Back for Another Ride

A few years ago, Justin covered the base Tenpenny Parks, praising its simplicity while offering gamers of all experience levels a thinky, Tetris-like puzzle akin to A Feast for Odin, only significantly shorter.

I'm largely in agreement with his assessment. The base Tenpenny Parks is a smooth, quick, and charming ride, which feels appropriate given the theme park setting.

As the leaves change color and the nights grow cooler, it only feels right to inject some holiday-themed fun with the Winter Lights & Spooky Nights expansion. Aside from its wonderfully rhyming name, either or both halves of the expansion can be integrated into the base game alongside any other modular expansions you may have (Innovation, Fast-Pass, etc.).

Bonus points for fitting all the expansion components into the base box. Space is a precious commodity in my small Chicago condo!

What's New?

Both expansions introduce exciting new rides and additional components rooted in their respective holiday themes. From the spooky Pirate Ghost Ship and Ghoulish Grimoires to the holly-jolly Sleigh Ride and North Pole Plunge, these attractions come in unique new shapes for your spatial puzzling enjoyment.

Each seasonal expansion replaces one ride from each attraction type, with the new additions simply shuffled…

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There may be easier assignments for an assassin than trying to kill Sam Vimes.

In Kill Sam Vimes, the upcoming Discworld board game from Modiphius Entertainment, players control aspiring assassins attempting to do exactly that. Of course, anyone familiar with Terry Pratchett’s famously stubborn Commander of the City Watch probably knows how well that is going to go.

Designer Dom Westerland has spent years working on games at Modiphius, including licensed properties such as Fallout, but Kill Sam Vimes presented a very different challenge: creating a relatively light, chaotic game that could capture some of the personality of Discworld while remaining approachable to players who may never have picked up one of Pratchett’s novels.

We spoke with Westerland about his relationship with Discworld, designing around spectacular failure, why commercial realities sometimes shape game mechanics, terrifying prototype versions of Sam Vimes, and the Discworld novel he would most like to tackle next.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[caption id="attachment_335788" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Photo from Modiphius Entertainment[/caption]

Entering Discworld

MM: Before we talk about the game, what is your personal history with Terry Pratchett and Discworld? Were you already a fan when the opportunity to design Kill Sam Vimes came along, and is there a particular book or character that…

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Mashup? Remix? It’s hard to put a finger on what I would call the new Ravensburger title Carcassonne Labyrinth, because three plays in, I’m still amused that someone behind the scenes was sitting in the Ravensburger design lab one day and had some version of the following conversation.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Sally said. “We reach out to the guy who designed Carcassonne, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, and see if he would be willing to put a new spin on our game Labyrinth by working with that game’s designer, Max Kobbert.”

“Sally, that’s ridiculous. Who’s looking for a game that takes the tile-laying magic of Carcassonne and smashes it into the tile-pushing, luck-driven treasure-hunting mechanic we already have with Labyrinth?” responded Teddy.

“And what’s the market for that?” screamed Hal. “Are people looking for another version of titles that have sold well for 20–”

“--I think you mean 30–”

“--actually, 40 straight years???”

The three imaginary design lab techs probably looked at each other at that point. “Wait,” they must have all thought, “this idea is bulletproof, because a new version of Carcassonne comes out almost every year, and we’ve been slapping popular licenses on Labyrinth for decades. That clown from Meeple Mountain even wrote about the one we did with Nintendo!!”

From this conversation—or something very, very similar—Carcassonne Labyrinth was…

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Two or three turns into my first play of The Amazing Journey, I knew we had a winner.

A take on the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days, players take on the role of exceptionally well-illustrated animals who are trying to make an around-the-world trip in 80 days or less. Each turn, a player must take at least two actions and be at or ahead of other players on the action space track…a track which (of course) runs around the outside of the board with 80 total spaces.

Each action uses time, and based on the player’s current location, they have access to certain routes on the main board: travel by bus, train, balloon, or other forms of transportation that align with a specific time cost to navigate.

