A Brief History

I do not recall the first time I played this game, but I do recall loving it for years and years. The best sessions of Diplomacy were while I was in the Navy. We had a six-month deployment, so what we would do is handle the game one move per day. Players had a 24-hour window to secretly negotiate and scheme with each other: and scheme they did!

One person (usually me) would collect the orders from each of the players; at a designated time set so we could all be there, we would run through what took place, adjust the board. Everyone would crib down notes on who was where and then disappear for a few hours. Phone calls would take place. People would meet for lunch or midnight rations. And then, within a couple of hours of game time, I would start getting visited by players as they turned in their orders. One game we played on the USS RANGER lasted over two months. Given that two moves in the game is one year, in that game World War I lasted over 30 years.

Diplomacy is a wonderful game... if you have the right people.

[caption id="attachment_306158" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A classic version of the Diplomacy board.…

The post Diplomacy Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I don’t know that I’ve ever played a more divisive game than Arcs. Cole Wehrle's latest design, unquestionably the most-anticipated board game of 2024, won’t even be out at retail for another two months, but seemingly everyone has already played it, and seemingly everyone has an opinion. Most of those opinions are strong.

This is becoming de rigueur for Wehrle releases. While Root and Pax Pamir are consensus classics—even the people who don’t like them wouldn’t generally argue that they’re bad—Oath had a stark divide between fanatics and detractors. You don’t meet many people who think Oath is “fine” and have nothing more to say on the matter. Arcs, from my experience so far, is plowing a similar furrow. For every “I enjoy Arcs, and would happily play it any time” or “Arcs is the greatest board game ever made” you hear, there exists an “I get what it’s trying to do, but I don’t think it does it” or “Oh, I hate Arcs” to balance it out.

It is now my job to not only reconcile these viewpoints, but to assign an objective numerical value to my play experience. It is my job to solve Arcs. Sure. Simple enough.

Arcs Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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…

The post The Warp Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Over the course of several months, I led a group of six players through the Grand Campaign scenario from Europa Universalis: The Price of Power. For 4-6 hours a day, every other Sunday, we would convene around the gaming table, remind ourselves of where we left off, and get to the business of running the great nations of Europe in the 16th century.

All six players were acquainted with Europa Universalis IV (EUIV), the massive computer game that served as source material for this massive board game. Several of them had put thousands of hours into exploring its nooks and crannies. This isn't, I am told, unusual. EUIV is the type of game that consumes lives. It is one of PC gaming's largest sandboxes. “I mean, it's a Paradox game,” people would say over and over, the developer's name considered enough of an explanation.

The first EU computer game, released back in 2000, was itself adapted from a 1993 board game of the same name. Given that, a modern board game adaptation feels inevitable. It also feels ludicrous. The Price of Power…

The post Europa Universalis: The Price of Power Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Cosmic Encounter is a classic. It is a bright and shining star in the history of board game design. When I introduce the game to new players, I have encountered a few who hear ‘variable player powers’ and begin to doze off. I get it. The idea of an asymmetric game allowing players to break the rules in unique ways is fairly common these days.

These days.

Set the wayback machine to 1977, however, and this game is nothing short of revolutionary. It’s like the film Citizen Cane. Kids watching it for the first time today look at how the story unfolds, how it was filmed, what it does, and they have no idea! They think it’s quaint, or even old fashioned, but they do not see the greatness. They fail to grasp how every movie they watch in a theater or over some streaming service today owes that film a sizable debt. It is not a stretch to say that modern cinematic storytelling began with Citizen Cane. Likewise, the modern concept of variable player powers and asymmetric game design began with Cosmic Encounter.

Let’s take a look at this masterpiece.

A Little History

[caption id="attachment_298973" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The science fiction game for everyone.[/caption]

The original Cosmic Encounter was published…

The post Cosmic Encounter Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

[caption id="attachment_297454" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Catan: Starfarers The Box[/caption]

In 1995, Klaus Teuber introduced Settlers of Catan, to the world. It won the Spiel des Jahres that year and, without a trace of hyperbole, changed board gaming forever.

Four years later, Teuber launched his game into outer space with The Starfarers of Catan. This version included a much larger board with planetary systems, new resources to gather, and one large rocket per player. Unfortunately, the production aspects let the game down. The rocket and the pieces that attach to it often broke through repeated play. As a result, Starfarers disappeared from shelves, leaving a mixed legacy behind.

In the years since then, Settlers of Catan has been renamed Catan with many, many expansions. People like me, who had long heard of Starfarers as being better than standard Catan, waited patiently for a Starfarers reprint. In 2019, that reprint finally hit the stores. It came with improved plastic pieces and a modular board. 

But, is Catan: Starfarers really any good? And could it possibly be better than Catan?

Let’s get it to the table to see for ourselves, shall we?

Setup

You’ll start by building the game board. It comes in six 11” x 11” puzzle…

The post Catan: Starfarers Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Let Freedom Ring

Monopoly tends to be a hot-button board game to discuss. Most people grew up with at least one copy floating around somewhere between their family and extended family, and it has remained ubiquitous since its release. There are hundreds of special versions and variations of the game. Famously, Monopoly originated as The Landlord’s Game, designed by American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie. The game wasn’t intended to be a solid bit of game mechanics as much as it was intended to be a statement piece in support of an economic philosophy known as Georgism.

