In Maps of Misterra, you’re playing as explorers, mapping out the island’s landscapes—landscapes that might change from turn to turn, say Mountains become Forests. That’s because there’s a difference between terrain types that are ‘confirmed’ and what your sponsor has said they want to see on your map. Score the most points at the end of the game and you’ll be the winner.

If that sounds a bit confusing, stay with me. The mists will part as we get the game to the table.

[caption id="attachment_305395" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Maps of Misterra: The Box[/caption]

Cartographers At the Ready

You’ll place the large central board in the middle of the table, then hand each player their own smaller version of the map. Depending on the player count, a number of Forests will be placed, full-color side up. (More on this soon.)

[caption id="attachment_305401" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] A 3 or 4 player game ready to be played.[/caption]

Each player will also get a Cartographer of their choice and three Claim tokens in their matching color.

At the top of the board, place the four stacks of terrain tiles full-color side down. Then shuffle the…

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Man, I love a good mobster theme.

That starts with my love for the mainstream Mafia movie canon. Sure, everyone loves the Godfather films…the classics are classic for a reason. Ditto for Goodfellas, Casino, and nearly everything done by Martin Scorsese. I have a preference for flicks like The Untouchables or newer takes like Gangster Town, The Departed (based on a Hong Kong film called Infernal Affairs—which I think is the better film), Public Enemies, and any of the older flicks reminding us of Prohibition-era crime.

I love gang, mobster, and crime themes, to the point where my wife knows that if there’s a new TV show coming out that gives her “those ‘Narcos’ vibes” (her words), I’m going to watch it. Anything featuring illegal drugs, booze, drive-by shootings, and infamous real-world crime figures is a 100% go for my personal viewing tastes.

My appreciation for mobster themes carries over into board games. Whether it is Scarface 1920, La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War, Speakeasy Blues, or The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire, I am all the way in if a game gives me the chance to celebrate the music of the 1920s and 30s, force opposing gang associates to “swim with the fishes”, or drive a car bomb into a neighborhood.

Given this history, it should come…

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The Cartographers system is fantastic. Simple, compelling, creative; it ticks a lot of boxes. Here at Meeple Mountain we’ve already got reviews of the original Cartographers and sequel Cartographers Heroes (with Map Packs 1-3). But 2022 brought three new Map Packs so we’ve equipped our crayons to brave the unknown and document these new environments for the benefit of our readers. Plus at the end we take a quick look at all the currently available mini-expansions. It’s a tough job but someone’s gotta do it.

Map Pack 4 – Frozen Expanse: Realm of Frost Giants

Frozen Expanse introduces three small changes to the standard game: 1) ‘scouted’ squares on the map indicate which terrain type must be placed there; 2) a frozen lake provides a bounty of coins if surrounded; 3) two new ambush cards and one new hero card join the battle.

The scouted spaces (in setting-speak, fragments of known landscape from a previous expedition) restrict the central puzzle in a way that often makes seasonal scoring harder. Most of the time they’re great, adding a satisfying challenge. Occasionally they accentuate those moments when the draw of the explore cards edges the game into more frustrating territory, since scouted spaces can get in the way. Often in both the base…

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Terra Mystica is a sort of game design white whale — there have been dozens and dozens of imitators (Barrage, Horizons, Clans of Caledonia) and even when the designers of the original system have attempted to riff on their own design (Gaia Project), it often feels like some ineffable ingredient, some key to the special sauce, is missing.

I’ll tell you what I think that special sauce is in a minute, but I’m talking about Gold West here, and while Terra Mystica might not be the game design that immediately springs to mind, bear with me.

Gold West is a game by J. Alex Kevern, mostly known for Succulent, World’s Fair 1893, Passing Through Petra, and the under-rated Daxu. The game is relatively straightforward. Each turn, you generate resources, then you move on some tracks, buy an endgame scoring condition, and/or fulfill a contract card. After you’ve done that, you build a camp on the board, a settlement if you’ve got more resources, or you “loot,” which is where you gain resources but build nothing on the board.

The resource engine of the game is the defining puzzle of the enterprise. Many people have compared it to a mancala system like the…

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Clash of Galliformes is a bit of a throwback to when area control games contented themselves with being dumb and proud of it. As a dumbo, I appreciate this. I do not demand intricate combat systems with convoluted rules about order of battle, troop deployment, terrain. I’m not here to be a grognard, dammit, I’m a lord of the giant sage grouse kingdom, and I demand blood, not rules overhead!

[caption id="attachment_302380" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Blood for the bird god![/caption]

I don’t like “animals” or “nature” as a setting for a game. Sorry, Dominant Species, I’d rather play as a man than as a bug. Now, if you cast me as a group of humans who have co-evolved with gigantic landfowl and ride them around like horses, now I’m interested. Thomas, the great Quail-lord. I suppose birds are the exception to my no-animals rule.

Them’s fightin’ birds

Anyway, Clash of Galliformes is an area control euro-puzzle hybrid game where you build bird soldiers, march them around a point-to-point map, take over sites, build outposts on them, and try to level up your bird board to get better powers. At the start, you have a single minion, but you expand to develop greater resource production capacity, and you start collecting chits.

