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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During a recent game night at my place, we played a lot of my old-time party favorites, such as UNO and Just One. But before we got too far down the road, I made sure to break out Wavelength (2019, CMYK), my favorite party game of all time.

Wavelength is the game in the wildly colorful box you might have seen at a friend’s house, your local Target, or maybe through the game’s app, which is a standalone product that can be found in the App Store or Google Play. First, two teams are split as evenly as possible. On a turn, one player from the active team is named the Psychic for that round and has to select a scale from a card in the draw deck. Scales could be spectrums as simple as Hot/Cold, or something more challenging, like Better as a Book/Better as a Movie. There are dozens of double-sided cards included in the box, each with two terms used to define a spectrum of ideas.

The Psychic’s job is to give their team a clue that aligns with a randomly-spun result on a wheel showing points. The Psychic spins the wheel, looks at the result, shuts a cover that hides the result, then comes up with a clue that will hopefully give…

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Reiner Knizia is one of the most prolific game designers around. His author page over at BoardGameGeek has a Top Games section with 717 entries as of this writing. Obviously, with such a long list of games written, some hit amazing highs (e.g., Ingenious, Ra), while others fall flat (e.g., At the Office,  Into the Blue). Regardless of the level of fun and engagement, some have called his games “an interesting scoring system and mechanics draped lightly with a paper-thin theme” (thanks KMortis!). Even as a fan of his work, I have to say that this is a decent description of many of his games.

There are a few of his games that, honestly, define what I love about board gaming. Blue Moon is one such game. But before we delve into the plight of the Holy City of Psi, let’s take a quick trip through the history of how the game was released.

Releases

Blue Moon is a two-player card game. It was initially released as a base game with two factions: the Hoax (wise scholars and librarians) and the Vulca (magicians of fire and passion). This box contained a pre-constructed deck for each faction, a game board, three dragon figurines used for scoring, and a rulebook.

[caption id="attachment_296239" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

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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 game: DVONN

[caption id="attachment_296552" align="aligncenter" width="500"] DVONN The Box[/caption]

DVONN is a game about stacking. Throughout the game, each turn you take moves a piece or a group of pieces atop another piece or a stack of pieces.

Unlike the other games in the series, DVONN has a board three times as long as it is wide. There are 49 spaces, one for each piece. If viewed as hexes, the board is only five hexes wide and nine hexes long on the edges and eleven in the center.

Playing the Game

Players start by choosing to play as either black or gray. They then collect all 23 pieces…

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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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For me, General Orders: World War II was a highly anticipated design, authored as it was by the dynamic duo of David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin (Undaunted, War Chest). My interest increased as more information came out. A light wargame that takes thirty minutes to play and uses worker placement? No need to draft me, I volunteer!

I was not expecting the box to be so tiny. Well, “tiny” is an overstatement. It’s deep, approaching equilateral cube, but the length and width are surprisingly and endearingly petite. Then you open it, and inside is the tiniest li’l quarter-fold board. This must be how Shaq feels when he plays Concordia. I’m worried I’ll break it. I feel some sort of primal drive to protect this board, to feed it milk from a bottle until it’s strong enough to make it out in the wild.

What I mean to say is, this may be the tiniest quarter-fold board I’ve ever seen. Usually, at this size, they don’t bother folding them.

Deployment

A game of General Orders is divided into four rounds, which follow standard worker placement conventions. Taking turns, each…

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A little glimpse into my past: Video games were a major passion of mine before I discovered the joys of board games. I doubt my story is unique—like many PC gamers back then, I was obsessed with first-person shooters. But my second love was racing games, though not the uber-realistic sims. I gravitated towards the arcadey racers, where drifting and nitro boosts flowed as freely as coins in a Mario game.

As someone who loves board games and has a soft spot for racing video games, my options are quite slim. For the past few years, the only racing board game that has truly captured my heart is HEAT: Pedal to the Metal. However, that game focuses more on hand management than delivering an authentic racing experience. Most other racing board games either lean too heavily on dice rolls or become ridiculously convoluted in their attempts to simulate the intricate details of an F1 race.

REM Racer promises to be none of these things. The track doesn’t have a grid to represent spaces on the board. Instead, you move your vehicles using template movement rulers that you would find in a miniatures wargame. That’s not a surprise, because the publisher behind this one is Corvus Belli, a Spanish company. Corvus Belli is mostly known for their miniatures wargame, Infinite,…

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At SPIEL 2023, I had the chance to meet with one of my favorite publishers, Horrible Guild. They have never done me wrong, with games like Quicksand, Dungeon Fighter, Evergreen, and The Great Split getting rave reviews from our team as well as my personal network.

