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…

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Does the third game in the Horrified series, set in ancient Greek mythology live up to the standards set by its older siblings? Check out our review of Horrified: Greek Monsters.

Horrified is a family-weight cooperative game that burst onto the scene back in 2019 to much acclaim, both cementing its place in my collection and establishing design group Prospero Hall as the go-to producers of IP-based games that hold up to gamer scrutiny. In Horrified, players work together to defeat a varied number of movie monsters intent on terrorizing the most unlucky town ever. Horrified: American Monsters, the standalone sequel, swaps out Universal movie monsters for American cryptids. Horrified: Greek Monsters (HGM for short) takes the monster-hunting, town-defending romp to the world of ancient Greek mythology, with such villains as Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur, and other mythological entities.

[caption id="attachment_307843" align="aligncenter" width="1500"] What's in the box?[/caption]

Let’s Do That Again

Gameplay for the previous two Horrified games features a pickup and deliver mechanic with the primary variance being the specific conditions required for each monster. (For more on general gameplay, see our review of the original game.)  HGM takes the same approach. If you’ve ever played either the original or American-cryptid based sequel, you will…

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Starmada is a set of rules that allows you to design starships, then (with some miniatures or chits on a hex grid) send them out to reduce other starships to so much space debris. The idea of the game is to be a quick playing, tactical, and universal set of rules for such things. The system for ship design has basic components and myriad add-ons allowing it to simulate just about anything you can think of in a way that ensures that even if you and your friends are simulating different universes, the relative strengths of the ships can be calculated to ensure a fair fight. Want to put a fleet of Star Wars Super Star Destroyers up against a group of Star Trek Borg Cubes or perhaps a few Babylon 5 Vorlon Planet Killers? This game can do that.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Admiralty—the group of volunteers that Daniel Kast (Majestic XII Games) brought together to take Starmada X rules and use them to create a new edition of Starmada a bit over a decade ago. Daniel and the members of the Admiralty were all people that loved many of the previous editions of the game. We each had our thoughts on where the strongest and weakest areas of…

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Don’t tell my erudite friends but skirmish games, in particular, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, got me back into board gaming (even though I find the entirety of the modern Star Wars franchise unbearably boring). I love pushing miniatures around on a grid of some kind and making them shoot each other.

Now, I do love Star Trek, the show about people solving problems with talking, and I’m happy to say that if you’re looking for a highly approachable two-player skirmish game, Star Trek: Away Missions fits the bill. While the way you win can feel slightly disjointed as a game, it often ends up feeling more in the spirit of a Star Trek set piece, where a character has to perform some jargon-filled objective while dodging phaser fire.

Yellow Alert

Away Missions has you selecting your team from amongst Romulans, Klingons, Borg, and Federation factions. For this review, I had access to the starter kits for each. As I understand it, you can get other collections of minis which add characters you can swap in, more cards to build your decks with, and additional options for objectives.

You have a deck of Support Cards, and a deck of Mission Cards. The former contain various pieces of equipment that you…

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I'm largely unfamiliar with the Aviation Wargame genre of gaming, although not due to lack of interest. As much as I'd love to sink my teeth into something like Star Wars: X-Wing, I'm well-known for going all-in on miniatures games only to find myself lacking someone who would mirror the same investment. Therefore, I was intrigued to see Aerodome: Rising Horizons as a budget substitute for the sprawling miniature experience.

Aerodome: Rising Horizons Overview

The object of the game is aerial supremacy. Take down your opponent by reducing their Hit Points to 0 before they do the same to you.

When starting a new game of Aerodome: Rising Horizons, you need to select the Stadium that you'll be fighting in. It's called a Stadium as opposed to a Battleground or Location because you're playing as pilots of aircraft across time and dimensions. At least, that's what I was able to glean from the 'Story so Far' section of the rulebook that really just outlined the various factions battling in the game.

Each player hops into the proverbial cockpit of a fighter, assuming the role of a prodigious pilot like Alice Drummond or Van Vertigo. The pilot determines which types of cards—and how many of each—can be combined to make your Maneuver Hand. Think of the Maneuver Hand as…

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At last year’s SPIEL event in Essen, Germany, I had the chance to try The Warp, a game I followed during its crowdfunding campaign because I was intrigued by its approach to the 4X genre of spacefaring adventure games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate). The campaign, which ended in late 2020, gave me the sense that there would be a real chance at being blown off the map, so the “eXterminate” portion of the 4X mechanic here looked real…and many games in this category do not really follow through on that promise.

I’ve now played The Warp in both three-player and four-player arrangements, and after these plays and a promising demo back in Germany, I know that The Warp does a lot of things well, particularly in the way objective scoring takes place. While it falls a tier below the best 4X and 4X-adjacent games I have played, such as Voidfall, Scythe, Circadians: Chaos Order and Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy, I think The Warp delivers on many fronts.

The real challenge? Finding it, especially if you live in North America.

“Do You Want to Follow?”

The Warp is a relatively rules-light, 1-4 player area control and hand management experience that can be…

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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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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…

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There are boundless joys I get from working with Meeple Mountain, and one of those is the opportunity to see a game before it makes it to store shelves. Hedge Mage is a game about making hedge mazes to prevent mages from stealing garden gnomes… while you are in another hedge maze stealing garden gnomes. To say I was intrigued would be an understatement.

I have played a few games of this now (several by myself as I simulated other players in an attempt to get my head around what is going on in this game), a few games with my wife (two-players) and my game group (4 players) and, if I were to bottom line this, I would say: this game needs more time in development.

Setup

When Hedge Mage is set up and ready to play, this image shows what one player might see:

[caption id="attachment_301166" align="aligncenter" width="600"] One Player's Setup[/caption]

So let’s break this down:

• Three gnome ceremony cards are selected at random. This will be one card for each type of gnome (pumpkin, flower, and mushroom).
• On the players’ garden boards, there are spaces that are of a darker color of green. Six of those spaces are numbered. The pumpkin and mushroom gnome ceremony cards have…

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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,…

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A little glimpse into my past: Video games were a major passion of mine before I discovered the joys of board games. I doubt my story is unique—like many PC gamers back then, I was obsessed with first-person shooters. But my second love was racing games, though not the uber-realistic sims. I gravitated towards the arcadey racers, where drifting and nitro boosts flowed as freely as coins in a Mario game.

As someone who loves board games and has a soft spot for racing video games, my options are quite slim. For the past few years, the only racing board game that has truly captured my heart is HEAT: Pedal to the Metal. However, that game focuses more on hand management than delivering an authentic racing experience. Most other racing board games either lean too heavily on dice rolls or become ridiculously convoluted in their attempts to simulate the intricate details of an F1 race.

REM Racer promises to be none of these things. The track doesn’t have a grid to represent spaces on the board. Instead, you move your vehicles using template movement rulers that you would find in a miniatures wargame. That’s not a surprise, because the publisher behind this one is Corvus Belli, a Spanish company. Corvus Belli is mostly known for their miniatures wargame, Infinite,…

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