Around these parts I'm known as the RPG guy for my love of different systems and the opportunity to immerse myself in the theme of a game. Accidental Heroes, an upcoming app-driven adventure game designed by Wojciech Grajkowski and published by Lucky Duck Games, puts your hero on a topsy-turvy joyride through an ever-changing world bursting with familiar references. Let's hop on the tracks and see how it plays.

Accidental Heroes: The World is Your Oyster

I'll preface my discussion of Accidental Heroes by acknowledging that my experiences are based on a prototype copy that was limited in scope compared to what's expected in the complete game. At first I thought that the lack of content would be disappointing, but instead I was surprised by how many branching paths were available to my heroes as I played.

In Accidental Heroes, players assume the role of an "hero", a term surrounded by quotation marks because whether or not you live up to the moniker is up for you to decide. The object of the game is to pass two difficult Tests associated with Final Missions, acquiring a pair of Dragon Eggs before any other player is able to do so.

Heroes have three main attributes: brain, body, and combat. Each of these attributes is represented in an 'exquisite corpse' fashion…

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Ever since I first played Tag Team with Meeple Mountain's Justin Bell at Gen Con 2025, I've racked up dozens of plays of the 2-player autobattler card game. I revel in its simplicity. After playing thoroughly with the entire stable of Fighters, I still craved more. Enter Tag Team: Arthur's Legacy, introducing six new Fighters from Arthurian myth, available to play standalone or combined with the base game.

Tag Team: Arthur's Legacy: By Merlin's Beard

Instead of rehashing the main mechanics of the original game, I'll let Andrew's Tag Team review speak to that. Tag Team: Arthur's Legacy uses that same core gameplay loop, so instead I'll focus on the six new Fighters and the shenanigans they bring to the (round) table.

First up is Excalibur, the fabled sword gifted to Arthur by the Lady in the Lake, or the sword that he pulled from the stone, depending on the tale you follow as canon. Excalibur enhances your partner, typically offering benefits like increased power. If Excalibur's HP goes to 0, the game isn't over like it normally would. Instead, the card gets flipped over to its Broken side and those positive abilities on Excalibur's deck become accompanied by a negative effect.

Morgan places a Crow…

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By almost every metric, the latest Unmatched Adventures set, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is an improvement on its predecessor.

Now, that’s quite some feat, given Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze's impressive achievement. It turned the competitive Unmatched system into a cooperative experience and did it with style. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars just a few months ago, and I stand by that score.

But Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the better game and the better experience. I’m going to use Tales to Amaze as a comparison throughout this review, not because it’s lacking, but to show how this new version builds on it.

Raise some shell

For the record, I am fairly indifferent to the cowabunga-ing Turtles. My 9-year old son recently asked me who has what weapon and I had to shrug and promise we’d look it up when we got home. They like pizza, they hang about with people whose names are months, and they wear colourful masks. (Why do they need masks, how many other humanoid turtles are wandering about New York?) Both their teacher and their villain are named after processes of making small fragments, but I couldn’t tell you which was the good one.

My praise for this…

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There’s some version or another of Peter Pan that has Captain Hook deliver a quick monologue to Pan just before the good captain is vanquished. “You’ve defeated my men, taken my ship,” that sort of thing. While I cannot find this monologue in any edition of the script, I remember it very clearly from the summer camp production in which I played Captain Hook. I’d think I hallucinated it, but my prop hook was broken during the fight and I improvised a tidy, “broken my hook,” to cover the malfunction. You don’t forget that kind of triumph.

Hook isn’t yet defeated in the moment when he makes that speech. Well. He may be defeated, but he doesn’t feel it. He uses the line to lure Pan closer, to take one final lunge at the buoyant brat. Down, but not out. Lying to himself until the last moment that he has a chance. From the characteristically superb historical ephemera included with Fort Circle Games’s new release Hunt for Blackbeard, it seems to me that Blackbeard was in a similar position in 1718, as Virginia Colony and the Royal Navy closed in on his position.

“Down, but not out” just about sums up Blackbeard’s situation perfectly in Hunt for Blackbeard. The great terror of the Caribbean—or at least that’s how the…

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As someone who finds the wanton violence, corruption, and who-cares-i-ttude that’s baked into American life truly repugnant, the sheer unadulterated fantasy of a fair contest or battle is intoxicating. An oasis in a desert. Game designers and publishers seem to agree—there are so many darn area control beat-em-ups. I’ve played so many, because, when they’re done well (the razor-sharp edge of Inis or the skull bludgeon-y Shogun) you get to have a rare experience—a test of will, bravery, and risk.

Gunsen: The Battle for Toshi Ranbo’s main problem is that it is sleight. It comes in a big box, it supports up to six players, it has faction asymmetry, tons of card powers, cool pieces, and a compelling premise. But each of these things, while initially compelling, reveal themselves to be paper-thin, and nothing becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

King o’ the mill

The way you win Gunsen is by being the first to accomplish 7 objectives. There are more than 7 available, and all of them, with one exception (holding the center) are permanent once you accomplish them. Most of the objectives are resource management things: build two buildings, play 3 tactics cards, occupy 2 shrines, use your 3 special action slots, etc. If…

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Gudnak has a great name, and maybe that’ll be enough to overcome the gigantic obstacle that the genre of games that are trying to become lifestyles struggle with.

