All the Crawl

Co-op dungeon crawlers are becoming so prevalent that they are pretty much their own genre. Open up Kickstarter or Gamefound, and you’re bound to see a flashy ad for some variant of this, often packed with oversized minis, excessive expansions, and a price tag that makes your wallet start sweating.

Early in my gaming career, I was enamored with these games, enjoying my time with Mansions of Madness, Gloomhaven, Arcadia Quest, Cthulhu: Death May Die, and many others. As time marches on, these games start to blur together, many feeling like different mix-ins of the same ice cream flavor. The theme changes, but innovative mechanics don’t always follow.

I had a chance to check out The Stygian Society, a game that came out in 2020 during the pandemic, with a cooperative angle perfect for partners stuck inside together.

But unlike other dungeon crawlers I’ve played, this one is a tower crawl, and a physical tower at that. Dexterity games are definitely not my thing, and it took me a good 15 minutes to build this centerpiece. At the very least, the table presence will turn heads.

The Big Climb

The Stygian Society plays out over a series of turns as players try to clear six…

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I've been playing board games since the 1970s, and playing what are considered hobby games since the 1980s. (Yes, I am that old.) I've also played many RPGs in that time, and even a few wargames. I've seen many changes over the years, especially regarding the treatment of women in the hobby. Thankfully, things have improved greatly for women in gaming since those long ago days.

It was once the case that a woman just had to accept sexist remarks, inappropriate jokes, and offensive artwork as part of the gaming experience. Even after demonstrating interest and ability, many women were dismissed or belittled. Now, attitudes in many spaces have changed, and it is easier to find groups and shops that not only welcome women but embrace the different perspectives we bring to the hobby.

But…

As the saying goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Unfortunately, even in the year 2026 CE, I still encounter more than a few casual assumptions about women who play and buy board games.

I don't bring this up to bash anyone, or to throw an entire gender under the bus. As I said, things have improved greatly. Learning is happening, and positive change is all around. There are some…

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When I was younger, somewhere between five and eight years old, my family took a few road trips that I still have fond memories of. The era in which these trips took place, the early ‘90s, is worth noting as it’s part of what made these trips memorable.

Before cell phones, tablets, and portable gaming systems were widely available, long road trips were often a struggle to answer the question “How can I entertain/distract myself for X hours?” Surprisingly, my family found a variety of answers, including a “game” involving license plates.

The game consisted of identifying license plates, on cars driving by, from various states in an attempt to find as many as possible during the drive. It was a race of sorts where the first person in our car to point out a new state license plate earned a point and added to their total. When the drive was finished, we tallied up points and declared a winner.

Not only did VNTYPL8S send me on a nostalgic trip down memory lane, but it also turned out to be a fun, laugh-inducing experience for everyone that had a parking spot at the table.

Y00SYRBRN (Use Your Brain)

Gameplay in VNTYPL8S takes place in two phases, a writing phase and a guessing phase, across 3 rounds.

The writing phase…

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“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

That old adage, often spoken in jest with a hapless shrug of the shoulders, speaks to a day that begins like any other day where one ill-fated decision causes everything to fall apart, a veritable misplaced pebble cascading into an avalanche. That cold, bleak, wintry Sunday morning at the cafe was just such a day.

I’d arrived early to open the cafe for the day and my three employees had shown up soon thereafter. It was a Sunday, so expectations were very low. We typically didn’t get much traffic and, usually, I’d have to start sending people home early to save on labor costs. But, you never know how things are going to go. So, you’ve always got to be prepared.

About an hour after opening, a young man walked in with a camera in one hand and a trophy in the other. Upon stepping to the counter, he asked to speak with me, and the story he told me was so unusual that I will never forget it. His name was Ty and he was a Youtuber with a following in the millions. His passion was traveling to various, random cities, visiting their local establishments, and providing them with exposure on his channel. On this particular day, his mission…

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I have played my fair share of Root games, lord knows. I have no official play count. I respect the impulse of those who track their plays, but board games are one area of my life where I don’t do that sort of thing. Some back-of-the-envelope math tells me I have played well over 50 games of Cole Wehrle’s juggernaut since I first bought a copy back in the summer COVID lull of 2020. It quickly became, and has remained, one of my favorite board games.

