The team at Board gave us the chance to cover their initial push late last year, and now that the platform is pushing out a new game every month, it’s been much easier to get my kids to join me at the table to check out the new wares. (If you’ve never heard of Board or need a quick overview of its features, check out our product review of the Board electronic device.)

Now that Board is fully up and running, new games are coming to market every month. We asked the Board team if we could continue covering new content, and they have been kind enough to oblige. Luckily, I have two children (ages 12 and 9) who loved the initial batch of games and are constantly looking for new ways to engage with the platform.

Once a quarter, I’ll offer thoughts on the newest batch of releases—both community-designed games as well as centralized releases from the Board development team, using a review style similar to our regular Quick Peaks coverage. Enjoy! (All images here were provided by the Board marketing team.)

The Heist

After spending almost two months playing Board regularly on our living room table over the previous holiday season, the lack of new…

The post The Quarterly Board Meeting—Summer 2026 appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Exit: The Game has been synonymous with “escape room” in my circle, and though there are many similar contenders (just look at your local Walmart/Target games aisle!), Exit continues to be the gold standard for the experience.

Amazingly, so many can be cranked out so quickly with various themes and still keep the puzzles fresh. At least, I would assume so. I can’t say I’m an Exit die-hard; I’ve only played a few of them, so I can’t attest to every iteration’s uniqueness, but I’ve felt that each puzzle was wildly different from all the others I’ve played.

EXIT: The Game – The Circus Mystery has players solving a string of heists, with the common denominator being that a certain circus is in town. The components immediately jump out at you as you assemble a number of 3D trapeze artists, strange swords, and a foldable magician’s assistant. The premise sends players on a quest to explore the different circus performers’ wagons in hopes of solving the ultimate whodunnit.

Without going into spoilers, I had a great time with the puzzles. It follows the same formula of figuring out a three-digit code and then using a decoder wheel to search the answer deck and test your theories. Like past…

The post EXIT: The Game – The Circus Mystery Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Rebuilding Chicago - Thomas Wells

I’m not that crazy about polyomino games, but Rebuilding Chicago is the kind of thing I like—razor sharp. I think that that sharpness decreases at lower player counts, but at four players, our game was over in 20 minutes with a point spread of 50. The schtick of this one is that you can either lay the polyominos in your little city board or activate an event that affects everyone. So, you’re constantly seeing how little you can do to edge out opponents, and they’re doing the same with you. Multiple times during our game, an event resolution would result in someone scoring 15-20 points, with someone else getting nothing. It’s got an enormous amount of variability, and for my money, I’d happily polyomino Chicago any time.

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

Read more articles from Thomas Wells

Dragonarium  - Kevin Brantley

This cute, cozy title comes from Wonderful World Board Games, a publisher that infuses Taiwanese culture and heritage into many of its games.

Dragonarium has players drafting polyomino tiles to create same-colored habitats, though doing…

The post Quick Peaks – Rebuilding Chicago, Dragonarium, Shape it, My Island, Las Vegas appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

There’s a level of chaos that appears when a player’s turn is up in the new word-association party game Mind Sweeper (2026, Floodgate).

You see, players are staring at a table that has like 50 small cardboard tokens scattered here and there, from easy visuals (like one of those Egyptian-style pyramids, or a sword, or an apple) to some that are a bit opaque, like a single exclamation point. The active player is dealt a card with six words, and separately a number token forcing the player to illustrate a specific word (using those tokens) over the next 60 seconds.

Get your team to guess what the word is, and you score the card. Players can shout anything as soon as the timer starts, adding to the chaos. If they don’t get the word in those 60 seconds, the active player flips the word card in view of all players, then the team gets 60 more seconds to guess which of the six words was the original answer.

Across 10 word cards, you’re looking at a 15-20 minute experience, in a cooperative, high-score challenge that pushes players to get as many of the 10 words right as they can.

The keys here is twofold. Each card’s clue words are…

The post Mind Sweeper Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Surplus of Sloths (2026, Weird Giraffe Games) isn’t bad.

