Have you ever been walking through the woods, enjoying nature, when you hear a weird rustle in the leaves? Or perhaps it’s a branch in the canopy above you making a sudden noise. Or maybe it’s just a general feeling that something is there, just off the path, watching you from the underbrush. Whether its intentions are good or bad are entirely unknown. All you know is that you are not as alone as you thought you were.

If you’ve ever had this experience before, chances are you were just mere feet away from a pixie. In the game of Pixies, players take on the roles of…

Well, who knows really? The story above is something I created out of whole cloth. Aside from the delightful images of weird little creatures created out of natural objects (think Little Big Planet meets Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and you’ll have an idea of the aesthetic), there’s not a lot of theme or story to go around. At its heart, Pixies is a pure abstract. Albeit, it’s an abstract with some ridiculously cute artwork.

Overview

In Pixies, the players will take turns drafting cards out of a lineup and then placing them into their tableaus following some…

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When I picked up a pile of the new “Tiny Box” game series from Allplay at Gen Con 2024, I just assumed that at least one of these games would be weak. Underdeveloped, maybe. Not much meat on the bone. Certainly not replayable.

But with my plays of Panda Panda, I’m three for three on games that are at least decent, and in the case of both Rainbow and Panda Panda, games that not only landed with players in my groups, but were also enjoyed by my family, meaning they will reside in the game closet for at least a little while.

That’s because Panda Panda has just enough depth to make it worth the ten minutes it takes to teach, then play with a group of up to four players. Using a small deck of just 32 cards, players aim to make a winning set of cards by mixing their starting hand with cards drawn from the top of the deck as well as the discard piles of each opponent. But here’s the rub: unlike a game such as Gin, where a player has to end play with a hand of 10 cards that all fits into sets or runs, Panda Panda asks players to declare victory with a wide range of winning hand combinations, meaning…

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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.

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During my first play of The Gang (2024, KOSMOS) at Gen Con 2024, I had the chance to learn the game from the publisher. I was intrigued by the whole production: The Gang is a poker game, played cooperatively, where players use poker chips to hint at the quality of their hand. Using a theme so loose I laughed out loud when it was explained to me—fellow thieves are working together to rob a bank, and to succeed, they have to play poker cooperatively!!—The Gang gets a ton of mileage out of the Texas Hold ‘Em format of poker, a game that I didn’t think fit into a co-op format.

But I was wrong. Worse, I was wrong to assume that the people who published other great card games such as The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine suddenly didn’t know card games. That’s because The Crew is the single-most played card game that has hit my table over the last five years by a sizable margin. (And, I’m told the sequel is even better than the base game.)

All this means that even if you don’t play poker, you need to try The Gang. Its initial conceit makes for a fun time at the table, then it includes three additional modes of play to keep things…

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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 years back I was wandering through various campaigns on Kickstarter (as I am wont to do) and I saw a pair of images that were right up my alley. The images were sci-fi but of the old 1930s to 1950s variety. The sort of images that invoke some of my childhood heroes!

[caption id="attachment_307619" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A return to the golden age of sci-fi![/caption]

Pulp Invasion! I read the description of the game and saw that it was a solo affair. I decided to get two copies: one for me, and one for my friend, Steve (Steve loves solo gaming). I started getting the expansions, too. I stopped, but that is another story (see below).

This game (and Pulp Detective) came about after Mr. Sanders acquired the rights to a whole bunch of pulp magazine covers and interior illustrations. In other words, this is the real deal! These are not modern artists mimicking the pulp era styles, these are authentic pulp era pieces. And they are beautiful!

Engage the hyperdrive!

In Pulp Invasion, you are a Free Captain, a sort of trader and mercenary who roams interstellar space. However, you are no ordinary Captain! In secret, you are an agent of the Intergalactic Council, an arm of the…

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A few years back after discovering Todd Sanders’ latest work (Pulp Invasion), I was looking into this game designer and discovered that he had designed a game around the old Gumshoe genre.

