“Daddy? Is this a math game?”

My son recently helped me rip open a box of new games from our partners at Blue Orange, including the new game Scatter Brain. The package was interesting—a pink snow globe-style head on a small tin can that looked like it held a small treasure trove of cards. My son then read the side of the container:

“Scatter Brain–The Quick-Thinking Match & Grab Counting Game.”

Yep, sounds like a math game to me!

Scatter Brain attempts to carry on the great tradition of other real-time snatch/slap/grab games at our house such as Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, Gimme That!, Galaxy Trucker, and to a certain degree, co-op games like Quicksand. Somebody scatters 10 cards on the table, featuring numbers that range from 3-18. Then someone rolls the four pink dice before people scramble to grab any cards that match either a single die face or a total based on any number of rolled dice.

For example, let’s say there’s an 11 on the table. If three of the rolled dice showed a six, four, and one, that equals the card’s total, so it’s a legal grab. Any cards grabbed illegally cause the person who touched those cards to miss…

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The cooperative games that I come back to time and again are consistently those with heavy communication restrictions. When done right, encumbrance leads to moments of discovery, as the players discover the sorts of creativity that only exist in the presence of narrow parameters. Much as Japanese poets find remarkable beauty in seventeen syllables, so the arc of an entire round of The Crew can be indicated with a single card. Restrictions breed innovation, exploration, and discovery. Without walls to bind us in, we have nothing to push against.

The restrictions placed on you by Ritual, a cooperative game from designer Tomás Tarragón and publisher Strohmann Games, are near-total. It is meant to be played in complete silence. Your only means of communicating is indirect, implied in the action you choose to perform each turn.

Each player begins the game with four random gems and a card. The cards show some combination of gems: five in a single color, three each in two different colors, or two each in three different colors. In order to progress through the round, players have to help one another collect their sets by making smart use of the actions available: Take a gem from your left; Pass a gem to anyone else; Place a gem on the placard that indicates you would like…

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Project GIPF is a series of eight abstract strategy games designed by Kris Burm. Each game features a hexagonal playing area and involves a dwindling of either pieces or playing area mechanic. The way they approach these elements is not only unique, but combines what I feel are the best qualities in most abstracts: simple rules that reveal complex game play.

If you’ve never heard the games within Project GIPF, GIPF, TAMSK, ZÈRTZ, DVONN, YINSH, PÜNCT, TZAAR, and LYNGK, I encourage you to seek them out, either in cardboard and bakelite or digitally online. They are well worth your time.

Today’s game: TAMSK

[caption id="attachment_296560" align="aligncenter" width="500"] TAMSK: The box[/caption]

Before I start, I know some diehards may object to TAMSK being included here. That’s because in 2007, when Brum introduced TZAAR, he stated that it was replacing TAMSK in Project GIPF. Fine. When you write your review of Project GIPF, feel free to leave it out. Having played TAMSK, I know it deserves to be mentioned anytime Project GIPF comes up.

That’s because TAMSK, a game about balancing the falling sands of time against a quickly shrinking board, is a great game. A great game. 

Playing the Game

Players start with the hexagonal, black board situated between them.…

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I don’t know why this is, but suddenly, dexterity games with sand timers are very, very hot.

Maybe “hot” is the wrong term, but it’s a strange coincidence that of the 40+ games I grabbed at SPIEL 2023, two of them featured sand timers as their main mechanism. Quicksand (Horrible Guild) was the first of these two, and I really enjoyed that experience thanks to the player scaling—Quicksand has a solo mode and accommodates up to seven players—and great depth, thanks to 20+ scenarios included in the box.

Skyrockets (Floodgate Games) is an updated version of Kites. In fact, it is so similar that the game’s BGG page says that Skyrockets “reimplements” Kites; officially, this is an updated version of the older game.

Let’s make one thing clear right away: if you do not own either version, Skyrockets is the definitive Kites game you should own. I thought Kites was great and frankly did not need a new version, but if you are shopping at your local game store and are staring at both games on a shelf, buy Skyrockets.

