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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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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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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Spirits of the Wild: Awakening - Andrew Lynch

First released by Mattel back in 2018, Spirits of the Wild had a brief period in the sun before its publisher decided to pivot away from hobby games. It quickly became a cult favorite, fetching absurdly high prices on the secondary market. Fast forward eight years and Mattel is not only pivoting back to hobby games, they’re starting with a new edition of Nick Hayes’s game, this time called Spirits of the Wild: Awakening.

It was with some excitement that I sat down to, and vague dissatisfaction that I stood up from, my first game. Spirits of the Wild and its predecessor are equal parts set collection and tug-of-war, as two players try to fill out the gem slots on their different tiles. I do love the structure: pick an available action from your personal supply of actions, make it unavailable, perform the action, then on to the other player. Spirits shares the same tempo considerations as many of my favorite 30-minute two-player games.

What it lacks is any sense of intentionality. The game ends the moment five wild gems are drawn from the bag. This can happen any time, and it has never once felt satisfying. Across four or five…

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Grinivil is what I want to see more of—ambitious design with thoughtful development decisions throughout. It’s not perfect, there’s the characteristic rough edges of a one-man show, but even the grumpiest player at my table was chuckling when someone would randomly say the game’s bizarre tagline: “You want to live here!”

This is a rondel house

Evoking my beloved Urban Sprawl, Grinivil is a game about building a town and using it to score points. But, it isn’t about that card-driven lifestyle, it’s about ~time~.

Grinivil’s disorganized rulebook buries the lede about what makes the game great: the TIME ACTION RING. Slightly reminiscent of Glen More’s square rondel/tile draft, there’s a ring of 20 tiles around the game’s resource market. Instead of drafting these tiles, you’re going to move your action pawn to any position on the ring, take the action, and then be forced to move forward a number of spaces listed on the tile. You can even fully circumnavigate the entire rondel and take the same action again. There’s a sort of “passing go” mechanism where you have to pay for your workers which discourages this, but it’s refreshingly open. The action ring also has 7 variable tiles each game, which add a wild texture to the experience—the tiles range from goofy crowdsourced auctions, forced trades, and…

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Stack Nabbit - Justin Bell

Stack Nabbit, another quick card game from the folks who gave us Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, is so light on theme and setting that there’s no backstory regarding what players are doing here at all. Drawing cards to determine which point cards you’ll keep, and which cards you might steal from a neighbor, comprises most of the rules here, as players try to bank as many cards as possible before the draw deck runs out.

What is Stack Nabbit? It’s not quite a push-your-luck game, although there is a hint of that when players try to draw a card that matches one of the cards already in their play area. And the rules around stealing only affect the players to one’s immediate left or right…so, in a three-player game, everyone can rob everyone else, but in a five-player game, you can’t do much at all against a player sitting across the table. The rules are simple enough to teach to a grandparent, and we did just that for two, quick back-to-back plays that totaled about 25 minutes. But even that grandparent, who won the second play, didn’t seem that interested in playing it again. Taco Cat Games has pushed out some of our favorite rules-light…

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Kano was a title that had a lot of buzz around the halls of Gen Con this year. Though the theme of the convention seemed to be small-box card games and RPGs, this tile-laying puzzle managed to squeak onto my radar.

I always appreciate games that center around cultural art, especially something that may not be familiar to Western audiences. Players are creating emakimono, the traditional Japanese art of hand-painted scrolls. The cover immediately grabs your attention, as the fantastic artwork from Jun Sato immerses players in soft, painted imagery worthy of hanging in a museum.

Kano is a tactical spatial puzzle that challenges players to carefully optimize their paintings. Players draft paint pots of a single color and place them on their personal boards. The paint pots follow the law of gravity, meaning pots can't stack unless there's one underneath to support them. If a player ends up with more than four pots on their board, they must discard down to four and replace the excess with 1x1 cloud tokens that score zero points at the end of the game.

Players can then trade combinations of colors for beautiful polyomino artwork tiles of varying sizes. The game ends when one player has filled their entire board, at…

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Welcome to GM Screen Time, the series where we dive deep into my bag of Gamemastering tricks to find different strategies and tips I've used at my tables to promote a fun environment. In this installment, we discuss the dreaded topic that stops an unverified 90% of people from ever getting their games to the table at all: scheduling. Everybody wants to play games together. The problem is that between school, work, extracurricular activities, soup nights, vacations, and everything else, people are busy. It's not only finding the time to game, but finding an amiable time where everyone can game.

The ABC Framework for Scheduling

My group recently wrapped up a playthrough of Paizo's Sky King's Tomb Adventure Path for Pathfinder Second Edition, a campaign that encompassed two and a half years IRL. We play two hours per week every Wednesday, and over the past eight years of consistently playing together we are averaging only a handful of missed weeks each year. Since we mostly play remotely, this offers a significant level of flexibility, but we've managed to get together across states spanning Seattle all the way to Maryland, and even worked around a player's work trip to the Eastern Hemisphere.

Playing with the same group for that long is different from queuing up a multi-year campaign with strangers. It's…

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Wool Street - Justin Bell

This is hard to believe, but sometimes a game ends up being…well, too short. Enter Wool Street, a “Mini Card Game” from the folks at Hachette. Players buy and sell wool products in five different colors while trying to influence a market by trying to throw players off the scent of a single piece of hidden intel each player gets before the game begins. Which of the five colors will end the game being worth zero, or possibly even negative, points?