[caption id="attachment_307620" align="aligncenter" width="600"] I need a card in this game that lets me play as Rigby Reardon.[/caption]

I loved it! I searched around and I located the base game for Pulp Detective, all three expansions, the slip-cover to hold all of the boxes together (like a set of books), and the puzzle-piece playing board for the combined experience.

This game (and Pulp Invasion) came about after Mr. Sanders acquired the rights to a whole bunch of pulp magazine covers and interior illustrations. In other words, this is the real deal! These are not modern artists mimicking the pulp era styles, these are authentic pulp era pieces. And they are beautiful!

Just the facts, ma’am!

In Pulp Detective, you are a gritty private eye (or detective, or socialite avenger, etc.) who is hot on the case of some nefarious crime that has been committed. You have a day (or sometimes less!) to find the clues, solve the crime, and confront the culprit what did it!

The game is about playing your odds and hedging your bets. But…

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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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I have had several enjoyable gaming experiences with the lineup from Keymaster Games. This includes a number of exceptionally well-produced games: PARKS, PARKS: Nightfall, Parks: Roll & Hike, Caper: Europe, and Harvest.

When the Keymaster team reached out to gauge my interest in a review copy of their upcoming trick-taking game Fuego I immediately said yes. I’ve never had a bad time with a Keymaster game, I always need shorter games to balance my plays with the heavy Euros I get to the table. And since nearly every publisher I work with has at least one trick-taking, shedding and/or ladder card game on the docket, I was curious. What angle would Keymaster bring to the river of card games coming to market?

Fuego is an above-average time at the table. Across three review plays—one each at two, three, and four players—I really enjoyed the cardplay and team dynamics in our four-player game more than the other player counts.

Strike a Match

Fuego is a 2-4 player trick-taking game. It is played as a best-of-three setup—the player or team that wins two rounds wins the game. With two players, it’s a simple head-to-head affair; with four players, each person’s teammate sits across the table from their…

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Wyrmspan is a game that looks and feels a lot like Wingspan. This is purposeful, since the designer took the Wingspan mechanics and used them as the baseline for this new game. There is a lot here that will be familiar to a Wingspan player, and just enough to throw them a curve once in a while. This was anticipated.

Wingspan is a game with almost universal acclaim and recognition. If you are not one of those people familiar with the game, please check out our previous reviews of Wingspan (Mark Iradian’s review of Wingspan, or Logan Giannini's review of Wingspan), or perhaps Tom Franklin’s wonderful review of Wingspan digital, or our Wingspan strategy guide.

Stonemaier Games has a Rules and FAQ page that discusses where Wyrmspan differs from Wingspan. Below is a summary of these differences:

• Your personal game board starts with three places where you can place dragons. Additional locations in each cave must be excavated first by placing a cave card there. Doing so activates a one-time power. You explore and excavate the caves from left to right. Completing the exploration of a cave has some additional benefits.
• Actions are paid for with coins (and sometimes eggs) rather than action tokens. It is possible to acquire additional coins and take…

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“It sounded like you guys were having a LOT of fun last night,” my wife began. “What game were you playing when you were laughing so hard?”

Funny you should ask.

Belratti (2024, KOSMOS) is a reprint of a 2018 game designed by Michael Loth, where players work together to score as many points as possible before a dastardly forgery artist known as Belratti gets enough of their paintings into the local museum. Playing as either Painter Owl (representing a pool of legitimate painters) or as Dr. Cat, a team meant to simulate the efforts of the museum director, players will submit works of art (cards) that align with one of the two theme cards being used for a given round. When added to four random cards drawn from a massive deck of nearly 200 cards, the curators have to figure out which pictures are “real” (submitted by players) or fakes (the randomly drawn cards).

In essence, that is the entire game. Play ends when Belratti is able to sneak six fakes into the museum, then players use a tiered high-score chart to figure out how well they did.

Here’s why I know Belratti works—we finished our first game in about 20 minutes and got absolutely demolished, scoring eight points and finishing in the lowest scoring tier. As soon…

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