This turns The Amazing Journey into a moderately thinky, point-to-point connection game that was enjoyed by both gamers and casual players in equal measure. That’s because the movement system is such a treat.

The game’s main board comes in two flavors: regular, and fast. Even on regular speed, The Amazing Journey played in about an hour, so fast truly is for a player who is under a major time constraint. The random board setup has three checkpoints that…

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I love farming games. I grew up working on farms, and there is a special kind of bucolic pleasure that comes from tilling the earth without actually having to till the earth. Farming and gardening are actually very difficult, and as my graveyard of houseplants can attest, it’s best if this aspect of my life is kept in the realm of fantasy.

Three Sisters: Harvest Edition is a re-release of the roll-and-write game Three Sisters, where you manage a little farm and grow various vegetables and fruits. It’s charming and well-executed, though it is still essentially a game where you check things off on a pad of paper, so if that’s not your jam, it’s not going to blow your hair back.

Checkboxes: this time, with plants

Three Sisters comes out the gate strong. This isn’t a roll-and-write for the weak-wristed. There are two notepads for you to scribble on. One features a large garden area with a whole bunch of boxes, while the other has your orchard/shed area, which houses upgrades and special powerups (AKA berries and trees).

Each round, all of the dice are rolled and placed in same-numbered groups, starting from a wooden pawn and going around the spaces of a circular track that I won’t call a rondel because it’s just a circular track…

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Symbiosis - Justin Bell

When it comes to a quick, easy-to-teach tile-laying/tableau building game in the vein of games such as Castle Combo or a more recent title like Pondscape, I just want something cool to look at while I place or flip cards to score points based on the conditions in my play area. Symbiosis is fine, even above average, at that task, while adding one wrinkle to the build of a 2x4 grid of cards: you are forced to care about what your neighbor is building, giving the game a chance at slightly more player interaction than other comparable titles.

On a turn, players take one of the four face-up cards from a market, then swap it with one of the cards in their personal grid of cards. The four inner cards are scoring conditions tied to your final grid layout…but the two cards on either edge score based on what your neighbor to that side of your play area is doing. So, placing a card in your upper left corner that scores two points for other pink cards can be huge if the neighbor to your left is going hard on playing pink cards.

Scoring is easy, as is the one-page teach from the rulebook. Our play took…

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Gold Country, the latest Reiner Knizia resurrection from publisher Bitewing Games, looks like it should come with prospector costumes. To pull it off the shelf for the first time is to expect dirt under your nails and spit in your spittoon. It presents as a game for salt of the earth types, for those with a history of good, honest blue collar work.

The reality is quite different. Gold Country’s collar is as white as it gets. This is a stocks game, perfect for the MBA candidate in your life. It’s all about buying low, selling high, and churning out dividends. It’s about shorting the market to your benefit. This humble, enjoyable, forty-minute experience would make a great warm-up, filler, or cool-down for the people in your life who make Excel spreadsheets for 18XX games.

The real miracle is that this is a stock game just about anyone—and I do mean anyone—would be happy to play. It may be the most approachable stock game in the history of the medium.

Mine Every Mountain

The titular gold in that titular country is harvested from four mines, each…

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Totally Human, from designer Kasper Lapp and publisher Bitewing Games, is a bit of an odd one. The idea draws from the same well as A Fake Artist Goes to New York and The Chameleon, social deduction games that use a secondary activity to make people try to blend in or suss one another out. A Fake Artist has everyone add one line to a shared drawing, but the faker doesn’t know what the drawing is. The Chameleon uses a word game to similar effect. The first smart choice for both was the decision to center their games around activities that are already fun on their own. People love collaborative drawings and word association. For its central activity, Totally Human employs everyone’s favorite style of exam, the multiple choice question.

