Giant wooden bananas!

When you see a hand holding one of the bananas, you might think the size is exaggerated, but you’d be wrong. The bananas in Tasso Banana really are that big. Open up the box and you’re immediately struck by the size.

[caption id="attachment_309041" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The Tasso Banana box has a clever origami influence. It folds in on itself and is held closed by magnets![/caption]

These, my friends, are game pieces of substance.

In Tasso Banana your goal is to be the first to get rid of all your bananas by placing them out on the game board. Bananas on the same level can’t touch each other, the table, or one of the included banana leaves, or go outside the boundaries of the playing field (as defined by the game board). A stacked banana can only be stacked on two other bananas, and a banana which already has another banana on top of it can’t support any other bananas. With these rules you’ll wind up with a crazed jumble of gently curving fruit, some stacked on their sides, some arch side up, as if poured out of the…

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From the rulebook: “Scholars of the South Tigris is set during the height of the Abbasid Caliphate, circa 830 AD. The Caliph has called upon the keenest minds to acquire scientific manuscripts from all over the known world. Players will need to increase their influence in the House of Wisdom, and hire skilled linguists to translate the foreign scrolls into Arabic. In this Golden Age of wisdom and knowledge, be mindful not to neglect one in pursuit of the other”

In Scholars of the South Tigris (Scholars), players will be vying to score the most victory points by the game’s end. Players begin the game with a collection of Action cards and dice. Through the placement of these cards and the assigning of these dice, players will be traveling the world to collect scrolls, hiring translators to translate these scrolls into Arabic, and using the knowledge contained therein to increase their power and improve their standings in the game’s various guilds.

Of course, this is a high-level overview of the game. If you’d like to learn more about how the game is played, read on. Otherwise, feel free to skip to the end to find out what we think of Scholars.

Setup

Scholars is played around a central main board that is broken up into several distinct zones. Along…

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Have you ever been walking through the woods, enjoying nature, when you hear a weird rustle in the leaves? Or perhaps it’s a branch in the canopy above you making a sudden noise. Or maybe it’s just a general feeling that something is there, just off the path, watching you from the underbrush. Whether its intentions are good or bad are entirely unknown. All you know is that you are not as alone as you thought you were.

If you’ve ever had this experience before, chances are you were just mere feet away from a pixie. In the game of Pixies, players take on the roles of…

Well, who knows really? The story above is something I created out of whole cloth. Aside from the delightful images of weird little creatures created out of natural objects (think Little Big Planet meets Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and you’ll have an idea of the aesthetic), there’s not a lot of theme or story to go around. At its heart, Pixies is a pure abstract. Albeit, it’s an abstract with some ridiculously cute artwork.

Overview

In Pixies, the players will take turns drafting cards out of a lineup and then placing them into their tableaus following some…

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When I picked up a pile of the new “Tiny Box” game series from Allplay at Gen Con 2024, I just assumed that at least one of these games would be weak. Underdeveloped, maybe. Not much meat on the bone. Certainly not replayable.

But with my plays of Panda Panda, I’m three for three on games that are at least decent, and in the case of both Rainbow and Panda Panda, games that not only landed with players in my groups, but were also enjoyed by my family, meaning they will reside in the game closet for at least a little while.

That’s because Panda Panda has just enough depth to make it worth the ten minutes it takes to teach, then play with a group of up to four players. Using a small deck of just 32 cards, players aim to make a winning set of cards by mixing their starting hand with cards drawn from the top of the deck as well as the discard piles of each opponent. But here’s the rub: unlike a game such as Gin, where a player has to end play with a hand of 10 cards that all fits into sets or runs, Panda Panda asks players to declare victory with a wide range of winning hand combinations, meaning…

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Sometimes, you need to table a game that is good, dumb fun. (And look—I might sound like a guy who has the mental capacity to play heavy pieces of chicken like Speakeasy, Nucleum and Railways of the Lost Atlas, but the reality is that this works only because I balance it with games like UNO.)