Skyrockets takes everything great about Kites, then adds a mechanic that makes the entire game slightly more forgiving. Then, Skyrockets goes for replayability gold thanks to 11 “Festivals” included in the box, with…

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Into the Metaverse

If you’re anything like me, you’ve dabbled in the Collectible Card Game (CCG) world at some point. Whether it’s Pokémon, Magic: the Gathering, the newly-released Disney Lorcana, or any number of the hundreds of other CCGs on the market, it’s not uncommon for board game enthusiasts to wind up with a passing interest in CCGs at some point. For those unfamiliar with the typical experience, it goes a little something like this: you buy packs of random cards to rip open in hopes of finding a super rare card, you build a deck of cards from the random cards you open, and you go to tournaments or game nights where you do battle against others with your deck. Of course, that’s only one aspect of the hobby. Some people are collectors who just like to collect everything; others use the hobby to make money by selling individual cards to game stores; and some just like the art and the theme.

Millennium Blades is a hilarious love letter to CCGs and nerd culture at large. The experience is so heavily defined by typical CCG tropes and experiences that I would wager it’s hard to get the whole experience of this game if you've never dabbled in those worlds. This game is explicitly tied to its theme, and…

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Did you know that the guy who designed The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is also the brains behind one of the best deductive game series on the market?

Thomas Sing has designed both of The Crew games (published by KOSMOS). The Crew is one of the reasons why it feels like billions of trick-taking games hit the market over the last 3-4 years. Sing has also designed five games in the family deductive game series The Key, published by HABA.

I reviewed three of the five games last spring in a single review. The mix of real-time investigation and a scoring system that rewards efficiency was a winner in my household; my kids love these games!

If you have never played The Key, feel free to read my previous article detailing the play system. Nothing has changed with Royal Star Casino Burglary except the criminals and the types of puzzles that can be solved here. Don’t worry, no spoilers here! I will talk about the puzzle format this time around to give you a sense of whether this game is right for you.

Tetris!

In Royal Star Casino Burglary, three criminals have broken into the vaults of a casino and tried to make…

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There’s nothing quite like the particular feeling that comes from seeing people enjoy the fruits of your personal labor. If you knit, or cook, or fix up old cars, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a warmth in experiencing the joy of others and knowing you did that. The hours you spent crocheting that hat were worth it, because it’s keeping your friend’s head warm. You were worried you added too much paprika, but look how much everyone is enjoying the cream chicken.

It doesn’t even need to be something that serves the joy of other people. Maybe you make your own furniture, or you paint watercolors you’re never going to show anybody else. The making of things is a deeply personal experience, and probably our best way of proving to ourselves that we exist in this world. We need it.

The Promise of the Premise

Unboxed, from designer Jordan Sorenson and publisher WizKids, has a marvelous premise. You play as archeology students on a dig who have come across the remains of a series of ancient games. Given nothing but a (miraculously) complete set of components and a few hieroglyphics, you are tasked as a group with figuring out how exactly these games were played.

Isn’t that wonderful? I was enamored with it from the moment…

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Back in 2021, I had the chance to review Dungeon Scrawlers: Heroes of Undermountain from WizKids. Since then, Heroes of Undermountain has consistently stayed in my gaming rotation. It’s fast, it’s kid-friendly, and it’s relatively easy to teach. When I learned about the Heroes of Waterdeep expansion, I had only one question: what could they possibly add to this game?

Complex City

Truth be told, Heroes of Waterdeep is more of a standalone sequel to Heroes of Undermountain. The gameplay is familiar: players simultaneously race and trace their way through identical dry-erase dungeon maps while grabbing treasure, eliminating monsters, and generally scoring points in various D&D-themed ways. (You can find a more thorough explanation of play at the review linked above.)

[caption id="attachment_286979" align="alignnone" width="961"] Several of the new dungeons are based in the city of Waterdeep and have a slightly more urban feel.[/caption]

Of course, this version sports a few new features. The most immediately obvious is the set of cards that come along with the standard double-sided player sheets. There are five character cards, swapping the original game’s sturdy cardboard for dry-erase so that players can track their score across all three rounds. This is a nice quality-of-life addition, though the new cards only include a graphical representation…

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I would imagine, to a game designer, each of life’s moments presents an opportunity. They simply must for a game like Paku Paku to exist. How else does a disheveled pile of dollhouse dishes end in shouting panda-themed madness? 

Panda, fill thine belly!

Each of the five wooden dice in Paku Paku contains some combination of green smiling pandas, red dish icons, and/or the numbers one and two. At the outset, these dice are passed out one at a time until they are all out. With up to eight players, some may begin empty-handed. In the center of the table are twenty four plain white Barbie dishes (plates, bowls, and cups), a handful of penalty markers, and a Table board. 

