Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In my Focused on Feld series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2010’s Spiel mit Lukas: Dribbel-Fieber, his 11th game. One of two games in Queen Games’ Spiel mit Lukas line of games, Dribbel-Fieber was Stefan Feld’s very first and, so far, only co-design (co-designed with Wolfgang Panning).

From the moment that I latched onto Stefan Feld as a designer who I wanted to collect, I knew there were two titles that it was going to be next to impossible for me to obtain. The first, Strasbourg, was long out of print and apparently so good that nobody wanted to let go of it. The second was Spiel mit Lukas: Dribbel-Fieber (or, simply, Dribbel-Fieber for short), a game that didn’t see a large print run, was only available in German, was long out of print, and was highly sought after for its rarity. I had a good…

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This might sound like a bad thing, but here’s a surprise: I like dice and I like charts. I also like simultaneous play which, for the most part, Lords of Baseball manages to pull off with aplomb.

Cards. Lots of Cards.

The game might be what some would call a CDG (card-driven game), but if you’re looking for something in the vein of Twilight Struggle or COIN, you’re likely going to be disappointed. LoB takes a more loosey-goosey approach to hand and card management.

Basically, it goes like this. You have a player board with your stats. You’ve got a money tracker, a tracker for prospects, a tracker for regular players, a tracker for your GM, Front office, and a few other stats. You add together these stats to determine your team’s quality, which we’ll come back to later.

The game is highly procedural. First, you get dealt “Spring Training” cards (3), plus additional if you have raised your farm system tracker. You can also turn in media tokens to get more cards, but you’re never going to have more than 5 going…

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I’m a pretty big fan of the games Challengers! and Challengers! Beach Cup, games that have often been referred to as “War: The Deckbuilding Game” by friends in my game circles. This is fair—players compete in a game of capture the flag against a single opponent (with as many as four minigames taking place at the same time) by slowly revealing cards from their decks in order to take control of the flag in an attempt to outlast a rival.

In a fun attempt to simulate a real-world sports playoff structure, the two players with the most points at the end of Challengers! go head-to-head to play one final match to determine the game’s overall winner. By the end, the player with the winning deck has usually been quite strategic in building a deck that has a number of card synergies that helped the player win.

After three plays of the new game Golden Cup (2024, Cranio Creations), it is clear that Challengers! had at least a moderate influence on this new design. Players manage a team of shoddy players competing to win the “Fantasphere”, a sport that looks like it might be a cross between soccer, baseball, and volleyball (based on the shape of the oversized ball pictured on the box cover). Over six rounds, players…

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Snooker has never made sense to me. On those rare occasions when an American has cause to observe snooker, it seems impenetrable. Some balls get pocketed, and stay that way. Others get pocketed, and a man with white velvet gloves puts them back on the table. It’s all very quiet and intentional and I haven’t the slightest idea as to what’s going on. Not that I ever read the rules.

Carrooka, handmade in England by carpenter Jack Furnival, is an attempt to bring snooker into the home, a marriage of billiards rules with the disk flicking of crokinole and carrom. It’s a beautifully realized idea. The level of craftsmanship is immediately impressive. If the price tag (around $220) causes you to catch your breath, just know that it is justified. One man made this massive thing, with evident care and attention, out of high-quality materials.

All of that is well and good, but means little if the game is not fun. Carrooka is excellent. My first few…

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As a board game reviewer, I frequently venture into the unexplored realms of tabletop gaming. While the masses hunt for the latest offerings from first-rate publishers, I find a unique excitement in unearthing games yet to grace store shelves or Kickstarter campaigns. Sometimes this leads to interesting gems, while others remind me why not every game is published.

Runner Tactics is a game where these two perceptions are engaged in endless combat. While its core concept is undeniably intriguing, certain aspects of its product design and gameplay raise questions about its readiness for the spotlight. Of course, for you to understand where I’m coming from, we need to delve into this game’s mechanisms.

In a few words, Runner Tactics is a strategic, grid-based, two-player programming game where the players will draft a team of three members for a 3 vs 3 match. Instead of abilities, each member has their own movement range and attack pattern. On the field itself, there are two lines, similar to a North American Football field. The objective is easy: Eliminate your opponent’s team or, at the end of any round, have more members on the other side of the line than your opponent.

