D.V.C., as wonderful and consistent and quirky a publisher as you’ll find, largely does its own design work. With the exception of 2020’s Rosetta: The Forgotten Language, all of D.V.C.’s games up till now have been credited to house designer Jasper Beatrix. In a just world, Jasper would be unable to walk down the street without being mobbed by fans, but there are two barriers to that: we certainly don’t live in a just world, and Jasper Beatrix doesn’t exist.

Not corporeally, anyway. Good ol’ J.B. is a pseudonym for a loose collective, a merry anarchic band of creatives who work together to make these wonderful games. They’re so prolific, and release games of such high quality, that the announcement of Pacts and the realization that it was not designed by Jasper Beatrix, was quite the surprise. This area-control game for two is the work of Ben Brin, a single corporeal designer.

Well. I assume.

I Pick I Pick You Choose

Pacts is an exemplar of I Split, You Choose, a mechanism whose promise is often let down by…

The post Pacts Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

It’s still early in 2026, but I think I’ve already played the game that will end the year with the widest array of opinions within my review crew.

Wunderwaffen was one of my targets at SPIEL Essen 2025, so I was eager to get it home and put it in front of my team. I was attracted to the game for a few reasons, chief amongst them the game’s publisher. Ares Games has done great work in steadily tight packages, from the Quartermaster General series to family-friendly fare such as TEDOKU and Builders of Sylvan Dale. Ares’ reprint of the Mega Civilization series, Mega Empires, didn’t hurt the cause.

Wunderwaffen is a fragile system, one that worked wonderfully for some players while landing badly for others. But as a very straightforward game that plays in about an hour at its full player count, it is certainly worth a look, especially for wargame lovers looking for a weeknight game they can table with both hobbyists and casual players.

Nazis, You Say?

Wunderwaffen looks, on the surface, like a one-versus-all wargame for strictly two OR four players. There are four playable factions in the box: Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet…

The post Wunderwaffen Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I think many of us in the tabletop media space have a particular set of rules when it comes to reviewing games; everyone takes a different approach.

One of my big things is to get my three, maybe four, plays of a review copy with different groups as often as I can, ideally at different player counts. This is especially true with new game properties (expansions are a little easier to cover, and usually I have superfans of a base game who are better equipped to share their thoughts on an expansion if they know the original game).

I played the upcoming Mighty Boards game Yotei (up on crowdfunding now) with three different groups: my review crew on a Monday, then three friends from my Wednesday gaming group, then my nine-year-old on Saturday. That meant three plays with three different groups spread across six days in the same week, thanks to a tighter-than-normal turnaround time to get this review up.

As a result, I had a range of opinions to measure against my own. Here’s the only thing everyone agreed on: the card and token illustrations by Maria Kato are absolutely gorgeous.

But after that?

Please Pass the Potatoes

Yotei is a tableau-building set collection game for 2-4…

The post Yotei Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

From the rulebook:

“Welcome to Yellowstone Park, the home of many wild animals. Impressive geysers spray their hot fountains into the blue sky. The players go on a trip through the park, which is shown on the game board. Each player has a hand of animal cards with different colors and numbers. During the game the players try to put their cards down as skillfully as possible on the game board to avoid penalty points.”

Yellowstone Park is played on a 7x7 grid laid on top of an illustrated overhead view of the titular park. The rows are numbered from 1 to 7 in ascending order, starting from the lowest row and moving upwards. There is a score track running along the left side of the grid. Each player’s score marker begins at the number 5 spot on this track.

There is also a deck of 56 Animal cards. Each card is one of four colors (red, green, yellow, blue) and one of seven numbers (1 through 7). For each number, there are two copies of that number + color pair (two copies of green 1, for instance). Every card features a cartoonish image of an animal, but these illustrations are unimportant for the purposes of the gameplay.

The post Ave Uwe: Yellowstone Park Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

The Fox in the Forest predates the contemporary trick-taking craze by a few years. It was an early harbinger of what was to come, of the deluge with which we have subsequently been blessed, and it proved successful. Successful enough that now, almost a decade after its initial release, Joshua Buergel’s two-player trick-taking game is getting the Deluxe treatment.

For those who’ve never played, The Fox in the Forest distinguishes itself from the bulk of trick-takers in two ways. Way the first: all of the odd-numbered cards in this non-traditional deck have special powers that trigger when played. Normally, I try not to get bogged down in the weeds when reviewing a game, but I do think the powers here are illustrative: The 1 in each suit lets you lead the next trick even if you lose, the 3 lets you change the trump suit, the 5 lets you draw one of the cards that weren’t dealt that round before discarding any card from your hand, the 7 is worth a point for whoever wins it, the 9 is always considered a trump card, and the 11 forces your opponent’s highest card in the same suit.

