My view of criticism is that, when done well, it is generative and contextualizing to the form it critiques. Having the privilege of reviewing and analyzing games comes with a degree of responsibility. Don’t misunderstand me—there is zero responsibility to a corporation, a designer, and anyone else who has made the business of games their business. My responsibility is to the mysterious and magical mental maneuver that allows a game to become more than pieces and rules and become something that facilitates agreement between people. Lofty, I know.

In my mind, players of games are akin to guests. Sure, a guest can be a big ol’ jerk, but when you’re playing a game, you’re stepping into an experience that is supposed to connect you to other people, to new ideas, interesting decisions, new concepts. You’re not a line item in a budget spreadsheet.

This perspective, coupled with some professional jealousy (I think I have some really cool game designs of my own that are worth sharing) can lead me to be seemingly harsh about a game that another critic might deem “acceptable” or “fine.” But I’m not that other critic. Enormous amounts of resources go into the creation of a mass market game, and when the product is derivative…

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Euphoria Essential Edition (2026, Stonemaier Games) is the updated version of 2013’s Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia, a game that I had heard about over the years but never played myself.

That’s not because the game isn’t easy to understand; featuring a rulebook with a linen finish and lots of clear ways to understand the game’s mechanics (both in multiplayer and for its automa rules), Euphoria Essential Edition is easy to parse. And, like other Stonemaier products, Euphoria Essential Edition is beautiful—save for dice that feature pips that are just a little too cute for their own good, everything about this production whoops the old production’s behind, based on pictures I have seen of the original version. The board layout, in particular, is a big change and I like the look of this newer edition.

But Euphoria Essential Edition suffers because it doesn’t appear to have aged well. Players are collectively running a society that seems to have some rough edges, and keeping workers unaware of their surroundings is a critical part of the gameplay. As play begins, each of the 1-6 players at the table has a worker pool of two, represented by dice that can be sent out into the world to gather resources, collect artifacts, and…

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The new game Revenant (2026, Mindclash Games) arrived about a month ago, and it took me a couple weeks to get the game to the table for my review plays. Between the ruleset (complex) and the playtime (substantial), tabling any game from Mindclash is typically a big endeavor.

Now that I’ve finished four plays—once at three players, twice at four players, then once solo—I have a lot of thoughts. For those on a time budget, I’ll say that Revenant is worth a look, particularly for fans of worker placement games where the options for players truly change over the course of the play experience. I’m also surprised to share how many factors of the Revenant experience align with other classic market manipulation games I love, from Acquire (or games that use an Acquire framework, such as Dawn of Ulos) to 18xx games to any games you know that feature hidden shares.

One thing that Revenant is NOT, though, is a Voidfall game. Let me explain.

Stellar Ventures

Revenant is a worker placement game for 1-4 players. The game is set in the Voidfall universe, so it uses some of the House factions from Voidfall as well as their matching illustrations to illuminate its world-building, and…

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About four years ago, I wrote a negative review of the game Lacrimosa. I’d never written a major pan before and, while I stand by the diagnoses in that review, I have come to believe that the review itself was too much. In trying to capture the feelings of exasperation and bloat that Lacrimosa brought up in me, the review itself became exasperating and bloated.

 I’ve played more than my share of unsuccessful games in the years since Lacrimosa, but Whisperwood is the first to evoke similar negative feelings. They are not similar games: Lacrimosa was dry as could be, an efficiency Euro with combos galore. Whisperwood, with its massive table presence, multiple tracks, and plurality of tokens, gives off the impression of a sandbox game. I think that was the goal, anyway.

