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.

From card games to social deduction, mega games to role-playing adventures, the possibilities of board games might seem endless. However, this wasn’t always the case. In the late 2000s, 'narrative' games were far less common than they are today. The concept of app-integrated storytelling or voice-acted narratives wasn’t even an idea at the time. If you wanted to have your story experience in a board game form, options were scarce, and the most well-known at the time was Tales of the Arabian Nights.

As you can tell from the game’s name, it draws inspiration from the classic “One Thousand and One Nights” as players traverse the lands to seek fortune and glory. Instead of complex mechanics, they are told about their situation through a book and the players decide on their response to the situation. To some players, this was a great game, especially for families that want to tell silly stories. For others, like myself, we found the game to be quite random and nonsensical, often overextending its welcome.

When I heard about Tales of the Arthurian Knights, saying I was interested is downplaying my reaction. I loved the idea of Tales of the Arabian Nights, but I was yearning for something that was a bit more consistent and I was quite curious to see fifteen years’ worth…

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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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Generally speaking, I am not an RPG guy.

From time to time, I can be tricked into Gloomhaven-like gaming experiences. While games like Gloomhaven feature some elements typical in a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, the main focus is on the combat and the loot, not the storytelling.

Don’t get me wrong—I love good storytelling, especially in my visual arts, like TV and film. But in my board games, I want action. If I only get an hour or two to play a game every night, I wanna get in there!

As long as we are speaking broadly, I’m also not a tabletop campaign guy.

Maybe you’ve experienced this, too—it is getting harder and harder to get people to come over to play the same game 12-15 times. (Sometimes, it’s hard to get people to play the same game twice, am I right?) If anything, post-COVID life killed the ability to do campaign games. During COVID, we found another couple or two to “bubble up” and play campaign games, or my wife and I did two-player games on our own, because no one had anything else to do.

But when the world opened back up, getting a weekly run of games like Clank! Legacy—Acquisitions Inc. became almost impossible in my circles. Who is coming out…

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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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In Maps of Misterra, you’re playing as explorers, mapping out the island’s landscapes—landscapes that might change from turn to turn, say Mountains become Forests. That’s because there’s a difference between terrain types that are ‘confirmed’ and what your sponsor has said they want to see on your map. Score the most points at the end of the game and you’ll be the winner.

If that sounds a bit confusing, stay with me. The mists will part as we get the game to the table.

[caption id="attachment_305395" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Maps of Misterra: The Box[/caption]

Cartographers At the Ready

You’ll place the large central board in the middle of the table, then hand each player their own smaller version of the map. Depending on the player count, a number of Forests will be placed, full-color side up. (More on this soon.)

[caption id="attachment_305401" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] A 3 or 4 player game ready to be played.[/caption]

Each player will also get a Cartographer of their choice and three Claim tokens in their matching color.

At the top of the board, place the four stacks of terrain tiles full-color side down. Then shuffle the…

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Pencil erasers. You know the sort, the molded 3D variety that were never intended to erase. They were more like elementary school status symbols, beacons of personality that wagged in the air as you filled in bubbles with your Ticonderoga No. 2. Truth be told, they were a bit of a nuisance for how they threw your pencil out of balance, but they looked so cool.

Finally, someone has made a game with erasers as player markers—minus the hole necessary to properly top a pencil. It was the artwork that first drew me in as I listed Kyoto No Neko among my most anticipated list for GenCon 2024. Even as I tore into the shrink to check out the illustrations, though, I had to pause to admire the kitties made of the stuff of erasers. Endearing, they are.

In fact, everything about Kyoto No Neko has a charming look. The square board is flanked on all sides by stair-stepped player-specific territories to create a unique overall shape. The finished grid is an overhead map of the city: rooftops, terraces, and roadways for kitty travel. Cute little kitty paw tokens are scattered about, face-down and waiting to be discovered.

Feline It Out

The whole of the game is a series of skill checks. Every token requires one of several…

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There's one trope in gaming that I feel is severely underutilized: flipping the script. Typically, games put you in the shoes of the valiant heroes to slay beasts, collect treasures, and save the day. That's all well and good, but sometimes I want to play on the other side of the aisle and be the bad guy. Games like Evil Corp or Overboss immediately come to mind, offering a different perspective from the norm. When I saw Open Season for the first time, I was naturally drawn in simply on the premise of collecting heads from hapless heroes to put on my trophy room wall.

Open Season Overview

Gameplay in Open Season is very simple. Each turn starts with the Inn showing five potential People for the active player to take. Of these People, they'll choose two, placing one onto an available space on their Wall and the other into their Stock. Seems straightforward, right?

Where the game gets interesting is that your Wall restricts cards from being played in certain spaces. Usually this comes in the form of a row disallowing another of a previously played type of People card from being played in that row. A portion of the middle row is an exception, where playing three of the same kind of People card will…

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One of the fun things about discussing the catalog of strategy game designer Vital Lacerda is finding out how each fan ranks Lacerda's games. I have a lot of friends who enjoy Lacerda's designs, and I am no exception…for a good part of 2021 and 2022, I tried to host a series of Lacerda-only game nights in Chicago called “Café Lacerda.”

