Hey everyone! Been a while, hasn’t it. If you’re a regular reader then you may have noticed that we just dropped off the face of the Earth last year. I’m happy to say, rumors of our demise have been premature. Still, if you’re still here after all this time, I thought you might appreciate some explanation. As many of you probably know, we do most of the work around here in two people, one of us doing the writing, the other maintaining the website and handling photography. We’re also not doing this as a job, we’re working full time and run the Meople’s Magazine as a hobby. Considering, daily bo ..read more

ThunderGryph Games It’s not only about having workers, it’s about having workers qualified to do the job, and about helping those not yet qualified to get there. That still seems to be a difficult concept for many modern management types, and that will make playing Darwin’s Journey against those guys a lot more entertaining. Worker qualification is a big deal in this new worker placement game by Simone Luciani and Nestore Mangone. As you recreate Darwin’s famous journey where he came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection, you send workers to explore the islands, collect specimen ..read more

Renegade Game Studios The Snallygaster Situation (Renegade Game Studios) Renegade Game Studios will release The Snallygaster Situation, an asymmetric cooperative board game based on the popular role playing game Kids on Bikes. Like in Kids on Bikes, players in The Snallygaster Situation will be kids in a small town in the US faced with supernatural problems. In this case, one of their own has gone missing and the others need to find the missing kid before they can all together defeat the monster. The missing kid player plays cards to give clues to their whereabouts, referring to landmarks, str ..read more

Grail Games Many dexterity games don’t have much going on besides the dexterity part. Many, but not all, if you’ll excuse the confusing negation there. What I mean to say is, Hibachi is a dexterity game that has more going on. As chefs around the hibachi grill in a Japanese teppanyaki restaurant, the players compete for ingredients to complete their dishes. Acquiring ingredients is the dexterity part, you get them by throwing your player chips on the ingredient bowls. But like I said, that’s not all. Landing your chips on a bowl doesn’t give you the ingredients you want yet, it gives you the r ..read more

Year 2019 Publisher Thunderworks Games Author Jordy Adan Players 1 - Age 10 - 199 Time 30-45 Strategy Luck Interaction Components & Design Complexity Score “But, your majesty,” the Master Mapmaker stammered, “surely you must understand. I don’t create the lands I draw on my maps. I merely put on parchment the landscapes that I find.” “And what,” the Queen asked, her voice icier than any glacier he’d ever mapped, “stops you from mapping those rivers and lakes that I ask for. Do you go chasing waterfalls instead? Do we need a new master mapmaker?” “Your ..read more

Elf Creek Games As if saving the people of Atlantis wasn’t tricky enough already! Your goal in Atlantis Rising is to cooperatively build a cosmic gate to help the Atlanteans escape. Build a cosmic gate, that sounds tricky, right? Well, it’s about to get much trickier. Atlantis Rising: Monstrosities, an expansion to the second edition of Atlantis Rising, puts Harpies and the Medusa in your path. How are you going to deal with that, on top of your other problems? Fortunately, you’ll have some so-called monstrosities on your side as well, with allies like the Centaurs. They’ll help, but even so A ..read more

Ion Game Design / Sierra Madre Games Two new games, one Kickstarter, that’s new this week from Ion Game Design. One game is Bios: Mesofauna, a gateway game into the Bios series. Players control and species of Cambrian arthropods and evolve them into all kinds of insects and arachnids through a relatively simple yet deep mechanism of evolution and speciation. The game has three levels of difficulty, appropriately named Caterpillar, Cocoon, and Butterfly and will integrate with Bios: Megafauna. That’s amazing all the way through. Game number two has nothing to do with the Bios games. In Galenus ..read more

Contact: Signals from Outer Space (Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag) Another Essen fair has come and gone, and to say this year it was different would be an understatement of some considerable magnitude. Let me just put this ahead of everything else, canceling the physical event in Essen, Germany was the only responsible thing to do. I generally have a pretty healthy immune system, and I bring back some sort of respiratory infection back from Essen every year. In the year of Covid-19, a fair with as many people from all over the world as the SPIEL was guaranteed to become a superspreader event. T ..read more

Boardcubator Project L by Boardcubator is a fun mix of mechanisms. It’s a puzzle game with similarities to Ubungo where you’re trying to create a given shape using Tetris-like pieces. At the same time, it’s an engine building game. Every puzzle you solve rewards you not only points but also a new piece to build your solutions, allowing you to solve more complex tasks and more tasks in parallel. The original Kickstarter ran in 2018, but now there’s more. The new Kickstarter not only has a reprint of Project L with revised rules, it also includes the Finesse and Ghost Piece expansions. The first ..read more

Hans im Glück Another classic is about to make a return. Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers was one of the most beloved Carcassonne variants to date. The stone age game follows Carcassonne‘s success formula, but adds some minor complexities like bonus tiles and fishing huts. In time for this year’s online Essen fair, there’ll be a new edition of Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers with new art, some new tiles, and some minor rules tweaks. Weird Giraffe Games You probably think that wizards have it easy, don’t you? All your problems gone with the wave of a hand. You never even consider that they ..read more