Walnut Grove - Andy Matthews

When I first got started in the hobby, I came across Walnut Grove on BoardGameGeek. It was definitely more in-depth than what I was familiar with, but the theme and artwork seemed quaint and appealing. I always wanted to try it out, but never had the chance. Then recently I was able to trade a copy of Sriracha for Walnut Grove and finally try it out.

Walnut Grove is a tile laying and worker placement game in which players farm the land with workers you hire over the course of the game. Over 8 rounds you’ll expand your property—gathering milk, fish, lumber, ore, and grain. You also have the chance to head into town and hire more workers, buy materials to construct buildings, and buy and sell your bounty.

Walnut Grove is certainly a bit tighter than I was expecting. You’re constantly clawing and scraping to make sure you can feed your crew and keep them warm. And it feels like you have a hard time earning enough money to do more than just subsist. Because it’s a tile laying game, there’s a degree of luck involved in the tiles that you draw from the bag. Sometimes you get what you need, and other times…

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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 2023’s Vienna, his 37th game.

Vienna is the 5th title in the Stefan Feld City Collection (SFCC). Vienna is played in one of two modes: an introductory version and an advanced mode. The introductory version is a nearly pound-for-pound reimplementation of Feld’s 2014 classic La Isla. In fact, if you want to get a firm grasp on how the introductory version is played, you can check out my review of La Isla and walk away with a decent idea. The terminology for the different parts has changed, and the two themes are as dissimilar as can be, but the concepts are the same.

Rather than focus on the game play itself, in this review I am going to focus on two things: What’s Changed? And What’s New? If you’re already familiar with the answers…

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Time Division - Andrew Lynch

Time Division is a card game with a simple premise. The first player plays a card, and then the second player plays one. Whomever plays the higher card gets to make a choice: one player scores their card, the other player uses their card ability. That’s a great premise for a game, and I know the kind of game Time Division wants to be, but it isn’t very good. There’s almost never an interesting tradeoff to be found. Whether it’s better to score or to use your ability is always obvious.

I held out hope that the game would grow with familiarity, that new layers of complexity and planning would reveal themselves. It doesn’t, and they don’t. Time Division wants to be a game like Match of the Century, a game filled with tense trade-offs and hard decisions about what’s better in the long run. It doesn’t get there. Even after five or six games, there’s not much of anything to discover.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★☆☆☆ - Would play again but would rather play something else

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Odin - Andy Matthews

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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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St. Patrick’s Day, that time of the year when everyone seems to be Irish for a day!

While that might seem like hyperbole, St. Patrick’s Day is more widely celebrated around the world than any other national festival. It’s an official holiday in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Newfoundland, and Montserrat. It’s also celebrated in the US, Canada, Brazil, the UK, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Some of this is due to the Irish Diaspora, and some of this is undoubtedly because it’s the one day during Lent when restrictions on drinking alcohol are lifted. That, alone, has turned the day into a proper Irish cèilidh, or a gathering with dancing and Gaelic music.

To help you celebrate the day with your friends, we’ve put together a list of six Celtic-inspired board games for your consideration.

Sláinte!

St. Patrick

Where better to start a list of games to play on Saint Patrick’s Day than a game named after Ireland’s Patron Saint himself?

This St. Patrick is a trick-taking card game where players work to not take tricks—or, specifically, any cards displaying Snake Bites. Players start by claiming relic cards that will protect them from Snake Bites, but lose points equal to the number of relics in their hand when the…

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Overview

Easily summed up in a few paragraphs, the rules for playing Keltis are pretty straightforward.

From Ashley’s excellent writeup of Keltis’s 2008 Spiel des Jahres win:

“Keltis is a followup to Reiner Knizia’s 1999 smash hit Lost Cities, and the gameplay is very similar. In fact, if you’ve ever played Lost Cities, then you’ll grasp Keltis right away. Players take turns playing cards, of different colored sets and numeric values, from their hands into their own personal displays following some simple rules:

1. If the played card is the first card of the set played, a new column is started.
2. The second card played to that set can be of any value.
3. The value of the card (provided it is not of the same value) determines which other cards may be played into that set in the future. If the card played is of a higher value, then each subsequent card must be played in ascending value. The reverse is true if the card played is of a lesser value.
4. If the player chooses not to play a card, they will discard a card from their hand into a shared discard area.
5. After a card has been played or discarded, the player draws a new card either from the deck or from the…

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It’s been a long time since I played UNO.

In fact, it wasn’t until I walked into my mom’s house a few weekends ago to find her sitting there playing UNO with my 5-year-old son that I realized just how long it had actually been. That struck me as weird because I can clearly recall UNO being such a central part of my life during my youth. I have vivid memories of sitting around the table with my family, yucking it up, as day turned into night and, occasionally, the other way around. I played it with friends at church. I played it on camping trips with the Boy Scouts. I played it any chance I could get.

To say that I was once UNO obsessed would be underselling it. My love of UNO went much deeper than obsession.

And then, it just kind of faded away. I’m not sure when I stopped playing and I’m not even sure why. In fact, until I saw my son sitting there playing it with my mom, beckoning me to join them, I hadn’t even given any thought to actually playing the game since sometime in the 1980s.