If designers Brad Brooks, Erin McDonald, and Christian Strain had pulled that off, it might have suited the setting. As members of the Council of Druids, players compete to best restore the magical Whisperwood, clearing away Corruption and gaining the favor of ancient Golems. That made manifest as a wide open space in which you can more or less do what you want…

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The Old King’s Crown - Will Hare

As we put away The Old King’s Crown, there were two seemingly incongruent but true sentiments coming from my play group. The first is simply… that first play was a mess. Total mess. Constant takebacks and missed triggers, being blindsided by some shocking thing you didn’t know your opponents could do, or having your carefully planned turn totally upended by some bonkers, cartoonishly evil play made by another player. The second sentiment, however, was that we all wanted to play again immediately.

Almost everyone agreed that playing with the full four players really escalated the hijinx, so I’d be curious what a three player game would be like. The teach was shockingly smooth, though the real complexity and weight of this game lies in the overwhelming number of abilities and effects printed on the 50-something Kingdom cards, 20 special faction cards, and 16 tactics abilities. I am immediately smitten by this game and want to peel back the layers, while also fully aware that nobody’s first game of this is going to feel super great.

Ease of entry?
★★★☆☆ - There were a few questions
Would I play it again?
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more…

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It’s Sort of Like…

The majority of my friends are non-gamers. While we do all kinds of other hobby activities together, gaming simply isn’t one of them. I stopped bringing games to gatherings a long time ago because we all know they won’t get played, and that’s okay. The key to a balanced social life is knowing which friends are good for which activities.

Every so often, though, I’ll get my hands on a party game that’s easy to teach, accommodates a large group, and requires very little rules explanation. This, I CAN get my friends to play. It helps if I describe it as “kind of like Cards Against Humanity,” which usually earns a few oohs and ahhs of recognition.

Party Stories

Wing It! follows the pattern of many other party games, using preprinted prompts and cards to create some sort of offering for a judge to award points to. I can’t say whether Apples to Apples was the first game to popularize this system, but there are plenty of structurally similar titles out there. Just check the game aisle at your local Walmart or Target.

Here, players become improv-driven storytellers. One player acts as the judge and reads a scenario aloud, while everyone else must tell a…

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Once again Gen Con did not disappoint in 2026, and Meeple Mountain scoured the halls in full force with a whopping six members of our team swooping down on Indianapolis for the convention. As always, attendance hit all-new highs in terms of con-goers and vendors as gamers from all over the world joined the festivities. With several new additions including a D&D Tower, drone show, and the ever-present construction downtown as the convention center expands to accommodate, there was plenty to be excited about.

Here are our thoughts on Gen Con 2026!

Crawl Con in Full Effect

With the recent crowdfunding efforts by Renegade Games for their new Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG and Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable it was already preordained that Gen Con would be beset upon by the full force of DCC fandom. Couple that with the appointment of author Matt Dinniman and voice of the series Jeff Hayes as Media Guests of Honor to the convention, and you have all the necessary ingredients for a DCC takeover.

Sure enough, heart-patterned boxers and tortoiseshell Persian cats were all over the place, especially when the cosplayers put on their Saturday best for the annual contest. Saturday also happened to be the day when 2,000 crawlers—as members of the DCC fandom are called—assembled for a photo at Victory Field. I've…

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What is gaming without games? What is life without memories? In Gaming Memories Volume 03, our team shares happy, sorrowful, or deeply impactful memories of their lives, seen through the lens of tabletop gaming. Please join us for Gaming Memories, and if you have one you’d like to share, drop us a line.

Board Building - K. David Ladage

I was about five years old when I realized I had a thing for board games. I was about nine years old when I discovered role-playing games, and that took over much of my gaming energy. Once I was in the Navy  many years later, Magic: the Gathering had taken over most of my board gaming time, and GURPS was the linchpin in my RPG space. Once I left the Navy, my circle of friends for playing anything dwindled.

My Navy buddy, Rich, returned to civilian life not long after I did and moved to Iowa. While he was working, looking to get back into school he opened his own game store. He would often come to my place to show us new games he was selling. We discovered a lot of games in those days, some of them quite eye-opening.