Any time a new Ravensburger game arrives at the house, my kids want to give it a spin. That’s because Ravensburger has generally been good to us—Villainous, Horrified, Piñata Blast, The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game, Dungeons, Dice & Danger, etc.—and the games are always easy to get to the table. So when I whipped out Oh My Pigeons! after dinner the other night, something magical happened:

The kids wanted to play it again as soon as the game was over.

Now, some of that is because Oh My Pigeons! is SO short. The first game was won in less than five minutes. But subsequent games didn’t take much longer, with our longest game taking about 12 minutes. That’s because Oh My Pigeons! is so easy to teach you can knock that part out in less than 60 seconds.

Each player has a…

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The Dwarves: Big Box - Andy Matthews

Up until 2022, I’d never heard of The Dwarves, a hugely popular German five book fantasy series, which spawned a video game and a board game. And I certainly never expected to play it. But my game group wanted to inject some cooperative action into our game nights and The Dwarves was picked.

The goal of The Dwarves is to work your way through a scenario deck of cards, while protecting your lands from invading orcs, trolls, and elves. Players may also complete side quests which can provide valuable bonuses or cause trouble in Girdlegard (the dwarven homeland). At the beginning of every player’s turn the hero marker advances can trigger new enemies to emerge, cause drama in the dwarven high council, or cause negative effects to the side quest deck. In typical coop game fashion there are multiple ways to lose, but only one way to win.

My group had a good time playing The Dwarves, and even spent some time afterwards talking about different approaches we might take in our next play. While I don’t think The Dwarves is going to win any awards, it’s a solid game and one we’ll be playing again. 

Ease of entry?:
★★★☆☆ - There were…

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For a modern audience, the witch trials that took place in the American colonies in the latter half of the 1600s seem to have hinged on the question of whether or not witches were real. The people who participated in them don’t seem to have much questioned that idea. Witches were real, alright. The question, as they saw it, was narrower: are there witches here?

Obviously, many people felt there were. Witchcraft!, a new solo game from designers David Thompson, Roger Tankersley, and Trevor Benjamin, joins the colonists in presupposing the existence of witches. They’re definitely here. No doubt about it, witchcraft is a-happening. Instead, the game asks, what if the witches were good?

As the witches of Wildegrens, yours is a solemn task. The town is under assault from black magics unknown. Demons walk the streets, lurk in the forests, and stalk the graveyard. Your coven is the only thing standing between the people of this colony and certain death. You’d think the populace would be grateful, but no. They suspect you of witchcraft—or, rather, of witchcraft!—and have brought you to trial. Your goal is to fend off the demons just long enough to prove to your fellow villagers that you mean them no harm, and to convince two of the three jurists of your innocence.

Witchcraft! Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

High Rise Penguins, from publisher Alley Cat Games, is the new English edition of Yura Yura Penguin, a nichely-beloved dexterity game from designer Yabuchi Ryoko. The idea is simple: Players take turns playing cards Uno-style onto an ever-growing iceberg condo. If you empty your hand, you win. If the condo falls on your turn, you lose. If the condo ever reaches the point of being completed—good luck with that—then everyone wins.

Each card forces the following player to do something. Maybe you have to add the next level to the apartment block, or draw cards, or place some ice crystals into the apartments. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get to help move one of the adorable little wooden penguin meeples into their new apartment. Those are the moments when the structure is most vulnerable, but the sense of peril is balanced out by the rush of endorphins that comes with touching one of the penguins. They are very cute.

Maybe a…

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Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of these products in exchange for an honest, unbiased preview. This preview is not intended to be an endorsement.

With Paizo's release of Player Core 2 for Pathfinder Second Edition, 8 more classes and Ancestries are now reworked to coincide with the Pathfinder Remaster Project. This also rounds out the original 'core' classes from the first Core Rulebook so that nobody is left behind any longer. It always seemed strange to me that some of those weren't remastered in the Player Core and instead put on the backburner until this installment. Nevertheless, the combination of Player Core and Player Core 2 exist as a sturdy base for this next era of Pathfinder Second Edition.