Root’s status as a personal all-timer has never been threatened, but I have found myself moving away from it over the last few years. Since the release of The Marauders Expansion in 2022—an expansion of which I am very fond—I’ve found myself less and less interested in playing. This has nothing to do with the quality of the game. It hasn’t worn on me, nor has it grown tired. If anything, the fact that I haven’t played Root as much as I used to is Root’s fault; it offered early instruction in the idea of board games as strange and ungainly, and I’ve spent the last few years eager to explore new designs, new spaces, and tracking down new experiences. Root became the kind of game I would happily play if suggested,…

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Seek No Further

Trading card games are one of the anchor pillars of the tabletop hobby. Whether it’s something mainstream like Magic: The Gathering, Lorcana, or Flesh and Blood, something a little more niche like One Piece Card Game or Final Fantasy Trading Card Game, or the crazy phenomenon that is still Pokémon, TCGs will always run parallel to board gaming.

The downside is that TCGs can require a heavy financial investment, and there’s always a risk surrounding the game’s longevity. Unlike staples like Magic and Pokémon, many TCGs fizzle out soon after release, becoming another name on the tombstone. Is anyone still playing Altered?

X: Seekers of Fortune is a card game that simulates the feeling of a TCG with no continued investment, no chase cards to pull, and no meta deck-building. That’s a huge draw for me since I love the playstyle of TCGs, but I’d rather have a self-contained experience like Compile  or Mindbug.

The folks at Mega Moth Studios were nice enough to send over the deluxe version of the game, which includes crisp playmats and even a first edition booster pack to mix into the base game. Hmm…do I smell a system being built here?

Fortune and Glory, Kid.…

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The Game Makers - Andy Matthews

Even in this age of elaborately produced games, The Game Makers from Bezier Games stands out from the crowd. A “game about making board games”, the team behind this title spent years working on the production, acquiring licenses, and working with Panda Manufacturing, to bring this to tables all over the world. Our man Kevin Brantley had the chance to talk with Bezier Games about this game at Origins 2025 and Gen Con 2025, and even got to sit in on a full play through last year.

The Game Makers features a nearly 12” square cube chock full of wooden components (3 different sizes of meeples, wooden trees), dice in three sizes, plastic buildings, double layer player boards, magnetic wheels, miniature forklifts, and SO MANY CARDS. And all of it is crammed into the box in a very well thought out series of stacked inserts.

How does it play? Quite well actually. 

While there’s a lot going on, the main gameplay loop is not only fairly simple, but also simultaneous. Everything starts with the center rondel in which players send their forklifts out to collect resources. Every resource in the game can be used to either improve your personal factory, or to…

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There are times, engaging with this hobby of games, when one is confronted with the very real possibility, regardless of one’s self-esteem, that one is in fact stumbling through this harrowing and at times magnificent experience we call life with a dearth of cognitive capacity.

Put another way, there are games that make you wonder, “Am I a dumdum?”

Thief’s Market, from publisher PickPocket Games and designer Dave Chalker, is just such a game. This is surprising for a few reasons, not least of which is because Thief’s Market is, mechanically, a breeze. It’s a challenge to think of something simpler without tipping over into party games. Each round is divided into two phases: grab some loot, then spend said loot on resource conversion powers and points until someone wins. This is not, in theory, the stuff analytical types tend to lose much sleep over.

The starting player rolls all the dice, which are then placed in the middle of the table along with the first player token. Players take turns drafting dice by either staking a claim from that middle or picking the pocket of a fellow player. If…

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(Last updated July 2026.)