One of the first of those games to alter my view of what a board game could be…

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Michael Hardacre’s Rattlesnake, a two-player card game about a gun fight in the wicky-wicky-wild Wild West, is a fabulous marriage of setting and mechanisms. This thing is lean, mean, and jumpy. More sting than a scorpion and more bite than a…well, you know. It is tense enough that the components list should include brow sweat. And it’s so small! For form factor, this no-frills set of cards—with a gun token for flavor—is my favorite thing to come along since High Tide. There’s nothing quite like a big game in a small box.

The goal of the game is simple enough: kill your opponent. Well, I shouldn’t say “kill.” Pokémon has taught us that death isn’t always the end result of [checks notes] running out of health. Strictly speaking, your goal is to hit your opponent four times. Death is not the dictated outcome. Maybe all those hits grazed you. Maybe they missed organs. Maybe your opponent rushes you off to a hospital, where the gangrene can do its slow, ante-antibacterial work. I’m not a historian.

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I’m going to hop into this review and almost completely agree with Andrew’s review of Nature. I don’t have that much to add to his assessment. I’ve played Evolution, Oceans, and now this, and I like what this series does mechanically, I think it provides a sharp, competitive experience that scales well with player count, and offers the possibility of drama without requiring players to understand a billion card interactions to jump in and start kicking each other in the teeth.

I’ll cover what the upcoming Climate module adds to the experience, and then I’ll play around in my ivory tower and conclude with some thoughts about edutainment products. I’m going to assume you have a sense of how the game works.

Get cooked (or frozen)

The Climate module for Nature adds variability to the amount of food that appears each round. Because of the game’s modeling of timescale, it’s doing big chunks of time between each round, so you have some pairing of the setting of the game with a mechanism. When the climate tracker moves toward an ice age or a scorching age, there will be less food available for everyone to compete over, and there is a new survival mechanism that every player will…

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Gems from Across the Pacific

It’s always great to see games from Asia make it stateside. As someone who is half Asian, I’ll always be drawn to games from my home continent. But in a time of crazy tariffs and international uncertainty, there’s a lot of gold that never gets its spotlight over here in the States.

Formosa Formosa, which literally translates to “beautiful Taiwan” in Portuguese, fortunately fell into my hands at the GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association) Expo this year. Designer Kirk Beiser is an expat living in Taiwan who happened to pack a few copies in his suitcase for the long flight to Louisville, Kentucky.

With events like the Tokyo Game Market and Asian Board Games Festival showcasing fantastic titles, we’re often on the outside looking in. Different cultural upbringings shape different ways of thinking and often lead to games that feel unlike much of what we see from Western designers. We can only hope more make their way stateside, whether through new distribution channels or smuggled over in luggage!

Toss and Tour

Formosa Formosa is a “toss-and-write” game in which every component is used, including the box itself. Players take turns until the final round, with the number of rounds scaling based on the player count so everyone receives an equal number of turns.…

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Thrilla in Manila

Fellow Meeple Mountaineer Andrew Holmes recently published a review covering Unmatched: The Witcher - Realms Fall and Steel & Silver, and his opening comment mentioned that we at Meeple Mountain differ on our opinions of the Unmatched franchise. But that makes sense as different reviewers covering differently themed sets are going to land differently on their thoughts.

(The correct opinion is that Unmatched is awesome)

However, Andrew is right that Unmatched is a great system because of its simplicity, quick pace, and heavily contrasting roster of fighters. And like him, I’m the ideal demographic, but for different reasons. The original game, Star Wars: Epic Duels, was played dozens upon dozens of times by my friends in middle school and me. We even found custom heroes online and printed them out, and though they were wildly unbalanced, it was a blast nonetheless.