The almighty…

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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’s a departure from the norm. Today, I’m not reviewing a game so much as I am reviewing an experience. And, I’m not doing it alone. Recently, Awaken Realms ran a campaign for a The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition (referred to as Special Edition from here on out) reprint, and that’s caused some chatter in the Meeple Mountain Slack channel.

It turns out, I’m not the only one currently in possession of this magnificent version of this magnificent game. Meeple Mountain’s own (and dare I say ‘magnificent’) Andrew Lynch has also got a copy… and we have some thoughts which we’re excited to share…

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I met with Gigamic during the Festival International des Jeux a few months ago, and they provided a copy of the upcoming Viking-themed tile-laying game Looot.

“I saved this copy just for you!” our friend Rawan said during our marketing meeting. “I think you are going to like this one because we are very excited about it.”

As I say often, publishers say this to me all the time. I always smile, say thanks, and move to my next meeting with the same level of optimism. Gigamic has never led me astray, but tile-laying games are very, very close to the signature cliche “a dime a dozen.” Between high-water abstracts such as Azul, to any number of animal-themed tile layers like Cascadia, to harder puzzles like Calico, to Euro-themed classics like Carcassonne and Tigris & Euphrates, players have hundreds of options in this crowded field.

Still, I think Looot—despite its tricky title, which is one O too heavy for every spell-check tool in the book—is worth a look. That’s because its weight, playtime, and strategic depth give Looot a pretty interesting distinction through the first quarter of 2024: this is the most game you can play in about 30 minutes. Not a lot of games can say that!

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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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Aldebaran Duel is a two-player game where two opponents face off as leaders of space fleets vying for control over a newly available planetary system. Over three epochs, the players will discover new planets, populate them, use their mineral wealth to build spaceships, and try to gain superiority over their opponent.

A Race For the Galaxy

In the game, the players use multi-use cards to purchase other cards from a card offering (by discarding cards from their hand) in order to increase their movement along several technology tracks—many of which will help reduce the cost of future cards. At the end of each epoch, an interim scoring will be performed to determine who has the greatest military might, and also who has mastered the art of trade and diplomacy. These criteria will move a marker around a grid on a shared board. Where the marker ends its movement determines who receives victory points, as well as how many.

At the end of the third epoch, players will do a final scoring. In addition to the points received from the trade/military/diplomacy scoring, players will earn points based on how well they moved along the various resource tracks (as well as from a couple of other sources). And, when the cosmic dust settles, the player with the most points will…

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Here are the scariest words in the English language: “During your turn, you may take any of the following actions, any number of times, in any order and combination you want, as long as you have the resources needed to carry them out.”

This line, on page five of the English rulebook for the 4X-ish deckbuilding skirmish game Monumental (2020, Funforge), frightened me when I read it. In the wrong hands, a player could take a lot of actions on their turn while taking time to consider what they wanted to do on a turn…all while three other players would be waiting for the active player to wrap things up.

And during our very first review play of Monumental—on the fourth turn of the first round!!—a player strung together a series of actions that took maybe six or seven minutes. Not long in the scheme of things, right?

Then the next two players also took turns that ran about five minutes each. That left me waiting for about 15 minutes to take my second turn of the game.

Monumental does quite a few things well. Unfortunately, the game is buried in downtime, which takes away from an experience that should shine at higher player counts but assures that I will never play it again with four players.

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I did not expect to be playing Wroth within ten minutes of sitting down. Chip Theory’s latest offering, a collaboration with designer and artist Manny Trembley, is an area control game with remarkably straightforward rules. This may be unfair to Chip Theory Games, but I have not previously associated the publisher of Too Many Bones and Cloudspire with approachability.

Nevertheless, I found Wroth easy to get going. Better still, even while dealing with some of the issues that can plague a preview copy—poor printing on neoprene mats, as-yet-unclear action icons, some minor balance issues that the publisher has already assured me they’re in the process of recalibrating—I thought Wroth was crackerjack.

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

I find that a lot of contemporary games get ahead of themselves, burying interesting decisions under too much of the window dressing that the Era of Crowdfunding seems to demand. I was delighted to discover that Wroth, a streamlined area control game, doesn’t do that. The rules and mechanics are no more complicated than they need to be.

Each round, somebody rolls a bunch of dice, equal to twice the number of players plus 1. The die faces feature different actions, and are drafted one…

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We’ve talked about Cascadia many times before, from our review of of the Cascadia base game, to our review of the Cascadia: Landmarks expansion, our inclusion of Cascadia in a list of games you can easily play with kids and a humorous list of games which include bears. But I don’t think any of us expected Cascadia to get “the dice game” treatment.

That’s right; this newest member of the family (technically two newest members) is a reimagining of Cascadia as a roll and write game. But let me reassure you that Cascadia: Rolling Hills, and Cascadia: Rolling Rivers aren’t just some money grab. While they do share the same DNA, they’re totally new games.

Let’s dive in and find out what makes these two new entries tick. Note that while my main focus in this review is on Cascadia: Rolling Hills, I do talk about both games.

Cascadia: Rolling Overview

As the name implies, these are dice games built atop the Cascadia framework: the animals and habitats we’ve come to know and love, as well as the hex based layout of the countryside. Over the course of 20 rounds you’ll roll dice to gain various animal and nature token symbols. These symbols allow you…

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