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.

In recent years publisher EmperorS4 has been a reliable source of interesting small-box games, their Hanamikoji series being a standout.

Hanamikoji is one of the best two-player games around, and for my money it’s easily the most memorable I-cut-you-choose game I’ve ever played, at once uncompromising and comedic. Geisha’s Road added new cogs to Hanamikoji’s original tug-a-war battle; it lacks the same lacerating edge but is more thoughtful and knotty. Meanwhile Shadows in Kyoto is the adopted sister, more of a Hanamikoji-flavoured take on Stratego than a blood relation, and slightly weaker for it.

2024 brings a new baby to the family in the form of Kimono Memories. It’s an altogether softer experience from the plots and subterfuge of its elder sisters whilst still retaining some of the same features in its chubby little face. This fundamental difference might put you off or you may find the friendlier gameplay more inviting.

A Snapshot

This time round, you and your opponent are photographers, visiting Kyoto and trying to amass the best photo portfolio of traditional kimonos, the national dress of Japan. 

As with Hanamikoji and Geisha’s Road there are a series of battlegrounds you’ll be vying to win, although in this case it’s not the favour of individual geisha you’re looking to gain but photos…

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So let me introduce you to Knitting Circle.

Knitting Circle Overview

In Knitting Circle, your goal is to earn the most points by creating completed clothing: combining garment cards, yarn tiles, and scoring buttons into a finished product. But it’s not as easy as it might sound. Make sure your garment meets one of the approved patterns or else you’ll earn the dreaded “ugly sweater” pin and lose points at the end of the game. Mix in the Advanced Request cards and your eyes will be seeing rainbows for hours after you finish each game.

Let’s briefly touch on setup, and then jump straight to the gameplay. Just be aware that each…

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[caption id="attachment_305366" align="aligncenter" width="764"] Umbrella: The Box[/caption]

Umbrella, by Flavien Dauphin and Benoit Turpin, published by Lumberjacks Studio and Pandasaurus Games, is a simple, elegant game that has recently earned a place on my abstract shelf. Let’s see if it lands on yours as well.

The concept is easy enough: you’re trying to rearrange your 4x4 field of colored umbrellas to match the patterns on one of your scoring tiles. Do so, and you’ll place one of the limited number of scoring tokens on your player board. When someone has claimed the last token, the game ends. Whoever has the most points wins.

Of course, the rules make doing so something of a challenge, so let me explain how to play Umbrella.

Falling On My Head Like a Memory

Each player has a board whose center, recessed area, is a 4x4 grid. You’ll place wooden discs with colored umbrellas on the matching, pre-printed spaces on your board. Above this area is a long open space where you’ll place one of the narrow scoring tiles. Players will also receive four square tiles with patterns on a 4x4 grid that matches your umbrella playing area. You’ll place these in two piles, one each on the two leftmost spaces, making sure the…

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Cozy.

It’s an up-and-coming literary term these days; used to describe a softer sort of book: fantasies, mysteries, etc. where the stakes are relatively low, and readers are given plenty of reasons to fall in love with the characters and their lives. Some of my favorites are Becky Chambers’ sci-fi novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes, and Mia P. Manansala’s Tita Rosie’s Kitchen mystery series. But in the past few years, board games have been picking up this flag and proudly waving it. With titles like Calico (a game about making quilts for cats), The Whatnot Cabinet (collecting trinkets and arranging them), Flamecraft (artisan dragon helpers in a small village), and now River Valley Glassworks (a game about collecting river glass).

You might know that I’m a big fan of other games from this team: including French Quarter, and Three Sisters. I was so interested in River Valley Glassworks that I backed it on Kickstarter. This game is aimed squarely at games like Azul, but should resonate with gamers of all ages and experience levels. So let me tell you why I love it.