As I sat there playing, it got me thinking that, if any game was ripe for the…

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sequitur (noun): the conclusion of an inference: consequence

Do you consider yourself a wordsmith, a connoisseur of lexicographical delights, a veritable exemplar of sesquipedalian predilection? If reading that sentence really gets your blood flowing, chances are you’ve played a few word games in your time and have relished those experiences. And, if reading that sentence fills you with dread, there’s a good chance that you’ve played a few word games in your time and have left those experiences feeling the exact opposite. Word games tend to reward those of us who are verbose while alienating those of us who just aren’t.

Games should be enjoyable. You should walk away from having played a game with friends feeling uplifted, filled with emotions of friendship and camaraderie, or, at the very least, enlightened. You should not walk away feeling belittled and stupid. All too frequently, at least one person walking away from having just played a word game walks away feeling the latter.

What if I told you that there was a word game that isn’t about the words? What if I told you there was a word game that doesn’t require you to be a walking dictionary? What if I told you that there was a word game where even the smallest words could lead you to victory? Well,…

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Vienna - David McMillan

This past weekend, I finally got my copy of Vienna to the table. Vienna, for those not in the know, is the 5th game in the much-lauded (and also highly criticized) Stefan Feld City Collection from Queen Games. Reimplementing La Isla, which I reviewed as part of my Focused on Feld series, Vienna plops the players down right smack dab in the middle of Austria during the early 1950s. World War II has ended, but the Cold War is just getting started. Espionage is the name of the game.

Vienna comes with two modes of play: the basic mode—which plays almost exactly like La Isla— and an advanced mode that introduces a whole lot of new elements. I got to play the basic mode. A few mistakes were made, but I enjoyed the experience overall, and I feel like that was the consensus among the other players at the table as well. I’m really excited to get it to the table again so that I can dig into the new material.

Keep an eye out for my upcoming review!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles…

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Imagine being several hundred feet underwater, trapped in a hollow metal tube, with nothing but your wits and training at your disposal if you hope to survive. One wrong move and the only evidence of your failure will be some bubbles on the surface of the water, there for a few moments before fading into obscurity. Few things sound more terrifying.

The thrill and excitement of the experience of stalking prey through the unknown using only science, technology, and good old-fashioned intuition is not an easy thing to capture in board game form. Many games have tried it, some succeed better than others. Let’s take a look at three such games in today’s Step Ladder: “Blind in the Water”.

Battleship > Steam Torpedo > Captain Sonar

Battleship

Originally designed as a pen and paper game at the end of World War I, Battleship wouldn’t become the board game it is today until 1967. While the game has undergone some aesthetic and component changes over the ensuing decades, it’s still largely the same game now as it was back in the era when humans were first walking on the moon. The approachable theme combined with the simple mechanics have turned Battleship into a mainstay of many household gaming closets worldwide.

Briefly,…

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For the longest time, Barcelona was a city behind walls. Initially, this served the city well, keeping out the unwanted while protecting those within. But, the population explosion in the mid-1850s changed all of this. As the population swelled, the space within the walls began to become cramped leading to much higher mortality rates and the easy spread of disease.

Then came Ildefons Cerdà, a civil engineer, with an interesting idea (the Eixample, as he called it). He proposed a new city district beyond the walls, but not just any city district. His idea was to approach urban design scientifically with a layout featuring wide streets so that every building within the district would be able to enjoy the light of the sun. His plan also included plenty of green spaces to make the air more breathable and to provide areas for socialization. And, he also envisioned the district’s iconic octagonal buildings, which would provide more visibility at street crossings.

The game of Barcelona drops the players into the mid-19th century during this expansion. As the game begins, the district is little more than a blueprint composed of building plots, the roads running alongside them, and the intersections where these roads meet. Each of these roads has an action associated with it. On their turns, players draw citizen tiles…

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Amygdala - Andrew Lynch

It’s been a less-than-stellar month for me and the Kiesling/Kramer design team, but what can you do? Sometimes that happens. Pueblo was an interesting idea that didn’t result in an interesting game, and now we have Amygdala, a resource management and tile-laying game that’s about emotion. Really, it’s an abstract game.

I thought Amygdala was perfectly alright. It didn’t do much for me, but one member of my playgroup enjoyed it tremendously, enough so that he requested it at subsequent game nights. It looks great on the table, especially if you play on the black-and-neon side of the board. I thought the ten-space limit for inventory was a fun restriction, but I’ve seen that before. The tile-laying isn’t dynamic enough for my tastes, and left me wanting a round of Babylonia. I personally wouldn’t recommend Amygdala, it struck me as forgettable, but it seems to have its audience.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★☆☆☆ - Would play again but would rather play something else

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Fractal: Beyond the Void – David Wood

Fractal touts itself as an “an ever-changing, story-driven” 4X legacy…

The post Quick Peaks – Amygdala, Fractal: Beyond the Void, Orion Duel, Sequitur, Pax Pamir appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

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 2023’s Cuzco, his 38th game.

The sixth game in Queen Games’s Stefan Feld City Collection, Cuzco is a reimplementation of 2013’s Bora Bora. Bora Bora took place in a Polynesian setting replete with beaches, tribesmen, and women wearing hula skirts. Cuzco hearkens back to an earlier age: the age of the Incas. In Cuzco, the players are messengers, running all over the empire, delivering important information on behalf of the Sapa Inca (the emperor). Like Bora Bora, almost everything you do in Cuzco is going to earn you points, and the person with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Aside from the dramatic shift in theme, there isn’t much to distinguish…

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