Rarely, I come across a game whose aesthetics overpower my critical sense. Fabled: The Spirit Lands is one of those games. It also makes moving up tracks not look and feel like moving up tracks, which is high praise from a curmudgeon like myself.

Bookington Bear

The object of Fabled: The Spirit Lands is to collect the most red books by the time the game ends. There are several scenarios that alter this formula, but ultimately, it’s a Knizian affair, where if there’s a tie for the red books, you go to the green books, then the blue books, and finally the crummy yellow books.

You can think of the books as cubes of four colors, and what you’re doing throughout most of the game is turning the books from one color to another color. It’s resource conversion at its most basic–two yellow books become a blue, two blues become a green, and two greens become a red.

The game operates with a simple formula, but it has some interesting quirks. Let’s talk tracks.

Take a hike

The game doesn’t call the map cards tracks, but tracks are what you have to work with as a player, so I’m going with it. At the beginning of the game, each…

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Geekway has been on my bucket list for years and years. A well-regarded board game convention only a handful of hours from my home in Nashville, and the birthplace of the “play and win” library? It seems like a no-brainer. I was finally able to attend, and now I’m adding my thoughts to those of Kevin Brantley, who attended Geekway in 2025.

Full disclosure: in addition to being a gamer, I’m also a convention organizer with ten years of running Nashville Tabletop Day under my belt. While I did want to do some gaming, my main reason for attending this event was to observe the Geekway team and processes to find ways to improve my own event. So be aware my thoughts about the event are going to be colored by “event organizer glasses”.

Arrival and Initial Thoughts

Geekway runs from Thursday morning to Sunday evening, although I could only attend Friday afternoon to Sunday. After arriving in St. Louis, checking into my hotel, and driving over to the St. Charles Convention Center, I arrived at the gaming hall around 1pm.

Registration

Registration was smooth, with pre-printed badges displaying a barcode (more on that later). The badges were full-color, double-sided, pre-printed, laminated, and came with a high quality lanyard. By the time I arrived on Friday, they were already…

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Several years ago, my friend Nathan introduced our group to Tyrants of the Underdark, a deck-building game that used Dungeons & Dragons lore for its setting. My initial response was dubious, as often happens with licensed product. The art, which Nathan had warned us about in advance, didn’t help. Dozens of artists are credited on the game, and many of their illustrations are not…good. The hodgepodge of styles did not promise a robust play experience.

Fortunately, first impressions can be wrong. Tyrants of the Underdark is an excellent, taut marriage of deck-building and area-control. It is wonderfully interactive, encouraging players to step on one another’s toes at every turn. The modular deck system, which changes the cards in play from game to game, ensures a good amount of variety. The game is both immediate in its pleasures and rewards deeper exploration.

Tyrants of the Underdark is exactly the kind of game that I would expect to be a cornerstone of The Hobby™. And yet. Despite the quality of its reputation amongst those who’ve played, Tyrants remains somewhat obscure. I can’t even tell if it’s currently in print or not. It is often hard to find. It begs for expansions, but it only has one, which is both long out of print and heinously expensive. For a game that threatens…

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I have never before given much thought to the ways in which music composition and game design are similar. Like all creative arts, both share the goal of trying to communicate and share an experience with their audience. As disciplines, music has notes and rhythms while game design has rules and mechanisms, but both are about taking those disparate ingredients and making them cohere into something whole, something that vibrates with inevitability.

Ted Mann Schaller’s Counterpoint is a must-follow cooperative trick-taker with bidding and a trump-suit. A blessing, to live to see such times as those in which I can write that sentence and assume much of the audience will understand. Each player is a member of an animal chamber trio–to-quintet, be they an iguana violinist or an armadillo pianist. Such is the quality of Brandon Campbell's illustration work here that fights will break out over who gets to be what. The cooperative nature of the game follows the template laid out by blockbuster predecessors The Crew and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Trick-Taking Game: over a series of performances, scenarios named after pieces in the chamber music canon, players attempt to complete certain challenges while also ensuring that everyone makes or exceeds their bid.

There are a few twists on the formula,…

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Hoopla: Hoopla is an informal noun referring to excited, noisy commotion, bustling activity, or extravagant, sensational publicity (often referred to as hype or ballyhoo). It often implies unnecessary fuss or exaggerated attention surrounding a person, event, or product. 

Kevin

A Softer Side of Gaming Conventions

Last year, I attended about six gaming conventions, mostly on the larger side of the spectrum: Gen Con, PAX Unplugged, and the like. These conventions are huge, multi-day, overly stimulating showcases of everything the gaming world has to offer. If the massive vendor hall isn’t competing for your attention, then it’s the organized events, publisher presentations, or state-of-the-industry talks. It’s exhausting and invigorating all at the same time. I often come home from these large-scale carnivals with no voice and an empty wallet.

