For a modern audience, the witch trials that took place in the American colonies in the latter half of the 1600s seem to have hinged on the question of whether or not witches were real. The people who participated in them don’t seem to have much questioned that idea. Witches were real, alright. The question, as they saw it, was narrower: are there witches here?

Obviously, many people felt there were. Witchcraft!, a new solo game from designers David Thompson, Roger Tankersley, and Trevor Benjamin, joins the colonists in presupposing the existence of witches. They’re definitely here. No doubt about it, witchcraft is a-happening. Instead, the game asks, what if the witches were good?

As the witches of Wildegrens, yours is a solemn task. The town is under assault from black magics unknown. Demons walk the streets, lurk in the forests, and stalk the graveyard. Your coven is the only thing standing between the people of this colony and certain death. You’d think the populace would be grateful, but no. They suspect you of witchcraft—or, rather, of witchcraft!—and have brought you to trial. Your goal is to fend off the demons just long enough to prove to your fellow villagers that you mean them no harm, and to convince two of the three jurists of your innocence.

Witchcraft! Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

High Rise Penguins, from publisher Alley Cat Games, is the new English edition of Yura Yura Penguin, a nichely-beloved dexterity game from designer Yabuchi Ryoko. The idea is simple: Players take turns playing cards Uno-style onto an ever-growing iceberg condo. If you empty your hand, you win. If the condo falls on your turn, you lose. If the condo ever reaches the point of being completed—good luck with that—then everyone wins.

Each card forces the following player to do something. Maybe you have to add the next level to the apartment block, or draw cards, or place some ice crystals into the apartments. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get to help move one of the adorable little wooden penguin meeples into their new apartment. Those are the moments when the structure is most vulnerable, but the sense of peril is balanced out by the rush of endorphins that comes with touching one of the penguins. They are very cute.

Maybe a…

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Burning Banners: Rage of the Witch Queen is a beefy box. It would have to be. There are dozens of scenarios and hundreds of tokens, as well as four different full-sized boards. There are two manuals and six player boards. Burning Banners is a production. It feels a bit like an event. It isn’t Twilight Imperium beefy, but it would make a good Reuben.

The quick pitch: old-school hex-and-counter wargaming married to a Dungeons & Dragons-esque fantasy setting. Players control dwarves, orcs, armies of the undead and beplagued, usually in the name of conquest. Spend money to deploy units, move the units, fight with the units. This is the fundamental turn structure of Burning Banners.

There’s more to it than that, of course. It comes with an awfully large manual for that to be everything. There isn’t much more, though, which is to Burning Banners’s credit. Though the rulebook is intimidating—I would argue it is inefficient and in need of an overhaul—the rules themselves are easily grasped. This is not a GMT design. There are few if any dangling edge cases. There are no complex charts to…

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I was excited about Dracula vs Van Helsing. I’m a big fan of Korean publisher Mandoo Games. They put out beautiful and unusual games, games that stay with me long after the box is back on the shelf. It’s easy to feel like publishers exist to extrude content, which, well, the necessities of capitalism mean that they do, like it or not. Mandoo Games is in that rarified circle of publishers who feel like they take risks, even if those risks don’t always pan out.

The brand on the side of the box was enough to get me going, but Dracula vs Van Helsing was also sold as a trick-taking game, and as we all know, I’m a fan. Having now played it, I’m not so sure, but we’ll get back to that.

The early impression is strong. Weberson Santiago’s art is striking. I’d read that comic, and I’d certainly watch that movie. The box, which 25th Century has faithfully reproduced for the American market, is high-quality. That sounds stupid, sure, like I’m grasping for straws, but it’s a nice box. Maybe this is just where I’m at these days. My first thought about The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth was that the box is larger and flimsier than I…

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The box for Unreliable Wizard immediately announces its intentions. There’s a lineup of six characters identifiable as the archetypes that populate classic RPGs, each lovingly rendered in 8-bit pixels. The key detail here, the one that shows that Unreliable Wizard designer and artist Kamibayashi knows what he’s about, is the arrow above the wizard’s head. This is no box front. This is a character selection screen.

