You Know the Name

Flip 7 took the world by storm in 2023, touting itself as the “World’s Greatest Card Game.” It backed up that claim in 2024, taking home a slew of awards, including Origins Best Party Game, Golden Geek Best Party Game, and even a nomination for the 2025 Spiel des Jahres award.

It’s also gaining recognition outside the gaming bubble. I recently had an interaction with coworkers in my office who wanted to play Uno, and I asked if they’d heard of Flip 7. To my surprise, more than one of them said yes with immediate excitement. Whether you love it or hate it, Flip 7 is almost a household name now.

It’s only natural that a game in this format would spawn variations to keep the cash coming. Last year, we saw the Dr. Seuss’s Grinch variant, and I have an inside scoop that more reskins are on the way.

Following on the heels of the Uno: No Mercy madness from a few years back, Flip 7 now has its own “mean” version, packed with ruthless cards and more stabbing. But how does it hold up against the original? Let’s flip the next card and find out.

Same Flips, New Cards

…

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Aeon’s End: The New Age - Andrew Lynch

Indie Board & Card Games took their foot off the gas just a little with The New Age, by which I mean it isn’t nearly as punishing as War Eternal. The New Age introduced Aeon’s End’s campaign system, which would become de rigueur for their future releases, and those of us who’ve played Aeon’s End before will know that that’s a mixed blessing. The constant injection of new cards and powers is great, but the writing…well. Nobody plays Aeon’s End for the quality of the writing. You win some and you lose some. If you play Aeon’s End enough, you’ll lose quite a bit, in fact.

Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★★☆ - Would like to play it again

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Kraken Skulls!  - Kevin Brantley

Kraken Skulls! puts 2–5 players at the helm of a pirate ship, chasing the most fame to become the king (or queen!) of the pirates.

Players bounce between a random selection of dice mini-games (via cards) laid out in a circle, mixed with open-water cards that house the dreadful…

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It’s rare to get an opportunity to review an organizer, and I’m a sucker for a good organization system. Half the appeal of games like Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy for me comes from the insanely sleek storage trays. When PlayMode asked if we’d be interested in covering their new inserts for the Dune: Imperium games, I immediately jumped at the opportunity. Readers may recall that I was very high on Dune: Imperium - Uprising in my review.

The box arrived from PlayMode and took up space on my shelf for a month or two while my busy travel schedule kept me from digging into it. It is, after all, quite the behemoth of a box at first glance, and even starting to figure out how everything fits together is a tall task. Finally, I found myself free on a recent Sunday, and my husband and I sat down. We dumped the contents of both Dune: Imperium - Uprising and its Bloodlines expansion out on our game table and tossed the included cardboard inserts.

Let’s tackle this thing.

Buy the PlayMode Dune Imperium Uprising & Bloodlines Playsystem.

Building the Stronghold

Fresh out of the box, the PlaySystem can definitely take your breath away. We pulled out roughly two dozen individual components, which made the process feel…

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In the midst of Suzannah Herbert’s tremendous documentary Natchez, religious fundamentalists stage a Westboro Baptist–style protest outside an LGBTQI+ event. They stand there with their signs, decrying sin and the fate of the wayward souls inside. One man reads scripture into a megaphone, citing chapter and verse to support his belief that the drag queens emceeing will go to hell.

For some reason, it struck me in that moment as particularly absurd that this man was citing documents written over 2,000 years ago to explain his beliefs now. Well, “to explain” is wrong, and I even think “to justify” wouldn’t quite get across what I felt. I believe in and understand the power of citing the Bible as a collection of parables to relay lessons, questions, universal experiences. This man was not doing that. He was quoting the best-selling book of all time as edict. Those dusty old words were why he is presently required to believe that gay people will go to hell.

