It seems mean to say it, but I sort of wish that Parks, rather than Wingspan, was getting all the mainstream attention. It’s not just a better game, it’s a better game for the specific niche that Wingspan seems to have dominated – something endearing enough to bring non-gamers organically…
Author: Michael Heron
Parks (2019)
Much like the national parks system itself, Parks the game is an absolute treasure. And like the national parks system, you shouldn’t overlook it just because there are flashier forms of entertainment available. It’s a gorgeous production with a straightforward ruleset that promises little and then over-delivers in spades. Its…
Burnout, The Hobby, and the Hustle
I often struggle with the work I do for this site. Not… doing the work. But rather, the deeper motivation of why this work and why in this form. Before Meeple Like Us I was happy with academic publishing as being my main venue for getting thoughts, results and ideas…
Bang! The Dice Game (2013) – Accessibility Teardown
Bang the Dice Game is a perfectly okay game about banging and dice. It’s inoffensive to an extreme. Briefly amusing with a social cost for playing that can’t really be at all justified in comparison to what its required player count would otherwise let you do of an evening. We…
Bang! The Dice Game (2013)
Bang: The Dice Game plays like a kind of unholy fusion between Yahtzee and the movie Blazing Saddles. It draws not so much from Sergio Leonne as it does Mel Brooks. Imagine the kind of slapstick gunfight you might see if the end of The Good, The Bad and the…
Wavelength (2019) – Accessibility Teardown
Wavelength is a fascinating, interesting game of staring into the bleak abyss that exists in the gulf between inside and outside of our heads. It’s a solipsist horror story of abject isolation. A game of learning what it means to truly be alone in a universe vast beyond all human…
Wavelength (2019)
It’s a pretty great time to be a party gamer, provided that you ignore the fact that being the kind of person that brings games to a party instantly marks you out as a social deviant. The market is full of well known and well regarded titles though, and more…
Top Twelve Best Board Games with which to Start a Collection
Introduction We’ve done quite a lot of lists at this point, ranging from the obvious (top ten best games) to the downright bizarre (top twenty-two games we’d like to crossbreed in terrifying and unethical experiments). They’re fun to write and have the additional benefit of being reasonably newbie friendly. Each…
Joking Hazard (2016) – Accessibility Teardown (NSFW)
Games like Joking Hazard often get treated with casual disdain in the hobbyist game reviewer space. ‘Not really for us’, we sniff while quaffing vintage meeples from a plastic goblet. ‘Gauche. Vulgar. Base. Low art’, we sneer while liberally loading refined d20 pate onto cardboard crackers. And yet, these games…
Joking Hazard (2016) (NSFW)
Joking Hazard is a fun game, and perhaps that ought to be enough for any of us. It doesn’t have to be clever, or original. It just has to be worth playing….
The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014) – Accessibility Teardown
While I don’t think Castles of Mad King Ludwig is quite as fascinating a design as Suburbia, it might well be a more fun game. It depends really on what you want out of a box like this – an emergent story of compromise and consequence, or something that sacrifices…
The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014)
The very first game I ever reviewed for this site was Suburbia. That was the title that sent me down a path of inquiry that would consume, at this point, almost four years of my life. Never before had I seen a collection of physical components that was so interesting…
Managing and Curating a Circulating Game Collection
Back when I was young I had two answers to the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’. The first was ‘a librarian, ook’. The second was ‘a fire engine’. Neither in the end turned out to be the path my life took, but I’ve spent…
The Estates (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
The Estates got a pretty rough ride in our review. It’s undeniably a well designed game, but one that leaves me so unhappy at the end of play that I just want no part of it. I’m not opposed to a streak of meanness in my game. I just don’t…
The Estates (2018)
The Estates is a well-designed game and I don’t like it. Worse, I don’t want to like it. That’s an awkward pitch for a review. The last time I had a similar issue was when I reviewed Catan – a game that makes me so angry I can only play…
No Thanks (2004) – Accessibility Teardown
No Thanks is a marvellous design for a game. It’s like a behavioural economics experiment in a box, teaching you which of your friends will jump on a grenade to save the group. Spoiler – it’s probably none of them. We gave it four stars in our review, although it…
No Thanks (2004)
The games about which people often get the most excited are the ones that look substantial. Big, bold, beautiful games. Thematic monsters with miniatures and rulebooks thick enough to choke an otter. Complicated games are difficult to get right because they have so many different elements that need to be…