One…two…three…Paku Paku! Simultaneously, players begin rolling the dice in front of them. When a number comes up, they roll again. When a smiling panda comes up, that die is passed left. When a red dish comes up, a single dish must be added to the stack in the center of the table board before rolling again. If at any time a player is rolling more than the allotted limit of dice (which changes, depending on the player count) or if they knock over the stack of dishes, someone yells Paku, Stop! The offending player then rolls the dice in…

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When a friend expressed interest in playing Bullet⭐, the fully-compatible sequel to Bullet♥︎, I was in the unusual position of having to tell him to read the manual. This almost never happens, but the circumstances were exceptional.

When I came back fifteen minutes later, I asked him if he knew how to play.

“Yes. It’s basically a mobile app that steals your data.”

Starlight Express

Bullet⭐ is, indeed, basically a mobile app. 1-4 players rush—this is a real-time game—to use cards and abilities to remove colored Bullets from their boards. These Bullets are drawn at random from each player’s personal bag, and added to their personal board. Bullets have numbers on them, indicating the number of empty spaces they cross before stopping. If a Bullet should happen to make it all the way to the bottom of your board, it takes away some of your health.

Bullets are removed by playing cards from your hand that depict something akin to a tetromino. Certain spaces have to contain a bullet, certain spaces have to be empty. Once Bullet tokens have been lined up appropriately, which almost never happens without you using…

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Every now and then something lands on my desk that charms me completely. Something irresistibly playful, smart and altogether beautiful. Something I can’t help but pore over, a fidget spinner for the mind.

Let me tell you about 21X.

Algebraic Blackjack

The goal of 21X is to get as close to 21 as possible without going over. Each round you receive two cards, the value of which might be fixed or could be determined by the number of cards you have (N) and/or an integer of your choosing (X).

You might be dealt these cards:

[caption id="attachment_269544" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Your starting cards are -5 and 8X.[/caption]

The total value of these cards is (-5 + 8X), but since you can choose the value of X you have some flexibility. If X is 1 then your total would be 3. If X is 2 then it's 11. With 3 you’re up to 19 and might call ‘Stick’, challenging your opponents to beat your score within a minute. But that leaves you open to someone else reaching 21 in that time so you might instead ‘Twist’ and take another card.

[caption id="attachment_269545" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Your third card is 3N.[/caption]

Since you’ve got three cards, N…

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Unlock! is a good friend of the family here at Meeple Mountain. We’ve reviewed all the following games from this “escape room” game series: Escape Adventures, Secret Adventures, Mystery Adventures and Exotic Adventures.

When publisher Space Cowboys (through their distributor, Asmodee) reached out with a copy of 2021’s Unlock! Legendary Adventures for review, I was excited to run through another escape room-style single-play mystery game. I’ve played so many over the last year or so: four of the Unsolved Case Files games from Pressman, two of the Cold Case games from ThinkFun, Suspects: The MacGuffin Affair from Studio H, and a couple of the EXIT games.

But I hadn’t played any of the Unlock! games. Trying out a new series that is already so well loved by the team was pretty cool.

For some notes on how to play an Unlock! title, you can re-read my colleague Ashley’s review of Escape Adventures. All the games play using the same systems—the use of an app, a deck of cards, and a one-hour time limit to solve that specific mystery. I’ll summarize my final thoughts about the three cases included in Unlock! Legendary Adventures in this spoiler-free review!

Action Story (Easy)

Let’s start…

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I’ll be the first to admit that while I am not religious, I do love a good Advent calendar.

24 days of candy? Yes please. 24 days of miniature boozy gifts? Absolutely. 24 days of Harry Potter LEGO toys? The kids say thank you.

We have 3-4 Advent calendars on the mantle every year, so when our partners at KOSMOS offered to send a copy of Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar: The Hunt for the Golden Book, I jumped at the chance. If you are familiar with the Exit games, you know you are getting top-notch puzzles from the brains of Inka & Markus Brand. The Brands are designers of classics such as Rajas of the Ganges and Village, and they have essentially focused on Exit and other family games over the last five years or so.

With the Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar entries (there is one other Advent Calendar game, The Mystery of the Ice Cave), you are getting something that just fits well with a family on the go: 24 bite-sized puzzles that take 15-30 minutes to wrap up.

My Favorite Way to Exit

I can only tell you so much about The Golden Book without giving it all away; while there is technically a plot to the story here, your main focus is on solving each…

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