Analog Posts

I feel like sending postcards to loved ones is a bygone practice. I remember, as a kid, my parents would send those handwritten snapshots on every trip they took, filling me in on their activities while abroad. Nowadays, postcards have been replaced by social media posts, but they still evoke that familiar feeling of envy when seeing the picturesque adventures of someone else’s holiday.

Postcards, from designers Eric Dubus and Simon Kayne, aims to bring back that old vacation tradition, sending players around France as they collect the sights of the European landscape.

Players may recognize Eric Dubus from his previous works, Encyclopedia and Museum: Pictura, both of which play with the theme of cultural exploration through the art of gaming, all with gorgeous art to boot.

Cartes Postales

Postcards plays over a series of turns until one player has shipped off four postcards. Once that happens, the player with the most points wins.

On a turn, players play three cards from their hand, using them either for their color to fill in a stamp on their postcard or for the card’s action. When players collect the required number of stamps, they travel by bike to the postcard’s location and ship it off to friends…

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Last Light is a 4X game designed by Roy Cannaday and published by Grey Fox Games. The premise is simple: the last sun in the universe is dying, and it’s your job to harvest the most Light. Be the first to collect 20 pieces of Light and you’re the winner.

The Board & Setup

Last Light is likely to be one of the most impressive-looking games you’re going to see for a while. Seeing it on a table at Tantrum Con for the first time, I immediately felt drawn to it. Rotating circles of outer space, small plastic spaceships in three sizes (the game being set up was an upper-tier Kickstarter edition with 3D ships and Resource tokens; my review copy is the standard, cardboard-only release) and the planets.

The marble-like 3D planets, each rising from the board on its own stand and featuring swirls of colors, made me willing to sit down for a teach and a quick few rounds. Had the setup just featured flat cardboard with drawings of planets, I would have kept walking.

[caption id="attachment_332390" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The standard edition of Last Light, with lollypop-like planets rising off the board.[/caption]

The board itself comes in…

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Excelsior, heroes, and welcome to a Meeple Mountain article for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! Today, we’re here to talk about the newest wave of releases for MCP, as your favorite evil robots join the battle. But that’s not all—we have not only fresh models to enjoy, but a whole new set of missions that aim to shake up the meta game! As we say goodbye to the previous 1.5 years of missions, these new ones promise to change the game entirely.

Quick refresher if you've never picked up MCP: this is a skirmish game where you build a squad of Marvel characters - usually four or five, pulled from a larger roster you build ahead of time—depending on how much "threat" (basically their power level and cost) you can afford, and throw them at each other across a comic-book cityscape. You win by controlling objectives called secures and extracts, not by wiping out your opponent, though plenty of games end with someone getting tabled anyway (losing every model on the table). Power is the currency that fuels your abilities, and you earn it mostly by dealing and taking damage, which is why a change to how power works can ripple through the entire game. Got it? Good, because that's exactly what just happened. And that ripple effect is exactly why this…

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We did it.

On June 4th, 2026, despite the considerable difficulty of coordinating regular play sessions with a group of six, I was part of a group that successfully completed a campaign of The Queen’s Dilemma. For 15 sessions over the course of about three months, we were the six nobles ruling in the queen’s stead. For 30-35 hours, we dealt with famine, a new religion, an influx of migrants, a religious schism, and put the matter to a vote.

It was time well spent. I was hanging out with five of my friends, doing what we do best: cracking jokes and selling one another up the river. It was easy to forget sometimes that we were playing a game. The Queen’s Dilemma, like The King’s Dilemma before it, is deeply social. The game melts away while you’re playing. That’s key to its magic. All games exist to engender some sort of social dynamic, but the more involved a game is, the more the game itself tends to insist on its own presence. You can’t play Agricola and forget there’s a rulebook. The Queen’s Dilemma is the world’s most involved party game; it wants to vanish. You spend so much of each session staring into the eyes of the other players and asking them what they’re thinking that you…

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Normally, when I’m sitting in meetings with our publishing partners at shows like Gen Con or SPIEL Essen, I ask about the games that are on the horizon. And, normally, we buzz through that part of the conversation with ease, since there’s not much in the way of real, earth-shattering news: another expansion for that popular title from a year or two ago is underway, or a new animal-themed trick-taker is set to hit the following summer. My brain says “ho, hum” and I quietly move through my meeting schedule.

