A Brief History

Back when I was in the Navy, I became enamored with the game designer Richard Garfield. He had designed two games I enjoyed in those days: Magic: The Gathering and RoboRally. We had a blast playing these games... and one other game: The Great Dalmuti. When I was introduced to Gang of Four, it was described as a sort of hybrid of Dalmuti and Poker. And I think this is an accurate description.

• In Gang of Four you are dealt a hand of cards you are trying to get rid of (like in Dalmuti).
• The player who did most poorly in the previous hand had to exchange their best card with the person who did best in the previous hand (like in Dalmuti).
• The player that leads determines how many cards need to be used in a play for that round (like in Dalmuti).
• The hands are ranked exactly as they are in Poker.

This is where the similarities end, however.

A Very Cool Deck of Cards

Gang of Four is a game for four players. At the start of each hand, each player is dealt 16 cards. The object is to get rid of all of your cards and catch the remaining players with as many cards in their hand as…

The post Gang of Four Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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.

Anyone that has followed my work for the past few years knows that I have a weird affection for the deckbuilding genre. I have been into deckbuilders since the days of Ascension and Dominion, and my first handful of reviews were deckbuilders. Because of this experience, it’s hard for me to get interested in any random deckbuilder.

Queen by Midnight’s hook is that’s a battle royale with a heavy emphasis on diplomacy and a round limit. Yes, a round limit, in a deckbuilder game. Absolutely bonkers proposition that engrossed me enough to play the game and spend some time writing many sentences about it.

The plot is not too hard to understand. The Queen is dead and her last wish is to have a trial by combat with the deadline being midnight. Six princesses show up and you know the ending to this one.

Like many other deckbuilders, the starting deck is full of money cards that you use for the first few rounds to buy new cards to improve your deck. So far that seems quite straightforward, until you look at your options to buy. While this does use Ascensions’ familiar “market row” system where you buy your cards from a row, the similarities end there.

Dealt a Royal Hand

On your Princess playmat, you have a “Vault…

The post Queen by Midnight Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

In the sea of historical, card-driven war games, the COIN series (short for COunter-INsurgency) from GMT Games has always stood out to me because its subject material is precisely NOT what most others are: large, national superpowers fighting one another in historically well-known and globally impactful (but otherwise covered-to-death in the wargaming space) conflicts. From the Colombian government hunting down Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel (Andean Abyss, Volume I) to Mohandas Gandhi’s civil resistance against colonial rule (Gandhi, Volume IX) to a bloody civil war in Finland (All Bridges Burning, Volume X) the COIN series focuses on smaller guerilla, revolutionary, and civilian fighters and protesters taking on the powerful, ruling parties (as well as one another), using asymmetric powers, variable winning conditions, and an innovative turn structure to produce some of the most compelling war games I’ve ever played.

A quick COIN gameplay overview: Using a deck of Event cards, players take actions on their turn (based on the faction initiative on each card) with the resources at their disposal, attempting to reach their unique winning condition. A small number of cards, spaced out and mixed into the Event deck, lead to a “victory check” when flipped up, and if no player has reached their particular winning condition, there is some shuffling of the map, resources, and/or pieces, and…

The post People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1981-1986 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.

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,…

The post Ultimate Voyage Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Pax Penning, like all the Pax games, has Things on Its Mind. The entire Pax family is concerned with political turbulence and periods of significant change. Your job, from one design to the next, is to ride the waves as best you can. Unlike most games, the pieces on the board in Pax designs do not belong to any one player. You may control them temporarily, but nothing is yours, nothing is mine. It’s all a loose series of associations and temporary partnerships.

Pax Penning is not part of the formal Pax series, which primarily consists of games from designer Phil Eklund and publisher Ion Game Design, but it is clearly made in the same spirit. It earns the title. Players represent the various Houses in the town of Sigtuna, ca. 1000 CE, navigating the political ramifications of changes implemented by the first Christian King of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung. You have to decide whether or not you support him.

The ways in which you answer that question are abstracted enough that it’s easy to forget what you're…

The post Pax Penning Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The post Evil Corp. Game Video Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Nights of Fire is a block wargame, a genre that seems by and large to have fallen out of style. Was it ever in style? I actually don’t know the level of relative ubiquity block wargames achieved.

