We did it, folks. Humanity has invented—nay, perfected—time travel. They said it couldn’t be done. They were wrong. The scientists at publisher Plaid Hat Games figured it out. It’s less complicated than I’d have expected time travel to be, requiring only that you set up a copy of The Monolith and sit down. The technology also seems to be fairly limited in its applications, since The Monolith only has the ability to transport players back to the summer of 1993.

Picture it: Fireball Island is in the rearview mirror, the Euro revolution is but a faint glimmer on the horizon, and sweet sweet Ameritrash rules the roost. There’s wood panelling on the walls, left over from when your parents had the basement finished in ’86. Breathe in the aroma of freshly-toasted Bagel Bites, taste the corona of blue Squeezeit around your lips. Hear the faint sounds of “I’ve Been Thinking About You” and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s cover of “Passionate Kisses” waft in from a nearby radio. That’s The Monolith.

Everything about The Monolith as an object was seemingly designed to evoke a previous era, if not always the same one. The table presence is the maximalism of…

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Inca Empire: The Card Game - Thomas Wells

At some point I’ll have to review Inca Empire, as it’s a pretty neat take on a cube rail, shared incentive track-building game. Inca Empire: The Card Game, in the storied tradition of X: The Card Game, is less than a pale imitation of its predecessor. It’s a game with some novel mechanisms, but because of turn order problems and really uninteresting cardplay, because essentially Inca Empire: Munchkin Edition. 

You have a hand of multiuse cards, which can be used for four things. You expand the shared card tableau, using cardboard chits to mark routes you claim. You’re limited by available chits, Hansa Teutonica style. You can play one-shot cards, you can add cards to an income tableau for yourself (called terraces) or you can play a trade agreement card between you and another player, which give you both a special rule and you an extra action at the end of the round. To win, you’re trying to plot down tons of chits and score the best 3 of 5 secret goal cards at end of game. 

The rules for expanding the card tableau are pretty restrictive, and the goals arbitrarily reward players who’ve drawn ones that don’t interfere with…

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I’ve spent much of my time with Gazebo, publisher Bitewing Games’s update of Reiner Knizia’s cult release Qin, appreciating the humble domino. Why is it so good? Is it the heft? Unexpectedly heavy tiny objects are disarming, after all. There’s the abnormally smooth texture and the rounded corners, the clack—not a click, but a clack—every time you put one down on a hard surface. Maybe it’s a shared cultural memory of the nearly 1,000 years we’ve been playing with them. 

Whatever the reason(s), dominoes are enchanting. They’re one of the few objects that suggest and immediately invite play of all sorts for people of all ages. The youngest children know to construct with them. A love of dominoes seems to be hardwired into us from the jump.

While Gazebo is one of the thinkier applications of dominoes I’ve ever come across, the magic is still very much there. Rather than two sets of pips, these dominoes—or regular-degular cardboard tiles if you don’t opt for the upgraded components—show two squares of color. Players take turns placing one tile down on the cloth board with the goal of creating groups of the same color. Well, that’s not entirely true.

The goal isn’t to…

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Human memory is a funny thing.

Every time I sit down to play Gingham, the latest collaboration between designer Robert Hovakimyan and publisher Bitewing Games, the song “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” rises like a leviathan from the depths of my memory. “If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure for a big surprise,” I sing as I lay out the checkerboard picnic blanket and organize the ants. “If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise,” as I set out the sweet treats across the map and set my score counter to 0.

My only exposure to “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” a popular children’s song in the U.K., was a 1986 VHS tape documenting a live concert on Boston Commons by the musical duo Rosenshontz. I have not seen, let alone thought about, that VHS tape in over three decades. Nevertheless, here we are. Again, and again, and again.

But what of Gingham? We can’t speak of obscure regional concert films forever, though I could probably pitch that to Pitchfork as a series. What about Gingham indeed. It’s a bit of a funny game to describe. I would call it an abstract game centered around route-building with a clever sort of auction system for figuring out turn order. The BGG entry suggests the publisher more…

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Imported from Abroad

It’s nice to see a foreign game company pop its head up, especially when it comes from a country not often represented in the gaming community. Mozaic Games, from India, made its convention debut at Gen Con last year, bringing over numerous titles centered around the country’s rich heritage and culture. The company had sold out of nearly all its inventory by the show’s end, which is outstanding for an indie publisher at such a large convention.

Chai Garam, with its charming art and colorful presence, puts players in a busy mala, or market, running a chai tapri, or tea stand. I always think of the line from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse that goes something like, “Chai is tea. Why would you call it chai tea? It’s just saying tea tea.” Players spend their turns gathering ingredients, serving customers, upgrading their tapris, and completing goals in an effort to reign supreme over the world of chai.

Top Tapri

Players continue taking turns until someone reaches 10 stars at the top of the favor track. On each turn, a player chooses one of two main actions: collect three ingredients from the market or serve customers using tea they have already brewed.

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Out of Sorts is now the second memory game I’ve played in the last few years that isn’t really a memory game at all. Like Wilmot’s Warehouse, which uses the façade of memorization to trick players into collaborating on a story, the memorization in Out of Sorts is a distraction, a means to an end rather than the end itself. Do you want to spend twenty or thirty minutes memorizing the order of numerous abstract symbols? No, of course you don’t. That sounds awful. Do you want to spend twenty or thirty minutes in passionate debate with your friends about how a set of abstract symbols relate to one another based on three arbitrary criteria, to argue about whether and why that set of squiggles with a line through it feels more like a Reptile than it does Travel? Of course you do. That sounds joyous, and it is.

Out of Sorts is a cooperative game in which players work together to organize an alien’s library. The lot of you have been abducted for the purpose by this seafoam green monstrosity, who sits in a chair reading while you do all the work. The alien starts out not paying much attention to you…

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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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