Bunny Kingdom Town is a two-player version of the original Bunny Kingdom. Instead of trying to establish the best fief in the kingdom, as in the original Bunny Kingdom, you are now heading out into the ‘burbs and trying to establish the best town beyond the kingdom. The player who does this (i.e., earns the most points) becomes the mayor of the new town. 

Bunnies In The ‘Burbs

Bunny Kingdom Town is played over four rounds, with each player taking turns being the starting player. At the beginning of the game, the Building Tiles are shuffled and twenty are stacked randomly into a pile on the board. To begin the first round, the top five tiles are drawn and placed into the market on the board. These are the buildings you can choose from this round. Each player is given two coins that can be spent to construct buildings. (You’re given three coins during setup, and two additional to start each round.) Each player also takes two Request Cards and chooses one to keep face down in their player area, and one to discard. These cards offer end game bonus points if you meet their conditions. 

On your turn you must take one of the…

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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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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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Around these parts I'm known as the RPG guy for my love of different systems and the opportunity to immerse myself in the theme of a game. Accidental Heroes, an upcoming app-driven adventure game designed by Wojciech Grajkowski and published by Lucky Duck Games, puts your hero on a topsy-turvy joyride through an ever-changing world bursting with familiar references. Let's hop on the tracks and see how it plays.

Accidental Heroes: The World is Your Oyster

I'll preface my discussion of Accidental Heroes by acknowledging that my experiences are based on a prototype copy that was limited in scope compared to what's expected in the complete game. At first I thought that the lack of content would be disappointing, but instead I was surprised by how many branching paths were available to my heroes as I played.

In Accidental Heroes, players assume the role of an "hero", a term surrounded by quotation marks because whether or not you live up to the moniker is up for you to decide. The object of the game is to pass two difficult Tests associated with Final Missions, acquiring a pair of Dragon Eggs before any other player is able to do so.

Heroes have three main attributes: brain, body, and combat. Each of these attributes is represented in an 'exquisite corpse' fashion…

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My man Andy Matthews wrote a review of the Mountain Goats base game a few months ago. After trying the base game on Board Game Arena, I mostly agree with his summary. Mountain Goats is a very simple dice chucker with just enough strategy to warrant your attention when it is your turn. You roll four dice, then use the pips on each six-sided die to move goats in your player color up one of six different mountain tracks to score points. Only one player can have a goat at the top of a mountain; when another player’s goat arrives, your goat moves to the bottom of that hill, and it might take a couple turns to crest again later.

The base game takes about 20 minutes to play. Mountain Goats: Legacy is the new version of the game, and it has ten chapters, a very family-friendly Storybook that is used to provide just enough flavor text to get players from one chapter to the next, a couple of main characters to follow through a story, and almost the exact same gameplay experience offered by the base game.

And, that’s the problem.

For this review, I completed six of the ten chapters; five with my nine-year-old son,…

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By almost every metric, the latest Unmatched Adventures set, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is an improvement on its predecessor.

Now, that’s quite some feat, given Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze's impressive achievement. It turned the competitive Unmatched system into a cooperative experience and did it with style. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars just a few months ago, and I stand by that score.

But Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the better game and the better experience. I’m going to use Tales to Amaze as a comparison throughout this review, not because it’s lacking, but to show how this new version builds on it.

Raise some shell

For the record, I am fairly indifferent to the cowabunga-ing Turtles. My 9-year old son recently asked me who has what weapon and I had to shrug and promise we’d look it up when we got home. They like pizza, they hang about with people whose names are months, and they wear colourful masks. (Why do they need masks, how many other humanoid turtles are wandering about New York?) Both their teacher and their villain are named after processes of making small fragments, but I couldn’t tell you which was the good one.

My praise for this…

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Friendly Fishing, a feather-light set collection game, was one of my most anticipated GenCon releases. This tiny box, from publisher GameHead and designers Bruno Faidutti and Alex Randolph, caught my interest with artist A. Giroux’s charming cover. It held my attention thanks to the magic of shared incentives.

