I appreciate that the game Ipso (2026, Gigamic) reveals itself immediately…because it is not great.

That’s not to say that it’s a complete negative, though. A deck of 90 cards, spread across five suits (and, importantly, NOT in numerical order) is used to seed the play area. Each player gets 14 cards dealt face down, which are then used to build a pyramid. A 15th card, represented by a single, bright, very large star, sits at the top of this pyramid. A market of two cards from the deck is built in the center of the play area, then the game begins.

On a turn, players select one of the two face-up market cards to replace one of their face down pyramid cards. That replaced card is never technically owned by the pyramid’s owner; it is simply moved, face-up, into the market, so that the next player always has two cards to choose from.

Choose your face-up card wisely, because scoring is tied to three simple elements. The first is the easiest: at the end of the game, only rows that feature cards in ascending order will score any points. Second, if the row is eligible to score, each card is worth a single point, but if the entire row is made up of only one color, each card…

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LOOP is designed by Takashi Saito, who is from Nagasaki, Japan. I bought this game when I was traveling in Nagasaki. Because of this the game will have a special place in my collection. This is a climbing card game, like Tichu and Big 2. You play different combinations of cards and your goal is to play all your cards. The most important twist in this game is

Haunted Mouse is a hard game to write about, because it falls perfectly into the gap between the good, about which there is much to say, and the bad, about which there is often even more to say. Jonathan Cox’s shedding game, a reimplementation of his own Spring Cleaning, is a perfectly alright time at the table. People talk about their days, the weather, the latest gossip. The game goes on quietly around this, undemanding and unobtrusive.

The goal of the game is to empty your hand by playing sets of increasing size and strength. Every trick-taking and shedding game has its gimmick(s), and Haunted Mouse is no exception. It joins the rapidly expanding field of shedding games in which you cannot rearrange the cards in your hand, and are forced to make sets out of adjacent cards. This has been used to marvelous effect in Scout, Jungo, and dnup, and works just fine in Haunted Mouse.

A common mechanic between these games, though it works differently in each, is the ability to add cards to your hand, putting them anywhere you want. In Haunted Mouse, this idea is combined with allowing players to shed troublesome singletons from their hands to make…

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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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A review copy of Kobayakawa was kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts & opinions are my own. Another colourful Oink game joins the gang. This time it’s an older game that’s been given a facelift. Jun Sasaki’s Kobayakawa has a simple premise: bet on a single hand of cards; high card wins. Doesn’t sound too exciting when you put it like that, but there are a couple of twists which…

Source

Ukiyo-e is the 2025 Japanese edition of an old game from Michael Schacht, called Crazy Chicken (2003). This is a simple, mostly abstract card game, so it is easy to retheme. I would never have imagined a game about crazy chicken getting transformed into a game about traditional Japanese woodblock prints.  In this Japanese edition of the game, you are collecting pieces of art by famous

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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Gen Con 2026 – Thunderworks Games Gen Con 2026 is over (as well as the fall school kick-off) and I’ve come back up for air, just in time to ramp up the annual Gen Con run-down here at OpinionatedGamers. Will … Continue reading →

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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Snow muffled every footstep until the only sounds were distant birds and the steady crunch beneath our boots. The silence stretched in every direction: left to right, ahead and behind, as well as all the way up into the thermosphere. We were far away from anywhere. Yet, we knew we were safe. As the darkness settled all around us, we could finally see it: the Borealis: Arctic Expeditions by Dariusz Mindur from Lucky Duck Games with art by Rodrigo Camilo Alves De Almeida, Kevin Sidharta, Inês Toczyska and Ariadna Żytniewska.

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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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Let’s play poker but in a different way. There has been several modern hobby games which make use of poker hands, e.g. The Gang. The good thing about these games is they use an aspect which most people are already familiar with. It will be easier for us gamers to convince our non gamer friends to try modern boardgames with us.  Half of All-In: Predictions is

There has been quite a few Lord of the Rings games in recent years. I think that's a good thing. I hope this brings more people into the boardgame hobby. There are two games in the Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking Game series so far - The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. I have only played some of the missions in The Fellowship of the Ring. I was told The Two Towers is

A small hand reaches into the tin, fingers excitedly hovering over the treats inside. The choice should be simple: take a biscuit, any biscuit. But no: two biscuits are better than one, and three better than two. Yet, if the little hand takes too long to make up its mind, the little burglar will be discovered. Well, it's time to Risk It For A Biscuit by Jessica Metheringham from Dissent Games.