Fans of Unmatched will recognize Bruce Lee as a highly sought-after expansion, being the first single-character pack and, at times, running upwards of $250 on the secondary market. Fortunately for those patient enough, Bruce Lee has returned in both an affordable and memorable set, going toe-to-toe with the famous boxer Muhammad Ali. I wasn’t alive during their height of fame, but their quotes, stories, and larger-than-life personas live on through pop…

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Gods' Will showed up in my social media feed, comparing itself to Resistance: Avalon like a new kid on the first day of school telling everyone he used to be popular somewhere else. I have heard this pitch. I have reviewed this pitch twice, from Witch Hunt and Human Punishment, two games that made the same promises and delivered the same disappointing results. So when Gods' Will came knocking with the same marketing aura, I had to open the door with at least one eyebrow raised. Maybe I’m just addicted to disappointment, who knows.

After half a dozen plays, I can say with a bit of confidence that Gods' Will is doing more right than wrong here. More importantly, it earns it by fixing the real problems with its predecessors rather than just the ones that look good in a Kickstarter pitch.

A Skeptic Walks Into a Kickstarter

Like 90% of social deduction games that have ever existed, there are two teams: Light and Dark. There is also a loner faction, a third party whose goals shift depending on player count and whose presence ensures that the ride from start to finish won’t ever be a smooth one. Every player is a God with a public special ability…

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Art Society - Tom Franklin

I picked up a copy of Art Society based on my friend and colleague Justin Bell’s excellent review of the game. After weeks of heavier games, I thought my gaming group would like something lighter.

Art Society is a shape-laying game where you’re trying to cover all the spaces on your board. Unlike many current games, the shapes here are simple rectangles, and your board is square, making for easier planning. Players take turns being the Auctioneer, meaning they pick the paintings up for bid that round. Highest bidder takes first choice, then the second, third, etc. Your new painting gets placed on your board, touching at least one side of another painting, then the next player sets up the next auction.

Justin discussed what makes Art Society such a good light game, but I want to tell you about the production of the game. The paintings themselves are alternative takes on famous images, and come with half-circles around the edges that show how many spaces on the board it will cover. The board has slight round bulge that matches those half-circles so the paintings stay in place better. The bidding indicators are paper auction bidding paddles. Perhaps best of all is the box insert.…

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With a title like LUZ, Spanish and Portuguese for “light,” you’d expect this Taiki Shinzawa trick-taking game to have a bit more clarity. Silly you. Silly me! LUZ is a game of shadows and half-knowns, a trick-taker that casts a shadow of uncertainty.

Given that Shinzawa is responsible for the likes of Ghosts of Christmas, a trick-taker in which you play three or four must-follow tricks at the same time while the trump suit shifts with player behavior, I should clarify that LUZ isn’t that opaque. It’s all relative. If Ghosts of Christmas is a few standard deviations outside the mean, LUZ is safely within the bell part of the curve.

This is a must-follow trick-taking game where players bid before the hand begins. You have the choice of making an exact bid, which requires you to hit the nail squarely on the head in order to score, or a more forgiving bid that gives you one trick’s worth of wiggle room in exchange for scoring half the points. Higher risk, higher reward.

This doesn’t sound so different from whist, other than the room for some wiggle in your wager. The opacity comes from the last two rules: the back of each card indicates what suit that card belongs to, and you never know the values of your…

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I reviewed Snake Charmers awhile ago, and I found that experience punchy and delightful. Now, I’m feasting my eyes on Bubble and Shadow, a game that is prettier, slightly more complicated, and ultimately, flatter.

The game has lofty ambition, noting as its inspiration W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, but I’m not sure if any of that translates. I’ve only read Of Human Bondage, and I ~think~ the aforementioned story is a fictionalized account of Paul Gauguin’s life or something, but I couldn’t for the life of me find how this game was related, other than it having really cool paintings on the cards.

Anyway, the objective of the game is to collect the right distribution of three types of wooden token: If you have the most purple tokens (bubbles), you’ll be eliminated from the scoring consideration at the end of the round. Then, if you have the fewest gray (coins) you score a point and are removed from the scoring. Finally, the player with the most yellow (moons) gets three points, and second most gets two points. You play three rounds, and if someone gets to five-plus points before that at the end of a round, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

But how do you acquire these tokens?