It’s a card drafting game where players try to build a hand of ascending card runs across five different suits of sloths. A market wipe mechanic pushes one leftover market card into a “surplus net” after each round, and players can view and gauge whether it is worth trying to score a suit at the end of the game.

I just gave you 75% of the rules, and designer Charlie McCarron (Skyrockets, the Kites riff I quite enjoyed) has given us a game so quick that my 12-year-old and I played it twice within a 15-minute stretch. Even winning one of those two games didn’t impress the 12-year-old, who shrugged their shoulders before admitting that the game was “only OK” before heading off to their room.

You’re right; that’s not an endorsement. My review crew joined me for a four-player game the following day, and the winner of that game also shrugged their shoulders and landed in the same rating range I landed on for this review.

Surplus of Sloths isn’t bad because its scoring mechanic is interesting. In an ideal world, you want to build up a run of three, four, maybe even five low cards of…

The post Surplus of Sloths Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

One of my favorite things about the games released under Carla and Nick Kopp’s Weird Giraffe banner: the games are often legitimately weird.

Here’s what I mean. I was explaining the rules to my wife and nine-year-old for our first play of Effervescent (a Carla design currently on crowdfunding, set for release in 2027), and when I tried to explain the main concept of placing sea-based creature tiles in such a way that the tail of a newly-placed tile must touch the head of a previously-placed animal tile, my wife openly balked.

“So, like, this way?” She used a large whale tile as an example.

“Well, sort of,” I began. “Each tile has a head area, a distinct tail point…then, every other part of the tile is a ‘side.’”

“Seems kind of weird,” she said. And our first play went that way, as players took tiles in one of three sizes to create scoring patterns that would trigger with a mix of scoring sequences, tied to “Drift” cards and Harmony cards, the latter of which were established before the game as public milestones that are always available to score.

Turns are simple. Place a tile, and if a placed tile meets a Drift card scoring condition, a player puts…

The post Effervescent Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

In Gulo Gulo, players compete to rescue a young gulo—a wolverine—from the evil swamp vulture. I say “evil,” but that’s unfair. The wolverine pup was trying to steal one of the bird’s eggs, after all. Is the vulture really evil, or simply a participant in larger systems that force us into binary rolesl? If the game were from the vulture’s perspective, would the gulos not be the evil ones? You could reframe Gulo Gulo as a tower defense game in which the vulture fends off a hoard of ravenous gulos and not have to change any of the facts on the ground. Games really can teach us things, if we have the heart to listen.

Philosophical implications of this exercise and its framing aside, Gulo Gulo is Candy Land with dexterity elements. To move to a new space, you pull a matching egg out of the nest, a wooden bowl full of the colorful ovoid ova. This wouldn’t be much of a challenge at all were it not for the tall and precarious stick that pokes out above the nest, its weighted end causing it to weave and wobble and constantly threaten to fall over. If the stick does fall or if you cause any eggs to fall out and hit the table, you move back to the previous…

The post Gulo Gulo Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

To design a meaningfully thematic trick-taker is no small accomplishment. Other than Traveluencer, Daniel Newman’s Gachapon Trick is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head. In Traveluencer, the players are social media stars, and the cards they play represent both their posts and their view count. The trump suit is whatever topic is trending. The winner gains likes as points. It’s good. It’s thorough.

Mechanically, designers Ryo Nakamura, Zhonghao Yang, and Kai Zu have drawn from an unlikely source: Taiki Shinzawa’s 2019 charmer Inflation!. In both Inflation! and Traveluencer, you can play as many cards into the trick as you want, chaining them to create a single high number. If I play a blue 2, 5, and 7, I’ve played 257. There’s no limit to how many cards you can chain, but you do want to avoid both running out of cards too early and having any cards left at the end of the hand. Tricks missed due to a lack of cards represent periods of inactivity, death itself in the world of social media.

The risk of you running out of cards is minimal. Almost non-existent. There is no…

The post Traveluencer Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

(Note that this tile set is for American mahjong, not Chinese mahjong. While the games are similar and share the same roots, the tile sets required to play each are slightly different.)

Editor: Please read to the bottom for a discount code on Monet's Garden Mahjong set.