Let's get the obvious question out of the way: yes, it's a miniatures game, and yes, that phrase alone is enough to send some board gamers running for the hills. I get it. I was one of you. The idea of assembling tiny plastic limbs with tinier plastic glue, then learning a ruleset that looks like it was fully written for people who already know what a "beam attack" is, felt like I was trying to translate the Necronomicon or something.

Marvel: Crisis Protocol is Atomic Mass Games' skirmish game built around Marvel's absurdly deep bench of heroes and villains. "Skirmish" is doing real work in that sentence: you're not commanding armies or pushing platoons around a table. You're fielding a handful of named, iconic characters and throwing them at each other across a comic-book landscape. This means the game is about how Juggernaut specifically behaves in a fight as an unstoppable wrecking ball, not how many identical soldiers you can cram into a formation. If you've ever wanted Hulk to pick up a dumpster and throw it through a building, this is the game built for that exact impulse.

Here's the game, stripped all the way down. You build a roster of characters ahead of…

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Last November, I attended the San Diego Historical Games Convention for the first time and it was one of the best events of 2025. When the SDHistCon board announced they would be putting on a new convention outside of San Diego, SDHistCon North, and invited me to attend, I was absolutely thrilled. Even more so when I learned it was just about an hour flight from Chicago, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Purple and Gold

Given my undying love of Prince, Hüsker Dü, and the Coen Brothers, it’s strange that this was actually my first time in the North Star State. The downtown St. Paul office buildings, ballparks, and breweries definitely gave it a different vibe from the tiny surf shops, bait shops, and oceanside restaurants of Point Loma in San Diego. The convention itself had a distinct feel, as well. To begin with, it was only a two-day event, as opposed to four in San Diego. While this meant that I had to pack my gaming schedule pretty tightly, it also meant that I didn’t spend too much time exploring the city.

SDHistCon North took place at the historic St. Paul Union Depot. Originally built in 1881, it was rebuilt in 1923 after the original burned down in 1915.…

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Dungeon Delve for One, Please

On lazy Sundays, I quite enjoy breaking out a solo game and throwing on some old records. No group bickering over game choice, no fear of another player’s analysis paralysis, just me, myself, and a deck of cards. There’s a particular joy in quieting down and figuring out a game by yourself, and Puzzle Dungeon is an ideal mix of dungeon delving and puzzle solving to keep those silent thoughts busy.

I was fortunate enough to experience the deluxe edition of the game, which comes with an overwhelming amount of heroes and baddies alike. It’s a smorgasbord of characters packed into this monster-hunting card game, so any characters mentioned here may not be present in the base game!

Puzzle Play

Puzzle Dungeon is a straightforward, solo-only hand management game that challenges players to defeat the required number and types of monsters listed on their hero’s card before their deck runs out. The monster deck is made up of five different monster types, randomly shuffled into four columns and laid out into ordered lines.

To defeat the frontmost monster in a column, players must discard cards with symbols matching that monster. These cards can be…

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I gotta say: I love it when a rulebook uses terms like “midlife crisis”, “murder”, “tax revolt”, “mutiny”, “apostasy”, and “voodoo”...and that was all before I found out I needed to rise from the ranks of teenage piracy during the Anglo-Spanish War all the way through the 30 Years’ War!

Pax Hispanica (2025, Ion Game Design) has a lot going for it. That starts with being a game that creates some drama thanks to a rich backstory. I’m not a theme-first gamer, so usually, I read the flavor text in a manual’s introduction before getting back to the task of shuffling resources around a board or drawing a bunch of cards that don’t mean anything or gathering my income and launching into a new round of taking actions. Story, schmory.

But Pax Hispanica—somehow this is my third foray into Pax games in the last two months!!!—forces a player to accept a few difficult facts. The first is that slave labor in the 17th century was a real thing. No getting around it. That means rounds of Pax Hispanica—each lasting four years—start with a rough truth: your faction, be it the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, or Courish forces under your control, need to ensure that vacant colonies on the map…

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What is the problem?

