Despite reviewing board games for nearly 5 years now and having written over 100 reviews, I never reviewed a campaign game. Time is a bit of a luxury for me, and campaign games have the daring proposal to subject me to hours of my time to get the “full experience” these behemoth boxes offer.

So why on earth am I reviewing this one? The answer is as simple as writing this sentence: I used to play the Monster Hunter video games back in the day. Much like how Nemesis is an unlicensed version of Aliens, Primal: The Awakening is an unlicensed version of Monster Hunter. However, that isn’t the only reason.

Campaign games have always irked me on their design. You see, a game calling itself a "dungeon crawler" or "boss battler," and you think, "That's my jam!" But then you're stuck doing some bean-counting for upgrading a town or playing choose-your-own-adventure in between the good stuff. I'm here to skewer baddies, snatch their loot, beef up my gear, and then go skewer even bigger baddies. I want boss fights to feel like I’m a third monkey rushing towards Noah's Ark because, brother, it is starting to rain.

Taming the Complexity

Fortunately for Primal: The Awakening, the campaign structure is exactly that. Your “prologue” is fighting a creature that…

The post Primal: The Awakening Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The best board game I played in 2021 was Dwellings of Eldervale (2020, Breaking Games). It did everything I wanted in a board game—lots of combat, a fantasy setting, Euro-like engine building elements, player powers and cards that all felt a little “broken”, cool miniatures, and Game Trayz. I played it four times that year and was sure it was one of the best games ever made, at least in terms of my play preferences.

Dwellings of Eldervale has the kind of randomness that is fun because the stakes were often quite low. Even when players lose in combat, they seem to always get something useful, and getting damaged units back was as easy as taking a recall action. Sure, that recall action is better when your units are healthy when they return to your play area, but over the course of a three-hour game, everyone took their licks from time to time.

At PAX Unplugged two years ago, I had the chance to demo Andromeda’s Edge, the updated version of Dwellings that changed the setting to space and made mostly minor changes to a variety of the original game’s design elements. Like Dwellings, Andromeda’s Edge is designed by Luke Laurie (adding Maximus Laurie as a co-designer this time around) and Andromeda’s Edge continues to utilize my favorite…

The post Andromeda’s Edge Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Leviathan Wilds Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The Unmatched system is approaching such a critical mass of expansions that we can likely start referring to the series as a whole as “storied.” There are currently 18 different boxes available in the main series, though in saying that I am perhaps stretching the definition of “available.” Bruce Lee will cost you a few hundred dollars, if you can even find him.

The sets fall broadly into two categories: those based on contemporary, licensed intellectual property, and those that are based on works in the public domain. The majority fall under the former umbrella, with Marvel characters alone accounting for a full quarter of all releases. Jurassic Park and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with the late Mr. Lee, make up the rest of those.

Those sets are, in my opinion, largely fine. I mean, look, they play as well as any other set, I just don’t get my kicks from playing as Spider-man anymore. I’m all webbed out. The Jurassic Park sets feature three of my favorite characters, but that’s nothing to do with the source material.

My heart sings for the public domain characters. The Invisible Man? Sun Wukong?? Bloody Mary??? Call me Chen Shih-yuan, cos I am ready to go!

Unmatched: Slings and Arrows Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

As I've become more cognizant of the size of my burgeoning board game collection, I often find myself culling games from the shelf that are replaced by better versions of a similar game. That meant that Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game finally found its way to the seller's block when Marvel Champions: The Card Game came home to roost. Saving the universe and the streets of Queens never looked so good.

Marvel Champions: The Card Game Overview

Marvel Champions: The Card Game (which, henceforth, I'll be simply calling Marvel Champions) is a living card game. This means that there is a core box designed to get you started and there are also new expansions of varying sizes to keep you coming back for more. For the sake of this review, I'll only focus on the core game, which contains five heroes and three villains.

The game starts with each player choosing which hero they want to use, along with the singular villain that the collective table wants to square off against. Marvel Champions designed their introduction well, packaging up prebuilt Spider-Man and Captain Marvel decks for a two-player game against Rhino. There's even a separate Learn to Play booklet that will walk you through the basics for your first game, which is most welcome.

If you've played…

The post Marvel Champions: The Card Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post Weirdwood Manor Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I know that not everyone loves dice chuckers, but there’s something satisfying about grabbing a handful of dice and rolling them across the table. Particularly when those dice influence the actions of 500 foot tall monsters duking it out in a major metropolitan area; like in 2011’s King of Tokyo. The series has had a slew of releases over the years: from “monster packs” (promo cards featuring new monsters), to brand new titles like King of New York, and even a reimagining of the original in 2024’s King of Tokyo: Origins. But the game has been largely the same since the original was released: 2-6 players going head to head trying to come out on top. But now with the release of King of Monster Island, the series has gone coop, with players all trying to defeat a fire monster born from the depths of a volcano on an island in the middle of the Pacific.

Way to set the stage!

King of Monster Island Overview

The first thing you’ll notice when sitting down to play is the enormous volcano in the center of the player board. Cleverly assembled from cardboard and plastic, this is not only the centerpiece of the game, but also acts as a…

The post King of Monster Island Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

What is Kingdom Death: Monster?