The Mahjong Moment

Mahjong is a traditional game that’s having a modern moment. Like chess, it’s a game that has long had its followers but has never quite become part of the mainstream hobby scene. Now both games are experiencing renewed popularity.

In the tabletop world, we saw a big boom in gaming during and after Covid. The need for entertainment and escape, coupled with a need to engage in-person after being isolated drove renewed interest in modern board games. The same is true of role-playing games, chess, and, yes, mahjong.

Suddenly mahjong is everywhere. Social media is bursting with pictures and meetups. I don’t even live in a major city and I see flyers advertising mahjong classes, playgroups, and tournaments all over town. Hallmark even made a mahjong movie and matching Christmas ornament!

With all of this interest comes a flood of products designed to capture every possible dollar. Mats, racks, lamps, tile sets, tables, carrying bags and more are all…

The post Monet’s Garden Mahjong Tile Set Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

If you asked me many moons ago whether the horror genre would be a good fit for a party game, my answer would have been a straight-up no. Sure, Murdery Mystery party games exist, but horror is on another level. Horror has a body count, and it ain’t no lead pipe in the library nonsense here. The corpses, more often than not, don't remain particularly intact.

Yet three years ago, I did take a look at the Scream board game by the now-defunct Funko Games. It was a surprisingly fun game that somehow made a real-time set-collecting card game with an app work. Not exactly the best game I'd ever played, but it was different, and more importantly, it was good enough to hit the table quite a few times at my local game meetups.

So when I heard about This Game is Killer (great name!), which could handle up to 10 players, lasted around 15 minutes, and used the Aliens franchise as its setting, curiosity got the better of me. And since I'm no cat, I wasn't too worried about where that curiosity might lead.

Wake From Cryosleep

The premise of the game is pretty simple: there is an alien on board causing problems, as aliens tend to do,…

The post This Game Is Killer: Alien On Board Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

They talk about iconic dynamic duos: Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jelly, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and now Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson. But hold the phone! They’re back with a third, Brett J. Gilbert, evolving their design-duo superpowers into a full-fledged trio.

Many will recognize Benjamin and Thompson from modern classics such as the Undaunted series, War Chest, and Resist!. Factor in the euro-y talents of Gilbert, whose credits include Mandala and The Guild of Merchant Explorers, and For the Gods! couldn’t hit the table fast enough.

I’ll admit, as much as I love the idea of wargames and “dudes on a map,” I’m often quite bad at them and, as a result, tend to admire them from afar.

For the Gods! is a dudes-on-a-map game, yes, but scratch beneath the surface and there’s a clever bag-building and hand-management game driving the entire experience.

After Mighty Boards blew past its crowdfunding goal by more than tenfold, I was curious to see whether all those ingredients would come together into something worthy of Olympus.

Zeus himself would approve.

For the Gods! is an area-majority game where players sail around ancient Greece, building towering temples dedicated to the gods. Each player begins with the…

The post For The Gods! Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Excelsior, heroes, and welcome to a Meeple Mountain article for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! Today, we’re here to talk about the newest supervillain to join the roster: Onslaught! This big boy boasts his own personal affiliation where anyone you bring is automatically affiliated with him and uses his leadership. The model is cool, but how does it all pan out?

I want to give a quick shoutout to one of my local players, Isaiah Cooper, who excitedly agreed to paint this Onslaught for me when he arrived. I would rather put impressive painting on display for y’all than my mediocre attempts at whipping something up.

Two Minds, One Grudge

Onslaught is a character lifted straight from the comics (and for my money, likely to feature heavily in season 3 of X-Men ‘97.) He’s a fusion of Professor X and Magneto’s consciousnesses after the two of them used their powers on each other. Here in MCP, he’s the first character to carry two alter-ego tags, serving as both Charles Xavier and Max Eisenhardt. This means you can’t run either character with him, but since Onslaught has the “peerless” tag, it means you can’t run him with any other peerless characters anyway, which Magneto has.