Summer is a slower season for new tabletop releases as everyone gears up to make a splash at the big fall conventions (Gen Con, SPIEL, PAX Unplugged), so I have been going through my personal collection to find games that we haven't previously reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. I got Escape Plan (2019, Eagle-Gryphon Games) back to the table recently (after logging a half-dozen plays in years past) and thought now would be a good time to publish my thoughts on the game.

Escape Plan is, amongst my circles and what appears to be the tabletop community at large, the most divisive game Lacerda has designed over the last 10 years. Everyone has an opinion. A limited few think of it as only OK, but almost everyone I spoke to in the lead-up to this post had something to say about what they thought about it.

…

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What’s That Sound?

As you slowly regain consciousness, you become aware of a red glow enveloping you. You begin to recollect things. You're on a ship. You're part of a crew. You were in hibernation. But that sound is deafening. Is that the alarm?

As you step out of your stasis pod into the hibernatorium, you become even more aware of your surroundings. You're now sure that's the alarm. The red emergency lights bathing everything in crimson are a definite tell. Your crew mates are also emerging from their pods. But, wait. Is that?

One of your crew mates has been removed from their pod, and their body lies cold, lifeless, and mangled on the metal floor. Your mind is suffering from short-term amnesia from the deep sleep, so when one of your crew suggests that you all should investigate, this comes with some pangs of anxiety. You're not even sure you remember these hallways.

The engine room and bridge are simple enough, since one is always in the back, and the other is always in the front. But the locations of the rest of the rooms are fuzzy right now. Everyone else is already going their separate ways, so you pick a dark hallway and move forward.

It was a short trip before you reached the armory. While…

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The game of Weirdwood Manor begins with a narrative explaining the situation. Lady Weirdwood rules over a magical mansion that stands as the nexus between the mortal realm and the lands of the fae. It is her job (along with her wardens—that would be the players) to keep the forces of evil at bay. However, something has gone wrong and some evil from the Fae Realm has breached the manor and has come to wreak havoc.

The setup is quite interesting. Everything within the game, from the way the manor works to the interesting abilities of the various characters you can play to how the secondary characters (called companions) operate… all serve this theme admirably.

What follows is a look at how the game is set-up and played. If you want to skip this, continue on to my thoughts below. Otherwise, click on the link and check out how the game functions!

[mks_toggle title="Check out the rules to Weirdwood Manor" state="close "]

Setup

Setup is relatively straight forward, even though it is a lot of steps.

First there is the main board setup:

• Assemble the two halves of the manor.
• Place the outer-ring rooms into their ring in a random order.
• Assemble and place the Day Corridor and place it just inside the outer-ring rooms with Day 1…

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One of my crotchety opinions is that, like racing, the concept of “adventuring” doesn’t often translate well to board games. The latter function as systems that often help us think about other systems, and adventure isn’t really a system, at least, it’s not a feeling or an idea that can be easily transmogrified.

The gold standard for adventure games, in my book, is Mario Papini’s De Vulgari Eloquentia, a game where you wander around Italy collecting books to create a language. While this isn’t exactly swashbuckling, it captures how hard it was to just move around in the early modern era. Crossing an ocean? Forget about it. Every decision in DVE is built around a simple question: you can do it, but do you have the horses? Tension, consequences, and stakes–that’s what an adventure needs.

[caption id="attachment_302375" align="aligncenter" width="768"] A fun cast of player characters.[/caption]

Like DVE, The forthcoming Ultimate Voyage (Final Quest of the Treasure Fleet) is a resource management eurogame that’s got its hiking boots on. Ultimate Voyage continues the trend of not exactly being a game that feels like adventuring, but it does have some novel mechanisms that blend together in new and interesting ways. As far as mapping new horizons for the genre, it makes some interesting,…

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I met with Gigamic during the Festival International des Jeux a few months ago, and they provided a copy of the upcoming Viking-themed tile-laying game Looot.

“I saved this copy just for you!” our friend Rawan said during our marketing meeting. “I think you are going to like this one because we are very excited about it.”

As I say often, publishers say this to me all the time. I always smile, say thanks, and move to my next meeting with the same level of optimism. Gigamic has never led me astray, but tile-laying games are very, very close to the signature cliche “a dime a dozen.” Between high-water abstracts such as Azul, to any number of animal-themed tile layers like Cascadia, to harder puzzles like Calico, to Euro-themed classics like Carcassonne and Tigris & Euphrates, players have hundreds of options in this crowded field.

Still, I think Looot—despite its tricky title, which is one O too heavy for every spell-check tool in the book—is worth a look. That’s because its weight, playtime, and strategic depth give Looot a pretty interesting distinction through the first quarter of 2024: this is the most game you can play in about 30 minutes. Not a lot of games can say that!

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