Gridiron Hussle

Turns are as simple as the objective. You put a big wooden player shield in front of you and…

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Racing games have been around for a long time in the board game world. You can even classify games like Sorry, Candyland, and Snakes & Ladders as racing games. They involve moving pieces from a starting point to an end point, with the player reaching the finish line first being declared the winner.

However, if we narrow our focus to motorsports-themed racing games, the options become surprisingly scarce, as the majority of published board racing games revolve around either NASCAR or Formula 1 racing. Rallyman: DIRT stands out as perhaps one of the few examples of modern rally racing board games, a niche within the broader world of motorsports.

It's a pity to point out that rally racing, despite its thrilling nature, often gets overlooked in the motorsports hierarchy. This sport involves pushing high-performance vehicles to their limits on terrain unsuitable for such extreme driving conditions. It's this contrasting dynamic that makes rally racing exhilarating.

From a game design perspective, the sport of rallying offers a wealth of opportunities that go beyond simply replicating famous circuits like the Monaco GP, which is a common approach in many other racing games. Rally racing allows for the incorporation of diverse challenges such as uphill and downhill sections, jumps, drifting maneuvers, shortcuts, and treacherous surface conditions. As a game genre, rally racing…

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Button Shy games have a certain set of characteristics: they are eminently portable (18 cards in a plastic wallet sized sleeve), they’re easy to teach (the rules live on a piece of paper smaller than a paperback book page), they have a surprising depth of gameplay. Super Slopes, one of the newest games from the micro-game titan certainly fits those criteria: a ski run packed with yetis, energy drinks, forest hazards, and as many points as you can grab on the way down the mountain. Let’s find out more about Super Slopes.

Super Slopes Overview

In Super Slopes you’ll build your own unique ski run by drawing cards from a shared face up display. After selecting your card you’ll place it onto your map in “bricklaying fashion”, either side of an existing card, or top and bottom offset. After each player has drawn a number of cards—dictated by player count—the game ends and scoring takes place.

Selecting a card

When cards are initially placed into the main display, they’re arranged in descending order (based on the number in the top left corner). You may only select a card whose “leg” connects to the ski run which begins at the topmost card. There are 3 exceptions to this rule, based…

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Although the NBA is my main port of call when it comes to sports passion, I used to be a bigger fan of baseball.

I grew up in Rochester, New York, watching the Rochester Red Wings (a AAA affiliate that fed the Baltimore Orioles at the time) at a podunk field a half-hour from my house. It was great. Cheap tickets and cheaper food, with every seat in the house providing a fantastic view of the field. The best thing about the Red Wings? They played against all of the other teams that were the final farm system stop for the teams I really cared about, like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. It was cool to get a preview of the players who would eventually end up on the biggest stage.

I played baseball from T-ball leagues all the way through high school. Like most prospects, my dreams were make-or-break based on the breaking ball. I was a home run-hitting outfielder and first baseman, and I had the chance to start on my high school team through sophomore year.

Then, during my junior year, it seemed like everyone was throwing curveballs. And, so began the end of those aforementioned dreams. (I’ll always have softball, though. Even though it feels too easy, I love hitting home…

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My favorite sport by a country mile is professional basketball, specifically the National Basketball Association (NBA). And as much as I love the NBA, the NBA playoffs are magic. (And speaking of magic, Magic Johnson was my favorite player growing up and the “Showtime” Lakers of the 1980s are still my favorite stretch of NBA history.)

Another year of great playoff action has recently wrapped up. During the playoffs this year, I worked through a review copy of the game Basketboss (2022, BoardGameTables, the publisher that is now known as AllPlay).

Basketboss is an auction game with minor, draftable player powers that plays in about 45 minutes with 2-5 players. It’s also a hoot for an NBA junkie like me, even someone who also dabbles in the WNBA and follows women’s college hoops.

That’s because all of the available players for each “manager” (you, the gamer) are shadily-named current and former hoopers like Shane Berlin (say it fast and it sounds a lot like some guy named Wilt Chamberlain), Ellis Odman (quite possibly Dennis Rodman), Suzanne Flight (bears a striking resemblance to Sue Bird) and Yanis Anotheroopoh (you may have heard of a gentleman named Giannis Antetokounpo).

