There’s quite a bit about Castle Nightingale to catch the attention of the discerning gamer. That box, with its palette of dark blue and warm orange, stands out on a shelf. As you get closer, the colors organize into three mangy cat ninjas and a game red panda samurai, all charmingly rendered by Vincent Dutrait. That one cat making eye contact more or less dares you not to be interested. As you pick up the box, which you inevitably will, you might notice the “B. Cathala” listed alongside co-designers Eliette and Jérémy Fraile. Only then might you notice the logo in the lower left corner.

You don’t often get to say, “Sand Castle Games has a new game out.” Prior to Castle Nightingale, you’d have said it twice. There was the 2019 release of Res Arcana, and the 2022 release of First Empires. Three games in eight or so years—I’m including production work on Res—is a slow, considered pace. And to think that people used to marvel at Days of Wonder’s approach of only one title a year.

Even if they only have a 50% hit rate, Sand Castle’s pace suggests that they only release the games they really want to release. It’s clear from their production choices that they pour all of their attention into each…

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Wonder Boy, Hercules

I’m a fan of mythology in general. There’s a childlike wonder that comes from reading stories of epic heroism, self-sacrifice, memorable characters wrapped up in the hero’s journey formula. I remember when Disney’s Hercules came out in 1997, I was engrossed in the mania of toys, picture books, and even the promotional plates in partnership with McDonald’s (yes, back then McDonald’s had tableware!).

Fast forward to today, and while I don’t have kids of my own, the inner kid is always drawn to mythological stories. Though the actual story of Hercules and the 12 Labors is vastly different from the children’s cartoon, complete with graphic violence and other adult themes.

I was excited to link up with Mathue Ryann from Envy Born games last year, both over our mutual Friendsgiving of bourbon and board games, and at PAX U, where Hercules and the 12 Labors debuted. This title, with all the gold foiling and pizzazz, follows a format of grinding through a deck of cards in the similar vein of Kinfire Delve, One Deck Dungeon, and Witchcraft!

On a nice Sunday afternoon, I find myself playing solo games with a cuppa tea, and this…

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Concerning Formatting

Before we begin, we should discuss formatting. Meeple Mountain’s house style is to italicize the names of games. Arcs, Catan, Kabuto Sumo: Sakura Slam. This is not contentious. They are, after all, titles of authored works, and deserve the grammatical demarcations befitting their status. When it comes to classic, authorless games such as chess and checkers, there is a schism within the church of Meeple Mountain. Some believe they should be capitalized too, but this has (as evidenced just now by my flagrant disregard for the house style) never sat well with me. Chess has no single author. “Chess” is a name, but it is not a title, and the dominant English convention is to neither italicize nor capitalize it.

The same is true of most traditional games, a number of which will be discussed in the article that follows. Cribbage, oh hell, solitaire, koi-koi, and canasta will come up, but they will only be capitalized if they happen to begin a sentence, and they will only be italicized for the purposes of emphasis. This would not be worth explaining if this article did not also cover French Tarot and scopa.

You see the issue.

“French Tarot” is generally capitalized in English in order to separate the card game (French Tarot) from the deck with which that card…

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Windmill Valley: Blooming Sails - Justin Bell

On my way out of my meetings with Board&Dice at last year’s SPIEL Essen 2025, our marketing contact asked if I wanted a copy of the new Windmill Valley expansion, Blooming Sails. I thought the base game was fine, certainly not at the top echelon of Board&Dice’s other, better, more combotastic Euros such as Tiletum, Nucleum, or even recent hits like Reef Project and Tianxia. Still, I love games, and one player from my review group really enjoyed Windmill Valley, so I agreed to bring a copy home.

The expansion addresses what most players I know agree to be the weak link in the base game’s design: the Foreign Trade action, where players would drop a tulip bulb to get two meager bonuses—maybe a tool, a point, maybe another tulip bulb—or take all the bulbs on a card to get a lot of bulbs at once. I’m not a Windmill Valley expert, but it was always the action I would cover with another action tile first because I used Foreign Trade so infrequently. The expansion blows that portion of the game up, using a new side board, new Crate bonuses, and a separate boat token used to…

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Layeth the Smackdown

Synthezoid Smackdown is the latest scenario pack building on the hero-vs-hero gameplay introduced in the Civil War big box expansion of the larger Marvel Champions: The Card Game system. Aside from having a name that could double as a WWE pay-per-view, it pushes the Superhuman Registration Act schism forward by pitting players against two “villains”: She-Hulk and Vision. They’re on opposite sides of the Civil War divide, and each comes with a customizable scenario plus eight new modular encounters you can mix into the larger Civil War ecosystem. More cards are also added for the PvP (Player vs. Player) mode which Civil War introduced.

