Cosmic Encounter is a classic. It is a bright and shining star in the history of board game design. When I introduce the game to new players, I have encountered a few who hear ‘variable player powers’ and begin to doze off. I get it. The idea of an asymmetric game allowing players to break the rules in unique ways is fairly common these days. These days. Set the wayback machine to 1977, however, and this game is nothing short of revolutionary. It’s like the film Citizen Cane. Kids watching it for the first time today look at how the story unfolds, how it was filmed, what it does, and they hav ..read more

[caption id="attachment_298713" width="500"] City of Crowns: The Box[/caption] Shem Phillips is a remarkable game designer. Since 2014, he has published 17 games, not to mention the many expansions for some of those games. That the majority of these are well-respected, challenging games makes his output even more impressive.  One of his best games is Paladins of the West Kingdom, a 2019 title my friend and colleague David McMillan reviewed here on Meeple Mountain. To sum up his feelings about the game, I’ll quote from the review where he relates his first time playing: “Paladins was, ha ..read more

“Can I speak with you for a moment?” I was at Gen Con last year when someone from the CrowD Games booth grabbed me; he saw that I had a media badge on. I was at the booth because CrowD had released City of the Great Machine and reviews were spectacular for the one-versus-many steampunk game. I was anxious to meet someone from the team to see what else they had up their sleeve. One conversation led to another, which took me on a ten-minute walk to a completely different booth with a completely different person, then back to the CrowD booth to talk to a third person. I got my steps in, then I go ..read more

I’ve never played anything quite like The Light in the Mist. I’ve done dozens of escape rooms and escape room games, and I’ve played a handful of games that were narrative-driven. The résumé is strong. None of them have managed to combine the two in the way that designers Rita Orlov and Jack Fallows do here. I've never played anything quite like it. To be fair, I could say “I’ve never played anything quite like it” about every Rita Orlov design I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with. In the span of only five months, she’s gone from someone I knew nothing about, to a designer I would foll ..read more

Project GIPF is a series of eight abstract strategy games designed by Kris Burm. Each game features a hexagonal playing area and involves a dwindling of either pieces or playing area mechanic. The way they approach these elements is not only unique, but combines what I feel are the best qualities in most abstracts: simple rules that reveal complex game play. If you’ve never heard the games within Project GIPF, GIPF, TAMSK, ZÈRTZ, DVONN, YINSH, PÜNCT, TZAAR, and LYNGK, I encourage you to seek them out, either in cardboard and bakelite or digitally online. They are well worth your time. Today’s ..read more

El Grande is back. Hosanna. For those who are unfamiliar, El Grande, The Big itself, is one of the great canonical games in our hobby. Every podcast, list, and forum that extends beyond the Cult of the New considers it one of the greatest games ever published. That’s for good reason. El Grande is, in fact, a masterpiece. Great. Review’s done, then. Wrap this up. I’m going to go grab a sandwich. Le Grand El Grande is an area-majority game in which players aim to accumulate political power throughout Spain. There are nine rounds, each of which follows the same pattern: players bid for turn orde ..read more

Taĉmento - Justin Bell An 18-card “wargame” in the vein of microgames from publishers like Button Shy Games and Matagot, Taĉmento arrives courtesy of NAC Wargames. Using objective cards to set up a series of puzzles, players will re-enact various conflicts from Spanish wars of the 16th century. I use the word “re-enact” loosely, because Taĉmento is a fairly themeless deduction puzzle system in the solo mode. While Taĉmento also features a two-player version, I think it’s really a solo-only game, since two-thirds of the rulebook is dedicated to the Instruction (solo) mode and a seven-episode s ..read more

I imagine design teams the world over work very hard to determine how you will feel the second time you play a cooperative game. Oh sure, they must pour themselves into first impressions, everything from the communication of the box, the first crack of the shrink, the setup, the rulebook, and the introductory experience. But all of that leads up to the second play, because it’s the second play in which the rabble come to the table with a genuine taste of what they’re up against.  That second visit might be marked by the despair of a swiftly brutal first defeat. It might be enthused by th ..read more

In my continued efforts to remind people that there are in fact games older than 15 minutes ago, I stopped by the Red Raven Games booth at Gen Con last year to see if the publisher would provide review samples of their older games. “Sure,” was the one-word response I got from the staffer at the booth. Like most publishers I meet, they appreciate that some of us want to look back in time to play the games that helped build the foundation for newer games hitting store shelves. One of the games offered was Near and Far, the sequel to the first game in the “Arzium Storybook Series”, Above and Belo ..read more

Bacon is a climbing game, a genre of card game in which the goal is to empty your hand by playing increasingly powerful sets of cards. The specifics change from design to design, but the basic principle stays the same: if you play a pair of 2’s, I can beat that with a pair of 3’s. The most popular recent example of a climbing game is surely Scout, one of my favorite games of the last few years, which simplifies the types of sets you can play: a straight or any number of the same card. Bacon is drawing from an older well than Scout, though, reaching back to the far off year of 1991 and the gre ..read more