Meeple Mountain – Board Game Reviews, Videos, Humor, and more Board Game Reviews, Videos, Humor, and more
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Jibber Jabble Game Reviewby Justin Bell on September 15, 2026I picked up a review copy of the new word game Jibber Jabble during my visit to Gen Con 2026. After meeting the game’s designer, Carrie Sykes, at a pre-con media event organized by the publisher, I had the chance to demo the game later that weekend before getting Jibber Jabble in front of both my review crew, a group of six at a family beach vacation a couple days later, then a group of eight during one of my weekly gaming group nights. Here’s the synopsis: it’s hard to beat the value proposition of a collaborative word association game that plays fast for an MSRP of $9. It doesn’t land on my personal Mount Everest of word games, but everyone who played it wanted their own copy. We Need Some Clue Words for “Statue” Jibber Jabble is a word association game that plays in about 20 minutes, maybe a bit more with more players. Across six turns, players provide clues for a word or term, helping the active player by giving them clues for the word they cannot see (yes, this is the format for games like Just One). So, the active player flips a card towards everyone else, then the team picks a number, from… The post Jibber Jabble Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Trails & Tails Game Reviewby Justin Bell on September 15, 2026At the end of the day, my review criteria is really simple: is the game fun or not? Trails & Tails is a new self-published title. (BGG does not list a designer, artist, or publishing company…only “self-published.”) It admits its hook right up front: Trails & Tails is going for a Snakes & Ladders-style gaming experience (or, if you’re a gringo like me, Chutes & Ladders), where players move their playing piece up a board all the way to the top…hopefully taking short cuts along the way to reach the top faster. The downside of Snakes & Ladders comes when snakes appear in the space where you end your movement…because if that’s what happens, you fall backwards and/or downwards until you reach a much less desirable space lower on the board. So, keep moving forward and things will generally work out. Trails & Tails adds spice by giving each player two starting dice, differing by player; one player gets a D4 and a D20, while another might have a D6 and a D8. In each round, players roll these dice, then get to use 1-2 dice per turn to their liking. You can add the results of two dice, move forward a number of spaces on one die, or even subtract a larger die value from a smaller one… The post Trails & Tails Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Bordeaux Game Reviewby David McMillan on September 14, 2026
From the rules: “You are a winemaker in the heart of Bordeaux, guiding your vineyard from grape to glass. Every good winemaker knows time itself is an ingredient, and patience is as vital as ambition. This philosophy shapes every decision you make in Bordeaux. Over 13 years (turns), you will assign Workers to Make Wine or Gain Resources, choosing a duration of 1, 2, or 3 years. Longer commitments mean more powerful actions, but it will take longer for that worker to be ready again. As your wines mature, you chart a curated wine tour, connecting estates and guiding bottles into restaurants and shops where patrons can taste your craft. When the final year has passed, your legacy is uncorked. Score points for your wines and resources, and discover which winemaker’s careful timing has produced the most celebrated vintage.” Bordeaux defies easy categorization. There’s no card flipping, no dice rolling, no bag drawing. There’s just you, your available workers, the thing the game allows you to do, and the thing you or your opponents have decided you’ll have the ability to do. If you’re well-positioned, you may be able to do both. But chances are you’ll have to choose between one or the other. Everything you do is in the pursuit of victory points and, after 13 turns, the… The post Bordeaux Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Near: Echoes of Civilizations Game Reviewby Thomas Wells on September 13, 2026Man, I just love a civilization game. For a power-tripping megalomaniac like myself, there’s just nothing better than taking the helm of a conglomerate of violent individuals and making bad decisions. Near: Echoes of Civilizations has a goofy name—you really have to do some mental gymnastics for it to make sense at all. But, there’s some real fun to be had here. All the hits are here: Technology! Combat! Resource management! Points! Actually, part of what makes Near interesting is its commitment to synthesizing the heads-down-euro-bean-counter that constitutes a lot of its bone structure with a traditional build-stuff-kill-guys game. Unlike other civ games (for example, Civilization: A New Dawn, Mosaic, or Gentes) that have tried to incorporate concepts from euro-style mechanism-fests into their design framework, Near takes a holistic approach that makes it feel complete and cohesive, rather than a cobbled together bricolage. A novel new mechanism: “cards” At the beginning of Near, you get dealt a starting culture card (a personal endgame scoring condition), a wonder card (an in-game scoring condition), four regular cards from one of five colors, and a starting action bonus. Your wonder gives you a starting building, and in a