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Seek No Further

Trading card games are one of the anchor pillars of the tabletop hobby. Whether it’s something mainstream like Magic: The Gathering, Lorcana, or Flesh and Blood, something a little more niche like One Piece Card Game or Final Fantasy Trading Card Game, or the crazy phenomenon that is still Pokémon, TCGs will always run parallel to board gaming.

The downside is that TCGs can require a heavy financial investment, and there’s always a risk surrounding the game’s longevity. Unlike staples like Magic and Pokémon, many TCGs fizzle out soon after release, becoming another name on the tombstone. Is anyone still playing Altered?

X: Seekers of Fortune is a card game that simulates the feeling of a TCG with no continued investment, no chase cards to pull, and no meta deck-building. That’s a huge draw for me since I love the playstyle of TCGs, but I’d rather have a self-contained experience like Compile  or Mindbug.

The folks at Mega Moth Studios were nice enough to send over the deluxe version of the game, which includes crisp playmats and even a first edition booster pack to mix into the base game. Hmm…do I smell a system being built here?

Fortune and Glory, Kid.…

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Dungeon Delve for One, Please

On lazy Sundays, I quite enjoy breaking out a solo game and throwing on some old records. No group bickering over game choice, no fear of another player’s analysis paralysis, just me, myself, and a deck of cards. There’s a particular joy in quieting down and figuring out a game by yourself, and Puzzle Dungeon is an ideal mix of dungeon delving and puzzle solving to keep those silent thoughts busy.

I was fortunate enough to experience the deluxe edition of the game, which comes with an overwhelming amount of heroes and baddies alike. It’s a smorgasbord of characters packed into this monster-hunting card game, so any characters mentioned here may not be present in the base game!

Puzzle Play

Puzzle Dungeon is a straightforward, solo-only hand management game that challenges players to defeat the required number and types of monsters listed on their hero’s card before their deck runs out. The monster deck is made up of five different monster types, randomly shuffled into four columns and laid out into ordered lines.

To defeat the frontmost monster in a column, players must discard cards with symbols matching that monster. These cards can be…

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You put down a bowl of soft food, and moments later, you hear the jingle of her collar. Here she comes! First, she pauses at the conservatory door and watches you for a while. You eagerly point at the wonderfully fresh food, enticing her to come in and eat. She turns away to look out into her domain, our back garden. Eventually, she strolls over - in her own time. Of course, whether she's ready for her lunch, when she eats, or indeed, where she eats, is all her own choice. As her pet dad, you just Take Cat by Gareth Edwards from Gibsons with art by Juliana Eigner.

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Part of the fun of engaging with a system built around different characters, classes, species, or any other mode of substantive differentiation, is finding the build that’s right for you. Everyone who likes Root has a favorite faction, everyone who plays Magic has a favorite color, and the wonderful thing is that these preferences are almost always deeper than mechanics. If you’re lucky, if everything clicks, your chosen avatar feels ‌like an extension of yourself. There is something about playing as the Lizard Cult that elicits a deeper joy for me. Am I going to win? Probably not, but boy I’m going to have a great time. Blue may leave me with no friends, but I’m enjoying myself.

Leviathan Wilds has been my favorite cooperative game for a while now, and while I was equally fulsome in my praise of the first expansion, it is only now with second expansion Shattered Peak that I can say I have found the Class for me. The Geomancer, one of three new Classes that join three new Climbers and eleven new Leviathans in this box, feels like home. All the builds in Leviathan Wilds are about running around and smashing infectious crystals, but the Geomancer is the first to mess with those troublesome fungal blooms. He can manipulate their values…

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The escape pod rattles violently as it tears through the atmosphere, before the noise suddenly fades away. A rough landing throws you against the restraints, leaving only silence until the hatch finally creaks open and fresh air rushes in with a long hiss. After you take off your helmet, you can smell unfamiliar scents. As you climb out of the pod, you can see a landscape unlike anything you have ever seen before. There are giant mountains that disappear into the clouds, strange plants that sway gently in the breeze, and countless mysteries that are waiting to be uncovered. You notice that you crashed high on a lonely hill, giving you a really good Vantage by Jamey Stegmaier from Stonemaier Games with art by Valentina Filic, Sören Meding and Emilien Rotival.

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