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1 week ago | 
meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells
Who would have thought that a game about a fishing village would be an effective argument for both the welfare state and, dare I say, the working class owning the means of production? That’s Nusfjord, the best Uwe Rosenberg game that you probably haven’t played (yet). Every round of Nusfjord begins with everyone bringing in their catch. Each player has a player board that you’ll cover with boat tiles as the game goes on. Each boat tile covers up numbers representing a haul size.
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1 month ago | 
meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells
Writing a review of Tigris & Euphrates (T&E) feels like writing a review of chess—it’s indisputably great, and, to paraphrase a friend of mine: “any problem you have with chess is a problem with you.” The same goes for T&E. Entire branches of game design—including games by designer Reiner Knizia himself — have forked from this ur-text, yet none have quite managed to replicate it.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells
Inferno is one of those games that’s difficult to describe. The setting is “hell” or the Divine Comedy version of it. But it’s not really a game that has much to do with anything biblically inflected. If anything, the game is about going to Hell University to get your PhD in moving different colored pieces around. It’s bureaucratic, aesthetically garish, and completely delightful.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Thomas Wells
13 Best Games to Play with Family During the HolidaysThere are so many wonderful things about the holidays that make it one of the happiest times of the year. But inevitably, we find ourselves with more …
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells
If you’re a eurogame designer, odds are, somewhere in your game there are going to be contracts of some kind. It’s the Mount Rushmore of resource management mechanisms. You gotta have something to do with all those bits and bobs you’re collecting.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Thomas Wells
Three Women Finale: Blair Underwood, DeWanda Wise Unpack the Fallout From That Drug-Fueled OrgyIf Three Women has taught us anything, it’s this: Never take your husband to an orgy. In Friday’s finale of the Starz adaptation, Sloane (played by …
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells
While on its face, Lords of Baseball is a love-letter to the early days of the stick-and-ball, where everything had a sepia-toned luster, in reality, it’s a love letter to something else: rolling dice and consulting charts. 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.
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Thomas Wells
2 days agoWhen I’m playing board games, I have a habit of photographing the table at the very end, just before we put everything up. There’s something intrinsically rewarding about capturing how a game went from box to setup and then from setup to a full game — to capture how busy and frenetic everything …
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells
Don’t tell my erudite friends but skirmish games, in particular, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, got me back into board gaming (even though I find the entirety of the modern Star Wars franchise unbearably boring). I love pushing miniatures around on a grid of some kind and making them shoot each other.
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Sep 15, 2024 | 
meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells
I always want to try out a Vladimír Suchý design, but I’m typically disappointed. His games offer unique mechanics and interesting ideas that draw me in, but his continued emphasis on creating diligently balanced systems often leaves me feeling a little empty. League of Six was his first published design, now receiving a “complete edition” which includes an expansion, but fear not, this is a beige euro through and through — and you know that your boy loves a beige eurogame.
