Here’s a quick recap of Let’s Build A Magic Deck - Part One:

Someone introduced me to Magic. Someone taught me how to play the wrong way. I sucked. Someone taught me the right rules and how to build a deck. I got good. I went broke. I got out. Then Commander arrived.

I suppose now is a good time to talk about Commander: what it is and what it means for me.

Part Two: What A Mess

Where I Extoll the Virtues of the Commander Format

As mentioned in the previous entry in this series, a standard Magic deck is composed of 60 cards—consisting of cards from very specific blocks—with no more than four copies of a single card in the deck. Each player begins a game with 20 hit points, and the players win by reducing their opponents’ health to 0. There’s nothing wrong with this mode of play. It’s the way I played Magic for decades. But, it’s costly since entire sets of cards are constantly being rotated out, and new sets are being rotated in. This means you have to constantly buy more cards if you want to compete.

The Commander format changes a lot of things. Firstly, in Commander, your deck is composed of 100 unique cards (minus basic lands, which you can…

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The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.

Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.

In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.

The Downfall of Pompeii: What Is It?

The Downfall of Pompeii is a tricky one to categorize. Broken into two halves, it begins as a hand management game as players use a small…

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This past Christmas, my wife bought me a pre-constructed Magic: the Gathering Commander deck, which is set in the Doctor Who universe. Doctor Who appears within Magic: the Gathering as a part of an initiative called ‘Universes Beyond’. This series, based on various IPs, features other settings such as Lord of the Rings, Avatar: the Last Airbender, and Fallout (to name a few).

It was an unexpected, but welcome, gift to say the least. I haven’t played Magic: the Gathering in years (I’ve never played the Commander format), but I do love me some Doctor Who. So, I wasted no time tearing into it to check out the cards, and I have to say: I’m in love. From the artwork to the card mechanics to the flair text, the theme oozes from every card. It’s exactly what you’d want from a Doctor Who themed Magic: the Gathering set.

As I sat there reading the cards and trying to understand how the deck worked, I felt something long dormant began reawakening in me: the desire to play. And, as I sat there reading over the cards, it became apparent to me that I’ve been out of the game for far too long. Unfamiliar keywords, command zones, color identities… my eyes crossed trying to parse everything. Magic is an ever-evolving game and…

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The Hanging Gardens - Justin Bell

Last year, I played The Hanging Gardens and covered it in our Dusty Euro series of articles. A card-splaying gem from 2008, The Hanging Gardens was a fun time at the table and reminded me a lot of the game Honshu. In this way, both games require players to lay small cards on top of other cards to satisfy scoring conditions in a very snappy 30-minute format.

I picked up a review copy of the 2025 version of The Hanging Gardens during my trip to SPIEL Essen 2025, and immediately noticed that the game format had changed. Now, players must complete a 12-card pyramid of garden cards that include scoring options for various elements, such as visitors, animals, irrigation cards (which must be placed in a certain pattern to satisfy a private milestone card), and various adornments to empty garden cards. There are public objectives along with a mechanic that requires players to choose from different card markets (in three columns) to draft the right cards.

The new version of The Hanging Gardens is pretty ordinary. In fact, this new version feels very much like what an industry friend likes to say about the modern state of the hobby: “new games are…

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While our Diamond Climber Awards are on hiatus, we still want to make sure we, as a team, talk about our favorite games of 2025. These are the games that stand out, stand up, and won’t stand aside. Maybe it’s a light card game, or maybe it’s an hours-long space odyssey, the games on this list are our collective favorites that we played in 2025. Please join our team as we celebrate the best that board gaming has to offer.

Tom Franklin

Ingenius 3D

Thanks to my friend W. Eric Martin. I borrowed his copy of Ingenious 3D at the end of 2024 and forced it on all of my gaming friends in January 2025, from North Carolina to Maryland.

If you’ve played Reiner Knizia’s original Ingenious, you know how good the game is. Now, condense the board into a much smaller hexagonal shape and allow players to randomize the colors in the corners. The pieces are thicker, with a bar on the underside, across your pieces two hexes. This means you can only play on top of two adjoining pieces, and not completely cover a single piece.

Play starts on the first level of the board, but you can place a tile atop two other tiles at any…

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I was first introduced to the design sensibilities of Pete McPherson after playing Tiny Towns, a pattern-matching game about building structures for woodland creatures. Because I enjoyed Tiny Towns so much I also reviewed his game Wormholes (a route building and resource collection game set in outer space), and Fit to Print (a realtime tile laying game in which you’re building the front page of a small town newspaper). We’ve also interviewed Pete twice (Feb 2019 and Jan 2022).

So when Pickpocket Games told me about an upcoming Pete McPherson title called Lodge, I reached out and requested a review copy without any knowledge of the game other than the cover (which is gorgeous). And now that I’ve played it several times, I realize that it fits right into Pete’s catalog like it was born there.

Take a walk in the snow with me to the front door of Lodge.

“With luck, it might even snow for us.”

In Lodge, players run competing ski lodges, set high in the mountains. Over the course of the game, players add rooms and amenities to their lodges, then entice guests to stay in those rooms. Ah, but the guests are picky, and as guests do, have their…

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Excelsior, heroes, and welcome to a Meeple Mountain preview for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! The box we have today is one of the last ones in Atomic Mass Game’s old release format with two models per box. Moving forward, they’ve stated all boxes will be designed to have at least three models, meaning less space on the shelves and more value for the customers. That being said, they certainly picked a fine duo to go out with in the form of Spectrum and Blue Marvel! Let’s dive right in.

Anti-Matter of Fact: Blue Marvel Swoops Into MCP!

Blue Marvel is a 5-threat powerhouse that’s comfortable brawling up close and personal or taking shots from far away. Anti-Matter Blast is a heck of a builder, letting him blast people at range 4 with six dice. Oh, and did I forget to mention that he always gets to count skulls/failures in his rolls? That means he punches harder than Black Bolt, who was the go-to 5-threat meta menace for most of 2025. And, to top it off, every time he rolls skulls, he gets to power up. He can handle business just fine from far away, but if he manages to get up in the middle of everything, he has a pretty costly…

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The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.

Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.

In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.

Schweinebande: What Is It?

Schweinebande (German for “gang of pigs”) is a set collection game featuring livestock for 2-5 players. Let’s put it out there right here: Schweinebande is a weird game, with a hilarious cover and a pig featured…

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