I am not a smart man. If you ask me how the economy works, most times, I would stare at you like a deer in the headlights, grunt, and shrug. But this bit of context is important because Freedom Rings is similar to Monopoly in so many ways. It wears its influence on its sleeve. It’s just that this game happens to be based on a different economic philosophy, taking influence from Stephen Taft’s 2015 book A True Free Market: Conversations on Gaining Liberty and Justice Through Economics. It’s unclear how involved Stephen was in the creation of the game itself, as there are no credits listed on the box or in the rulebook (other than the artist), but the opening…

The post Freedom Rings appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I love an archival project. Publisher Eagle-Gryphon Games went through the notes of legendary designer Sid Sackson, creator of Acquire and Can’t Stop amongst others, and selected four of what he considered his best unpublished games. The results are here, in the two volumes of The Sackson Legacy Collection, which combine those four unpublished games with new printings of two Sackson obscurities.

There is no publisher I would rather have do a project like this. Eagle-Gryphon’s production is always exemplary, luxuriant without being fussy. With Eagle-Gryphon’s typical thick box stock and vibrant colors, these are games that would look good on a bookshelf. I suspect that’s exactly what the team had in mind. All they’re missing, as far as I’m concerned, is a spine number.

I love a spine number.

Blue

The blue volume includes three previously unpublished titles: I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game, Banana Blitz, and Scope.

I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game is a negotiation game inspired by Sackson’s own I’m the Boss!. Players take turns rolling dice, attempting to move to the top of various Expertise tracks while jockeying to negotiate different deals. Any time a player earns enough stars to be the Boss, they…

The post The Sackson Legacy Collection Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The post Royal Punks Game Video Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Between Two Cities is a wonderful game that only gets better when you add the elements of the Capitals expansion. Since I have already covered gameplay in the initial review, this article will cover how the expansion adds to, and changes, the base game.

What’s in the Box?

Between Two Cities is an excellent game on its own. This means that my first question when I became aware of the expansion was: what can they add that would make this game more fun? My first thoughts were empty – I really could not think of much I would want to see added to the game.

The main issue was that the mix of the tiles in the base game was good. I mean really good. If you add in more of those tiles, then they would need to be in the same proportions as the base game, which means why bother? If you were to introduce a bunch of new types of tiles, then they would dilute the originals, making each type harder to accumulate and get good scores.

Nothing came to mind for me. Luckily, Stonemaier Games was not relying on me to come up with new ideas! This is what you get with the expansion:

• Landscape Mats
• Civic Building tiles
• District Cards and scoring tiles

…

The post Between Two Cities: Capitals Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Games are a conversation. In this case, the conversation starts with someone asking how to split up a bunch of money and ends with someone yelling, “I’m the boss!”

I’m the Boss! Which I’m going to not abbreviate so you have to imagine someone yelling it at you every time you read it, is a negotiation game from the 90s from prolific designer Sid Sackson, who is the creator of Acquire, what I consider to be one of the most important branches in game design. He’s also part of a cute BBC documentary that lives on a weird corner of the internet.

If you like your negotiation games light, filled with regular injections of drama, and wrapped up in a little more than an hour, this is the game for you.

The premise of I’m the Boss! is CORPORATION. We’re all departments in a corporation of some kind, business people doing business things. On a turn, you either try to make a deal on the space you’re on, or you roll the dice, moving the deal marker the number of spaces rolled, and then you try to make a deal at the new location, or you draw three cards and your turn is complete. Once a certain number of deals are completed, the game is over.

[caption…

The post I’m the Boss! Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Between Two Cities is a tile-drafting/tile-laying game in which you are collaboratively building two cities, one with the player on your left and one with the player on your right. Each player is attempting to make the livability (point value) of each of their cities as high as possible. In the end, each player’s score is the point value of the lower-valued city upon which they were working.

How to Play Between Two Cities

The seating arrangement is rather important. Before play begins, a card is drawn randomly from a deck of fifteen cards that will describe how to seat the players. Players could be arranged based on their birthdays, the length of their hair, or even a number they were asked to write down. Once everyone is seated, a set of duplex tiles (pieces that have two tiles on them and are played as a unit) are shuffled and placed face down on the table. The remaining singlet tiles are shuffled and placed face down in the box.

Each tile represents a type of building (Factory, House, Office, Park, Shop, or Tavern). When complete, each city will be made up of 16 tiles in a 4×4 grid – while playing, no tile may be placed in such a…

The post Between Two Cities Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

In 1997, Uwe Rosenberg teamed up with the publisher AMIGO to launch an empire. An empire built on beans.

It wasn’t Rosenberg’s first design effort, but it was his first to get picked up by a publisher, and it was a smash hit. It was so well received, in fact, that it was nominated for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres that same year. If Uwe Rosenberg wasn’t on publishers’ radars at that point, he certainly was now.

There’s no denying that Uwe’s masterpiece Bohnanza is a juggernaut. In the 20+ years since its initial release, Bohnanza has spawned multiple expansions, spin-offs, and rethemes. It’s even been redesigned into different formats: the board game version, Bean Trader, in 2002 and the card and dice version, Würfel Bohnanza (later re-released as Bohnanza: Das Würfelspiel in 2022), in 2012. Surprisingly, Bohnanza hasn’t received the roll and write treatment yet, but if you ask me, it’s just a matter of time.

In Bohnanza, you’re a bean farmer tending to your crops, trying to harvest them when the time is right for the greatest profit. If you’re able to earn more coins than your competitors before the game’s end, you win.

Setup

A game of Bohnanza is set up thusly:

Shuffle all the…

The post Ave Uwe: Bohnanza Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.