very Terra Mystica-style start, you place some buildings out on the board and it’s… The post Near: Echoes of Civilizations Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Nemi: The Strawberry Festival Game Reviewby Steve Conoboy on September 12, 2026We’re in the middle of a war in our garden. It’s all based around the strawberries we have foolishly attempted to grow. Those strawberries are not making it into our bowls. Someone is getting to them first. We were almost convinced it was our regular visitor, Howard the Hedgehog. There isn’t much that Howard won’t scoff. Put a net over ‘em, you say? Yeah, we did that. Then, one super early morning (deeply unusual for me) I happened to squint out of the kitchen window, and what did I spy? Why, a particularly nimble squirrel, scoffing our strawberries. The little son of a nutcracker had torn and chewed a squirrel-sized hole in the netting, and was sharing his rewards with some happy starlings. I think I’ve had two of those strawberries. Two. Not exactly a festival. Not even enough for breakfast. So let’s head to Nemi where we can enjoy a strawberry festival! (Scout’s honor, every word of that odd little tale is true.) In Nemi: The Strawberry Festival, players immerse themselves in the charm of an Italian summer by drafting wild strawberries, baking mouthwatering desserts, and decorating the town with vibrant garlands. Designed by Valeria Cavasin and Edoardo Eibenstein, this 2–4 player game plays over 4 rounds, featuring… The post Nemi: The Strawberry Festival Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Aspens Game Reviewby David McMillan on September 11, 2026
Aspens is a two-player game of arboreal expansion and domination. Each player is given a bag of trees. On a player’s turn, they will roll the game’s two dice to determine the limitations of their actions. One die controls how many trees each of the players receive from their bags, and the other controls in which direction they are able to expand their holdings. On their turn, a player may expand outwards (filling in more spaces with their own trees), bolster their current holdings (increasing their odds of receiving new trees when the dice are rolled), or some mixture of both. Their goal is to get as many of those trees onto the playing field as they can so that when final calculations are performed at the end of the game, they’ll occupy more real estate than their opponent and thereby win the game. This, of course, is an oversimplification of the game (although, as you’ll soon see, not much of one). If you’re just interested in what I think about the game, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we talk about how to play Aspens. Setup First, assemble the game board. The board is divided into seven segments. When fully assembled, you’ll be left with a vaguely cross-shaped playing area composed… The post Aspens Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Playthings Game Reviewby Andrew Lynch on September 10, 2026It’s rare that a published game feels organic, but I guess that makes sense. Most authored works, regardless of medium, do not feel organic. The closest most games come is “intuitive,” which is not the same thing. “Intuitive” as applied to game criticism is more about the rules making sense and flowing. You use it when you’re talking about something that’s easy to teach and easy to learn and easy to play, about games that just. make. sense. In order for something to be intuitive, it has to build on what has come before, on a shared cultural reference or two. That is not the case with “organic,” a word which I cannot say I have ever wanted to apply to a board game before. Strap in, folks. We’re developing a new theory. “Organic” can be as free-form as it wants. That’s probably a key feature, right? I mean, who tells an heirloom tomato how to grow? Nobody, that’s who. When I say Playthings is organic, I mean that it feels like something a group of Victorian children would come up with whilst whittling away the unending hours of the day. It feels improvised, even as… The post Playthings Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Size Wise Game Reviewby Justin Bell on September 9, 2026
I’ve been struggling to poke holes in the design of the new game Size Wise, designed by Scott Brady and published by GameHead. And, here’s what I have got: The people who made those old Tootsie Roll ads from the 1970s should feel burned that artist Serge Seidlitz made an owl for Size Wise’s box and tokens that looks a heck of a lot like the one who knows how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. Like, everyone of a certain age who has seen the rulebook and the tokens has commented that the owl looks exactly like the one from those old commercials! (I haven’t reached out to GameHead for comment…but, they know. I KNOW they know.) Size Wise is a party game for 3-8 players that plays in about 20 minutes. I tried Size Wise three times at different player counts: four, seven, and eight players. Everyone loved it. Across a series of turns, players collectively flip a card from a deck, with six different items on each card numbered from 1-6. The backs of the cards are also numbered from 1-6, so when a player flips a card, they then look at the top card of the draw deck to see which number the table is forced… The post Size Wise Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Go! Go! Go Kart Game Reviewby Justin Bell on September 9, 2026