Your selection, as both the title and the arrow indicate, has been made for you. You are the wizard. Your quest is to defeat the Demon Lord Terra, who waits in the Demon Castle at the far end of the map. In the meantime, you have to make your way across that hexagonal map, moving one space at a time.

Most spaces are there to create the illusion of freedom, to give you the impression that you’re in a wide-open world full of possibilities. They have no other purpose. You enter those spaces, you pay a certain amount of health—travel is exhausting—and you go about your business. Every now and then, though, you encounter a space harboring a monster.

Unreliable Wizard appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

A few weeks ago, a few friends of mine needed a game recommendation. They had about 40-50 minutes to kill. One of them was in the mood for something heavier, or at least something with really satisfying decisions. Another wanted something interactive. The other three wanted something without too many rules. Though I wasn’t playing, I had a requirement too: given that they had 40-50 minutes, it had to be quick to teach.

As luck should have it, the answer was close at hand: Through the Desert, finally back in print after far too long. Full of satisfying trade-offs, deeply interactive, and taking less than five minutes to teach to a table full of comfortable gamers, the second greatest of Reiner Knizia’s tile-laying masterpieces was the cure for what ailed us.

Through the Desert couldn’t be much simpler. First, players take turns adding their Leader camels, one by one, to any valid space on the board. Those placements feel arbitrary the first couple of times you play, but every camel you place for the rest of the game will have to form caravans by branching off of your matching leader. You quickly learn that those five placements are the most impactful decisions you’ll make.

Through the Desert Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Napoleon’s image has had a rough year or two, huh? Ridley Scott’s 2023 film Napoleon painted the Emperor as a horny buffoon, an accident of history, an egomaniac of little substance. Now along comes Ted Raicer’s I, Napoleon, a solo game which suggests that the very act of being Napoleon was as simple as flipping an endless series of cards, doing what they say, and occasionally rolling a die.

I, Napoleon, published by GMT, has you step into the hat of Napoleon Bonaparte for the quarter of a century between 1793 and 1817, covering the full extent of both his rule and his reign. Every bit of the game is experienced through cards, drawn one at a time from an increasingly large deck. Draw a card. Read its effect. Perhaps you gain some Diplomacy or Glory, resources indexed on a track in the upper left corner of the enormous board. Maybe you lose some, heaven forbid. You might reveal a military campaign, or a new king of Spain, or that rat bastard the Duke of Wellington. For the historical aficionado, the deck is swarming with fun little cameos.

Many cards in the…

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Civolution - Justin Bell

I love coming back from SPIEL each year because many of my local Chicago friends bring home a ton of the hot new treasures they bought in Germany. At a recent gaming event, I plopped myself at the table where Stefan Feld’s new release Civolution was about to be taught because I was excited to give this one a spin. Then the teach started…and SIXTY-FIVE MINUTES later, we jumped into our play.

That teach was comically massive because Feld’s newest game is easily his heaviest, in terms of strategic decision making. I’m ready to say that “heavy” is not Feld’s lane. A civ-adjacent design, with tableau building technology cards, tracks, public goals, private goals, action selection, and map exploration, leads to a game with an unheard-of 32 different actions spread across each player’s personal board. Civolution is a dice game, meaning that this strategy game is really a dice-driven action selection design, which will rub many readers (and at least one of our writers!) the wrong way.

To Civolution’s credit, our playtime was just over two hours despite the hour-long teach, so at least the game didn’t take forever…but it never featured the kinds of interesting decisions I was hoping for. The best way I can…

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Most important of all in noticing and remembering Jim Williams is Jim Williams himself. The Englishman approaches every interaction with a level of sincerity, enthusiasm, and engagement that is rare. When Jim talks to you, you cannot help but feel that he is speaking to you, and you alone. He seldom checks his phone and rarely looks about the room. Like many people who are easily distracted, his attention is absolute when he applies it. Speaking with Jim over…

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I don’t know what they put in the water at PostCurious, but it’s working. Rita Orlov and her cohort have made a name for themselves over the last few years by publishing a remarkable series of escape rooms, including 2022’s startling The Light in the Mist and this year’s masterful The Morrison Game Factory. In a market dominated by the long-past-their-prime Exit games and the under-appreciated Unlock series, PostCurious distinguishes itself by offering games that push the boundaries of escape room narrative. These are games that stick with you not only as a series of clever and satisfying puzzles, but as stories.