At the beginning of the game, which lasts a breezy 10-20 minutes at most, everyone is dealt three cards. For most players, these cards will be irrelevant. They only matter to you if you receive one or more of the cards that designate you as an alien. Once everyone has had a moment to look at their cards, the first of three multiple choice questions is revealed to the table. The questions themselves are benign, broad, uninteresting in the way that these sorts of games’s questions often are: “What…

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I’m an easy mark for Rosetta, publisher DVC’s entry in the spontaneous language creation subgenre. It tickles the same part of my brain as Gibberers, which is a brilliant and singular experience, but Rosetta is much more approachable. Gibberers is a game in which you create a language and speak only in that language. It demands a good deal of time and the space for a tremendous cognitive load. Rosetta is significantly faster, and, rather than create and speak a new language, you work together to decode a logographic writing system for a language you never once have to speak.

One player takes on the role of the Author, the voice—albeit a mute one—of the lost civilization with which this writing system originated. They draw a random Inscription and Location, and set both out on the table for all to see. The Location is there for inspiration and to provide a little bit of context and grounding. The Author secretly picks a meaning for the Inscription associated with what they see in the landscape. You can’t pick something that is visible on the Location card, though it’s best to choose something directly related to what you see. A field of wheat may lead the Author to choose “farmer.” A snowy mountain might suggest “avalanche.”

At this point, everyone…

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It isn’t often that a puzzle game succeeds in evoking a strong sense of place. Place is the main thing Enchanted Ivy, a solo game from designer Sarah Joshua and publisher Allplay, has going for it. That is no small compliment. To sit down for a session of this spatial puzzle is to feel the sunshine in the clearing, to hear the chatter of guests coming and going. It’s an easy game to get lost in.

Every session, whether playing a standalone game or digging into the charming campaign, you must build your inn, accommodating guests as you go. Draw two cards and place them however you wish, so long as they are contiguous with everything you’ve played so far and they don’t break the pre-determined boundaries of your inn for that game. The vine pattern on each side of each card is identical; the only difference is that one side has a window and the other doesn’t. Each turn, you place one card window-side-up. Into the room upon which that window opens, you must place one of two guests.

These guests are both the ludographic and spiritual heart of Enchanted Ivy. They elevate what would be an enjoyable but somewhat dry exercise into a poignant and individual experience. Their room preferences drive the bulk of the decisions you…

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I’m tailor-made to enjoy “weeknight” 18xx-style economic route building games.

I heaped praise on the game Railways of the Lost Atlas in my 2024 review, with the (at the time) new publisher Asterisk Games doing yeoman’s work with a system some people think of as stodgy, tired, and certainly bland-looking. “ROTLA”, as it is known here at home, is one of the best-looking productions in my collection and comes with a heaping amount of variety thanks to its flexible player count, short and long-form play format, and a hex map that is literally built by the players each time the game hits the table.

If you haven’t heard of Railways of the Lost Atlas, please read my previous review. When the game’s first expansion, Landmarks of the Lost Atlas, was announced, I didn’t even reach out for a review copy…I ponied up the cash to get the expansion along with updated versions of the game’s base rules and a solo mode rulebook, developed after the release of the base game.

If you liked Railways of the Lost Atlas, you have already backed and are working through the goodies in Landmarks of the Lost Atlas. And if you have not tried either, my feelings haven’t changed: for anyone who loves a good Euro and wants to wade into…

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Here’s my early assessment of the Chris Couch Games catalog: comfy.

Jingle Bell Roll is the second game I’ve reviewed from Chris Couch, after my foray into the garden with Garden Club a few weeks ago. Jingle Bell Roll is holiday Yahtzee, both in terms of feel and in terms of its ruleset, as players try to score the most points across five rounds by using sets of gingerbread cookies, milk, gifts, bells, holiday wishlists and stockings to put together winning rolls.

Designed by Marcus Ross—a co-designer of the 2023 Ravensburger title The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game—Jingle Bell Roll is so cozy that the word “cozy” is used in the BGG description of the game. Across plays with my family and with my “review crew”, Jingle Bell Roll announces itself as a light, friendly filler right away.