At the…

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All the Crawl

Co-op dungeon crawlers are becoming so prevalent that they are pretty much their own genre. Open up Kickstarter or Gamefound, and you’re bound to see a flashy ad for some variant of this, often packed with oversized minis, excessive expansions, and a price tag that makes your wallet start sweating.

Early in my gaming career, I was enamored with these games, enjoying my time with Mansions of Madness, Gloomhaven, Arcadia Quest, Cthulhu: Death May Die, and many others. As time marches on, these games start to blur together, many feeling like different mix-ins of the same ice cream flavor. The theme changes, but innovative mechanics don’t always follow.

I had a chance to check out The Stygian Society, a game that came out in 2020 during the pandemic, with a cooperative angle perfect for partners stuck inside together.

But unlike other dungeon crawlers I’ve played, this one is a tower crawl, and a physical tower at that. Dexterity games are definitely not my thing, and it took me a good 15 minutes to build this centerpiece. At the very least, the table presence will turn heads.

The Big Climb

The Stygian Society plays out over a series of turns as players try to clear six…

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I've been playing board games since the 1970s, and playing what are considered hobby games since the 1980s. (Yes, I am that old.) I've also played many RPGs in that time, and even a few wargames. I've seen many changes over the years, especially regarding the treatment of women in the hobby. Thankfully, things have improved greatly for women in gaming since those long ago days.

It was once the case that a woman just had to accept sexist remarks, inappropriate jokes, and offensive artwork as part of the gaming experience. Even after demonstrating interest and ability, many women were dismissed or belittled. Now, attitudes in many spaces have changed, and it is easier to find groups and shops that not only welcome women but embrace the different perspectives we bring to the hobby.

But…

As the saying goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Unfortunately, even in the year 2026 CE, I still encounter more than a few casual assumptions about women who play and buy board games.

I don't bring this up to bash anyone, or to throw an entire gender under the bus. As I said, things have improved greatly. Learning is happening, and positive change is all around. There are some…

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When I was younger, somewhere between five and eight years old, my family took a few road trips that I still have fond memories of. The era in which these trips took place, the early ‘90s, is worth noting as it’s part of what made these trips memorable.

Before cell phones, tablets, and portable gaming systems were widely available, long road trips were often a struggle to answer the question “How can I entertain/distract myself for X hours?” Surprisingly, my family found a variety of answers, including a “game” involving license plates.

The game consisted of identifying license plates, on cars driving by, from various states in an attempt to find as many as possible during the drive. It was a race of sorts where the first person in our car to point out a new state license plate earned a point and added to their total. When the drive was finished, we tallied up points and declared a winner.

Not only did VNTYPL8S send me on a nostalgic trip down memory lane, but it also turned out to be a fun, laugh-inducing experience for everyone that had a parking spot at the table.

Y00SYRBRN (Use Your Brain)

Gameplay in VNTYPL8S takes place in two phases, a writing phase and a guessing phase, across 3 rounds.

The writing phase…

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“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

That old adage, often spoken in jest with a hapless shrug of the shoulders, speaks to a day that begins like any other day where one ill-fated decision causes everything to fall apart, a veritable misplaced pebble cascading into an avalanche. That cold, bleak, wintry Sunday morning at the cafe was just such a day.

I’d arrived early to open the cafe for the day and my three employees had shown up soon thereafter. It was a Sunday, so expectations were very low. We typically didn’t get much traffic and, usually, I’d have to start sending people home early to save on labor costs. But, you never know how things are going to go. So, you’ve always got to be prepared.

About an hour after opening, a young man walked in with a camera in one hand and a trophy in the other. Upon stepping to the counter, he asked to speak with me, and the story he told me was so unusual that I will never forget it. His name was Ty and he was a Youtuber with a following in the millions. His passion was traveling to various, random cities, visiting their local establishments, and providing them with exposure on his channel. On this particular day, his mission…

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