The scope of PostCurious’s narrative ambitions is generally matched by the scale of their games. The Light in the Mist takes 4-5 hours. The Emerald Flame hit around 7-8. I haven’t cracked open my copy of Threads of Fate yet, but the box promises 10+ hours of work. Those are not rookie numbers. The idea of sitting down—over a series of sessions, mind—for that much puzzle can be overwhelming.

It is with that in mind that PostCurious has started Ministry of Lost Things, a series of more modest offerings. Designed with a less-seasoned audience in mind, Case 1: Lint Condition takes about two hours when all is said and done, spread out over five chapters,…

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Small World (Collector’s Edition) - K. David Ladage

I love Small World. It is a wonderful game that my friend, Steve, and I played a lot back when new stuff was coming out for it on a regular basis. Steve is the kind of a guy that would give serious consideration to buying the over-the-top, extremely over-engineered, exceedingly expensive, will-not-fit-into-any-game-shelf-you-are-going-to-find Collector’s Edition. And so he did. He bought this thing.

The issue with this is that every single element of this game is some 50% larger than it was in the original and made of either wood or plastic. The giant wooden box needs a sticker warning you that this is a two-man lift! Thus, despite having owned this edition since it first came out years and years ago, he has not had many opportunities to pull it out with someone who would appreciate this product. Well, I was there and he wanted to play Small World. So out it came. We played a two-player game–and despite the small player count, this behemoth still managed to fill his 4-by-8 game table. We still had to keep a few elements (like the race tokens) in their giant trays on chairs just off the playing surface. The game was fun! The game was epic! The…

The post Quick Peaks – Small World Collector’s Edition, Squaring Circleville, Alpine Tricks, Fairy, Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Snooker has never made sense to me. On those rare occasions when an American has cause to observe snooker, it seems impenetrable. Some balls get pocketed, and stay that way. Others get pocketed, and a man with white velvet gloves puts them back on the table. It’s all very quiet and intentional and I haven’t the slightest idea as to what’s going on. Not that I ever read the rules.

Carrooka, handmade in England by carpenter Jack Furnival, is an attempt to bring snooker into the home, a marriage of billiards rules with the disk flicking of crokinole and carrom. It’s a beautifully realized idea. The level of craftsmanship is immediately impressive. If the price tag (around $220) causes you to catch your breath, just know that it is justified. One man made this massive thing, with evident care and attention, out of high-quality materials.

All of that is well and good, but means little if the game is not fun. Carrooka is excellent. My first few…

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The year is 2013. It’s October or November, skirting the edge of winter in Connecticut. The time is approximately 11:24 pm. I’ve just come back from a game night at my friend Namita’s apartment, where I played Pandemic for the first time. I’m sitting in my garden apartment, perched on the bamboo-and-denim sofa I found a few months earlier at a local thrift store. I hold a Playstation 3 controller in my hands, having decided to knock out one level of Shadow of the Colossus before bed. There is a three-quarters eaten bowl of Annie’s White Cheddar on the table in front of me. It won’t be there for long.

A knock at the door.

Unexpected. I don’t know many people in the area, and I certainly don’t know anyone who would be out and about at this hour. Save for the glow of the TV, all of my lights are off. The blinds are drawn. I briefly consider pretending I am asleep.

Another knock.

I get up slowly and raise a single slat to peek outside, where I see two severe-looking individuals in suits.

A third and final knock.

Worried about a noise complaint, I open the apartment door.

“Andrew Lynch,” one of them says, more a statement than a question.

“Yes?”

“We need you to come with…

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