But during the Board&Dice meeting at SPIEL last fall, it was hard to believe how many perfect-for-Justin products I saw on their 2026 dance card. Nucleum: Gibraltar, with the game’s third map and more goodies in a game system that I have fallen for over the last couple years. The crowdfunding campaign for The Voyages of Marco Polo, a classic game I’ll be backing whenever the project goes live. One of the designers of the Rats of Wistar-adjacent game ANTS, Andrea Robbiani, had a new title on the way called Maestro.

Board&Dice shared one other 2026 release. That game was Entropy, a new strategy title co-designed by three of the foremost game designers of our time: Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani, and Nestore Mangone. Between the three…

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The summer heat is intense, but it’s not as hot as Gen Con 2026. Soon gamers from all over the world will descend on Indianapolis for North America’s largest board game convention. Just like in past years, hundreds of new board games will make their debut – over 600 this year, an overwhelming number. But never fear, the Meeple Mountain team is here to help you find the gems among the coal. Our staff have scoured through the upcoming titles to select our most anticipated games of Gen Con 2026! So without further ado, here are our picks!

Check our past recommendations and see how we did!
Gen Con 2025 | Gen Con 2024 | Gen Con 2023 | Gen Con 2022 | Gen Con 2021

Andy Matthews

Class of '89

As someone who graduated from high school in 1989 I am, as the marketing literature says, “the target audience” for this upcoming release from Paverson Games. Class of ‘89 is set back in time when hair was…

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As a longtime manager and commissioner of fantasy football leagues for American football, I approach the process of drafting and curating a team throughout the season much like a chef might approach a new recipe. From the jump, I feel like I know the flavors of each ingredient, but I never know exactly how it'll turn out until all the pieces are working together at the end. Sometimes it pans out and you have a delightful scone in your hands, and other times you're left with a gelatinous mess. I was curious to see if Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game could replicate that feeling of accomplishment.

Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game: Take a Chance on Me

Just like traditional fantasy football, Huddle includes a preseason draft, a season of head-to-head matchups, and then a championship game between the two best teams to determine the ultimate winner. Matchups are quick enough that the other Managers aren't left out if they aren't in the title game, otherwise they can play consolation games to determine places 3-6 for a full table.

During the Draft, Managers get 20 poker chips to bid on players in one-minute rounds. Players are represented through decks of cards, one each for Quarterback (QB), Wide Receiver (WR), Running Back (RB), Tight End (TE), Kicker (K), and Defense/Special Teams…

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When Restoration Games launched the Unmatched series in 2019, the system was praised for its diverse character roster, a claim that’s stuck with it ever since. At the time of writing, there are now 75 hero decks, based on fictional characters and real people from around the world, with a Hellboy set due imminently. With an average of just over 15 new heroes released a year, we’ll hit 100 heroes before the end of 2028. The future as tabletop’s most accessible and diverse miniature fighting game looks safe, right?

Back in 2020 Kathleen Hartin wrote an article titled ‘Representation in Board Games Matters’. In the article, Kathleen highlighted a lack of representation of women in board gaming, with compelling evidence including poor representation in game covers, rulebooks, designers and reviewers.

It’s nice to think the tabletop world has moved on; whilst not perfect, things are certainly better than they were. At the time of Kathleen’s article, Unmatched felt like a sign of things to come. The then-released sets (Battle of Legends Volume One, Bruce Lee, Robin Hood vs. Bigfoot and Ingen vs. Raptors) drew on Greek, Arabian, British, Asian and North American sources and included 3 female and 5 male hero decks (plus cryptid Bigfoot, whose gender…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way backwards through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed that there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups active on Facebook, I created one of my own.

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

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

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

Module 1: Starting Attribute Chips

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

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Maximum Booping Chaos Ahead

The basic idea of boop Shuffle is the same as the original boop. You're placing Kittens out on the board in hopes of getting three of your color in a row so that you can graduate them into the Cats necessary to win the game. However, as Cats and Kittens are being played onto the table, they boop the cards next to them into adjoining spaces, or possibly off the table altogether. In order to win, you must get three Cats of your color in a row, or have all eight of your Cats out on the board. These win conditions are the same for both versions. That’s where the similarities end.

boop Shuffle is a card game, with cards taking the place of the cat meeples in the original. Each turn you will draw a card from the deck and place it into the 6x6 grid on the table. The placed card will boop any adjacent cards away from itself according to the rule of the placed card. If you run out of cards, reshuffle the discards and begin drawing again. 