The box is just one simple model, but don’t let that fool you. This is one of the…

The post Marvel Crisis Protocol – Onslaught’s Grip Tightens! appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Fresh, juicy strawberries. Busy nature-loving cottage-witches. Ginger cats on rustic roofs. If any or all of these things (they could be a few of your favourite things) made you go 'ooo', then this September you're in luck, my friend. Fiammingo Games, a small Italian publisher, has taken note of the burgeoning market in cozy games and is heading to Kickstarter with something they're calling The Cozy Bundle. It's not one game, but three, launched together under a single banner. That's a whole lot o' cozy. It is, in fact, a "plump cushions and knitted throw and pet on your lap and steaming cup of tea" amount of cozy.

It's also a bold move. Most publishers save their big swings for one campaign at a time. What we have here is not a trio of vaguely-linked mini-games, but three fully developed board games with a shared aura. You’d expect them to be separate releases. Fiammingo is betting that they can convince you otherwise: that a witch's forest, a strawberry festival, and a cottage full of good intentions are stronger as a trio than as three separate entities. I sat down with the designers and artists behind all three to find out why, and to ask what "cozy gaming" actually means…

The post Inside The Cozy Bundle – Fiammingo Games, Strawberries, Forests, and Happiness appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

There’s a lot of things I want to like about Haunted Lands. I like the premise, where you’re adventurers/exorcists trying to help your little city expand out into the countryside by sending ghosts to the great beyond. There’s some mechanical flourishes that are genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, the game itself does not really rise above a rote resource-collection exercise.

It’s important to gather wood when exorcising

Haunted Lands is an action point game, where instead of getting a pool of action points, you have discs that correspond to different actions that you use to do various things in a sequence of your choosing. For example, you move, then gather, then build a building, move again, and finally, help a ghost.

You’re doing all this because helping the ghosts (which requires the right number of action tokens depending on how far the game has advanced), harvesting, and building buildings all give you resources, which you use to build more buildings, or sell said resources to buy upgrades. Building buildings and paying for upgrades gets you points, and in the late stages of the game, helping ghosts gives you points too.

The game forms a fairly simplistic loop. You move, making sure…

The post Haunted Lands Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

There is a dangerous moment in every board gamer's life when a non-gaming friend says, “Sure, I'll try one.” Remain calm. Do not make any sudden movements. And, most importantly, do not immediately disappear into the basement and return carrying a box large enough to contain a microwave.

We have been waiting for this moment. That's the problem. When you love tabletop games, introducing someone to the hobby can feel like being handed five minutes to explain your favorite band, restaurant, television series, vacation destination, and minor religion simultaneously. You want them to understand why this thing matters. You want them to experience the clever mechanisms, impossible decisions, ridiculous betrayals, dramatic reversals, and that beautiful moment three hours into a game when everyone suddenly realizes Dave has been quietly collecting sheep for reasons nobody fully understands. So we get excited. And excitement makes us terrible ambassadors. Or, at least, obviously biased ambassadors to the point of destroying our credibility.

We start explaining. “This one's actually pretty simple.” This sentence is usually followed by eighteen minutes of rules. “You have workers, except they're technically druids, and you're placing them on action spaces to collect resources so you can fulfill contracts, although they're called prophecies, and the purple resource isn't actually a…

The post Your Friend Doesn’t Need to Become a Gamer Tonight appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I don’t remember where I first heard about Amoebunnies, a self-published game from a designer who’s not made anything else, but I’m so glad I did. This game was attractive to me for a couple reasons: it was cute, and I needed more cute games to play with my bunny-loving seven-year-old daughter. But the thing that intrigued me most was seeing it described as “Root lite”. Was there really a game I could play with my kids that would introduce them to the world of asymmetric play that would also be fun for adults?

The story

The amoebunnies have fallen from the sky and are doing different tasks on the earth. Each player begins with the same resources, but the movement rules, special abilities, and winning conditions are different for each character. The characters also have different difficulty ratings, which means you can give the easier characters to newer or younger players, and the more experienced gamers can pick a more complex character. There are movement cards, which tell you where to place characters and other bits and bobs (depending on which characters are involved), and the coveted jellies, which are like a wild card but are rare and difficult to get. The game is a race to finish your special task.

