Arkham Travel Guide - Justin Bell

I’ve now played the En Route gaming system—designed by Daniili Zaitsev, who also uses the pen name Dan Lièvre—nearly a dozen times, between plays of En Route: Special Edition through Innsmouth Travel Guide, the second game in the Travel Guide series. I recently got in a couple plays of Arkham Travel Guide, and although these are different games, they scratch the same itch: elevated roll-and-write (or flip-and-write, using En Route’s base system), higher interaction, high-score affairs, perfect for solo play or exactly three players thanks to the game’s dice choice system that gets all players involved. (En Route was one of my top 10 games from 2025.)

This time around, players have to guide tourists around a 6x6 grid of Arkham, with a final route that scores the most points. There are four choices of “Old Ones”, boss characters which change the scoring rules for a given game, along with in-round bonuses if players hit specific spaces during their turn. All the hallmarks of the series remain: personal objectives, boosting scores by running routes along the appropriately-colored city blocks if players can get matching tourists, 10 rounds, solo challenges, a 30-to-40-minute playtime.

The ending of Arkham Travel Guide might turn some players…

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When Ticket to Ride was released in 2004, it became popular the world over. That year, it was nominated for numerous international awards, even winning the prestigious Spiel de Jahres award. Capitalizing on the exposure, the following year designer Alan R. Moon released Ticket to Ride: Europe. By changing the map from the US to that of Europe—and introducing small but meaningful changes—Moon showed how he could expand the game in challenging and entertaining ways while still being familiar to anyone who had played the original. He’s been going strong with new versions of his game ever since.

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails (shortened to TTR:R&S from here) comes with a two-sided game board that lets you choose to either play across The World, or in a section of the USA and Canada surrounding The Great Lakes. To do so, you’ll use familiar train cars to move across the land to port cities where your new ships will continue your path across waterways and oceans.

As with my reviews of other Ticket to Ride editions, I’m going to skip the How to Play section of this review. If you haven’t played Ticket to Ride before, check out my colleague Kevin Brantley’s great review of Ticket to…

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A new Earthborne Rangers campaign? You don’t have to tell me twice. It is hard to get me to play the same game more than a few times, but I will drop any and everything to spend more time in—or, in this case, under—the Valley.

While the base game of Earthborne Rangers—one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life, and an experience with which this review will assume you are familiar—takes place across a wide range of beautiful landscapes, Legacy of the Ancestors sends players into the depths of the Arcology, the ruins of a lost civilization that used to inhabit the Valley. This is the sensible choice, a natural development coming out of the first game. The first campaign leaves the Arcology, a consistent splash of harder sci-fi tech in a sea of solarpunk, barely explained, and the underground tunnels are as strong a contrast in setting as it’s possible to have. No more sweeping vistas for you, no no. Best you can hope for is a spot of bioluminescence.

“We Got Distracted by the Ooze”

The cornerstones of what make Earthborne Rangers great are still here. The caverns of the Arcology teem with life and discoveries. There…

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Games like Tulikko are challenging to review because they are generic. Games like this embody much of what a particular genre of game attempts to do; and it’s very similar to a lot of other games of that genre. It’s another personal board tile placement puzzle. I don’t know if that’s bad or good anymore.

Tiles, but make them slide

Tulikko is a game of acquiring tiles and placing them on a grid on your player board. The tiles come in four colors, and you’re trying to place them on your player grid in specific configurations that are governed by the randomly determined objectives for each game. There are three cards that change each game. One type has you trying to make specific patterns of colors on your board, another has you making specific shapes, and a third has you making patterns using special wooden river pieces—I’ll cover those in a moment. The other scoring options are part of each game and reward you for covering one of four symbol types on your player board and/or placing enough tiles (3, 4 if you’re slow) of one of the four colors.

How do you get the tiles? Well, you put a tile that you draw from your personal pile of…

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The Stormlamp Rituals is billed as an "Illustrated Puzzle Narrative." At this point, you might be asking, "So what does that mean?" It's a hardcover book containing eighteen chapters, and each chapter consists of a series of clues to follow and puzzles you must solve in order to complete the main character’s adventure by the end of the book.

This isn't an easy thing to review because many things that I could tell you would spoil the puzzles and story for you. So let me just say that, generally, this is a story about a girl named Anna. She is a young witch trying to "uncover the dark secrets of her lineage." (That's a quote from the back cover of the book.) To complete her journey, she must solve puzzles and overcome obstacles in order to navigate a magical world called Twicelore. Her goal (well, your goal, really) is to complete the Incantation of Protection. When complete, the Incantation provides Anna with immense power.  

