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Feya’s Swamp Game Review – Meeple Mountain

1 week ago | meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells

I’m addicted to connections—board game design and criticism give me that special hit because games are dialectical. Their form relies on stringing together familiar operations, abstractions, metaphors. It’s why every time you see a game where people are moving little soldiers around a map you assume that some kind of slugfest is taking place. Games talk about other games through their mechanics, they are connective tissue between people.
Quick Peaks - Glass Garden, Mü & more: Revised Edition, Raising Chicago, Boxtop Pinball: Haunted House, The Gang

4 weeks ago | meeplemountain.com | Andrew Lynch |Justin Bell |Thomas Wells |Andy Matthews

Glass Garden – Andrew LynchIn Glass Garden, you cultivate a garden of succulents while contending with a pesky interloper, one variety of pest or another. Whether a snail, an ant, a worm, or a fly, they all try to get in your way. None of the included pests is a cat trying to eat your succulents, so I can’t quite relate. Like most Button Shy solo designs, Glass Garden offers a satisfying puzzle, though I found this one easier to master than expected.
Age of Innovation Game Review – Meeple Mountain

1 month ago | meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells

There are games which serve as ur-texts, creating or growing from disconnected roots into a trunk that forms a foundation for dozens of games to come. Chess. Age of Steam. Terra Mystica. Terra Mystica has spawned numerous pretenders, games that attempt to model its particular blend of deterministic resource management and area control. It even has had babies of its own: Gaia Project, Terra Nova, and several expansions.
Tapestry Game Review – Meeple Mountain

1 month ago | meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells

I’ve never been too concerned with genre identification and generalization of mechanisms as a method of critique. Classification is too often a cudgel that ends up keeping people from trying things that they might actually like. I am guilty of this. For example, I have disliked just about every game that Stonemeier games has published. Scythe? Undone by too many book openings that sour the experience. Wingspan? It’s Race for the Galaxy, but 5 times as long and half as good. Apiary?
Super Boss Monster Game Review – Meeple Mountain

1 month ago | meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells

Super Boss Monster is a tough game to review, mainly because I’ve gotten crusty. My tastes have gotten so oddly specific that when I encounter something that is clearly designed for the mass market rather than the nose-in-the-air critic, I am at a loss for words. So, I’m transporting myself back, imagining that I am myself from 8-10 years ago, a person who hasn’t played hundreds of tableau builders, zillions of take-that card games, and about a billion drafting games.
Trial of the Gods Game Review – Meeple Mountain

2 months ago | meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells

I’m extraordinarily critical of games with deckbuilding as a central mechanic. Part of the reason for this is that I find it to be one of the least immersive mechanisms in gaming. Nothing is more mechanical than probabilistically cycling a deck of cards to get the right combinations to maximize a turn. The other reason is that it often pulls players away from each other, rather than drawing them together.
Great Western Trail: El Paso Game Review – Meeple Mountain

2 months ago | meeplemountain.com | Thomas Wells

I’ve come out against system games before. I think most of the time the system that’s being reused or sequel-ized usually isn’t robust enough to support continuous iteration. 18xx games, while popular and with more franchises than McDonald’s, don’t get better than 1849. COIN—imperialist propaganda pieces with eye-crossingly bad rulesets that don’t stand muster. Quartermaster General doesn’t really improve that much past the original. And don’t get me started on the Spans.
Ave Uwe: Nusfjord Review – Meeple Mountain

2 months 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.
DerrocAr: The Week of Five Presidents Game Review – Meeple Mountain

2 months ago | meeplemountain.com | Justin Bell

No matter where you land on the American political spectrum, I think you’d agree that the first few months of 2025 have been interesting. For some people, that might mean interesting in a good way; others might have a different perspective. But reading the news each day brings new revelations that are often shocking in a world that recently acknowledged the fifth anniversary of the most shocking world event of my lifetime, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finding Community in Solitaire Gaming – Meeple Mountain

2 months ago | meeplemountain.com | Matt Fleming

One of the good things that came out of the pandemic lockdowns was the bonus of another year together for my family. All three of my children are adults, and two were studying or working out of state. The switch to remote work and education meant that they came home for a year. And while this was challenging at times, it gave us more of the meaningful time together that we thought was passed forever. The lockdown was also an opportunity to spend time around the table playing games together.