Pathfinder Player Core 2 Overview

Player Core 2 brings the total page count for the player resources to nearly 800 pages, which feels like a substantial barrier to entry for new players. Thankfully, there still exists a remastered version of the Pathfinder Beginner Box that cuts down the rules overhead substantially for those people who are just dipping their toes into the Pathfinder waters. If you want a bevy of character options as a player, however, the Player Core 2 is a must for the shelf.

The primary purpose of the Player Core…

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During my first play of The Gang (2024, KOSMOS) at Gen Con 2024, I had the chance to learn the game from the publisher. I was intrigued by the whole production: The Gang is a poker game, played cooperatively, where players use poker chips to hint at the quality of their hand. Using a theme so loose I laughed out loud when it was explained to me—fellow thieves are working together to rob a bank, and to succeed, they have to play poker cooperatively!!—The Gang gets a ton of mileage out of the Texas Hold ‘Em format of poker, a game that I didn’t think fit into a co-op format.

But I was wrong. Worse, I was wrong to assume that the people who published other great card games such as The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine suddenly didn’t know card games. That’s because The Crew is the single-most played card game that has hit my table over the last five years by a sizable margin. (And, I’m told the sequel is even better than the base game.)

All this means that even if you don’t play poker, you need to try The Gang. Its initial conceit makes for a fun time at the table, then it includes three additional modes of play to keep things…

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Burning Banners: Rage of the Witch Queen is a beefy box. It would have to be. There are dozens of scenarios and hundreds of tokens, as well as four different full-sized boards. There are two manuals and six player boards. Burning Banners is a production. It feels a bit like an event. It isn’t Twilight Imperium beefy, but it would make a good Reuben.

The quick pitch: old-school hex-and-counter wargaming married to a Dungeons & Dragons-esque fantasy setting. Players control dwarves, orcs, armies of the undead and beplagued, usually in the name of conquest. Spend money to deploy units, move the units, fight with the units. This is the fundamental turn structure of Burning Banners.

There’s more to it than that, of course. It comes with an awfully large manual for that to be everything. There isn’t much more, though, which is to Burning Banners’s credit. Though the rulebook is intimidating—I would argue it is inefficient and in need of an overhaul—the rules themselves are easily grasped. This is not a GMT design. There are few if any dangling edge cases. There are no complex charts to…

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Do you like sci-fi themes in your tabletop experiences? If so, I think 2024 has been an exceptional year. Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon might end the year as the best Euro-style strategy game I got to the table. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was great as well, especially at lower player counts. Maybe you’ve heard of a little-known game called Arcs? Heck, as good as Arcs was, it didn’t excite me the way Andromeda’s Edge did.

In other years, any one of those games might end up being the year’s best game. I’m already stressed out as I think about which of the above-mentioned games is my favorite of the bunch.

You’ve probably heard the expression “it’s all about timing” and in the case of the new sci-fi themed strategy game From the Moon (2024, La Boite de Jeu), the timing for my plays could not have been much worse.

That’s not because From the Moon is bad. In fact, across my two review plays (I tried From the Moon with four players and once solo before realizing I didn’t need a third play to know where I landed), I knew just a few turns in that the game was a by-the-numbers worker placement game that had shades of area majority scoring…

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I have the great fortune of serving as a member of the tabletop media. As a result, about 95% of the games I cover are review copies forwarded by publishers. That helps keep personal spend at a minimum, which is vital for a person who reviews about 125 games a year.

However, I occasionally break my own rules when a game tickles my fancy. Llama Dice, the design duo composed of Israel Cendrero and Sheila Santos, is the main reason for me to break some of my own rules because they are the duo that gave us The Red Cathedral and The White Castle, two of my favorite games of the last five years.

When I learned that Llama Dice had a game hitting at SPIEL this year, I happily stood in line to pay 25 euros to grab a copy. That game is Flatiron (2024, Ludonova), a 1-2 player city-building game based on the duo’s personal travel to New York City touring some of the great architectural wonders there. The duo’s appreciation for these trips is detailed in the acknowledgements of Flatiron’s rulebook.

Soon after I returned to the US, I got Flatiron to the table for three plays: two solo, and one with my wife. Flatiron is far from the duo’s best work, but…

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