To that man, and those around him, the text of the faith is the faith. It is the destination, rather than the compass. To him, the scripture can neither change nor can it be changed. It is unyielding, unsparing, unimpeachable. Some words written down over two millennia ago are to be followed to the letter…

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Operation Barclay is one of the most inspired marriages of setting and mechanic that I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. How did designer Maurice Suckling get the idea to pair the story of Operation Barclay, the Allied plan to feed the Axis false information about an upcoming Mediterranean invasion, with poker and a shell game? It’s such a remarkable idea, such a perfect idea. Most game designers would sacrifice body parts in exchange for an idea this good.

While the real Operation Barclay was about convincing the Axis that the Allies would invade Greece when they were in fact planning to invade Sicily, Operation Barclay the game gives us a bit more ambiguity than that. There are five possible areas of attack, stretching from Morocco-to-France and Egypt-to-Turkey. The Allied player places wooden Intelligence tokens into each of them. One lane, whichever the Allied player decides to make the Primary Offensive Sector, gets four positive Intelligence tokens and one negative. The Secondary Offensive Sector gets three of the first and two of the second, and the other three Sectors, red herrings all, get two and three.

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About five years ago, I had the chance to play a friend’s copy of the game Arkwright (originally published in 2015 by Spielworxx.) My buddy Jason was a huge fan and wanted to show off his copy to our strategy gaming group, so we got a three-player game rolling at my place. About four hours later, we came up for air to talk through our thoughts: mostly positive, a bit too long, a lifestyle game that really needed to be played often to be truly fulfilling.

My favorite game of all time—then, and now—is City of the Big Shoulders, now known as Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders. “City BS”, as it is known in my circles, is a special game for a lot of reasons. Its focus is on the city of Chicago, in a period where a somewhat shocking number of famous companies were born there: Oscar Mayer, Quaker Oats, Kraft, Florsheim Shoes, Schwinn, Swift & Co., and many more. It’s the only game I’ve ever played that successfully combined the stock manipulation mechanics of popular gaming systems (such as incremental capitalization of 18xx games) with a straightforward worker placement mechanic that drives the middle phases of each round. It’s also a knife fight, a game that has epic swings and great competition, in…

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Cities (2024, Devir) was a very late cut from my list of the top 10 games of 2024. I loved Cities, but competition was fierce that year. Cities was my second-favorite “long filler” of 2024, just after Tower Up, another city builder, and a game that was such an elegant and easy teach for gamers of all shades. (This is another reason why I think 2024 will eventually go down as one of the best years in tabletop…it was such a deep year for new releases.)

Had Cities hit the market in 2025, it would have been one of the top three or four games I played. But, that’s the difference, isn’t it? With thousands of games hitting every year, it’s a crapshoot trying to figure out the best time for a game to hit the market.

A box showed up on my doorstep recently…and when I opened it up, I was overjoyed to see that one of my most anticipated games of 2026 was inside. Cities USA is a standalone expansion to the Cities system, with 90% of the rules from the base game and a host of new city boards modeling major US city tourist destinations.

As a man who is pre-sold on the Cities system, I’ll save you some time: Cities USA is…

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One of my favorite things about reviewing games is finding titles where I begin to form opinions, only to pivot as I do additional plays of the same game.

That’s especially true when I hate a game after the first play.

All Aboard! (2025, Devir) is one such title. It’s a family-weight card game that accommodates 2-5 players. The rulebook is a bit too long, which I initially thought would be trouble for a game aimed at an eight-year-old and their family. I got a little worried when I got to the back of the rulebook, and found such a wide variety of card powers incorporated into the game. I knew, immediately, that the game needed but was missing one thing: a player aid. (Remember: EVERY GAME NEEDS A PLAYER AID.)

