differently to social situations, there are some things about game gatherings that can be instant turn-offs for potential new gamers. Here are ten things that might frustrate and/or offend your fledgling gamers and tips on how to avoid them.

1. Sexist, racist, anti-LGBTQ, political, religious, or other alienating language or appearances. 

Gaming has come a long way since I started way back in the 1980's. Back then, a woman practically had to accept being offended…

The post 10 Turnoffs for Potential New Gamers (And How to Prevent Them) appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

JOYRIDE DUEL: Next Gen is a bit of an oddity. It is marketed as the Mario Kart of racing games. That promises a certain amount of chaos and, indeed, chaos is what JOYRIDE DUEL has in mind. Rather than a fixed track, with the boundaries and prescribed routes such a thing necessitates, the board is open-world, with numbered gates you have to pass through in a particular order. There are exploding drones and flash grenades, oil slicks and mines that can be picked up on the track or acquired every time you pass through certain gates. The rules contain copious amounts of information concerning the collision of vehicles. Whether it’s a head-on or a side-swipe, you’ll know exactly what to do. The player dashboards have slots for damage, which slowly builds up and incapacitates your vehicle over the course of the race.

With all of these features in place, you too would assume chaos is the special du jour. Yet JOYRIDE DUEL is a surprisingly staid experience. Using a number of dice dictated by the gear you’re in, you zoom around the track, take corners, set up trajectories, and do your best to make it to the end, but it’s all much less dramatic than you’d expect. Across three races, I never added more than one or two pieces…

The post JOYRIDE DUEL: Next Gen Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I couldn’t tell you when I first heard about Neuroshima Hex, which was originally published in 2006 and predates my time in board games by just about a full decade. At some point, though, Michał Oracz’s tactical tile-layer set up camp on the periphery of my awareness, built a large fire, threw on a stew, and did the only thing it had to do: wait.

My interest in Neuroshima Hex was inevitable. The only trick? I couldn’t find a way in. There are several editions, and oodles of expansions, and it all made the game a bit daunting. Publisher Portal Games seems to recognize that themselves, so for the game’s 20th anniversary, they announced not only a new edition of the base game, but Neuroshima Hex: Battle, a starter box for two that lets the curious among us give the game a try without going all-in. $25 isn’t much in exchange for scratching a perpetual itch, is it? I couldn’t say no.

The sum of Neuroshima Hex takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which various factions are at war for resources and supremacy. You know, that kind of thing. Each player chooses a faction and its corresponding deck of tiles, then goes about attempting to systematically obliterate their opponent. The decks are made up of varying combinations of…

The post Neuroshima Hex: Battle appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Let’s Build a Magic Deck – Chapter Four: And We’re Off appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Like many people, my first game of Warhammer 40,000 (40K) was played at a local game store. It wasn’t particularly organized. Armies weren’t optimized, rules were misunderstood or misremembered, and “take-backs” were given freely and without hesitation. The atmosphere was relaxed, social, and forgiving.

Games stretched on for hours and were rarely uninterrupted. Curious onlookers stopped by to watch or chat, breaks were taken for food and drinks, and plenty of conversation had nothing to do with the game itself. Most games didn’t even finish, and no one cared. Those hours were filled with laughter, questionable decisions, and learning. That casual environment is where I fell in love with Warhammer and the hobby as a whole.

Among my group of friends, armies were built around what people enjoyed playing or painting, not what was considered optimal. Some of us played to win, but nothing was on the line. The outcome mattered far less than the experience and the stories the games created.

Fast forward several years, and I found myself stepping into a very different environment - competitive Warhammer 40,000. Instead of a local store table, I was now under bright convention lights, surrounded by rows of identical tables laid out with carefully planned, symmetrical terrain. Don’t get me wrong, this environment is still incredibly enjoyable. The people are welcoming…

The post Competitive Warhammer 40,000 – What Is It, and Should I Try It? appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

My wife and I are always desperate to find things to do during the ridiculously-long stretch over the holidays when the kids are out of school for the Christmas-to-New-Year’s period. Recently, that stretch lasted 17 days.

So, my wife often buys 2-3 activities—art projects, workbooks, LEGO installations, board games—to help pave the way in-between all the TV watching, tablet gaming, meals, and sleep. (Sadly, that is often all my kids do during that time if we are at home!) One of the activities she picked up this year was the cooperative legacy board game Ziggurat, published by one of our family’s favorite activity makers, the puzzle company Mindware.

At first, I rolled my eyes at this one. Do I not bring in enough board games for this family to play every year? But then I noticed the names on the box: Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock, two of the legends of the genre and the creators of the greatest legacy game of them all, Pandemic: Legacy Season 1. Then I flipped the box over and fell even harder in love with the concept—Ziggurat is a six-chapter legacy game and looked like a great time for the kids.

I was mostly right.

Stick Rule D Here After Completing Chapter…

The post Ziggurat Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I enjoyed my time with Corps of Discovery Duo, Joy Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim’s two-player version of Corps of Discovery. Or, at least, I would have told you I enjoyed it. I certainly had a nice time playing this cooperative deduction game for two. But when it came time to write this review, I found I didn’t have much positive to say at all.

It feels unfair, but it also feels right. Prior to writing about Corps, I had been having an excellent day, so I know I wasn’t moody. I even re-read this draft after taking a nice walk. I gave myself a little treat. I hydrated. I took a nap. When I returned, I found that I couldn’t argue with anything I’d written. Corps of Discovery Duo did not work for me in any meaningful sense.

As Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, or York, two players have to work together to map their way west. In practical terms, this is done by playing cards with one of ten different items on them out onto the table, following both public and hidden rules for each item while doing so.

Here we hit our first bump. Why are we arranging items? Why aren’t…

The post Corps of Discovery Duo Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Focused on Feld: The Sandcastles of Burgundy Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I’m a big fan of weird dueling games—Ortus Regni is one of my all timers—and if they allow for multiplayer silliness, all the better. Etherstone manages to be a complete product, thoughtful, novel, and at times, surprisingly clever. If nothing else, it gets props for not just being a blatant money-grab, instead offering a self-contained and compelling game that has a lot of depth.

The conceit

The lore of Etherstone is not that compelling, mainly because the art is so expressive that I don’t really end up caring much about whatever the story is. It’s evoking druids and biopunk—wild and crazy characters collecting various blobs of mana and using them to bring in more characters so you can battle shared threats, etc., etc.

Mechanically, at the beginning of the game you’ll select a leader card from two that you’re dealt randomly. This will give you a starting distribution of resources. From there, you’ll draft seven cards from a large deck. Once you’ve done both of these things, it’s time to duel.

Etherstone captures one of my favorite underutilized mechanisms in gaming—the point buy. Though it’s a standard card draft that you see in many games, the fact that you’re only getting seven cards to play the entire session with…

The post Etherstone Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.