Category: Board Game Accessibility

I described 6 Nimmt in our review as being ‘The Mind for people that didn’t like the Mind’ and I think that’s a decent frame to understand its appeal.   Released in 1994, it’s still the best ‘putting cards in an order’ game I’ve played.  Despite the inherent chaos of what…

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Planet is a visually striking game that is perhaps an ideal starter for newbies to the modern hobby.   It’s pleasingly tactile, straightforward to play, and has such a distinctive hook that it’s hard to not want to play.   We gave it three and a half stars in our review, noting…

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Terra Mystica is an overbearing monster of a game – one of those jovial pub psychopaths that is your best buddy one minute and then glassing you in the face the next.     It’s a properly great game… for those that can ride the shockwaves of its design.   For everyone else…

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When I Dream has a great elevator pitch and a weirdly compelling and transgressive hook.  Slipping on that eye-mask is an adoption of vulnerability you rarely see in board games.  It’s a shame really the game itself fails to be particularly satisfying – the ‘hidden traitor’ mechanisms just don’t work,…

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The Buffy board game wasn’t much of a hit with us here at Meeple Like Us.   All in all we’d rather just watch the DVDs, really.   The game had a couple of major problems.  The inconsistent design that liberally mixed heavy randomness with algorithmic optimisation undercut its effectiveness as a…

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We made the argument in the review that all stacking games are basically the same game, and that fundamentally they were more about the collapse than they were about the building up.   Junk Art is a great game and I’d recommend it to your attention, but I’d be hard pressed…

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I actually thought my review of Viticulture was going to be a good deal more positive when I sat down to write it.   The more I thought about it though the more I realised the fun I had was heavily influenced by the very factors that make it such an…

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My love of Discworld was a big factor in how the Discworld: Ankh Morpork review went – it’s a perfectly fine game set in Discworld, but fails as a Discworld game because it doesn’t capture any of the things that actually matter about the setting.  The problem when chaining a…

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I didn’t feel like the game of Nudge had enough development in the design to really make the most of an interesting mechanism.  Lacking the tools that are necessary for exerting control on a game state, it’s mostly an exercise of mirroring an opponent until one of you make a…

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If you broke Mechs vs Minions in two you’d have equally weighted chunks of what seem like high quality game.    You’d expect if you brought them back together you’d get a kind of Fun Fusion that generated energy from the critical mass.  You’d be wrong though – Mechs vs Minions…

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We liked Above and Below enough to give it three and a half stars in our review – a good game teetering precariously on the edge of genuine greatness.  It would only take a comparatively small push to send it into the abyss of being amazing.   Wow, those are some…

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It’s easy to dismiss Secret Hitler as yet another shock product from the makers of Cards Against Humanity.  I think that does a disservice to the genuinely insightful sociological storytelling that can be found during play.    The name does inspire a lot of strong feelings, but the game is something…

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Champions of Midgard didn’t exactly get our blood boiling with berserker rage.  Fundamentally it’s a version of Lords of Waterdeep that sacrifices the nuance and intricacy of an evolving cityscape for the uncertainty of dice rolls.    It’s competent but there are so many excellent worker placement games out there that…

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Railroad Ink is a game that is made up compelling parts, but it doesn’t cohere together in a way that made it feel particularly impactful to me.   We gave it three stars in our review – I don’t begrudge anyone’s affection for it but I’m never going to be able…

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Pit isn’t so much a game as it is an excuse for people to get together and have a good ol’ shout.   Sometimes that’s all that’s need to have fun – to provide people a reason to do something they can’t normally do in real life and just pretend there’s…

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I’m not going into this teardown with a great deal of optimism.  While Castles of Burgundy is a genuinely great game it is also one that is renowned for being an aesthetic mess.   However, it’s not as simple as saying ‘This is a game that needs a new edition’ because…

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I feel it’s important for a site like this to offer occasional points of auditability – reviews that don’t get written because they were needed but rather because they let readers calibrate their tastes against the arguments made.   For a long time now I have reflexively dismissed Monopoly in many…

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It’s no Secret(s) that this game didn’t land with me – our review managed to serve up two stars for a game designed by two stars.  It’s not the first time we’ve been down on a collaboration by this pair – HMS Dolores received a similarly po-faced rating and looking…

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We liked Scythe quite a bit. That’s unsurprisingly for a game that currently, at the time of writing, is living comfortably within the BGG top ten. That doesn’t guarantee a favourable writeup here – we are driven by our own erratic appetites more than we are those of that make…

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