Lore

During the Civil War storyline, She-Hulk (Jennifer Walters) and Vision (Jonas) were not spotlight characters in the conflict, but both occupied interesting spaces adjacent to it.

As a lawyer, Jennifer’s support of the Superhuman Registration Act was a natural extension of her faith in due process and the legal system, even if that system often lives in gray areas. Most notably, she represented Speedball in court following the Stamford Disaster, the event that led to the creation of the Registration Act. She was also hired by her father-in-law, J. Jonah Jameson, to sue Peter Parker for fraud after he unmasked himself.…

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I have more than once mentioned puzzle-maker extraordinaire Blaž Gracar's work in the same breath as releases from Rush Hour purveyor Thinkfun. I have rarely mentioned them together as a matter of direct comparison. These are different products for different audiences. Gracar makes pencil-and-paper puzzle books that are only for the sweatiest adults, while Thinkfun cranks out charming toyetic brain teasers that keep children well-and-truly occupied. The connection comes from Gracar’s gift for imbuing his puzzles with a sense of discovery that brings me back to my childhood, when I had a massive collection of Thinkfun games under my bed. With the release of Herd, Gracar’s publisher Letibus and Thinkfun now warrant direct comparison.

Rather than drawing lines or shading in boxes, Herd has you shifting Shepherds around a grid. These delightful, hollow black cones have wonderful neutral facial expressions and a pronounced indifference to your failures. It’s a good thing, because in trying to get them from a designated Point A to a designated Point B, you will fail often. And fail. And fail again.

Herd is a patient exercise, though I wouldn’t necessarily call it meditative. There is a flow state to be found in moving the pieces about,…

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Presentation is half the battle when it comes to tabletop gaming; I never follow the adage of 'don't judge a book by its cover' because it goes against the grain of any marketing textbook. Through the Hedgerow immediately draws attention thanks to its evocative, pseudo-woodcut artstyle, imparting its promise of rustic fantasy upon prospective readers. Will it stand the test of time like it requires of its characters? Let's find out.

Through the Hedgerow Overview

Information comes flying at you right from the jump when you open up Through the Hedgerow. Flavorful vignettes separate the mechanical rules so that you are constantly reminded of the setting. The game takes place over four Ages, starting with the Dark Ages and ending during WWII. Much of the game is centered around a singular location during one (or more) of these epochs, setting the table for your characters to watch how history and the magical world of Fay shape it.

Players have an array of Gentries to choose from when building their character: the headless, turnip-wearing Buggeber Fay, scarecrow-adjacent Flayboglin Fay, Light-driven Heathen Clerks, champions of the Light known as Hodkins, the Mortal Motley entertainers, bird-faced Ouzels, humanoid spiders called Tomnoddins, Mortal children protected through innocence known as Waifs, or Warlockes, Mortal wizards who internally struggle with their magic.

Through the Hedgerow Roleplaying Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

What’s on the Menu?

It’s been a long time coming.

I remember when I first encountered Chicken Fried Dice way back at PAX Unplugged 2024. At the time, I gave it the award of “Game That Made Me Fall in Love With a Mechanic I Thought I Hated” (roll and write) and promised a more in-depth review once it hit Kickstarter in a few months. Then those few months turned into more months, and then tariffs wrecked our industry, and then more delays… but FINALLY, I was able to catch up with designer Ashwin Kamath at TantrumCon 2026, where he handed me an almost-final production copy of the game. Later that evening, I gathered some friends, and Ashwin walked us through our first play. Puns were flying, people were giggling, and everyone at the table was having a great time.

Since then, I’ve sat down with friends to put the game through its paces. The concept is cute and simple - you’re trying to become the Top Chef at a food truck competition by serving your customers delicious meals. The more complex their order, the more points you stand to gain. However, the longer you take to finish their order, the more stars they dock you on their review. The better you do, the quicker…

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In Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, young Quentin Coldwater and his classmates are transformed into geese as part of a graduation trial. The description of their journey from New England, all the way to the South Pole makes for good reading. But it also helps remind us of the effort that geese make in their instinctive need to fly thousands of miles, through perilous landscapes, only to turn around and do the trip in reverse just months later.

But we’re talking about board games right?

In the tableau building card game Flockers, from Mark Swanson, players take the part of a flock of geese making a similar journey, albeit one which takes just 30-45 minutes instead of months.

Geese is the Word

Gorgeous graphics and amazing components aside, Flockers is a racing game; the goal is to be the first to travel across 10 landscape cards arranged in a central tableau, called the flight path. These cards consist of one or more terrain types (mountain, forest, field, and lake). Some cards have only one terrain, while others can have all four terrain types.

In order to do this, players play flock cards from their hand into a traditional V formation. The first card is the lead goose, while  subsequent…

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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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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!”

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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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