But what if I told you there’s a softer version of a gaming convention? One without long queues for the new hot game, a sugar-water refill, or even the restrooms? Now, what if I said the attached hotels were affordable, the schedule was packed, and you could still buy stuff?

Well, friends, I have an event you may want to pencil into your calendar for next year.

Gaming for a Good Cause

Nestled in the Baird Center in Milwaukee,…

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This is the second part of my three-part series on getting back into board gaming after a long absence. In Part One, I looked at ways to rebuild your gaming muscles. (If you want to skip ahead, you can go to Part Three (Coming Soon!) to read about the games that brought me back into gaming.) As with any hobby, a long time away can result in skill loss. Your ability to strategize and quickly learn rules can atrophy. The good news is, it's pretty easy to get those skills back with a little practice.

What's not as easy to regain is a lost group of board gaming buddies. My five-year layoff from gaming began with Covid and continued through a cascading series of family issues. By the time everything was somewhat back to normal, I'd lost all of my gamer friends. Covid destroyed my gaming groups, and caregiving for my parents left no time for games. When I looked around several years later, all of my gaming friends had moved on, either to new places, new hobbies, or new responsibilities.

Not being an extrovert, it's not easy for me to find new people to play with. However, I know that if I want to keep board gaming as a hobby, I have to gather my courage and get out…

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The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.

Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.

In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.

Thebes: What Is It?

Thebes is a press-your-luck set collection game featuring rondel-style movement mechanics for 2-4 players. In the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or any board game that features “competitive archaeology”, players…

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Here’s something spooky: I don’t own any Halloween-themed board games…not a single one. Now, I’m excited to say that I own one I’ll keep handy for at least the next few pumpkin seasons.

Tricky Treats, a family-weight title published by Cranio Creations last year, hit my table for a couple plays recently. Although I picked this up in Germany right before Halloween, other, buzzier titles hit my table first, so I didn’t play Tricky Treats this past Halloween and let the game sit for a while.

After breaking the game out with my family, then with my review crew, I’m a bit surprised that Tricky Treats is not getting more buzz. The game is a solid family title, with a fun gimmick that reminded both myself and other players of another recent title featuring transparent cards.

Do You Have 20 Minutes?

Tricky Treats is a set collection, card drafting game for 2-4 players that plays in about 30 minutes, longer if you are playing with my nine-year-old, who loves to take his sweet time as he makes his way through each turn of any game, not just this one.

Players manage a small posse of five kids getting ready for Halloween. There’s a grid of nine “treat” houses where…

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One pass of the rules and I could tell that the new Stonemaier trick-taking, engine-building game Origin Story was right up my alley.

That’s because after the handsome production and cool art from illustrator Clémentine Campardou fades to the background, there’s a fun game under the hood of designer Jamey Stegmaier and Pete Wissinger’s new creation. Over the course of five rounds, players engage in standard trick-taking mechanics—eight-card hand, must-follow rule-set, four suits with one always representing a trump suit—with a very nice twist: in each round, the rules change just a little for every player, thanks to the ability to use “stamina” tokens to trigger player board and card effects for each of the 2-5 players in the game. (Origin Story does accommodate solo play, but that was my least favorite of the three plays I did for this review, at solo, three-, and four-player counts.)

Each player is a character, with a somewhat basic ability that can be activated as many as two times per trick-taking round with those stamina tokens. Nothing about the base characters is anything to write home about. But a huge deck of Story cards offer players a chance to craft their own trick-taking monstrosity. For each of the first four rounds, players are dealt a set of three Story cards, each with…

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In the broadest possible strokes, games are created out of three or four things: what you can do, what you can’t do, what you want, and, occasionally, what you don’t want. Not every game includes something you don’t want as a category unto itself. You don’t want to end up with few resources in Catan, sure, but that’s just the inversion of what you want: resources with which to build things. I’m talking about things like running out of food in Agricola, where there is a specific punishment meted out by the rules.

In High Society, a fabulous auction game for three-to-five players by designer Reiner Knizia and recently out in a new edition from publisher Allplay, those four categories are crystal clear. That’s never a bad thing. Many of the best games provide clear, succinct definitions for each of them. High Society is a masterpiece not only because it provides ready definitions, but they work, delightfully, at cross-purposes.

The goal of High Society is, of course, to have the most points at the end of the game. There we have our first definition:

What do you want? To have the most points.

Points are accrued through the purchase of various cards, revealed from the…

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Polyomino Play

I’m a fan of polyomino tile-laying, and it always amazes me to see new ways the mechanic is used in board games. Some of my personal favorites include A Feast for Odin, Caverna: The Cave Farmers, and Planet Unknown. Here, we have a cooperative spin on polyomino tile-laying with a push-your-luck element to boot. Count me in!