[caption id="attachment_332475" align="aligncenter" width="1500"] Kitten cards and Blankie[/caption]

This isn’t simply a card game with the exact mechanisms of the original game, however.…

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Back on the Air

Fliptoons is BACK! I was fortunate to experience the new iteration a few months early, and it was quite hard to keep the excitement under wraps until the reveal.

The first set of Fliptoons was a grand time, and mechanically, there wasn’t much that needed fixing. But Thunderworks Games has doubled down on a framework that’s ripe for expansion. A game built around goofy card effects, conditional scoring, and unpredictable tableau chaos is the perfect stage for a new batch of characters to join the cast. More toons mean more combos, more dramatic reveals, and more opportunities for rounds to go completely sideways.

Thunderworks Games returns to the studio with Fliptoons: Season 2, bringing a new cast of cards while keeping the same breezy energy that made the original such an easy table hit. This standalone expansion is as exciting as an anticipated season premiere: familiar structure, new faces, and plenty of room for the fame race to get wacky.

Previously on Fliptoons…

Fliptoons: Season 2 is still very much Fliptoons. Players are building a little cast of cartoon animals, flipping cards into a 3x2 grid, and trying to squeeze as much fame out of those cards as possible.

Like the original, players begin with a…

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Silver Age Cartoons

I’m a sucker for an old-timey aesthetic, especially when it comes to cartoons. Growing up, my father showed me some of his favorites, like Popeye the Sailor Man and Woody Woodpecker. I think there’s still a real appetite for the animation style of yesteryear, especially in the modern age, as evidenced by the massive video game success of Cuphead and Mouse: P.I. for Hire.

The board game world is no stranger to this style either, with titles like Vagrantsong, Townsfolk Tussle, Vegetable Stock, Magical Athlete, and even the video game spinoff Cuphead: Fast Rolling Dice Game. Fliptoons from Thunderworks Games fits nicely into that ever-growing family, and I’ll always be drawn to every title in it.

Flip-Flip-Flipadelphia

Fliptoons is a fast-paced card-drafting game where the player who generates the most fame points after a final flip becomes the top toon.

Players start with identical decks of basic toons that are played one by one, creating a 3x2 grid of cards. Cards have various effects depending on their position, adjacency, game state, or other conditions in the grid, including other players’ grids. Some of these effects increase value, flip cards to void a previously played card, dismiss other cards, and so much more.

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Thanks to my side gig writing a weekly column for BoardGameGeek, I recently got a note from Steve Finn, the designer of Biblios as well as the co-designer of Cities and Cities USA. Steve saw that I do a ton of business travel, so he was kind enough to send a review copy of his recent release Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games.

The book really is a book—it’s basically a workbook that includes eight titles, each of which features a short rules write-up along with worksheets to play each game eight times. In that way, this book has 64 total plays available, and for this review, I tried four of the games twice each.

The setup is very simple: you have to be able to read basic English, possess a pen or a pencil, and have access to as many as four normal six-sided dice. If you don’t like to read, Steve’s got you covered—each game’s rules include a QR code that links to a teach video for each of the eight games. And if you don’t have dice, Steve STILL has you covered, with an online dice simulator that takes care of the die rolls for you.

Some thoughts on those individual games are below, as well as a few closing…

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My friend Joe and I share an interest in logistics games that feature planetary rotation. I’m not sure exactly why he’s into it, but I like it for the interesting questions that emerge from having to plot movement in two dimensions: distance and time.

Plutocracy got me excited because it puts landing on moving planets front and center. Unfortunately, while many of the mechanisms within the game are clever, the process of playing the game is frustratingly obvious. It puts you in the unenviable position of both having to do a significant amount of analysis and then discover that the analysis you did wasn’t really worth it.

As the world(s) turn

The object of Plutocracy is to turn money into majority points. You fly your ship around a truncated map of the solar system (sans Mercury, Venus, and if you’re not a hater, Pluto) buying and selling various goods. Each planet buys one type of good and sells one type of good. When you buy, supply price goes up 1, when you sell, demand price goes down 1. The objective is to buy low and sell high, and also land on planets where you can turn money into planetary council seats, which gain you points in the “Plutocratic Council” when scoring happens 3 times during the game.

