REM Racers. A name I didn't expect to hear again. Around this time last year, I reviewed the REM Racers board game, and as the name suggests, it's a racing game, a futuristic one at that. The box art is high-fidelity, the components are fantastic, and all of it would lead you to believe I'm about to gush. Instead, this was one of the least enjoyable gaming experiences I've had in a long, long time. I'm trying to be professional here.

So when they announced a card game version, I was a bit taken aback. From what I understand, the original wasn't well-received, and that usually doesn't earn you a spin-off. Then again, card games are cheap, and this one promises a runtime of roughly 20 minutes. Is it an improvement? Is it a good game? Am I going to stop asking questions? Yes.

They Did It Again

The title's a bit of a spoiler: it's a race. Everyone picks a pilot with a unique ability, and the goal is to finish first. But since there's no board or physical race track, the whole thing plays out pretty abstractly. Player positions are tracked by lining up everyone's car card in a row, first place to last. The track is represented by the "curve deck," a series of cards…

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Plastic bricks were a key part of my childhood. I have fond memories of tearing up my hands rummaging through a big tub of bricks that may or may not have actually held the one piece that I was searching for. Over time, my siblings and I developed amazing characters and lore of the hijinks that happened in our brick-world, leading me to naturally want to share that with my kids as they grow up. Epic Brick Adventures is designed to couple the world of bricks with the world of roleplaying games to facilitate creativity and storytelling without any age limitations. Ahead of the Kickstarter, I was able to get a look at the Introductory Guide and the Circus Catastrophe Intro Adventure to see if this game is more than just D&D with bricks.

Epic Brick Adventures: Building You Up

Epic Brick Adventures provides a rules framework for players to use their existing collections of bricks and plastic figures in a roleplaying game setting. Minifigures become MiniHeroes as a Brickmaster leads the players through an adventure of their own devising, serving as the Gamemaster (in conventional parlance).

MiniHeroes have Abilities broken out into Creative, Smarts, Willpower, Sense, Muscle, and Zip with concepts of Gusto and Clutch replacing energy and hit points respectively. Tack on an Occupation and some basic equipment…

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The Last Spell: The Board Game is one of those rare games that I can be unapologetically negative about. Contrary to what you might think reading some of my reviews, while I can be critical, I generally try to understand what the design was attempting to accomplish and if it accomplished that goal.

The Last Spell: The Board Game successfully accomplishes the aim of adapting a video game into a board game at what appears to be a 1:1 level of fidelity. Unfortunately, because of this, there is almost zero reason to play the board game adaptation.

This game is a waste of time.

Is there a good thing, Thomas?

Well, the aesthetics are kinda cool. I guess?

The premise of the game is that some wizards cast a big spell that killed nearly everything in the world, and the remnants group together in small towns bravely defending themselves against the dying of the light or some such thing. There’s purple mist. There’s a pixel art style that is very Dark Super Nintendo. Reminds me a bit of Super Boss Monster, and the text is reasonably easy to read. The miniatures for the player heroes are cool.

Unfortunately, beyond that, everything else is a travesty.

The game is a…

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Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay has, on the surface, everything that makes me typically dismiss the latest eurogame from the assembly line: It’s clearly inspired by Alexander Pfister’s Maracaibo and Boonlake, it has questionably silly cover art, and maybe one of the most generic and forgettable “this is a pirate game” names of all time (honestly, we accidentally called it “Scoundrels of Fortune Bay, Bay of Scoundrels, Founders of Fortune Bay, etc.)

I was surprised to just have a great time with Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay (FoSB). It’s always a treat to be delighted by the mechanical flourishes in a design, and this one has plenty of thoughtful choices that come together in a surprisingly mid-weight package.

We’re pirates, yar, but we’re also homebodies

Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay has an interesting rhythm compared to many games that feature seafaring as a central theme. Instead of sail, sail, sail, you are often sailing 1 or 2 spaces, then you’re doing a bunch of different activities for several rounds, then you might sail another space. The arrangement of the board is the shape of a bay, rather than a large expanse of ocean, and this is reflected in how the game plays. You’re more of a pirate party barge than a terrifying group of cutthroats. These pirates love to hang.

…

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Panda Spin - Andrew Lynch

There is a lot of promise in the core idea of Panda Spin, a shedding game with upgradeable cards. When/if you pass during a trick, you reclaim all of your played cards and turn them from their weaker side to their stronger side. Theoretically, this should cause hands to ramp ever-upwards as the game progresses and players start playing out massive set after massive set. It should also make the decision of whether or not to play something interesting, a game of chicken in which your desire to empty your hand of cards clashes with your desire for the stronger versions of things.

The reality falls short. Hands last too long. The rules are too clunky to explain to new players, with the juice rather immediately not worth the squeeze. The decisions aren’t particularly interesting. Many of the extra bits and bobs don’t feel like they enrich the game half so much as they complicate it, and therein lies the real rub: why play a somewhat inconveniently complex shedding game when I could either play a divine complex shedding game (like Tichu) or a terrific straightforward shedding game like Jungo or Scout?

Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play…

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This is my first review for Meeple Mountain, so by way of introduction let me tell you that tile-placement games are my favorite. Carcassonne was my introduction to modern hobby games, and it's possible this created a soft spot in my heart for the genre. And if a tile-placement game also has a city-building aspect, as in Warsaw: City of Ruins, Neom, or Suburbia? That's a double win. Throw in a puzzle to be solved and wrap it all in a light- to medium-weight game, and you'll almost always have a hit with me, unless the game is mechanically flawed, bug-ugly, or offensive in some manner.