All Aboard! has many elements of a programming game. Using a hand of cards, players must place one of their animal cards onto a boat in the middle of the table. Each boat (one per player is laid out on the table) can hold three cards, with a weight limit that will be checked later. On the player’s first and third turn each round, they must play a card face-up to a boat if there is space. On their second turn, they play one of their cards…

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Neuroshima Hex has known three previous editions, each ultimately widening the pool of available factions and improving on what was already a very good design. Now, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, publisher Portal Games has rebooted the line again. Blessed are we who live to see such times. Finally, you can own a base set of Neuroshima Hex with a box that doesn’t look like absolute butt. Aesthetics was never the point of all this, but goodness.

Inside that box, you’ll find four factions’ worth of tiles with which to play this marvelous game. Do the tiles look better? Listen, there are limits to what you can manage when designing a game that has to convey a large amount of information in a small amount of space. Do the tiles look good? No. Do they look bad? No! They’re a miracle of legibility. Don’t worry about it.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward: on your turn, you draw up to three tiles, discard one, and then play, discard, or save the others. Your tiles are a mix of Troops that attack and hinder your opponent, Modules that provide buffs and debuffs to the pieces on the board, and Actions, which can do all variety of things depending on the faction. As the game progresses, the board gets…

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I recently had the chance to pull in a review copy of the Stonemaier title Origin Story, a game I first learned about during SPIEL Essen 2025. As a bonus, Stonemaier threw in a free copy of a small card game called Smitten 2, based on the game Smitten, a title I was not aware of. When Smitten 2 arrived, I broke it out and did a couple solo plays.

The setup is quick, and the goal is simple: using a small hand of cards, players must build two matching 3x3 grids of cards, with the win condition tied to placing 17 of the 18 cards in the deck. During setup, all cards are shuffled with one being left out, unseen…in solo, the player manipulates two hands and has to play each tableau off each other, using the card powers aligned with each card and its specific playable position in the grid. (The 5 card can only be played in the middle of each tableau, while the 1 card can only be played in the upper left corner, for example.)

Across those first two plays, I didn’t win, but some interesting choices were on offer. Each card’s placement rules make for a fun puzzle, and I came close…

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I didn’t know there was a market for players looking for a dinosaurus skirmish game rich with history…but then the team at Ion Game Design handed me a copy of Dino Dynasty, their 2025 release designed by Ion’s Chief Creative Officer, Jon Manker. About a year prior, Manker had led a small group of media members through a demo of the game, and the most striking part about that walkthrough was the stunning dino art from artist Johan Egerkrans.

The work of Egerkrans, the author/illustrator of the book Dinosaur Dynasties, is the real star and reason to give the game Dino Dynasty a look. The game is an impressively streamlined version of more complex skirmish games, especially compared to some of the more rules-dense wargames I cover here on the site.

But the real question for me is the audience—while we had fun with our plays here, I can’t for the life of me figure out who the target audience is for the product.

This Biome Isn’t Big Enough for the Both of Us

Dino Dynasty is a very snappy “troops on a map” game for 1-6 players. The game’s incredible level of customization starts with the setup: there are more than 20 different playable dinosaur clans, 30 double-sided…

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Muster: Raise the Banners, from designer Spencer Lloyd Thomas and with vibrant art from Pedro R. M. Andreo, is a quick little two-player lane battler. Each turn, you play a single card to its matching lane, or discard a card onto one of the central spaces, then draw a card. The catch is that the cards have to be played in ascending order. If I play the mighty green six early in the game, I can’t play any more cards to green.

This may sound familiar to some of you. It certainly did to me. Muster draws a whole heap of inspiration from Reiner Knizia’s 1999 masterpiece Lost Cities, one of the greatest two-player games ever published. I don’t knock Muster for that, and you shouldn’t either. It adds some flair of its own, like the two-sided wild cards that can be played in conjunction with other cards, and the Rainbow cards, which can be discarded to any center slot to open up that particular lane to cards of any color.

This is a great idea. It means that you never quite know when a lane is done. I…

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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…

The post Quick Peaks – Windmill Valley: Blooming Sails, Aeon’s End: War Eternal, Rise of Babel, The Pirate Republic: Africa Gambit, Golem Run appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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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