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Unmatched is a modern classic. Unmatched, you might say, in the genre of miniature combat games. Accessible rules, punchy fights, card art that turns heads. It’s fun, especially for those of us who don’t generally enjoy player-versus-player miniature fighting games.

And then there’s Unmatched Adventures, a cooperative take on the system. The best of both worlds: all the fun of combat but working together to defeat a common enemy.

A lazy design studio might simply have created automated opponents and left it at that. Restoration Games is not a lazy design studio. Yes, the bulk of the game is indeed an automated boss and its minions fighting the players until one side is defeated. But the team pushed beyond that basic experience, adding little pressure points that influence how you approach defeating the big baddie.

A downside is that each villain is restricted to its own scenario, tied to a specific board and rules additions. You can’t mix-and-match villains in the same way as you can with the heroes. Mothman always tries to destroy the bridges of Point Pleasant, presumably to cause transportation chaos and highlight America’s overreliance on the automobile. Meanwhile, the Martian Invader is exclusively focussed on dropping aliens into the cornfields of McMinnville…

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Thunder Road: Ignition is Restoration Games’ attempt to streamline the production, ruleset, and gameplay of Thunder Road: Vendetta, itself an update of the 1980s Milton Bradley game Thunder Road, designed by Jim Keifer.

I’m on record here at Meeple Mountain as saying that Thunder Road: Vendetta is perfect in every single way save for one: the game runs about 30 minutes too long, and it does that pretty consistently regardless of player count. It’s gorgeous, it’s hilarious, it is a great design, and it has almost unlimited amounts of content in its deluxe Maximum Chrome version. Between that version, and the expansion Carnival of Chaos, there might not be a better “beer and pretzels” laugher in my collection.

When Thunder Road: Ignition arrived, I immediately set it up and waited for my nine-year-old to come home. He’s loved Thunder Road: Vendetta for a couple years now, and I was sure he would want to play Thunder Road: Ignition. He saw the cover artwork (once again brought to you by Marie Bergeron) and smiled that big smile. He was home. Then he asked a simple question, which I think defines the break point of where we landed on Thunder Road: Ignition.

“Where are the choppers?”

Son, There…

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I sit down to write this review with two questions on my mind: first, are twelve cards worth a full review? And second, with a game as near-perfect as Castle Combo, are twelve extra cards worth the risk? I’m going to assume the first one is a yes. As for the second, maybe.  

By the way, if you don’t know Castle Combo, check out our review before moving on. 

Where’s the bubble gum in this thing?

This pack of a dozen cards adds six cards each to the Village and the Castle. Along with new characters to make you smile, these cards introduce mechanical twists and a few delayed effects. 

The delay is marked by a (free!) key that is either turned in to unlock the ability or retained for endgame scoring. Whether the cards are resetting the market (with perks) or raining blessings on the current tableau, they are in high demand as soon as they appear. As far as I can see, this will be the big knock on Oubliette, an extension of one of the few legitimate gripes with Castle Combo: when player experience depends on managing cards as they are randomly revealed, some will cry foul if their opponent is fed consistent opportunities with some of these doozies. 

As for the new mechanical twists,…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

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

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

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It was easily the most shocking designer news I heard at last year’s SPIEL Essen event.

The designers of Devir’s new hidden role game, Berlin 1960—complete with cover art that made it look like a movie thriller combined with a wargame—were Flaminia Brasini & Virginio Gigli, co-designers of modern classics such as Coimbra and Lorenzo il Magnifico, some of the best medium-weight Euros of the last 20 years.

“The Lorenzo folks did a hidden role game?” I thought when I heard the overview. “This might be the biggest surprise of 2026!”

Berlin 1960 arrived at my house a few weeks ago, and I waited patiently for a game night when I had enough players to get a play rolling. That is a key component of this review…because the more players you can find, the better your experience will be. I’d frame it this way: Berlin 1960 is an eight-player game with variants that accommodate 4-7 players.

You should play this game at its maximum player count of eight…and, you should not play it with many less.

Gunshot Wound

Berlin 1960 is a hidden role game for 4-8 players. Players are individually assigned a role as a spymaster for either the KGB or the CIA, so…

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