Kingdom Death: Monster is, more than any other board game I’ve played, difficult to describe. Designed by Adam Poots and published by his miniatures company, Kingdom Death, this game is better described by what it’s not. Kingdom Death: Monster is not a role-playing game, but has some role-playing elements. It isn’t a dungeon crawl, but has some dungeon crawl elements. It’s not a boss battler, but has boss battling elements.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. Kingdom Death: Monster is a little bit of so many things, that it’s sort of a Frankenstein’s Monster. In the game, you’ll be making decisions that affect your character, the group as a whole, and future story events. You’ll be managing resources, crafting and upgrading, fighting, managing your inventory, rolling dice, having random encounters, gathering loot, and much, much more

So what is Kingdom Death: Monster? Let’s dive in and have a bit of a look. DISCLAIMER: This is a campaign-style game. There are some minor spoilers, and some content in this game is definitely for a mature audience. While I’m trying to not mention specifics or get too in depth, just the nature of this game alone makes it difficult to keep everything that follows spoiler free and rated PG, but I’ll do my…

The post Kingdom Death: Monster Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Unmatched as a series is based on a simple, perfect premise, one as old as humanity: Who would win in a fight? Throughout the six years the system has been available at retail, this two-to-four player dueling game has allowed players to throw together an impressively wide variety of characters, both licensed and un-. If your grade school recesses were consumed with purely theoretical conversations about matchups between Achilles and Doctor Strange, you can finally put those ideas into praxis.

Ever since its release, I’ve danced around Unmatched without committing. I’m not big on the licensed sets—your Marvel superheroes, your Buffies the Vampire Slayer—but I have been intrigued by the choices from the public domain. The idea of The Invisible Man and Houdini throwing down appeals to me. The newest set, Sun’s Origin, falls into the latter category, with two new fighters drawn from Japanese history.

[caption id="attachment_300638" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Yes, I painted one of the mini-figs. Yes, her face is terrifying.[/caption]

Logan v Mark

Meeple Mountain has twice covered Unmatched before. Though both writers came to notably divergent conclusions, their summations of the system are similar. In his review of the first several volumes, Logan wrote, “The mechanics in Unmatched are fine. Solid,…

The post Unmatched: Sun’s Origin Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Here are the scariest words in the English language: “During your turn, you may take any of the following actions, any number of times, in any order and combination you want, as long as you have the resources needed to carry them out.”

This line, on page five of the English rulebook for the 4X-ish deckbuilding skirmish game Monumental (2020, Funforge), frightened me when I read it. In the wrong hands, a player could take a lot of actions on their turn while taking time to consider what they wanted to do on a turn…all while three other players would be waiting for the active player to wrap things up.

And during our very first review play of Monumental—on the fourth turn of the first round!!—a player strung together a series of actions that took maybe six or seven minutes. Not long in the scheme of things, right?

Then the next two players also took turns that ran about five minutes each. That left me waiting for about 15 minutes to take my second turn of the game.

Monumental does quite a few things well. Unfortunately, the game is buried in downtime, which takes away from an experience that should shine at higher player counts but assures that I will never play it again with four players.

The post Monumental: First Take Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

King of Tokyo: Origins is a dice-chucking game that pits monster against monster in the age-old battle for Japan’s biggest city. The winner will either be the first person who reaches 20 points, or be the last monster standing.

Set Up

All players take a cut-out of a monster and sets it in the plastic stand. They then take the accompanying monster’s score tracker, setting the wheel in the upper left (Points) to zero and the wheel in the lower right (Health) to 10. 

[caption id="attachment_295759" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo: Origins[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_295760" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Mechamster and Cosmic Joe[/caption]

Set the board on the table in reach of all players—or don’t. The board only has a circle for the attacking monster to stand in. That’s all. Simply placing your monster in the middle of the table will have the same effect.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to purchase these to gain either a temporary or permanent bonus. Place three cards face-up and the remaining cards to the side.

[caption id="attachment_295762" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of cards[/caption]

Randomly choose a starting player and…

The post King of Tokyo: Origins Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Return to the beleaguered city of Tokyo—now with the addition of Tokyo Bay—as our monsters slug it out once again for domination and to claim victory. 

If you’re new to King of Tokyo, I went over the setup and gameplay in my recent review of King of Tokyo: Origins. (Known from here as KoT: O) That game comes with four monsters, each lacking in special abilities and rendering them disappointingly interchangeable. King of Tokyo: Monster Box (KoT: MB), a fully stand-alone game, solves that problem in a big way. 

Let’s start with some of the basics, though. 

[caption id="attachment_295770" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo Monster Box box[/caption]

KoT:MB comes with its own big deck of monster cards. 

[caption id="attachment_295771" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of the many Monster cards in the box[/caption]

From my games, these can be mixed in with the KoT:O cards if you want even more options.

KoT:MB also comes with two sets of dice, one in black & green and one in orange & black. The orange set was initially included in the King of Tokyo Halloween expansion. There is no difference between these sets of dice. If…

The post King of Tokyo: Monster Box Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Senjutsu is a skirmish game for 1-4 players, set in feudal Japan during the civil war that followed the fall of the Ashikaga Shogunate. Each player takes on the role of a samurai protecting their Daimyo, but the narrative doesn’t make its presence known. This is Street Fighter in three dimensions. Another name for that might be Tekken. Players battle it out, trying to be the last man—hey, that’s what’s in the box—standing.

Mechanically, Senjutsu is a card game with heavily customizable decks. At the beginning of each session, both players construct a deck that corresponds to their chosen character. The flexibility of the system is tremendous. Each character has a set of special cards only they can use, on top of a large stack of general cards that can be used by anybody. This portion of the game reminds me of Sakura Arms, a dueling game in which players select characters and choose cards from within their supply. Though Sakura Arms is a bit tidier about how it implements its version of this system, Senjutsu offers a similar promise: the more you play, the better you know the characters and their cards, and the more emotionally satisfying the deck-building portion of setup becomes.

[caption id="attachment_296693" align="alignnone" width="1024"]Senjutsu: Battle for Japan Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.