The success of CMYK’s Hot Streak has had the intended effect. I know, because while I was at Gen Con 2026 I saw a few more betting-style party games than I had in recent years, with Underdog Games’ Dino Racer leading the way at this year’s show. Taco Cat Games—the company formerly known as Dolphin Hat Games, before leaning into the company’s most popular title, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza—is swerving left in a world where everyone else is turning right. Here’s what I mean: Taco Cat Games has been making fast, fun card games for a decade, with titles like Moose Match Mayhem! and Gimme That! leading the way with games that feature zero board and dozens of cards, dice, pencils, and yelling. But with their new release, Go! Go! Go Kart, I had a somewhat shocking conversation with Taco Cat’s CEO, Dave Campbell. “Yeah, it’s a board game,” he told me when he handed over a review copy. “Let me know what you think; we’re really excited about it.” After a few plays at home—including a four-player game with my two kids and one of their friends, along with the standard plays with my kids and the wife—I’m ready to see why Dave is so excited. Go! Go! Go Kart mostly avoids… The post Go! Go! Go Kart Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Hacienda Game Reviewby Justin Bell on September 8, 2026
I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I have real questions, like this: does the new game Hacienda (based on the 2004 version of Hacienda by Wolfgang Kramer) want the leopard-looking creatures on offer here to be pumas, or jaguars? I ask because the rulebook interchangeably uses the terms for both (they are pumas on the manual’s cover description, but jaguars on page four), and technology tells me that the two breeds of cool-looking cats are definitely different. Another theme note: Hacienda’s new theme is tied to building an eco-friendly tourist destination in the hills of Argentina. For the life of me, though, Hacienda feels like a game where I am simply placing clumps of animal tokens on a map to score adjacency bonuses and piles of cute-looking capybara packs. Hacienda isn’t nearly as complicated as I’m making it out to be. In fact, like other Kramer games—the German legend has, as a lead or co-designer, gifted the world with titles ranging from El Grande to Tikal to Wandering Towers to my all-time favorite Kramer co-design, The Princes of Florence—Hacienda is extraordinarily simple to teach, and his work here with Daryl Andrews (Sagrada) is sleek, with a playtime that might last 30 minutes or less with lower player counts, 45 minutes with the… The post Hacienda Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Drillers Game Reviewby Justin Bell on September 8, 2026Sometimes you can tell where a company’s focus is in a given year. Czech Games Edition (CGE) has a very, very large piece of chicken releasing later this year called Kingdom Come Deliverance, a $150 game so large it has 10 individual artists working on only the artwork for the 700+ cards in the box. Forget the fact that CGE’s lead designer, Vlaada Chvátil, and one of the world’s hottest designers, Tomáš Holek (SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, amongst many other now-published titles), are the co-designers on Kingdom Come Deliverance and there are are dozens of hours of content in that box. (I’m more shocked that a single game has TEN ARTISTS working on it!) That means Drillers, CGE’s Gen Con release, is its other “big” release for 2026. It’s not nearly as ambitious as Kingdom Come Deliverance, but Drillers is as solid as its title is plain. Drillers is a deckbuilding game that plays in about 90 minutes even at its full player count, and it does excellent, limited work within its tidy playtime. Dive In Drillers accommodates 1-4 players, and is a very standard deckbuilding game. Players begin the game with a deck of nine cards—eight action cards and a “Damage” card, which essentially… The post Drillers Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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Crits & Tricks Game Reviewby Kevin Brantley on September 7, 2026Taking Tricks! Some readers may know that I wasn’t into trick-taking games at all a couple of years back. Since then, though, trick-taking has become the trend for small-box games, and somewhere along the way I developed a love for them. Whether or not I’m actually good at them is a different story. The downside is that the seemingly endless wave of releases has started to oversaturate the genre, making it rarer to find one that brings something unique to the table. But when games like Rowdy Partners, Tricky Kids, and Rebel Princess offer something different, my head turns. I had a chance to demo Crits & Tricks at Gen Con this year, and at first glance, I thought it was an RPG card game. Laid out in front of me were full sets of dice, from d4s to d20s and everything in between. Move over to the cards, and they stand out with fantasy artwork featuring bards, barbarians, and other adventuring types. Wait a minute, these cards don’t have any values? Are you sure this is a trick-taking game? Just wait and see. Dice & Quests Crits & Tricks plays over three rounds, and whoever collects the most loot wins. The deck is made up of different hero classes, such as wizards and rogues, that… The post Crits & Tricks Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
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