The lake is populated with fish, each part of a set that scores in one way or another. On your turn, you move the crushingly adorable boat token to any adjacent spot with a fish and add that fish to your collection. If at any point you find that you cannot collect a fish on your turn, you return the boat to the center island and choose a new path. The game ends when the boat is well and truly out of options. 

At that point, everyone scores up their fish, as you’d expect. What you may not expect, unless you’ve played the 2019 game Tonari on which this is based, is what puts the “Friendly” in Friendly Fishing: your final score is your own score plus the score of the person to your left.

Delightful. A tremendous idea, a clever way of inverting the usual dynamics of these games. Screwing over the player after you is second-nature, an assumed good. Not so in Friendly Fishing. In an ideal world, you’d…

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I’ll be honest with you. Panorama had built up a bit of a negative reputation around the metaphorical halls of Meeple Mountain prior to its release. When Justin Bell and I played the prototype with publisher Scorpion Masqué at Spiel 2025, I thought it was fine, not something I’d play, and Justin...well, I would say Justin didn’t have much to say about it, but he did, and all of it negative. Phrases like “entirely arbitrary” were thrown around. I’m sure his opinion had nothing to do with the fact that he got walloped.

After Scorpion Masqué provided Justin with a review copy of Panorama during GenCon this year, the game quickly found its way to me. He handed it over wrapped in a bag, like an illicit parcel. His raised eyebrow and sidelong glance said, “Better you than me.” I wasn’t thrilled.

Turns out the joke’s on Justin, and I have to eat crow, because Panorama has proven to be a delight. I have yet to play it with anyone—Justin aside—who didn’t enjoy themselves. People have been so fond of it, in fact, that “Can we roll that back?” has been a frequent response to finishing a first game. Even I, despite my initial indifference, have had a great time.

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Ambitious Amphibians

This adorable frog game caught my eye at Gen Con this year as I walked by Brother Ming Games who, despite not having a traditional booth, had a powerful presence thanks to their games and infectious enthusiasm in the gaming hall.

As I get more entrenched in my game writing, I find myself looking for titles I can convince my wife to play with me. She’s a hard sell on theme over mechanics, and the bright cover art with smiling frogs, adorable wooden frog meeples (frogples?), and all-around cuteness seemed like a winner.

But upon further inspection, it’s an area control game? Conflict games are tough to table.

But wait, it’s also a deck-builder and not necessarily a “battle” game?

Tell me more, Mr. Frog!

Pond began life on BackerKit and completely smashed its funding goal, raising more than six times its $20,000 target from nearly 2,000 backers.

Pond Party

Pond is an asymmetric (optionally so) area control game where players lead different frog factions vying for control of the meadow. Each player starts with a slightly different deck, which serves as the main vessel for carrying out actions throughout the game.

Players begin by deploying a frog meeple anywhere they have a fwog (yes,…

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Being relatively new to the world of modern board games (since around 2022), I’m still regularly amazed by the various elements of games that I play. While artwork and components are often the first thing to grab my attention, I usually leave the table most impressed and surprised by the ways in which a designer implements a game’s mechanics.

When I come across a brand new (to me) game mechanic, my interest is heightened to another level. This is exactly what happened after I played The Seekers, designed by Jay Cormier & Sen-Foong Lim, and published by Off the Page Games. For those familiar with Jay and Sen or Off the Page Games, The Seekers is actually a reimplementation of one of their previous games, Mind MGMT, which Andrew Lynch reviewed for Meeple Mountain back in 2023.

The mechanism in question, in The Seekers, was Hidden Movement, and after four review plays, I’m eager to explore other games in the genre; perhaps even the very first Hidden Movement game, Scotland Yard, which Meeple Mountain reviewed back in 2018. My only fear is that The Seekers set the bar too high for other hidden movement games.

A Twist on a Classic

At its core, The Seekers is a tabletop version of Hide and Seek. One player is…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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At the end of the day, my review criteria is really simple: is the game fun or not?