Each player is given a cute, well-illustrated character card with a once-per-round power. When one player scores gift rolls, other players get bonus action cards. Players who roll exactly two Santa’s List faces can score seven points…because “he’s making a list, and checking it twice”, as the song goes. There are so many ways to generate rerolls in this game that it’s surprising how…

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There’s no right or wrong approach when it comes to purchasing a game. A game’s theme, mechanics, and design can all be major or minor factors, depending on personal preference. For some people, one factor will always outweigh everything else, while for others the importance of each aspect can vary. I tend to fall into the second group more often than not. 

My fluctuating method for choosing games has led to some surprising (mostly good) gaming experiences, especially when it comes to review copies of games through Meeple Mountain. Part of the reason review copies in particular can be so surprising is that there’s often little information available about the games; information is often limited to one or two images of the game and a brief description of the gameplay.

Junk ‘n Gems, from Passion Project GG and Designer Kimmo Sorsamo, is one of these games that surprised me in a few different ways. With just an image of the game’s cover art and a short overview of how the game works, I had enough information to eagerly volunteer to review this one. 

Sifting Through Stuff

In Junk ‘n Gems, one to four players are sifting through the belongings of their uncle who recently passed away, attempting to sort the junk from the gems. Sorting through the items involves…

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You know that old chestnut about the stars and wet paint, right? Tell a man there are a million stars in the sky and he’ll believe you, tell a man the paint on a bench is wet and he’ll have to touch it to know for sure. Or maybe the Eddie Izzard bit about the scale of murder? You murder one person, you go to jail. You kill six or seven people, we put you in a padded room with a window and observe you. You kill millions of people, we don’t know how to process that. “You must get up very early!”

The attendance numbers for Spiel are a bit like that. 230,000 attendees, 1,000 exhibitors, 15 football fields of space, it’s all so large that it’s rendered abstract. “Boy, that sure does sound like a lot” is about as close as you can get to a cogent response. If you happen to work in event planning, your response is likely something approaching the Wilhelm Scream. It is a lot, I assure you. The city of Essen is stretched to its limits; try finding a seat for dinner on that Saturday night. Messe Essen, home to Spiel, is itself at capacity. For the first time, this year saw nary an inch of unutilized conference space.

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The end of every day at aSpiel is met with cheers and applause by those working the event, but the celebratory outburst that erupts come 6:00 pm on the Sunday is particularly enthusiastic. Understandable. Every convention is a lot of work, but few more so than this one. It requires months of planning, international travel and the accompanying jet lag, a day or two of load-in, and four high-intensity 10-hour days, days during which you are either interacting with an endless onslaught of customers/consumers/enthusiasts as you teach them the same game over and over and over again in a Sisyphusean act of pedagogy, or you’re in meeting after meeting during which you are constantly “on” and seldom with a break. There’s a reason publishers ask people like me, people who spend those four days roaming the floor, what we’ve seen that’s exciting. Sure, it’s polite, but it also smacks of a soldier asking if there’s any news from home, desperate for a reminder of what all this is for.

6:00 pm hits, the barbaric yawp is released unto the world, a palpable feeling of joy and relief runs through the halls, and then everyone gets to work. For the attendees, 6:00 pm on Sunday is a called game; for the people working, there’s one final, frantic burst of activity. An…

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Auto Battlers Assemble

Up until last year, I never really knew what an "auto battler" card game was. Sure, I've played TCGs like Magic: The Gathering and Flesh and Blood, or card battlers like Compile and Radlands, but those games require careful strategy and meticulous timing to come out victorious.

At last year’s Gen Con, I was introduced to Tag Team, my first auto battler, and I was immediately enthralled by how fun and straightforward the concept was. Essentially, you draft cards, arrange them in a specific order, and let the battle play out. There's no strenuous bookkeeping or agonizing over every move. Just compare values, resolve effects, and move on.

Super Auto Pets Card Battle is the tabletop adaptation of the popular video game that somehow flew under my radar. Though I've never played the digital version (and I definitely will now), I've been told the card game is a faithful adaptation in all the best ways.

My appetite for auto battlers is starting to grow, and this one fell into my lap at just the right time. Besides, who couldn't be wooed by adorable animals duking it out on colorful cards?