I love games. That statement should be an obvious truth, given that I regularly write for Meeple Mountain. Some of the games that I love have, over time, lost their luster. It is not that my tastes have shifted, or that I have joined the cult of the new. It is that, to some degree, the game has been solved, in the sense that they have a single dominant or obviously correct strategy.

If you were around in the first couple of months after Machi Koro came out, there were several people on the innerwebs (especially on BoardGameGeek) discussing the order in which you should purchase the properties. A couple of games after reading those articles and it was rather obvious they were right. Machi Koro has had some expansions over the years and managed some attempts to fix the issue (such as no longer showing all cards in the market). This created a slew of other issues. To their credit, Machi Koro 2 did move forward some.

If you enjoy the game Gizmos and you spend any time on Board Game Arena playing the people who are rated with a 300+ ELO, you will quickly find that there exists one and only one strategy employed by high-rated players. If you aren’t constantly focusing…

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When I reviewed Nine Men’s Morris a few years ago, I noted it is one of the oldest recorded games, with boards having been found “etched into ancient roof tiles and still exists in a temple from the 9th-10th Century AD in Karnataka, India.” Since then, I’ve also learned that a blogger  had discovered the board “scratched onto the side of Charlemagne’s throne in Aachen [and] at Canterbury Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey in England.”

Given the historical popularity of this three-in-a-row game, it’s not surprising that there have been many variations over the years—or that variations have continued into modern times. One such variation is Gigamic’s Qomet. 

The board is based on the Twelve Men’s Morris board, where the corners of the three squares are connected by a diagonal line. Designer Fabrice Puleo added a central space to give Qomet its unique design.

Next, he changed the number of pieces per player from 12 (or 9) to 7 and created a unique winning condition: the first player to form a square takes the game.

On your turn, you can either place one of your 7 wooden stars on any open space on the board or you can move one of your stars along the…

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Part of the fun of engaging with a system built around different characters, classes, species, or any other mode of substantive differentiation, is finding the build that’s right for you. Everyone who likes Root has a favorite faction, everyone who plays Magic has a favorite color, and the wonderful thing is that these preferences are almost always deeper than mechanics. If you’re lucky, if everything clicks, your chosen avatar feels ‌like an extension of yourself. There is something about playing as the Lizard Cult that elicits a deeper joy for me. Am I going to win? Probably not, but boy I’m going to have a great time. Blue may leave me with no friends, but I’m enjoying myself.

Leviathan Wilds has been my favorite cooperative game for a while now, and while I was equally fulsome in my praise of the first expansion, it is only now with second expansion Shattered Peak that I can say I have found the Class for me. The Geomancer, one of three new Classes that join three new Climbers and eleven new Leviathans in this box, feels like home. All the builds in Leviathan Wilds are about running around and smashing infectious crystals, but the Geomancer is the first to mess with those troublesome fungal blooms. He can manipulate their values…

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Pirates of Maracaibo: Bermuda Triangle - Justin Bell

I stand by my 2024 review of the Pirates of Maracaibo base game: I think it is designer Alexander Pfister’s best work, a co-design with Ralph Bienert and Ryan Hendrickson based on Pfister’s 2019 release Maracaibo that completely eliminated the older original from my collection. It’s a race that shears off all the loose ends of Maracaibo, with better card play (the entire map is actually a series of cards), simpler combat, a more comprehensive use of the Exploration board, and a shorter playtime. It was one of the top 10 games I played that year, and I’ve played it more than 15 times in person and more than 100 times on Board Game Arena.

Pirates of Maracaibo: Commanders has a “raison d’etre”: Euro players like to have their asymmetric powers, so Commanders very much as a reason to exist. Pirates of Maracaibo: Bermuda Triangle is the latest expansion, but it is very much a mini expansion. There is a small deck of cards that can be integrated into the decks of the base game, there’s a single solo card, and there’s a single location card (the Kraken) that may or may not add a little flair…

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This is my fourth Nucleum article.