“I’m not sure there’s much game here,” one player in my review commented after we finished our roughly 10-minute play. And, look: the game’s rules are actually provided, in full, on the game’s BGG page, so this game is both mini (as promised on the side of the small box) and short. But I had the same complaint as my friend did: it never feels like anyone gets to make a meaningful choice in Wool Street and everyone knows at least one color worth avoiding as play moves along, so in our game, players constantly moved to sell some of their goods in a single color all game long, and when it became clear that yellow (in our game) was going to end play as the…

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Essen SPIEL 2026 will be here in just over two weeks; the largest board game convention in the world, and a mecca for board gamers of all stripes. Nearly 1,300 games will make their debut into the European market; an overwhelming number. The Meeple Mountain team has spent their time sifting through the list to come up with our most anticipated games of Essen SPIEL.

K. David Ladage

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes

I have the entire Cascadia collection, including the roll-and-writes (one of the dangers of being a completist). I love the structure of the game, the way scoring works… everything. It plays well at two players and at higher counts. So yea, even if this is just a “more stuff” release, I am all in for more Cascadia pleasure!

Publisher: Flatout Games
Designer: Randy Flynn

Read our review of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes

Foundation: Isaac Asimov

Anyone who knows me knows that my absolute favorite book series of all time is Foundation. I have read them all, including the extended universe he managed to create…

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Two Worlds Collide

PAX West is a bit of a deviation from the traditional board game conventions we typically cover here at Meeple Mountain. Nestled in the tree-rich city of Seattle, PAX West offers a convergence of both the video game and tabletop hemispheres.

I had the wonderful opportunity to experience the show as an exhibitor, showcasing For All Mankind from Bad Cat Media. Though I’m fairly well traveled, I had never visited Seattle or attended PAX West, so the promise of new surroundings was absolutely tantalizing.

I’ve been a video gamer all my life, from my very first console, a red Game Boy Pocket, to now, where I recently beat Capcom’s Pragmata (fantastic) and Bethesda’s Ghostwire: Tokyo (very good). Tabletop gaming, on the other hand, is something I stumbled into only within the last six years. Given that I now write almost exclusively about board games, it’s actually a little puzzling considering I’ve had another gaming love for far longer.

So my coverage of PAX West was always going to focus on both worlds. Both have an equal place in my heart, and to say I was ecstatic to…

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There are board games that take twenty minutes. There are board games that take an evening. There are board games that require you to reserve a Saturday, warn your spouse, arrange childcare, purchase snacks in quantities normally associated with emergency preparedness, and begin explaining the rules sometime around breakfast. And then there is The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43.

[caption id="attachment_334851" align="aligncenter" width="882"] Photo courtesy of Michael Taylor and his daughter. Used with permission.[/caption]

James Purcell and Andy Taeger, two friends from Newcastle, are preparing to play the famously enormous World War II simulation from beginning to end. The game contains 111 turns, each of which represents roughly one week of the North African campaign. It was designed for as many as ten players, although James and Andy are attempting it with two. Estimates for completing the whole thing run to around 1,500 hours. They think it may take them twenty years. This is obviously ridiculous. I also think it might be one of the most beautiful things I have heard about gaming in a long time.

The BBC story about their project understandably focuses on the absurdity of the undertaking. The Campaign for North Africa has achieved near mythological status in tabletop gaming…

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Hellas - Thomas Wells

Playte has been putting out this “L-series” of games, which are basically small boxes with folding magnet boards that unspool origami-style. I’ve played a few of them, and I appreciate the publisher’s focus on bringing back oldies that are also goodies. Hellas isn’t that old, it’s from 2016, but it was next to impossible to get in the US, so this Stefan Dorra multiplayer resource generation slugfest has been on my list for a while. 

Basically, you build buildings in various arrays to try and score points at the end of the game, but half of the actions in the game are shared—you build a house, and I get to build a house after you. There’s shared infrastructure in the form of quarries and point-scoring areas that players collectively develop. The best part though is the mining action—when it happens, everyone gets marble (game currency) at the same time, and then the three mines on the board degrade. Each has a number, and you draw new mine tiles—a higher number can cover a lower number, and if there isn’t something the newly drawn tile can cover, you close the highest number mine and open the newly drawn one. As mines get higher numbers, they have lower yields. 

It’s…

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Loneliness is an epidemic. And evidence shows it is not just an issue in the USA where I live, but across the developed world. For some reason, as much as it promised to unite us, the Internet seems to have found so many ways to fracture and fragment society. Longer working hours and the pace of modern life combined with the geographic mobility often finds us living hundreds or even thousands of miles from our friends and families. And if you work remotely, it can be even worse. As an educator, I find that despite interacting with hundreds of teenagers every day, and attending several compulsory meetings with adults every week, I can start feeling isolated and lonely too. To make matters worse; despite living within walking distance of John Steinbeck’s birthplace (and grave), I have only one, small, used bookstore and no board game stores nearby. Fortunately, I travel often to attend conferences, present my research and check in on family a few hours away. And this has led me to a way to feel more connected.

[caption id="attachment_334660" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] It’s a beautiful Fall day in Santa Cruz, CA, so where should we go? The beach? Nah! I am going to my FLGS, Game Santa Cruz![/caption]

About three years ago,…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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