The Incantation is built from Anna’s experiences in Twicelore. Each chapter contains puzzles that, completed successfully, yield a word or phrase for you to write on the Incantation page. Each step/puzzle within each chapter must be completed in order, as each gives you…

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This is the third (and final) part of my series on how to get back into board gaming after a long hiatus. In Part One I looked at how to rebuild your gaming skill set. In Part Two, I discussed how to rebuild your gaming tribe if you find yourself alone. Now, I want to offer you my personal top six games that helped me accomplish those two goals.

Your top six (or ten, or fifty), should you ever need to think about such a list, will likely be different from mine. But hopefully seeing why I chose these six will help you if the day ever comes when you've been away from games for a while and need an easy way back in.

1. Dragon Castle

There have been times when I've wondered if I have too many games. I've purged a few over the years, and Dragon Castle was once on that list. I kept it, though, and good thing I did because Dragon Castle proved to me that there's nothing wrong with having a game available for every possible niche and contingency. I was able to offer this game to a group of mahjong players who ended up liking it. No, it's not "real" mahjong, but the similarity was enough to get them to…

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Diplomacy.

That's a word with power. The art of diplomacy has shaped the course of human history more than any army ever could. Wars have been avoided and empires preserved or dismantled entirely through the right conversation at the right moment. It is the oldest game humanity has ever played, so it makes sense that someone turned it into a board game.

Turning back to 1959, a certain Allan Calhamer designed Diplomacy. A game that spotlights the messy, treacherous, and deeply human act of negotiation. Dice were not welcome here. Players wrote down their orders in secret after tense talks with their opponents, and the table rarely survived intact. It resonated with many people, including John F. Kennedy, which tells you everything you need to know about what kind of game this is.

Despite its importance, Diplomacy was never destined to be a household name. People are aware of it the way they are aware of chess, with a vague sense that it is serious and probably not for them. It sits in a niche within an already niche industry, respected by the people who know it and largely ignored by everyone else.

JFK Would Need to Relearn This One 

Then Renegade Game Studios announced a card game spinoff.…

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No upcoming expansion had me more excited than the arrival of Shackleton Base: Below. Within. Above., the first expansion for one of the five best games I played in 2024, Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon.

“Shack Town”, as it is known in my circles, has hit my tables a whole lot since the late summer of 2024, thanks to receiving an advance copy from the team at Sorry We Are French (from overseas, no less, in the Before Tariff Times). The medium-weight Euro is a crowded field, and Shackleton Base stood out because it does a lot of things right, thanks in part to the seven different corporations included in the base game.

Almost any number of extra corporations would spice up the base game for me. I’m not exhausted with any of the base game corporations yet, but the mix can always get sweeter with more set-up options that shake up the meta.

Let’s talk about the new stuff. (For anyone new to Shack Town, you can check out my review of the base game to learn more.) Also, please note: the new stuff barely—and I mean, barely—fits in the base game box, assuming you keep the cute tuckboxes that make setting up the game a cinch.

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Every now and then, I sit down to play a game with no expectations whatsoever. I anticipate neither excitement nor despair. I am absolutely ambivalent, a perfect blank slate. I think of this as a true neutral response, but it occurs to me that I generally enjoy trying new games, so ambivalence is in fact a moderately negative response. I’ll process this on my own time.

Ambivalence was very much the case with Got Five!, a deduction game from designer Yoann Levet and publisher Blue Orange. I picked up a review copy because it was the slow season, I knew it wouldn’t take long to play, and I liked the tiles. I don’t know which of the two credited artists, Mathieu Clauss and Simon Douchy, is responsible for them, but those colorful bakelite tombstones with expressive eyes are hard to resist.

Don’t be fooled. Their friendly exteriors harbor terrible secrets, by which I mean numbers between 1 and 60. If you think that doesn’t sound so bad, you probably like math. During setup, each player takes one tile in each of the five colors and stands them up so the numbers are visible to everyone else at the table. It is extremely important that you not see the numbers on your own tiles, since the goal of the game…

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I have a secret to tell you. I like Monopoly Deal. Not love, not champion, just like. In the crowded basement of casual card games, it earns its keep. Put it this way, given the choice between Monopoly Deal, Exploding Kittens, and UNO, Deal is getting picked every time.

Yet there is a trend quietly taking over the casual card game space where publishers are releasing meaner, nastier versions of their existing games. UNO Show 'Em No Mercy, Flip 7 with a Vengeance, and now Monopoly No Mercy are all cut from the same cloth. More take-that and suffering for the people sitting across from you. Where this trend is coming from, I genuinely have no idea.

Cruel Details

The goal hasn't changed from the original. Collect three complete property sets, build your own portfolio while raiding everyone else's, and be the first to get there. What has changed is the action cards, some of which would qualify as war crimes in certain jurisdictions, and the addition of debt chips.

Debt chips are the most radical departure from the original formula. Money flows in and out fast in Monopoly No Mercy, and there will be moments where you simply cannot cover what you owe. That is…

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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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