If you’ve followed my thoughts on the three other Nucleum products I’ve covered—the base game, Nucleum: Australia, and Nucleum: Energy Research Institute–it’s pretty clear that I think Nucleum is the second-best route/network building gaming system in my collection after the Brass games.

And, in a world where I already love Nucleum, Nucleum: Gibraltar might be the system’s best content. It combines the things I love about the base game, adds juicy new building tiles to the mix alongside new contracts and special powers, and then does what I didn’t think would be possible: Gibraltar’s map is the best combination of Nucluem’s design powers all in one place.

“I think this is the best map now,” said two players who joined me for separate plays, players who have extensive experience with both the base map as well as Australia. I was pretty sure that was my feeling as well after my first play, but winner’s bias set in and I wanted to try again to make sure that’s where I really landed.

The answer? Yep. Nucleum: Gibraltar is the system’s best map!

The Middle is a Warzone

There are three new elements on display in Nucleum: Gibraltar: the new map,…

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Analog Posts

I feel like sending postcards to loved ones is a bygone practice. I remember, as a kid, my parents would send those handwritten snapshots on every trip they took, filling me in on their activities while abroad. Nowadays, postcards have been replaced by social media posts, but they still evoke that familiar feeling of envy when seeing the picturesque adventures of someone else’s holiday.

Postcards, from designers Eric Dubus and Simon Kayne, aims to bring back that old vacation tradition, sending players around France as they collect the sights of the European landscape.

Players may recognize Eric Dubus from his previous works, Encyclopedia and Museum: Pictura, both of which play with the theme of cultural exploration through the art of gaming, all with gorgeous art to boot.

Cartes Postales

Postcards plays over a series of turns until one player has shipped off four postcards. Once that happens, the player with the most points wins.

On a turn, players play three cards from their hand, using them either for their color to fill in a stamp on their postcard or for the card’s action. When players collect the required number of stamps, they travel by bike to the postcard’s location and ship it off to friends…

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Last Light is a 4X game designed by Roy Cannaday and published by Grey Fox Games. The premise is simple: the last sun in the universe is dying, and it’s your job to harvest the most Light. Be the first to collect 20 pieces of Light and you’re the winner.

The Board & Setup

Last Light is likely to be one of the most impressive-looking games you’re going to see for a while. Seeing it on a table at Tantrum Con for the first time, I immediately felt drawn to it. Rotating circles of outer space, small plastic spaceships in three sizes (the game being set up was an upper-tier Kickstarter edition with 3D ships and Resource tokens; my review copy is the standard, cardboard-only release) and the planets.

The marble-like 3D planets, each rising from the board on its own stand and featuring swirls of colors, made me willing to sit down for a teach and a quick few rounds. Had the setup just featured flat cardboard with drawings of planets, I would have kept walking.

[caption id="attachment_332390" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The standard edition of Last Light, with lollypop-like planets rising off the board.[/caption]

The board itself comes in…

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Excelsior, heroes, and welcome to a Meeple Mountain article for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! Today, we’re here to talk about the newest wave of releases for MCP, as your favorite evil robots join the battle. But that’s not all—we have not only fresh models to enjoy, but a whole new set of missions that aim to shake up the meta game! As we say goodbye to the previous 1.5 years of missions, these new ones promise to change the game entirely.

Quick refresher if you've never picked up MCP: this is a skirmish game where you build a squad of Marvel characters - usually four or five, pulled from a larger roster you build ahead of time—depending on how much "threat" (basically their power level and cost) you can afford, and throw them at each other across a comic-book cityscape. You win by controlling objectives called secures and extracts, not by wiping out your opponent, though plenty of games end with someone getting tabled anyway (losing every model on the table). Power is the currency that fuels your abilities, and you earn it mostly by dealing and taking damage, which is why a change to how power works can ripple through the entire game. Got it? Good, because that's exactly what just happened. And that ripple effect is exactly why this…

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