One of the things that I have always wondered about is this: why do people purchase copies of Yahtzee? It consists of five standard six-sided dice and a scoresheet. Nothing more. Standard dice are cheap and there are literally hundreds of places on the interwebs where you can go to download a scoresheet. But this game never seems to go away.

First marketed in 1956 and based on games like Generala, Poker Dice, Yacht, at Yatzy, this is a game that has had an influence on game development for decades. It keeps evolving, but is it a survivor or is it on its last legs?

In our Back in the Day articles revisiting classic experiences, we won’t discuss how to play these games…they are old, and if you want to learn how to play, feel free to search the ‘net for answers. We’ll instead focus on what still works, and what doesn’t, while making a recommendation on whether you need to dig this one out of your attic or not!

[caption id="attachment_297267" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Box Cover (1973 Copp Clark edition)[/caption]

Variations on a Theme

At its core, Yahtzee is very simple. You roll dice. You get two chances to re-roll any of those dice…

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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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In 2008, Matt Leacock introduced the world to Pandemic, a game where players work together to control four virulent diseases before the world is overwhelmed by outbreaks and all the players lose. While Pandemic wasn’t the first cooperative game, with over 5 million copies sold, it’s by far the most well-known. 

Since its release, Pandemic has spawned three expansions, numerous official spin-offs, and three legacy games. Pandemic is still constantly mentioned in lists of the best cooperative games, so when it was announced in 2022 that Leacock had designed a new co-op game, the gaming world took notice. With just under 9,000 backers, Leacock’s new game, Daybreak, brought in 6 times its target goal.

[caption id="attachment_297272" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Daybreak: The box[/caption]

Daybreak is about another threat to the planet: carbon emissions and their effect on global temperature. Your goal is to reduce your carbon emissions to an environmentally sustainable level while surviving the planetary crises that arise each round.  

[mks_toggle title="To learn how to set up and play Daybreak, click here. " state="close "]

Setup

Players will take on the roles of one of four nations/groups of countries (US, Europe, China, and everyone else, known as the Majority World). The game provides a starter set of five…

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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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Tom’s Take

The Raleigh Convention Center is located at the edge of Downtown Raleigh, walking distance to the North Carolina State Capitol building, the Museum of Natural Sciences, and the Governor’s mansion. It is also near the endpoint of Raleigh’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, held that same morning, something that made parking a bit of a challenge.

The lower floor of the Convention Center was home to this year’s Playthrough event. Two walls of the 150,000 sq. ft. exhibit hall were filled with video game screens with seated driving games along one wall, with a combination of PC and classic video game consoles along the other. About a third of the floor space was turned over to gaming tables. There, people could join D&D one-shot sessions, play games from the Playthrough game library, or have longer game sessions with some of the exhibitors.

Playthrough also boasted an Escape Room, something I hadn’t seen at a local convention before. Other vendors included people selling classic video games; a variety of D&D accouterments; aluminum chainmaille jewelry; plushies; custom keyboards; custom video…

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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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This is the description of the game Aggravation on BoardGameGeek:

Players move their four pieces around the board from start to home. Lucky die rollers can make use of the shortcut spaces to speed movement. However, players can not pass their own pieces and landing on any one else's piece sends the landed-on piece back to the base where it must start again. First player to get all four pieces home wins.

Other than explaining that the game uses one six-sided die, going over the rules for moving a piece from the base area to the main board, and showing the reader a picture of the four-player board (standard version) and the six-player board (deluxe version), there really is little else to be said about how to play the game.

Aggravation came onto the market in 1962. Does it hold up to today’s standards?

[caption id="attachment_296762" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Irwin - Deluxe Aggravation - 1962 - Eng/Fre (photo by OTTOgd @ Boardgamegeek.com; used with permission)[/caption]

In our Back in the Day articles revisiting classic experiences, we won’t discuss how to play these games…they are old, and if you want to learn how to play, feel free to search the ‘net for answers. We’ll instead focus on what…

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GAMA Expo is a primarily retailer-based trade show hosted by GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association) and has been in operation for decades. While the last few years have taken place in Reno, Nevada, this year they debuted their new venue in Louisville, Kentucky. This is convenient, not only for me (being from Nashville) but also for a multitude of other attendees. The ease of travel to this new location at the Kentucky International Convention Center was mentioned by many people I spoke with during the event. And the proof is in the pudding: attendance was up by 30% over the previous year for retailers, publishers, manufacturers, and of course media (like myself).

In addition, the new space was much larger than previous years, by tens of thousands of square feet—giving more capacity for vendors, more space for attendees to walk around, and more room for sessions and meetings.

What’s New on the Table?

One of the great things about being a board game media outlet like Meeple Mountain is the chance to see what’s going to be hitting tables over the next year or so. For example, when we attend Essen Spiel, we’re given a glimpse at what might make it to North America the following…

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The King of Tokyo Monster Packs are four monsters, each sold separately, that come with some special game-changing bits and pieces. From towers to build and conquer, to extra dice, these monsters add some spice to your King of Tokyo games.

Cthuhlu

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

[caption id="attachment_295782" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Cthulhu Box[/caption]

"A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."
     –from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H. P. Lovecraft

If you’re going to introduce new monsters to The King of Tokyo, where better to start than with The Great Old One, the cosmic entity that is Cthulhu? After all, it existed for eons before any other so-called “mythical creature” ever took to Earth.

King of Tokyo Monster Pack: Cthulhu (known as Cthulhu for the rest of this review) comes with components for both King of Tokyo and King of New York. However, I will only be covering the King of Tokyo components for this review.

Along with the standard Evolution cards, Cthulhu comes with Cultist tiles. Whenever the Cthulhu player rolls four of a kind, they can take a…

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As we were wrapping up a recent all-day gaming event, I decided that we had to get a round of Kingsburg in before we called it a night.

Full disclosure: I love Kingsburg. (I even wrote an article about it.) Have loved it for years. The game is old—17 years old now!!—but it remains a favorite of mine because it does so many things right, and it has dice, and it gives players the chance to gut your neighbor by cutting off their ability to use all of their dice during each placement round.

The base game is enough for me, but expansion content was built over the years. One of the modules, Soldier Tokens, fixes the only major complaint players had about the rules in the base game. When a six-sided die was rolled to determine what all players could add to their reinforcements in the base game, that number would be added to any other battle strength from their completed buildings.

Soldier Tokens takes away the randomness, and in a dice game where so many other things are random, the Soldier Tokens module is an excellent addition to an already-strong foundation.

But there are five other expansions available for the base game. During my most recent play, I decided to add…

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