During that meeting, our marketing contact was kind enough to provide a copy of the newest expansion to the Railroad Ink franchise, Archipelago. These new player boards represent four islands, drawn as 4x4 grids that are separated by bridges in a format that is four times the size of the map in the original game, in terms of physical footprint.

The rules of the base game haven’t changed. Anyone at the table can roll the Route dice, and the result must be drawn by all players on one of the four islands on spaces that connect previously drawn track/highway or start from one of the arrows around the spaces of the Archipelago map. However, a couple new additions add spice to the proceedings by triggering scores for drawing through certain spaces (like Houses, which score end game points) and the use of a Warehouse, which lets players save Routes for use later in the game.

Archipelago is compatible with “most” Railroad Ink expansions, according to the…

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I can remember several days in my personal history with Apples to Apples, such as the first time I played it and discovered that party games do not have to feel devoid of intellectual stimulation; the first time someone had some serious unintended innuendo come about with a play of a card. There was the time one of my best friends made a ten minute argument as to why Michael Jackson was the trump card in this game (i.e., he fits any nearly any adjective that can be played, and he fits them better than just about any other card could). But the one that I remember most was the day Apples to Apples started to wane in my game group’s rotation. More on that last date later; for now, let’s talk about what makes Apples to Apples tick.

The Game

Apples to Apples is, quite honestly, as simple as a game can get.

Players are dealt seven ‘red’ apple cards which have nouns printed on them (i.e., a person, place, thing, or event).

[caption id="attachment_296781" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A noun is a person, place, or thing.[/caption]

Players rotate being the judge, who will draw one ‘green’ apple card which has an adjective printed on it (i.e., a characteristic of a person,…

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Not long ago, I discovered Doomlings. The game has all the hallmarks of a winner: easy to learn, quick to play, a constant sound of giggling by the players. The game is a lot of fun!

Playing Doomlings

Doomlings is a card game. Although you can get/use community play mats, individual player mats, first player tokens, and the like, all that is needed to play are the cards. The base game of Doomlings has three types of cards: Ages, Traits, and Gene Pools.

[caption id="attachment_296769" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The various types of cards in Doomlings.[/caption]

Setup

Ages are the game’s timer. There are three types of ages: the Birth of Life card, the standard ages and the catastrophes.

[caption id="attachment_296771" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Birth of Life, the ages, and the catastrophes.[/caption]

You start by shuffling the standard ages together and then dealing them face-down into three piles of three (nine cards); put the rest of the standard ages back in the box. Then shuffle the catastrophes together and deal one onto each of the three piles of standard ages (three cards); put the rest of the catastrophes back into the box. Each of these three piles of four cards is shuffled individually, then stacked.…

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When I find a game I enjoy, or better yet, one my family enjoys, I try to build on that experience. It’s not always as simple as perusing the “Fans Also Like” portion of a game’s listing on BGG. After all, the fact that I like Shakespeare is in no way predictive of the fact that I like Altiplano (which appears on that list), nor does the mechanical composition of either build an effective bridge connecting the two. It just so happens that I like both, as do others, enough so to warrant being connected via BGG’s algorithm. 

BGG also offers title lists sorted by mechanics, but, to quote the great Patches O’Houlihan, that’s about as useful as a poopy-flavored lollipop. A list of 6,365 Area Majority games is not the most efficient path to finding a game that I will enjoy like I enjoy Petrichor. 

I’m grateful that we try here at Meeple Mountain to build bridges. Our step-ladders link games that seem to have a natural progression. Our topics aim to find games that are thematically linked. But the lists are hardly exhaustive at this point—they take time and experience to develop. 

My family’s unexpected love of The Flow of History left us looking for a sequel, or a prequel, or…

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Here are the scariest words in the English language: “During your turn, you may take any of the following actions, any number of times, in any order and combination you want, as long as you have the resources needed to carry them out.”

This line, on page five of the English rulebook for the 4X-ish deckbuilding skirmish game Monumental (2020, Funforge), frightened me when I read it. In the wrong hands, a player could take a lot of actions on their turn while taking time to consider what they wanted to do on a turn…all while three other players would be waiting for the active player to wrap things up.

And during our very first review play of Monumental—on the fourth turn of the first round!!—a player strung together a series of actions that took maybe six or seven minutes. Not long in the scheme of things, right?

Then the next two players also took turns that ran about five minutes each. That left me waiting for about 15 minutes to take my second turn of the game.

Monumental does quite a few things well. Unfortunately, the game is buried in downtime, which takes away from an experience that should shine at higher player counts but assures that I will never play it again with four players.

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