If you are at all familiar with the ebb and flow of trick-taking games, you can imagine well the sorts of shenanigans…

The post The Fox in the Forest Deluxe Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Wholly Knizia

Dr. Reiner Knizia is a name synonymous with board games. Even if you haven’t heard of him, you’ve likely played one of his designs; according to Gemini, he has created more than 800 games. Whether it’s Ra, The Quest for El Dorado, Samurai, or Huang, he’s everywhere.    We even had a lovely sit-down with him recently to discuss his highly successful career.

Whale Riders excited me because it comes from a power duo: Knizia on design and Vincent Dutrait on art. Dutrait’s work has become increasingly easy to spot as I’ve gone deeper into the hobby, and here his contribution is excellent. The thematic art is rich, depicting Indigenous Arctic tribes using handsome whales and other massive sea creatures as mounts. But despite that pedigree, this is not one for the Knizia hall of fame.

Ice Race

In Whale Riders, players take two of five possible actions each turn, moving between ports, buying goods, and completing contracts for money and pearls. Play continues until all the pearls have been purchased from the home area, giving the game a race-like structure from start to finish.

Goods in the market are replenished as they are bought, but new tiles can introduce storms that…

The post Whale Riders Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

SHASN: AZADI is a box full of gimmicks. Those gimmicks are equal parts corny and high-minded, clever and ham-fisted. The area majority mechanism that is used to tally points is, frankly, pedestrian and simplistic. But, in spite of it all, the game is ambitious, and I admire games that are high-minded, even when that highmindedness has flaws.

Hegemony this ain’t

And that’s a good thing. AZADI is trying for something explicitly political—it is about the construction of political blocs more than it is about forcing players to accept the roles and bounds of its simulation. From where I sit, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory’s conception of political economy and class is at best misguided and ignorant. AZADI doesn’t presume to gamify and fragment class struggle, casting players as some fake-o thinktank concept of the “middle class” and the “state.” Instead, players are a political ideologue constructing their own ideology out of what will best get them into the big chair. More on this in a moment.

The way you win AZADI is by forming majorities. In the version that I’m reviewing, you have a modular dual-layered map with holes in it for player pieces. Each map tile has a crosshair hole  (volatile area) and a number reading something like 11/21. Players get points for having majorities, which…

The post SHASN: AZADI Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I played a lot of games in 2023. The best of those games, by a sizable margin, was Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, designed by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou and released by the two men under the Hegemonic Project Games banner. A bold effort in almost every way, Hegemony did an excellent job of simulating a real-world environment and mixing that with a number of different gaming systems. The end result now resides on BoardGameGeek’s top 50 all-time games and has hit my table for nearly a dozen plays; as an event game, it’s tough to beat.

Those accolades put a big target on the back of Hegemonic Project Games’ second design, World Order. Varnavas and Vangelis were kind enough to send a review copy in advance of the game’s full release, and it was pretty easy to get the members of my review crew to line up for plays.

I tempered expectations a bit here. I thought Hegemony was a classic example of “lightning in a bottle”, an asymmetric negotiation game that really did play differently from faction to faction, which landed in a January dead zone after working through a big pile of games from the year before. Could Hegemonic Project Games do it again with World Order? My main hope was that…

The post World Order Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Cross Bronx Expressway, GMT’s third release in the Irregular Conflicts series, is not for the weak. It is exceptionally complicated, even by the elevated standards of a COIN title. A frequent refrain amongst the GMT faithful, and an accurate refrain at that, is that the rules aren’t all that complicated once you get over the hump of learning them. Not so here. For my first game, I gathered three of the finest gaming minds in New York City, all of whom had read the rules in advance, and it still took an hour or two to get things started. This is no doubt in part a function of the theme, the civic management of The Bronx across the latter half of the 20th century. It’s easier to keep rules in your head when they don’t use words like “coalition,” “partner organization,” and “Census Round Audit.” You may find yourself scratching your head and wondering why you didn’t go back to school to get an MB(oard game)A.

Work your way past the daunting exterior and you’ll find a game that is a fascinating mix of the exceptionally confrontational and the utterly inscrutable. Cross Bronx Expressway is a hard game to talk about as a game, in part because the gamic elements are relatively slight in view of the whole. Designer…

The post Cross Bronx Expressway Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.