Pet Friendly

Super Auto Pets Card Battle plays over six rounds,…

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Perfectly Imperfect - Justin Bell

A dating game by designer Danielle Reynolds (Caution Signs, Tricky Kids), Perfectly Imperfect asks 2-8 players how well they know each other! On each turn, one player is the “Dater”, and the player to their left draws three profile cards with mock profiles of potential matches familiar to anyone who has ever opened a dating app, using internet profile samples created by Danielle and the team at the publisher, Randolph.

All other players, considering the personality types on each card, use voting cards to determine which of the three profiles are most aligned with the Dater, which one is sort of “meh”, and which one is a hard pass. Points are handed out after the Dater votes on which profile they would most like to date, and each round has a lot of laughs as players try to figure out which person’s quirks might not work for the Dater.

We laughed very hard during our four-player game of Perfectly Imperfect, and most of that is tied to the writing on the 100 double-side profile cards. Also, it’s fun to see what your friends do, and likely don’t, appreciate about a potential partner, even if they are already married. (Spoiler alert: I’m not a beach guy,…

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Destruction of your enemies is hardly a new concept in board games. Monopoly can only end if you bankrupt your opponents. Risk doesn't stop until you've wiped everyone else off the face of the Earth. Board gaming and zero-sum game design have been best buddies for decades, but to many, it's become a tired-out trope. This probably explains why so many publishers these days prefer games where player interaction is minimized, helping cement the term "multiplayer solitaire" into the industry lexicon.

Black Rose Wars: Rebirth does not care for any of this. It's a game that borderline ignores industry wisdom simply because it can. You're encouraged to mess with your opponents from turn one, and every move is designed to either help you at someone else's expense or straight-up hurt them.

Friendship Was Never an Option

Which makes perfect sense, given the whole theme going on here. You play as a powerful mage, and leading the Black Rose Lodge is the prize, much like a crazed motorcyclist yearning for the Isle of Man TT. The Lodge has seen better days, though, and with your magic, you might be able to restore some of its former glory, hence the "Rebirth" in the title. You're not the only one with this…

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(For reference, everything in this piece refers to the 1960 version of The Game of Life. This version is the version I had as a kid and re-bought when Winning Moves Games remade it. There have been many versions since, but I haven't played all of them. The ones I have played tweaked the formula and have failed to capture "life" laike the original.)

Sigh. I just finished another play-through of the newest life-simulation board game, Coming of Age. As a "gamer's game" it is okay, if a lot heavier than I anticipated. There is a lot to think about, manage, and optimize. Plenty of cubes, tracks and tokens, if that's your jam. It gave my brain a workout.

That's not the reason I bought it, however. I was (and still am) looking for a fun, "gamer's" life-simulation game to replace The Game of Life. I've tried almost all of the life-sim games out there. Pursuit of Happiness. CV. Adulthood. And now Coming of Age. They are good games, for the most part, but they lack the pure fun and whimsy of The Game of Life.  

As a kid, The Game of Life was just a blast. We'd put the pegs on the spinner and send…

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Whenever a game has a double-digit player count, there’s a 99.97% chance it involves social deduction. Now, I love social deduction games. They give you an excuse to break the social contract and lie to your friends and family, all in the name of fun. They’re also one of the few genres that let you discover just how good the people around you are at scheming and lying. Eventually, you start wondering if their name is even real. That said, I’m also kind of sick of every single large group game being dropped in the social deduction box.

Coalition: Council of the Republic sings a different tune here, focusing on negotiation rather than inevitable betrayal. Better yet, it’s team-based, with four teams competing for influence and potentially a few independents thrown in to make things even messier. Instead of simply figuring out who’s lying, you have to convince people to work with you, negotiate deals, cross your fingers while making promises, and figure out how long those lofty alliances will actually last. All of this in one hour.

Draft Laws, Not Friends

The story behind this is a little more complex than most. The country is suffering through political turmoil and demanding reform, so four teams are tasked with drafting new laws. Naturally, each team wants to push laws…

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