River Valley Glassworks Overview

In River Valley Glassworks players are collecting…

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The triquetra is a triangular figure composed of three interlaced arcs. It’s a symbol that’s been used for thousands of years primarily as a decorative element, but sometimes in a more symbolic fashion, its triple knots infused with some sort of meaning or purpose. Its origins are unknown, but its usage began to become popular around the 4th century B.C.*

In the game of Triqueta, players will be competing against their opponents to create, and draft, rows of differently illustrated animal tokens in an effort to end the game with no more than exactly three of each. As the prefix tri- in the title implies, in the game of Triqueta, three is the magic number. If you end the game with fewer than three of a specific type of animal token, you’ll earn a few points, but not as many as you’d earn if you had three. And, going over three results in a penalty. At the end of the fourth round, the player who has earned the most points wins.

Of course, this is an oversimplification. If you’d like to learn a bit more about the specifics of the gameplay, read on. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section.

* The rule book acknowledges that the terms triqueta and triquetra are interchangeable.

Of Towers,…

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As a board game reviewer, I frequently venture into the unexplored realms of tabletop gaming. While the masses hunt for the latest offerings from first-rate publishers, I find a unique excitement in unearthing games yet to grace store shelves or Kickstarter campaigns. Sometimes this leads to interesting gems, while others remind me why not every game is published.

Runner Tactics is a game where these two perceptions are engaged in endless combat. While its core concept is undeniably intriguing, certain aspects of its product design and gameplay raise questions about its readiness for the spotlight. Of course, for you to understand where I’m coming from, we need to delve into this game’s mechanisms.

In a few words, Runner Tactics is a strategic, grid-based, two-player programming game where the players will draft a team of three members for a 3 vs 3 match. Instead of abilities, each member has their own movement range and attack pattern. On the field itself, there are two lines, similar to a North American Football field. The objective is easy: Eliminate your opponent’s team or, at the end of any round, have more members on the other side of the line than your opponent.

Gridiron Hussle

Turns are as simple as the objective. You put a big wooden player shield in front of you and…

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This is going to be a short review, as befits a short game. But please don’t take that to mean that Seaside isn’t good. It is, in fact, good, but it’s short and sweet and you can play it on a picnic table, a beach towel, or even standing up at a bar table.

The story goes that when Bryan Burgoyne was designing Seaside, he specifically wanted a game he could play at the beach. That meant a game that was portable, durable, and most importantly waterproof. Thus was born Seaside, a game in a small canvas bag, with thick double-sided painted wooden discs.

How to Play Seaside

Gameplay is uber simple, in fact the only setup required is taking the instructions out of the bag—you don’t even need to read them if you already know how to play, you’re just getting them out of the way.

As play progresses, each player will reach into the bag and pull out a single disc, determine which of the two sides they want to “play”, then do what the disc indicates (either putting the disc into the middle of the play area, or in front of themselves—more on that in a moment). Sometimes the player might be allowed to pull a…

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Clash of Galliformes is a bit of a throwback to when area control games contented themselves with being dumb and proud of it. As a dumbo, I appreciate this. I do not demand intricate combat systems with convoluted rules about order of battle, troop deployment, terrain. I’m not here to be a grognard, dammit, I’m a lord of the giant sage grouse kingdom, and I demand blood, not rules overhead!

[caption id="attachment_302380" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Blood for the bird god![/caption]

I don’t like “animals” or “nature” as a setting for a game. Sorry, Dominant Species, I’d rather play as a man than as a bug. Now, if you cast me as a group of humans who have co-evolved with gigantic landfowl and ride them around like horses, now I’m interested. Thomas, the great Quail-lord. I suppose birds are the exception to my no-animals rule.

Them’s fightin’ birds

Anyway, Clash of Galliformes is an area control euro-puzzle hybrid game where you build bird soldiers, march them around a point-to-point map, take over sites, build outposts on them, and try to level up your bird board to get better powers. At the start, you have a single minion, but you expand to develop greater resource production capacity, and you start collecting chits.