The post Amoebunnies Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Fuji Flush - Thomas Wells

Fuji Flush is a good time. It’s like super Uno that doesn’t fall into an infinite loop, especially at higher player counts. Basically, you play a card from your hand, and if the turn comes around to you again, and someone hasn’t “flushed” your card, you discard it. Get rid of your hand to win. Flushing is playing a higher card, but if someone plays the same card, your values are added together and you enter a sort of partnership where all same-card values are tougher to flush. 

Mainly, it’s an excuse to say flush a lot, but it’s a hoot with a larger count, and is really easy to table and play at the end of a night. 

Ease of entry?
★★★★★ - No sweat
Would I play it again?
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Thomas Wells

Terra Eterna - Kevin Brantley

We at Meeple Mountain always enjoy the chance to cover self-published titles, as they often don’t get the opportunity to be showcased to a larger audience. Terra Eterna is one of those titles, a semi-cooperative RPG focused on exploration and character building.

Unfortunately, the game…

The post Quick Peaks – Fuji Flush, Terra Eterna, Bring Your Own Book, Beach Bandits, Stuglandet appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. If you are going to release a game in the late summer of 2026 and want to ride a wave of free marketing, you can do a LOT worse than theming your new game around anything tied to The Odyssey, Homer, The Iliad, and all things Odysseus.

So, while it is possible that Gigamic’s new, light strategy title Odysseus was always intended to be a game about the lead character from the recent Christopher Nolan / Matt Damon blockbuster film The Odyssey, let’s just agree to give everyone involved in this game’s design a round of applause for timing the release and the theme to the Universal film’s massive global box office!

Odysseus, the game, is a very quick romp through the 15 trials Odysseus (the character, also known as Ulysses, depending on your preference between the Greek and the Latin version) survived on his quest to return to Ithaca. In fact, the game is so quick that we only get 11 turns to whisk through the entire affair, and turns are so fast you might break through a game of Odysseus in 15-20 minutes!

Turns are simple. The board is a replica of Ulysses’ vessel, with spaces for 12 cards. On…

The post Odysseus Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

One of the great things about being part of a regular game group is being exposed to titles you might have never seen before—because your friends also love games, and no two gamers have quite the same combination of tastes. Variety is one of my defining characteristics when it comes to playing games: I’d much rather play 6 games once, than 1 game six times. So when my friend Chas said “we’re going to play Bridges of Shangri-La”, a game I’d never heard of, I enthusiastically agreed.

Bridges of Shangri-La is an area control game from 2003. Set in the forbidding Himalayas, the goal is to earn the most points by training up masters in 7 different disciplines, then have those masters send their students to neighboring villages to “spread enlightenment”. Of course this is a friendly way of saying you’re going to beat the pants off them…except in Nepalese.

Did I mention that Bridges of Shangri-La is a bit…cut-throat? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

How to play Bridges of Shangri-La

The Bridges of Shangri-La board features 13 villages in the peaks of Nepal, each connected to several other villages by tendril thin bridges. Each player begins the game with 7 tokens, in 7 different disciplines. The goal is…

The post Bridges of Shangri-La Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I picked up a review copy of the new word game Jibber Jabble during my visit to Gen Con 2026. After meeting the game’s designer, Carrie Sykes, at a pre-con media event organized by the publisher, I had the chance to demo the game later that weekend before getting Jibber Jabble in front of both my review crew, a group of six at a family beach vacation a couple days later, then a group of eight during one of my weekly gaming group nights.

Here’s the synopsis: it’s hard to beat the value proposition of a collaborative word association game that plays fast for an MSRP of $9. It doesn’t land on my personal Mount Everest of word games, but everyone who played it wanted their own copy.

We Need Some Clue Words for “Statue”

Jibber Jabble is a word association game that plays in about 20 minutes, maybe a bit more with more players. Across six turns, players provide clues for a word or term, helping the active player by giving them clues for the word they cannot see (yes, this is the format for games like Just One).

So, the active player flips a card towards everyone else, then the team picks a number, from…

The post Jibber Jabble Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.