That obstacle: gluttony. Customizable competitive card games are the definition of an oversaturated market. Step into any local game store, and you’ll see the locus of competition for space and time on full display.

Gudnak has a lot of things going for it, but it also struggles with a few usability issues. I also imagine it will have a market visibility problem going forward, but that’s not for me to decide.

What’s a Gudnak?

Gudnak is an ambigram, which the back of the box helpfully tells you, meaning a symbol that can be flipped and retains its shape. The game is played on a grid of different sizes depending on player count, with square cards functioning as units and spells. You have a 20-card deck that serves as your game timer/health bar (reminiscent of my beloved Ortus Regni). If the other player occupies your gates (the square in front of your stronghold/deck) at the start of your turn, you discard a card. No cards? You lose.

Gameplay is reminiscent of

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Green Goblin Crashes the Party

When AMG first announced their foray into the world of board games with the Alliances line as a spinoff from Marvel: Crisis Protocol, I was… skeptical. After all, could they really take a game I love like MCP and spin it off into a team-based co-op experience? Could they capture what makes MCP work? I was dubious. While it’s not a perfect experience, I was completely pleasantly surprised by just how fun the game turned out to be. It’s just an absolute blast.

The quick idea is that each Alliances game brings together a team of four heroes, all with varying superpowers, to take down an iconic villain and their army of goons. Here, we get both Spider-Men (Peter Parker and Miles Morales) along with Black Cat and Ghost-Spider, teaming up to take down the Green Goblin. Together, they’ll fight him across three different chapters (two objective-based chapters and a final boss fight), each lasting roughly 90 minutes each. 

Getting started is simple - each player picks the character they want to be and picks a level 1 upgrade, and then you’re off. It’s worth noting that if you’re a solo player, this game is very easily playable in solo mode with you controlling all four characters, though I can’t speak to that experience…

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We did it, folks. Humanity has invented—nay, perfected—time travel. They said it couldn’t be done. They were wrong. The scientists at publisher Plaid Hat Games figured it out. It’s less complicated than I’d have expected time travel to be, requiring only that you set up a copy of The Monolith and sit down. The technology also seems to be fairly limited in its applications, since The Monolith only has the ability to transport players back to the summer of 1993.

Picture it: Fireball Island is in the rearview mirror, the Euro revolution is but a faint glimmer on the horizon, and sweet sweet Ameritrash rules the roost. There’s wood panelling on the walls, left over from when your parents had the basement finished in ’86. Breathe in the aroma of freshly-toasted Bagel Bites, taste the corona of blue Squeezeit around your lips. Hear the faint sounds of “I’ve Been Thinking About You” and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s cover of “Passionate Kisses” waft in from a nearby radio. That’s The Monolith.

Everything about The Monolith as an object was seemingly designed to evoke a previous era, if not always the same one. The table presence is the maximalism of…

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Michael Hardacre’s Rattlesnake, a two-player card game about a gun fight in the wicky-wicky-wild Wild West, is a fabulous marriage of setting and mechanisms. This thing is lean, mean, and jumpy. More sting than a scorpion and more bite than a…well, you know. It is tense enough that the components list should include brow sweat. And it’s so small! For form factor, this no-frills set of cards—with a gun token for flavor—is my favorite thing to come along since High Tide. There’s nothing quite like a big game in a small box.

The goal of the game is simple enough: kill your opponent. Well, I shouldn’t say “kill.” Pokémon has taught us that death isn’t always the end result of [checks notes] running out of health. Strictly speaking, your goal is to hit your opponent four times. Death is not the dictated outcome. Maybe all those hits grazed you. Maybe they missed organs. Maybe your opponent rushes you off to a hospital, where the gangrene can do its slow, ante-antibacterial work. I’m not a historian.

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Thrilla in Manila

Fellow Meeple Mountaineer Andrew Holmes recently published a review covering Unmatched: The Witcher - Realms Fall and Steel & Silver, and his opening comment mentioned that we at Meeple Mountain differ on our opinions of the Unmatched franchise. But that makes sense as different reviewers covering differently themed sets are going to land differently on their thoughts.

(The correct opinion is that Unmatched is awesome)

However, Andrew is right that Unmatched is a great system because of its simplicity, quick pace, and heavily contrasting roster of fighters. And like him, I’m the ideal demographic, but for different reasons. The original game, Star Wars: Epic Duels, was played dozens upon dozens of times by my friends in middle school and me. We even found custom heroes online and printed them out, and though they were wildly unbalanced, it was a blast nonetheless.

Fans of Unmatched will recognize Bruce Lee as a highly sought-after expansion, being the first single-character pack and, at times, running upwards of $250 on the secondary market. Fortunately for those patient enough, Bruce Lee has returned in both an affordable and memorable set, going toe-to-toe with the famous boxer Muhammad Ali. I wasn’t alive during their height of fame, but their quotes, stories, and larger-than-life personas live on through pop…

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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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