I had a chance to meet the folks from WWBG at a couple of different conventions last year. They’re a small but mighty publisher out of Taiwan whose passion for their games is unlike anything I’ve seen in the industry.

Their goal is to bring more Asian designs to the Western market, and some of their releases so far, such as Lone Wolves and Castle Raisers, are already a solid testament to that mission.

Learning the Lantern

Last Lantern plays out over seven to nine rounds, with players working together to place tiles in their canopy in an effort to cross the goal line.

Each round, players silently and independently select a location on their lantern wheel, which determines the familiar token and tile they’ll take. However, if multiple players choose the same location, they’ll have to discuss and decide who gets what. Familiars are collected into sets and can…

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The Best Gaming Experience With My Kids - Andy Matthews

When my 4 children were younger I played games with them all the time, easily several times a week, and sometimes every day. In addition to time together, it was a chance for me to instill important values like fair play, good sportsmanship, and how to win (and lose) gracefully. Early on I came across a game called Zombie Kidz, a small box cooperative game about preventing zombies from escaping a cemetery. It featured cartoony artwork and a simple game loop: roll a die, put a zombie out on one of the corresponding 9 spaces on the board. Then, you could move your character to a nearby space and potentially eliminate a zombie there. The goal was to put locks on all 4 corners of the board and win the game. My kids loved it, and it gave me a chance to teach them about teamwork and the consequences of choice. Eventually, they grew out of the game, and we stopped playing it.

That is until I heard that the publisher was releasing a sequel called Zombie Kidz Evolution, targeted at a slightly older audience, exactly where my kids were at the…

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Whoever walked away from a hand of trick-taking and thought, “Hey, you know what would make this better, is if we had to guess how many tricks we would win beforehand,” has my eternal gratitude. I like to think bidding came about as a party trick. “Françoise is really good at tarot, I bet he can guess exactly how many tricks he’ll win. Guess, Françoise, guess.”

However bidding started, it has long been a cornerstone of trick-taking, and is reliably my favorite way to engage with the mechanic. Card games are inherently subject to tremendous amounts of luck, of course, but bidding shifts the balance a bit closer to skill. More skill means more agency. More agency means more investment. More investment means more fun for everyone.

Torchlit is, above all, a bidding game, though it’s a strange one. The deck is dealt out, and every player chooses a card from their hand to put face-down on the table in front of them. The numbers on those cards, which run from 0-7, correspond to a series of dungeon door tiles placed out in the center of the table in numerical order. Whichever card you put down, the matching door is where you want to end up by the end of the hand.

Torchlit Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Oh, there is something deliciously slimy—smarmy, even—about the game Pax Illuminaten, designed by Oliver Kiley. (BGG says that Pax Illuminaten is based on Kiley’s earlier title Emissary, a game I have not played.)

One pass of the rulebook for Pax Illuminaten had me very excited. I’m not a dedicated scholar of Pax games, having only played Pax Pamir Second Edition (although Pax Hispanica, Pax Emancipation and Pax Porfiriana are currently on deck here at Casa de Bell). I HAVE played Pax Viking Junior, although I am sure a purist would not count that one.

But the core Pax system of historical, card-driven play with multiple end-game conditions and a closed economy is on full display with Pax Illuminaten, and I was further excited by the relatively straightforward rules and a playtime listed as 20-30 minutes per player.

A Pax game, in about 90 minutes? Sold, I said out loud to no one after that rules readthrough.

Then I got the game to the table…and I was mostly impressed. Pax Illuminaten is for a certain kind of player, especially one who likes to understand what is mostly possible in a strategy game, with ample space for a few surprises and a boatload of secondary actions.

Sorry, When…

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At this year's GAMA Expo I had the opportunity to play Symbiosis with some industry folks. I was charmed by it's artwork and card size, and delighted by the simple decision space and speedy game play. I brought home a copy and reviewed it for you. Check it out!

What is Symbiosis?

In Symbiosis players are growing and improving their pond in an attempt to earn the most points. They start with a 4 x 2 grid of face down cards, 1 of which is turned over at the beginning of the game. An additional 4 cards are turned face up in the center of the table, and serve as the market.

On your turn you select a card from the market and do one of two things:

Replace one of your face down pond cards with the card you selected from the market. Your pond card is placed face up into the market and becomes available for other players to select.

Alternatively you can take one of your face up cards and swap it with a face up market card. If you do this, you must flip one of your remaining face down cards face up.

“Why”,…

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Threaded is a game about sewing Bargello-patterned tapestries. Well, sort of. You are using cubes as thread, after all. You may not come out of this game with a new afghan, but you will come out of it with your brain slightly aching from the puzzle you must solve. 