The almighty…

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The scene is set thus: “A seafaring goat crew was navigating treacherous waters when their boat capsized! The ship broke apart, leaving wood strewn throughout the waves. To save the goats, players must build a raft from the wood. Each player fights to outsmart the others in a quest to get their goats on the raft. But watch out for the shark lurking in the waters...”

“Outsmart” is somewhat overstating the chaotic to-and-fro of rolling planks and leaping hooves, with the tiller steered as much by the 12-sided die as by player choices. And the obligatory shark in fact may rarely make an appearance.

Like a bagpiper in a submarine

The box is compact, easily portable in your handbag, and the contents fit snugly. The 28 goat pieces (six mamas and one baby, each in four colours) are pleasantly tactile, and stack in a cute way, the mamas carrying the babies across their backs, to protect them from ocean, shark and clan rivals alike. The mama-baby choice of language is perfectly legit, a) because the designer hails from the beautiful Southeastern United States, and b) because daddy goats can sometimes be a danger to kids (fun fact).

The gun-metal fin is fun and the mustard dodecahedron passes muster, but…

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I’m the kind of guy that likes to have a lot of 60-minutes-or-less game options in my quiver. That’s because I’m married to a partner who is usually open to games on a Friday night that last for about an hour. After that, you can begin to see the shiftiness setting in. “When can we do something else?” the eyes start saying after the first glass of wine.

Our partners at Devir sent a care package recently that included their 2023 release Bamboo. After reading the rules, I had a good feeling that this would work well for my wife because the playtime looked short (well under an hour for two players) and the rules could be taught in about ten minutes.

I was right on most fronts. Bamboo is a competitive, yet peaceful, tile-laying puzzle designed by Germán P. Milián, the man behind some games that I’ve really enjoyed over the last year or so: Sabika and Bitoku, the latter with the Resutoran expansion. Both of these previous games are much more complex than Bamboo, so I was curious to see how Bamboo would play with a lighter ruleset that could accommodate casual players and strategy gamers looking for an appetizer.

Bamboo’s production is perfectly Devir: exceptional, save for a rulebook that was only…

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Pax Penning, like all the Pax games, has Things on Its Mind. The entire Pax family is concerned with political turbulence and periods of significant change. Your job, from one design to the next, is to ride the waves as best you can. Unlike most games, the pieces on the board in Pax designs do not belong to any one player. You may control them temporarily, but nothing is yours, nothing is mine. It’s all a loose series of associations and temporary partnerships.

Pax Penning is not part of the formal Pax series, which primarily consists of games from designer Phil Eklund and publisher Ion Game Design, but it is clearly made in the same spirit. It earns the title. Players represent the various Houses in the town of Sigtuna, ca. 1000 CE, navigating the political ramifications of changes implemented by the first Christian King of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung. You have to decide whether or not you support him.

The ways in which you answer that question are abstracted enough that it’s easy to forget what you're…

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Last fall, my friend and colleague Tom Franklin reviewed the 1997 abstract Quoridor, published by Gigamic. (BGG indicates that Quoridor is based on an older game called Pinko Pallino that has a slightly larger map and different rules.)

I hadn’t played Quoridor before, so I was intrigued by Tom’s review. My experience with abstracts is limited but I have really enjoyed games like SHŌBU and Qawale.

Moving pawns around a small board, with quick play times and easy-to-teach rules, generally works for me, even if I don’t buy abstracts very often. When I went to the Festival International des Jeux recently, my friend Rawan at Gigamic passed me a new game that was a bit of a surprise: Quoridor, but with a major twist.

That twist is front-and-center on the new edition of the box: Pac-Man! Yes, the Pac-Man you remember from your local arcade back in the early 1980s, if you are a person of a certain age. (I am that person.) What, then, does Pac-Man have to do with Quoridor?

Money. Let’s face it—a game called Quoridor might sell well, but a game titled Quoridor Pac-Man is probably going to sell a lot better.

Quoridor’s reskin is still Quoridor, and…

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