Operation Barclay is one of the most inspired marriages of setting and mechanic that I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. How did designer Maurice Suckling get the idea to pair the story of Operation Barclay, the Allied plan to feed the Axis false information about an upcoming Mediterranean invasion, with poker and a shell game? It’s such a remarkable idea, such a perfect idea. Most game designers would sacrifice body parts in exchange for an idea this good.

While the real Operation Barclay was about convincing the Axis that the Allies would invade Greece when they were in fact planning to invade Sicily, Operation Barclay the game gives us a bit more ambiguity than that. There are five possible areas of attack, stretching from Morocco-to-France and Egypt-to-Turkey. The Allied player places wooden Intelligence tokens into each of them. One lane, whichever the Allied player decides to make the Primary Offensive Sector, gets four positive Intelligence tokens and one negative. The Secondary Offensive Sector gets three of the first and two of the second, and the other three Sectors, red herrings all, get two and three.

[caption id="attachment_329516" align="alignnone" width="1024"]Operation Barclay Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

What a charmer, this Honeypot. It has a great hook. It’s hard to have a bad time when you’re tucking cards into tiny manila folders. Also, there are bear costumes. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Honeypot isn’t quite I Split, You Choose, but it’s close. I Arrange, You Decide, maybe. I Slice, You Bite? I’ll work on it. As secret agent bears across five brisk ursine rounds, players draw six cards from the massive deck, arrange them however they see fit, place them in the aforementioned manila folders, and hand said folders to the next player in the direction of play. On your turn, you open your little gift and look at the first two cards. Now you have to make decisions.

[caption id="attachment_328210" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Photo by Ilya Ushakov[/caption]

If you want the two cards you revealed, great. You keep them and that’s your turn. But what are the odds your opponent, this rival secret agent bear with a grin on their face, would put the best cards at the top? The honey only gets sweeter the further down you go, right? If you think there’s something better deeper in the dossier,…

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4X games have come a long way since 2011, when Space Empires 4X was released, and while many of these games contain deeper backstories, more complicated systems, and elaborate plastic miniatures, for me the pencil, pad and cardboard counters of Space Empires remain the gold standard of 4X. With GMT Games sending me the final expansion, fittingly titled All Good Things, I was excited to get the game back to my table to see if it still holds up after all these years.

Don’t Fix what isn’t Broken

There’s been a recent trend to update older titles with more modern elements, beyond just artwork and theme–games like Skymines and Brass: Lancashire come to mind–and that can sometimes be a mixed bag. Caylus is a masterpiece but was in desperate need of a visual refreshment. Caylus 1303, while it looks great, also fundamentally changed how the original game plays, for the worse in my opinion, in its attempt to cater to a broader audience.

GMT and designer Jim Krohn understand what makes Space Empires 4X special and are able to revamp while avoiding these kinds of pitfalls with each new expansion. Much like the previous expansions, Close Encounters (which added variable player powers) and Replicators (introducing co-op…

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For some reason I thought fleeing an encroaching office fire would be less stressful than this.

Run for Your Lives!

Emergency Exit Only is a strange beast, a tile layer in which success or failure comes down to how good you are with spatial reasoning and memory. That will sound like a nightmare to some of you, and I get it. I can only assuage your concerns by emphasizing the degree to which this game is funny. Like That’s Not a Hat or the substantially more involved Galaxy Trucker before it, Emergency Exit Only is better when someone fails.

The goal is to get yourself to the end of an eternal, Severance-esque corridor, with a fire hot on your heels the entire time. You take turns adding a tile to the path, but the tiles are placed one atop the other. Only one is ever visible at any given time. Rather than seeing your path unfold before you, you are forced to picture it in your mind’s eye.

[caption id="attachment_327745" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Photo credited to @Olivier_Iello on BoardGameGeek.[/caption]

This means, rather inevitably, that mistakes will be made. If you think the path has hit a dead end, looped back onto itself, or that an otherwise invalid tile was played,…

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I play maybe a half dozen one-shot/escape room/murder mystery-style games a year. I’ve written so many reviews of these deduction titles that it’s hard to even remember them all at this point!

I know a winner when I see one, and on the heels of some of the best games to hit the market in this category with the entries from the KOSMOS Masters of Crime series, I am continuing to explore the market. I’m sure other publishers are making great titles here…right?

During my visit to Germany for SPIEL Essen 2025, I picked up a copy of My Murder Mystery: A Dead Monkey from the team at Horrible Guild. There’s no getting around it—the title of this game is terrible. I might have even said that to our friends at the publisher…”My Murder Mystery” is the name of the series? “A Dead Monkey”??? What is going on here? Even if some of this was lost in translation (Horrible Guild is an Italian publishing house), I still can’t figure out why they landed on “My Murder Mystery.”

(My 11-year-old heard the game’s title and was horrified by its implication: “do you have to investigate the murder of a MONKEY???”

Don’t sweat it. The title is terrible…but the game here is magic, and it instantly becomes a serious…

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