I grew up in the 1970's, seeing these groovy geometric patterns everywhere. My grandmother was a whiz with a needle and made all kinds of textiles featuring these stripy, blazing patterns, but I just figured it was a trend of the times. Little did I know that they were called Bargello, or that their origin dates back to the 17th century in the Bargello Palace in Florence, Italy. Right out of the gate, Threaded taught me something. 

[caption id="attachment_331060" align="aligncenter" width="1125"] My Bargello baby blanket, made by my grandmother[/caption]

Between having a strong nostalgic pull toward Bargello patterns and enjoying all kinds of needlecraft myself, it was a no-brainer for me to agree to review Threaded. It doesn't hurt that other needlecraft-themed games like Patchwork, Knitting Circle, and Calico have been big hits in my house. So does Threaded compete? Let's see. 

As I was reading the instructions, Threaded reminded me of Istanbul, and not in a…

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Tabling Tableaus

I once asked W. Eric Martin at GAMA Expo, “What’s your favorite game?” He replied instantly: Innovation. I hadn’t heard of it at the time, but I quickly tracked down a copy and have since played that wild tableau-building civilization card game many, many times. It has shot up to become one of my favorite games, so keep an eye out for my review of Innovation Ultimate in the near future.

But this isn’t Innovation—though it’s close in some very interesting ways. I was handed this review copy by fellow mountaineer Justin Bell at Gen Con last year, and I went in with absolutely no context for what to expect.

To my surprise, there’s a lot here that feels reminiscent of Innovation (and even Dominion), but with enough twists to make Citizens of the Spark one of my favorite new-to-me games of 2026.

Regular readers may know that tableau building is one of my favorite mechanisms, so when a game is built around that idea, I’m already interested.

Spark Plugs

Citizens of the Spark includes 30 different citizen sets, with 7 to 10 used in a given game depending on player count. Players collect sparks, which serve as points, and the game…

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The Crew: Mission Deep Sea - Joseph Buszek

Despite my aversion to both cooperative and limited communication games, I really enjoyed The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine when it was released, mostly because I love new innovations on the trick-taking mechanic, and it definitely delivered in that aspect. However, I didn’t get it to the table that much because, despite the clever gameplay, I found it worked best when you could play through several missions with the same group of players, following the recommended mission difficulty progression. For me, trick-taking games are usually more enjoyable as a quick filler game. Once you pass a half an hour, most at the table have had their fun and are ready to move on. This is where The Crew sequel, Mission Deep Sea, comes in.

While The Crew: Mission Deep Sea still has a mission-based logbook and follows the same standard rules as its predecessor, it’s the task cards for each round that are, literally, game-changing. In the original, the task cards were all the same difficulty­: some combination of color and number, which you had to win in a trick. The difficulty was ramped up by the number of tasks and task tokens (which changes the order to win…

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An unpopular war. Protests in the streets. An authoritarian US leader sending troops to a major American city, employing violence against its own citizens. Obviously, I’m talking about the events of 1968 in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, which happens to be the theme of Chicago ’68, a game from designer Yoni Goldstein and published by The Dietz Foundation.

Running south on Lake Shore Drive, Heading into town

I hope you’ll spare some time for a little personal context before I get into my review. When I moved to Chicago in the summer of 1998 to attend film school, the only thing I knew about the city was that the Bulls had just won their 6th NBA Championship in the last 8 years (side note: they haven’t been to finals in the 28 years since). It was in one of my classes that we watched Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, a movie that takes place (and was partly shot) during the 1968 DNC riots. The film had an enormous impact on me and, along with the book Boss by legendary columnist Mike Royko, was my introduction to the modern history of the city I have called home for nearly 30 years.

Boss is the unauthorized biography of the late…

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This is the first part of a three-part series on getting back into board gaming after an extended absence. (If you want to skip ahead, you can go to Part Two to read about rebuilding your gaming groups, and Part Three to see the games that brought me back to gaming.) Today we're looking at ways to re-build your gaming muscles (thinking strategically and logically, understanding mechanisms and how they interact, puzzle solving, etc.) that may have atrophied during a long hiatus from gaming.

My long hiatus began with Covid cancelling all in-person gaming and then swan-dived into three years of caregiving for my parents. When the storm abated, I looked around and realized that I had barely touched a board game in five years. Between having no time or mental bandwidth for games, my game shelf was covered in dust and, even more worrying, my gaming skills had atrophied.

I first tried to play Trollhalla, one of my favorite games. I felt stupid and slow. The game isn't difficult, but my ability to remember the rules and work through a strategy was shot. Five years of too much doomscrolling, constant stress, and lack of sleep did a number on my ability to think clearly. I tried other games with much the same results. It was depressing and…

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