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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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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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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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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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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After going hard on heavy strategy games in 2023, I need to loosen up a bit.

Lucky for me, there are lighter games hitting shelves every five minutes these days, and no category is getting more love than the trick-taking genre. All over the world, people are finding ways to tweak an age-old formula with games that take mere minutes to learn and play, and I have two friends in one gaming group who are constantly buying new games from Japan and Europe, hunting for the next great trick taker.

I recently had the chance to try a couple trick takers during my trip to TantrumCon, and the folks at Bezier Games were kind enough to hook me up with two 2024 releases that will hit later this year. (Another benefit of trick takers—they take up almost no space in carry-on luggage.) The first of those was Sandbag, and the second of those is Xylotar, an updated take on the 2023 trick taker Magic Trick, designed by Chris Wray.

In Magic Trick, players are dealt cards that are placed in numerical order, then passed to the player on their left. Here’s the twist: once passed, the cards can’t be looked at, so the player “holding” their new cards doesn’t know exactly what cards they…

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My 18xx journey continues!

During my visit to SPIEL last fall, I spent a few minutes with Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler, the owner of publisher Lonny Games and the designer of train game classics such as 1880: China, 1848: Australia, and Russian Railroads. During that conversation, Lonny was kind enough to furnish a copy of 18Mag: Hungarian Railway History for review.

I’m seven plays into my 18Mag journey, and I will give it this much: this is the most unique of the 18xx titles I’ve tried so far thanks to a couple major changes to the system. I don’t think all these changes work, but for those who are looking to shake things up a bit, 18Mag delivers a satisfying experience. Also, this is the only 18xx game I own that has a solo mode!

Minors, Not a Setback

18Mag is a 1-6 player economic tile-laying game based on the 18xx system created by Francis Tresham that began with the game 1829, released more than 40 years ago. For more details on how games in the 18xx system typically play, please read my kickoff article, 18xx: A Beginner’s Journey. There’s also a growing pool of content on the 18xx format that walks a new player…

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If you’ve been following along here for the last few years, you know how much I adore one-shot mystery / escape-room games. The Suspects series is right near the top. I’ve had the chance to cover two other games in the series: Suspects–The Macguffin Affair and Suspects: Adele and Neville, Investigative Reporters.

The center of my appreciation for these games starts with the system, detailed in my other reviews. Each mystery takes anywhere from 45-60 minutes to work through, longer if you really want to be sure you gather all the evidence you can before trying to solve the puzzle.

Suspects: Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator (2022, Studio H) is my third Suspects game out of the four published thus far. Designed by Guillaume Montiage (the Kemet games as well as some of the Unlock! one-shot games), each Suspects game is aligned with a style derived from the books of Agatha Christie. This is important, because it usually means that you’ll have to deduce some of the facts in each case based on some “guesstimates”...none of the cases is as cut-and-dry as other mystery games I have tried for reviews here at Meeple Mountain.

That works for many people (including me), but not for everyone. If you are looking for a logic puzzle, games like…

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I lead employee engagement for a food & beverage manufacturer when I’m not here talking games. At a recent lunch event, I decided to bring some of the games from my personal collection to the office to spur some laughs while we did yet another round of bland lunch catering.

I put my copy of Just One (2018, Repos Production) at one table, then waited to see if anyone would engage with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see members of our HR department sit at the table, read the short list of instructions, and dive right in.

Within seconds, you could see the magic beginning to form. Players used the (admittedly terrible) dry erase markers to begin following the game’s simple rules, putting one player in the hot seat while all other players used their easel to come up with a clue that hopefully no other player wrote on their dry erase easel.

When the HR team members not currently in the hot seat showed their words to each other, the usual amounts of surprise, cursing, and accusatory gestures took place. Left with only a word or two to come up with the answer, it was great to see the active player struggle to come up with the right word…and when they did, it was high fives…

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During my recent trip to TantrumCon, I ran into Jay Bernardo, the marketing manager with Bezier Games. We hit it off, and that led to a six-hour binge featuring games all night and lots of smack talk. (If you have not spent time with Jay, you need to get on that stat…the guy is hilarious.)

Jay also took the time to show me Sandbag, designer and Bezier CEO Ted Alspach’s latest game and what I think is his first trick-taking release. (Bezier has dabbled in trick takers before thanks to the release of the deluxe edition of Cat in the Box.) Jay was kind enough to provide a review copy after our first play, so I got the game in front of my Chicago game groups to see how the game played with other audiences.

During my first play of Sandbag, we got a single rule wrong, so correcting that did make a difference in successive plays. Still, I was surprised that this one was more of a curiosity than an outright hoot like the game’s rules seem to suggest. I don’t think that is a flaw, but the game does have a high rules overhead for such a simple concept and I wonder how this will play with broader audiences when it hits the market…

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The best thing about working with the team here at Meeple Mountain: respectful disagreement is quite healthy.

My colleague Andrew Lynch wrote a very balanced review of Bitoku (2021, Devir) a couple years ago, and there are a few elements of his commentary that I agree with. It’s a bear to teach—so much so that I insisted players watch the Game in a Nutshell teach video, which is about 38 minutes long and led by a professional—and the setup is “not nothing”, in the words of the folks at So Very Wrong About Games.

One thing we disagree on: play surfaces. The idea of playing a three-hour board game on my floor is out of the question, not because of the playing, but because of the standing up. I can’t imagine trying to stand up from the floor after sitting cross-legged on the floor for that long!

If you have a dedicated group of Bitoku fans who you can count on to regularly play the game, the turn elements here have the kinds of tension and decision-making I love in heavier Euros. That will also lead to less downtime in a game that can really spike AP (“analysis paralysis”) in the wrong hands. As someone who plays games like Voidfall a dozen times or…

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I was alarmed by the text on the back of the game box for Tanuki (2024, Synapses Games): “Do you have what it takes to win in this no holds barred take that game?”

The front of the box features a cute, furry tanuki (raccoon dog, per the box) running away from other characters towards the viewer. I’m not sure what the cover image is trying to convey—should I run away from this game??—but I like a good take that game. However, I was afraid to see if this would work with my kids, particularly my son, who abhors competitive games where players can be robbed (see exhibit 147: Berried Treasure).

I opened my review copy and quickly read the rulesheet. In Tanuki, designed by Cole Smith, players begin the game with a face-up Gardener card and a face-up Samurai card in their Garden (play area). A second Gardener card is also in the Garden, face down, waiting for the game’s second half to open before being revealed by an event card buried in the draw deck.

The Gardener cards score bamboo (points) each turn they remain in a player’s Garden. Samurai protect all Gardener cards, an important distinction because Tanuki is all about stealing cards and…

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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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