In this regard, Basketboss nails the street cred elements of the theme. Is the game any good?

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For most people skateboarding may seem like a relatively recent fad that only evolved in the 1980s, but it’s actually been around for more than 75 years. The first skateboards of the 1940s and 1950s were homemade inventions, a fusion of roller skates and salvaged wood meant to emulate the feel of surfing with none of the waves. Treated as a niche curiosity for a few decades, skateboards were mostly used for simple stunts. That is, until the infamous Zephyr team and their unorthodox style revolutionized skating forever.

The Zephyr team, known colloquially as the Z-Boys (with apologies to Peggy Oki), was a group of 12 skaters from California who brought a streetwise, surfing-heavy skillset to the sport of skateboarding. They carved along banks the same way that surfers carve along waves. They practiced in empty swimming pools–usually when the unwitting pool owners weren’t home. They showed how to slide the board along railings and copings, launched themselves into the air with unusual aerial moves, and invented outlandish tricks that emphasized personal style in addition to technical ability.

In the following decades, skateboarding became increasingly mainstream while still keeping its countercultural edge. Punk and hip-hop made perfect partners for skateboarding’s energetic audience, and the low requirements for participation helped it spread across the world. Famed Z-Boy Stacy Peralta mentored…

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Tennis is a fun game with a rich, centuries-old tradition. Conceptually simple, easy to learn, and hard to master, tennis has already been transported to the tabletop in the form of Ping Pong. But can the “sport of kings” serve up big fun as a card game?

Overview

Game! Set! Match! is a lightweight, 2-4 player card game for ages 13+ with a playing time of 30-45 minutes. Players will choose between identical red or blue decks and play both their cards and tokens (in the shape of tennis balls) to gain momentum throughout each mini game. The player who takes 6 mini games first is declared the overall winner.

How To Play

Game! Set! Match! is delightfully simple to setup and play. Like most centuries-old sports, tennis has unintuitive scoring terms, with points scoring “Love,” 15, 30, 40, and sometimes “Deuce.” (There are multiple theories on how these terms originated.) Fear not, because Game! Set! Match! has tracks that smoothly manage scoring regardless of your tennis background.

The board features a central Momentum track shaped like a tennis stadium with numbered spaces 0-19. During each mini game, two colored tokens (1 red & 1 blue) start at “0” and race…

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I was born and raised in Connecticut, only son to the youngest daughter of a man who made a modest fortune working as an executive for a local utility company. My grandfather, my mother, and I had season tickets for the Candlewood Playhouse, a regional theater that played host to touring productions of no insignificant quality. I briefly attended Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in Massachusetts. I own, or rather I have owned over the course of my life, many polo shirts.

What I mean to say, dear reader, is that I have played golf.

Is it my first choice of activity? No. I’d rather be watching a movie, reading a book, riding my bike, or playing a board game. My parents enjoy it, though, and it’s nice to spend a few distraction-free hours with them. In some ways, I think golf serves for them the same purpose that board games do for me: it’s an activity that gets everyone off their phones and into the present moment. While it can be difficult to get my parents to sit down for a game together, Seabrook Studios and designer Ryan Boucher have attempted to bridge our very specific gap by releasing a second edition of 18 Holes, a hand-management golf game.

18 Holes Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Years ago, SEGA put out a soccer management video game called Football Manager. The game was similar to the Franchise mode in the Madden franchise of video games, where players could focus more on how a team plays each game than the playing of the sport itself. I recently downloaded the 2022 Xbox version of Football Manager and the amount of things to think about was dizzying, maybe even too intense for what I was looking for in a video game experience.

Months ago, I read up on a board game version of these video games that was coming to tabletop. In time for the World Cup, Eleven: Football Manager Board Game (2022, Portal Games) has arrived. Eleven is the most thematic game to hit my table in months, and has some of the things I loved most about The Networks (2016, Formal Ferret Games) without the tongue-in-cheek approach.

Eleven is a game about soccer (or football, if you’re living anywhere outside of the US). It’s about the economics of managing a soccer club, putting the right players on the field, board room decisions and even getting sponsors for your team. There are a lot of fiddly bits to the process here, but this is the closest I have ever seen to a game about the business of…

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