Enter Timber Town from Alley Cat Games. Timber Town is a two-player game where players are beaver architects competing to construct the best (i.e., highest scoring) town on opposite sides of the riverbank. Your eager beaver builders construct town components (in the form of tiles) upstream and then float them down the river for you to collect and place in your town. As the architect, it’s your job to place the tiles in legal and optimal scoring positions.

The trick is, the river is fast moving and components you (or your opponent) don't choose in a timely manner will fall over the waterfall, lost to you forever. This simulation is…

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I struggled with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Trick-Taking Game. For all the inventiveness on display, as passionate a love letter to trick-taking as it was, Bryan Bornmueller’s commercial triumph left me cold. Too often, I said, that cooperative card game would leave players in the lurch, handing them combinations of characters and cards that were not winnable. Unlike its close cousin The Crew, something like half the hands in TLotR:TFotR-TTG proved unwinnable from the jump, save for an act of providence. I don’t want cooperative games to be easy, but I do want continuous losing to feel like a skill issue rather than RNG.

That’s the long and the short of it, anyway. And for what it’s worth, my criticisms of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - Trick-Taking Game are almost exactly the same as my criticisms of the first game. Critical decisions are made without crucial information. A lot of hands are dead from the jump and there’s nothing you can do about it. A few of the chapters here even sharpen my criticisms. It would be easy to get bogged down in an even more negative review, to dig into all the ways in which I continue to think Bornmueller’s game doesn’t work.

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“I LOVE the style of this artist,” my 12-year-old said while admiring some of the painting cards from the upcoming limited movement and order fulfillment game Concrete Canvas, available on crowdfunding right now.

I had to agree. The art, by real-life street artist Chris RWK, is fantastic, and this style carries into the playable character tokens, the subway tiles used to dictate each player’s movement, and the milk crate player boards used to store paint cans as players move their tokens around New York City in an attempt to tag more locations than their opponents.

Designer David Abelson’s game does a great job of capturing the look and feel of something straight out of Beat Street, or any of the other break-dancing, street jive 80s films I grew up on. Even video games like Jet Grind Radio (or Jet Set Radio, depending on where you grew up) feel like an influence here.

Then the game starts…when Concrete Canvas reveals itself to be the opposite of dynamic.

Up and Down

Concrete Canvas is an order fulfillment, area majority game for 2-4 players. Players will spend most of their turns moving one of their two character tokens through different parts of New York via subway tiles that are adjacent to…

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In Elizabeth Hargrave’s latest game, Sanibel, players take turns walking down the beach and stopping to collect a variety of shells and shark teeth. You’ll score points by dropping these treasures into your bag so they ‘fall’ in alignment with other items already there. Have the most points at the end of the walk, and you win the game.

Setup

To start, unfold and line up the three sections of the board. On the left, place the section with the beach chairs; to the right, place the section with the lighthouse. The section without a special area at either end goes in between these two.

Players then take a token of their chosen color and the corresponding board with a bag printed on it. You’ll place everyone’s tokens in random order in the upper left corner of the central board on the right, just above the beach chairs. Place the Wave token to the far left of the player tokens.

Shuffle the zig-zag-shaped pieces and deal two to each player. These are your Lighthouse tiles and will offer additional scoring opportunities once you reach the Lighthouse midway through the game. Read these carefully, as they may help you determine which shells you want to concentrate on.

Above the shoreline…

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If you're a Gamemaster running Starfinder Second Edition, the Starfinder Alien Core is your de facto manual of monsters. It promises pages upon pages of strange creatures that would feel at home in any sci-fi world. Some are geared more towards horror, others are more techy, and some are there as classics to hit you with a nostalgia bomb. Let's take some time to run through the highlights of the book.

Starfinder Alien Core

Right off the jump you are greeted with the full alphabetized table of contents for every creature featured in Starfinder Alien Core, including visual breaks for each set of letters to prevent the usual wall-of-text layout. Directly afterward is a brief section that describes the different aspects of a creature's statblock, how to play creatures, and making adjustments. I was quite surprised looking back at the Starfinder GM Core that this information was never included. There is more in-depth guidance into custom creature creation, but nothing that lays out the aspects of the statblock as succinctly as this.

Then it's time to dive right into the 200 pages of creatures, typically featuring one on each page. The general flow of information starts with a brief snippet of lore about the creature to set the scene, followed by the creature's statblock. The sidebar also always features…

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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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There was a point after my first lap around the South Africa track, one of the two new tracks in Heat: Rocky Roads, when I realized that it might be my favorite track in all of Heat. Nothing else in the extended Heataverse feels quite as rewarding of great play. South Africa isn’t as punishing of poor play or bad luck as España, nor is it a source of the same adrenalized fun that comes with ripping down the straightaways in Italia or Nederlands, but a skilled player in South Africa can do some incredible things. And for the record, I came to this realization while I was getting absolutely walloped.

What is it that makes the track so good? It isn’t the gimmick. The only special rule is that any player who finishes their move on a gravel space has to pay a heat if they have one. If you’re on gravel and you don’t have any heat, it don’t hurt you none. This is a perfectly fine addition to the game, one that will occasionally make you second-guess taking advantage of an opportunity to slipstream, but it doesn’t add so much to the game that it would change the feel of an entire track.

It’s the corners. South Africa is jam-packed with delicious, surprisingly slow corners, and…

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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.

[caption id="attachment_329516" align="alignnone" width="1024"]Operation Barclay Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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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