Reiner Knizia is one of the most prolific game designers around. His author page over at BoardGameGeek has a Top Games section with 717 entries as of this writing. Obviously, with such a long list of games written, some hit amazing highs (e.g., Ingenious, Ra), while others fall flat (e.g., At the Office,  Into the Blue). Regardless of the level of fun and engagement, some have called his games “an interesting scoring system and mechanics draped lightly with a paper-thin theme” (thanks KMortis!). Even as a fan of his work, I have to say that this is a decent description of many of his games.

There are a few of his games that, honestly, define what I love about board gaming. Blue Moon is one such game. But before we delve into the plight of the Holy City of Psi, let’s take a quick trip through the history of how the game was released.

Releases

Blue Moon is a two-player card game. It was initially released as a base game with two factions: the Hoax (wise scholars and librarians) and the Vulca (magicians of fire and passion). This box contained a pre-constructed deck for each faction, a game board, three dragon figurines used for scoring, and a rulebook.

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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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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 Luna, his 10th game.

2010 was another banner year for Stefan Feld. That was the year Luna (the subject of this review) and The Speicherstadt were introduced to the world, bookended by the relatively obscure games Spiel mit Lukas: Dribbel-Fieber and It Happens! That’s four games in a single year, a feat which he has only ever reproduced twice: in 2013 and 2022. With at least 3 titles slated for this year (that I am aware of at the time of this writing), maybe 2024 will be the year he’ll strike again. Who knows? All I know is that I’m excited to find out.

Of Temples and Sects (I Think?)

In Luna, players take on the roles of leaders of various sects of worshippers of the titular goddess, Luna. Throughout the course of…

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The best thing about working with the team here at Meeple Mountain: respectful disagreement is quite healthy.

My colleague Andrew Lynch wrote a very balanced review of Bitoku (2021, Devir) a couple years ago, and there are a few elements of his commentary that I agree with. It’s a bear to teach—so much so that I insisted players watch the Game in a Nutshell teach video, which is about 38 minutes long and led by a professional—and the setup is “not nothing”, in the words of the folks at So Very Wrong About Games.

One thing we disagree on: play surfaces. The idea of playing a three-hour board game on my floor is out of the question, not because of the playing, but because of the standing up. I can’t imagine trying to stand up from the floor after sitting cross-legged on the floor for that long!

If you have a dedicated group of Bitoku fans who you can count on to regularly play the game, the turn elements here have the kinds of tension and decision-making I love in heavier Euros. That will also lead to less downtime in a game that can really spike AP (“analysis paralysis”) in the wrong hands. As someone who plays games like Voidfall a dozen times or…

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Tales from the Tavern

A group of evil monsters has stolen all the drinks in the land of Barcadia, and now it’s up to your merry band of adventurers to brave the dungeon and recover all the drinks. Or… something like that. Heroes of Barcadia is less about the narrative and more about the laughs and, of course, the drinks. What exactly is it, then?

Well, it’s a dungeon-crawling game for 2-6 players (or up to 8 with the expansion), but unlike many dungeon-crawlers, you’re in direct competition. These other heroes are not your allies; they are your rivals! After all, what good is recovering the lost hoard of stolen drinks if it’s not you getting all the glory? You’ll take turns exploring the dungeon to find power-ups and slay monsters. Once you have three power-ups, you can try to take on the final boss and recover the drink hoard.

As a game, it’s… pretty basic. Heroes of Barcadia keeps the gameplay dead simple. There’s very little room for strategy. The rooms you uncover, the power-ups you get, and the dice you roll to fight the monsters are all random. You have little control over your destiny here. It is less of a game and more of a classed-up, shiny new way to have fun with your friends and…

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Back in 2010 Matt Leacock was fresh off the release of Pandemic—one of the first, and definitely one of the most successful, cooperative games in the world. I don’t know his motivation, but I think he wanted another cooperative game that was perhaps a bit simpler and more family friendly. And thus Forbidden Island was born. It used a similar framework as Pandemic: multiple, distinct player roles (each with their own special abilities); a card driven system which both advanced the game and provided benefits and penalties to players; and a goal (rescue 4 artifacts and get on the helicopter before the island sank).

Two other  Games in the Forbidden series have been released: the excellent and challenging Forbidden Desert, and the less-than-stellar Forbidden Skies. And now Gamewright Games has released the 4th title in the series, and I’m pleased to tell you that Forbidden Jungle is a return to the formula which made the first two titles so successful.

You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby.

In Forbidden Jungle, 2-5 players attempt to search and conquer an alien jungle landscape in search of four crystals which will powe the portal—which you must also find—escape through. All the while, you must avoid the deadly…

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Whenever I hear about a hit game from a publisher I don’t know as well, I like to take a moment to go back-catalog and learn more about what games made up their initial offerings.

Monarch, designed by Mary Flanagan (Surrealist Dinner Party, Phanton Ink, Visitor in Blackwood Grove) was originally published under Flanagan’s own LLC back in 2015. It is now a part of the Resonym catalog, so I requested a copy of Monarch when I met with a marketing rep at Resonym at last year’s Gen Con event.