Trails & Tails is a new self-published title. (BGG does not list a designer, artist, or publishing company…only “self-published.”) It admits its hook right up front: Trails & Tails is going for a Snakes & Ladders-style gaming experience (or, if you’re a gringo like me, Chutes & Ladders), where players move their playing piece up a board all the way to the top…hopefully taking short cuts along the way to reach the top faster.

The downside of Snakes & Ladders comes when snakes appear in the space where you end your movement…because if that’s what happens, you fall backwards and/or downwards until you reach a much less desirable space lower on the board. So, keep moving forward and things will generally work out.

Trails & Tails adds spice by giving each player two starting dice, differing by player; one player gets a D4 and a D20, while another might have a D6 and a D8. In each round, players roll these dice, then get to use 1-2 dice per turn to their liking. You can add the results of two dice, move forward a number of spaces on one die, or even subtract a larger die value from a smaller one…

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I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I have real questions, like this: does the new game Hacienda (based on the 2004 version of Hacienda by Wolfgang Kramer) want the leopard-looking creatures on offer here to be pumas, or jaguars?

I ask because the rulebook interchangeably uses the terms for both (they are pumas on the manual’s cover description, but jaguars on page four), and technology tells me that the two breeds of cool-looking cats are definitely different. Another theme note: Hacienda’s new theme is tied to building an eco-friendly tourist destination in the hills of Argentina. For the life of me, though, Hacienda feels like a game where I am simply placing clumps of animal tokens on a map to score adjacency bonuses and piles of cute-looking capybara packs.

Hacienda isn’t nearly as complicated as I’m making it out to be. In fact, like other Kramer games—the German legend has, as a lead or co-designer, gifted the world with titles ranging from El Grande to Tikal to Wandering Towers to my all-time favorite Kramer co-design, The Princes of Florence—Hacienda is extraordinarily simple to teach, and his work here with Daryl Andrews (Sagrada) is sleek, with a playtime that might last 30 minutes or less with lower player counts, 45 minutes with the…

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Growing Your Garden

In Perennial, your job is to grow the best prairie garden using tools and tiles. It's a tile-placement game with set collection, drafting, pattern building, and end game bonuses tied to how well you've placed your tiles. Are you thinking you've seen this before? Maybe in Cottage Garden, or Pergola? 

You haven't. 

Oh, sure. The game starts in a standard fashion: Each player is given a Garden Board on which to place tiles, and a Workshop Board to store resources. The Garden Board is seeded with boulders which act as obstacles that you must build around, and actual seeds which can give you benefits later in the game. A greenhouse polyomino is placed in the middle as an anchor point for your first tile placement (and it acts as another obstacle). A square Central Drafting Board is randomly filled with Flower Tiles and Animal Tiles. Four Tool Cards are placed around the edges of the square. The Pond/Feature cards are shuffled and placed near the board, and the top one is turned over to reveal the first tile. Each player is given four Pond/Feature polyomino tiles that must be placed, one per round according to the card drawn from the deck. 

[caption id="attachment_333238" align="aligncenter" width="1500"]…

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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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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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I have played my fair share of Root games, lord knows. I have no official play count. I respect the impulse of those who track their plays, but board games are one area of my life where I don’t do that sort of thing. Some back-of-the-envelope math tells me I have played well over 50 games of Cole Wehrle’s juggernaut since I first bought a copy back in the summer COVID lull of 2020. It quickly became, and has remained, one of my favorite board games.

Root’s status as a personal all-timer has never been threatened, but I have found myself moving away from it over the last few years. Since the release of The Marauders Expansion in 2022—an expansion of which I am very fond—I’ve found myself less and less interested in playing. This has nothing to do with the quality of the game. It hasn’t worn on me, nor has it grown tired. If anything, the fact that I haven’t played Root as much as I used to is Root’s fault; it offered early instruction in the idea of board games as strange and ungainly, and I’ve spent the last few years eager to explore new designs, new spaces, and tracking down new experiences. Root became the kind of game I would happily play if suggested,…

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