It seems like a great format. Units are printed on one side of chunky wooden blocks, and typically angled so that a player knows their own units without knowing anyone else’s. Block wargames incorporate bluffing, memory, and dramatic reveals, which are all good things. I feel like blocks should be a fixture of game design. Maybe the problem is that, outside of Stratego, they’ve seldom been attached to approachable games.

[caption id="attachment_295914" align="alignnone" width="1024"] On the other hand, maybe block wargames haven't caught on with the greater public because they're so hard to photograph without professional lighting...[/caption]

Nights of Fire: Battle for Budapest, the second game in a Hungarian Revolution diptych from designer Dávid Turczi and publisher Mighty Boards, aims to address that. While Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 focused on the initial uprising…

The post Nights of Fire: Battle for Budapest Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 is a cooperative game in which one-to-four players work together during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when students attempted an overthrow of the ruling Communist Party. The game also includes a one-v-all mode, with one player taking on the role of the oppressor. Both play similarly, with only mild differences between them. Since most of my plays were cooperative, I’m going to default to describing that mode.

The fundamentals of the Days of Ire system aren’t too far from Pandemic, the cooperative Allfather. The board is a network of locations throughout Budapest, each filled with potential allies and enemy forces. Players take turns to execute actions with the goal of clearing events and removing Soviet forces.

Player count determines the number of actions each turn. You can move, activate fighters, resolve events, attack militia, destroy tanks, and give/take cards. Some cards have free actions, while others include resources that can be used to resolve the aforementioned events. Say, for example, that an event pops up in the Radio location which requires one Intelligence. You’d need to have either an active fighter at the location with Intelligence…

The post Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The British Empire was having a bit of a time in the aftermath of World War II. To put it succinctly, the empire was crumbling. Colonial subjects had fought alongside the British in WWII, and now they returned home with military training and a sense of self-worth. Those pesky natives, you know. Don’t they appreciate that we brought them crumpets, cricket, and the eternal gift of an inbred’s face on their money?

The British Empire was an exquisite PR machine, telling its citizens and the world that this empire was different, sharing care and civilization with the savagery of the world. Never mind the fact that every empire has told that lie. For some reason, this time, it took. When she died, people were shocked—shocked!—to hear of the things that happened under Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Most people didn’t hear about them at all.

Flip a COIN

The British Way: Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire is one of the more recent entries in GMT’s popular COunterINsurgency (COIN) series, an ever-expanding collection of titles about guerrilla warfare and resistance movements. I don’t know enough about the politics of the series to delve into that, but I know enough to know that they are a hot-button topic. There is at least…

The post The British Way: Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

One of the many advantages of getting intellectual property for your board game is leveraging the audience to look at your project. For example, developing games based on well-known franchises like Marvel or Game of Thrones allows you to tap into those brands' existing fanbases. Fans of the IP are likely to take an interest in a related game, even if just to check it out briefly via marketing materials or initial coverage.

Which leads to my confusion about today’s game, The Last Kingdom. Based on an obscure Netflix show, it only made a blip on my radar due to some YouTube hype around it, calling it a “hidden gem” or “game of the year.” After checking them out and realizing that this is an area control drafting game where you can switch allegiances, I had to see this one to the end.

The Last Kingdom throws you a position of power of the political kind. You are a figure of importance during a time when the Saxons and Danes are having a series of cultural exchanges on the battlefield. Like any other board game, your power in this world is measured through victory points.

Based on that description, one can easily assume that this is a Risk-style or “dudes on a map” board game, and they would be…

The post The Last Kingdom Board Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

During an interview on the podcast 5 Games for Doomsday, designer Mark Herman discussed two different approaches to historical board games. He said that games can work like simulations, recreating the events more or less as they happened, or they can work to put you in the headspace of that moment. To illustrate his point, he used one of his own games.

In Empire of the Sun, which depicts the Pacific Theater during World War II, neither player knows if the atomic bomb will come into play. It’s possible to go an entire game without seeing it. Why does that matter? In real life, neither Japan nor the vast majority of the U.S. military knew about the bomb, until suddenly they did. If either party had, they would have made different decisions.

 If Harry Truman knew about the bomb before he did, the United States Military and other allies wouldn’t have planned an invasion of the Japanese mainland. If Japan knew the United States had the capacity to instantly end the lives of some 80,000 people in Hiroshima, to say nothing of people who died later from hunger, injuries, or radiation sickness, they may well have surrendered earlier, or never entered the conflict in the first place. To play knowing that the atomic bomb is coming is to fundamentally…

The post The Barracks Emperors Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.