I love looking at older games, and Monarch was no exception. A simple set of rules and a tidy box meant that accessibility was the priority here. The short play time and the artwork by Kate Adams didn’t hurt either!

Take the Throne

Monarch is a tableau building set collection game for 2-4 players; it plays in about 10 minutes per player. Each player is a sister vying to become the next monarch of Minervia. In order to take the throne, you’ll need to assemble a court of the best (highest scoring!) advisors, beasts and items from the game’s five different suits: Wisdom, Culture, Might, Bounty and Balance.

Play is extremely straightforward. I taught this…

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War of the Woods

Let’s set the stage. The longstanding oligarchal Eyrie Dynasty (a flock of birds) has fallen apart due to infighting and internal strife, leaving a power vacuum in the Woodland. The nefarious Marquise de Cat has seized power and begun chopping it down for fun and profit. But enough is enough…the denizens of the forest lived under the oppressive Eyrie but are now seeing a different kind of oppression from the Marquisate. They’ve joined forces to form the Woodland Alliance, hellbent on taking back the Woodland. Of course, war means a boost to the economy, and the Vagabonds skulk around the forest, wheeling and dealing with all sides to turn a quick profit.

In Root, players will take control of one of the four adorable factions vying for control of the Woodland in a race to score 30 victory points. These factions are brought to life by the impressive artwork by Kyle Ferrin but take inspiration from real-world historical entities. Cole Wehrle made those influences obvious during his wonderful designer diaries. Throwing a cutesy woodland critter coat of paint over everything makes the theme easier to digest, for sure, and adds a whimsical charm to the game. But at its core, the game is an examination of power structures and systems of control that exist…

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They had me with the cover art.

With the release of Trolls & Princesses, Game Brewer has once again given the world a fantastic physical production. The publisher, known for Eurogame titles like Oak, Paris, Stroganov, Gentes, and Gùgōng, always nails the look: great components, clean box covers, sharp visuals, and games that might lean a little too hard into language-free iconography.

I have played Gentes and Oak, and enjoyed both games. With Trolls & Princesses, I raised my hand to cover this game right away thanks to the comical cover art of a nasty-looking troll holding a human baby and carting a princess (with a miffed look on her face) off to do who-knows-what. It’s a hard image to shake, which told me I needed to play the game.

Trolls & Princesses is interesting. As great as it looks, everyone who sat with me for plays (each of my plays took place with three players) came away from the game impressed by the production and amused by the game’s theme. But as a game, Trolls & Princesses mostly left players at “yeah, OK, that was fun” and not much more excited than that.

Part of the reason: the princesses.

“Church Bells, Changelings and Outposts” Doesn’t…

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Before diving into the two new expansions for Mindbug, the cocaine-addled card dueler I first reviewed back in 2021, I pulled the base game off the shelf for a refresher. It had taken me a while to warm up to this strange, spasmodic design. Mindbug is so streamlined, so reactive, so fundamentally swingy, that my first several games felt like they didn’t involve any decisions at all.

That definitely wasn’t the case, as I came to see with experience. Mindbug is full of interesting decisions. Except for when it isn’t. It’s complicated.

My feelings about the base game haven’t changed, though they have muted. My admiration has diminished. Returning, I found myself a bit bored, which was never a feeling I had when it first came out, even when I hadn’t found my way in yet. Sounds like a perfect time to inject some novelty.

Don’t Mindbug If I Do

Any given Mindbug deck, be it the base game or any of the three expansions, is full of creature cards. Each creature is obscenely powerful in one way or another. Some are strong. Some are disruptive. Some are both. Nearly every card, by design,…

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The clue giver draws five cards from the deck and plays one out on the table. The card is placed either vertically, to indicate that this card and the target card share something in common, or horizontally, to indicate that they are unalike in some way. After the first clue, the rest of the players agree on a single card to remove. After the second clue, they must remove two. After the third, three, and after the fourth, well, you probably get it. The fifth and final clue has to steer the players between one of the two remaining cards. If the last card remaining is the target card, everyone wins!

I’ll note here that while the clue giver does draw a new card to replace each clue, we discovered a fun—and profusely sweaty—variant in which the clue giver is limited to the five cards they drew at the beginning of the game. They have to figure out the best…

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When people talk about cooperative gaming, Castle Panic almost always enters the conversation. When Castle Panic took the stage in 2009, cooperative gaming wasn’t anything new. Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings was arguably the front-runner, having introduced a whole new era of board gamers to the concept 9 years earlier. But, even that wasn’t the first one. Board games which task the players with working together to reach some common goal have been around as early as the first decade of the 1900s.

Regardless, it didn’t take Castle Panic long to solidify itself as a shining example of what cooperative gaming could, and should, be.

As the name implies, Castle Panic is a castle defense game that places the players squarely in the middle of a monstrous invasion. Sheltered within their fortifications in the middle of the board, the players must work together to eliminate the hordes of oncoming monsters before they are able to tear down everything the players have built. With a little bit of hand management, a healthy dose of teamwork, and a whole lot of prayer, they just might succeed.

In this two-part series, we’ll be taking a look at the Castle Panic: Big Box Second Edition (2E). In the first part, I will be discussing the base game, how it plays, and what…

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