You know all those caveats and warnings I put on my review of Thousand Year Old Vampire? Imagine they’re replicated here. The TLDR summary is ‘I don’t really know enough about playing RPGs to be a truly credible commentator and even if I did they’re not really within the scope…
Category: Board Game Review
Thousand Year Old Vampire (2020)
This review is a little bit of an experiment in branching out from the site’s core remit. Thousand Year Old Vampire bills itself as a ‘solo roleplaying game of memory, loss and vampires’ and I discovered it largely by accident. One of the things I’m doing this coming academic year…
The Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018)
I have a number of things that aggravate me about Quacks of Quedlinburg but none are quite so intense as my hatred for whoever named it. I have never once written it down correctly the first, second or even third time. It’s given my spell-checker a stress headache. Whenever I…
Walking in Burano (2018)
I love the art of Maisherly Chan so much that I will buy a game on its presence alone. Shadows in Kyoto was one such game, although its link to the dense extended universe of the Hanamikoji franchise certainly didn’t hurt. And so we find ourselves here, with Walking In…
Fallout Shelter (2020)
For a lot of people, the Fallout franchise is defined by high adventure. It’s about striding out into a broken world and finding ways to change it for the better – or for the worse. For me though, the real magic of Fallout has always been in the Vaults. For…
Inhuman Conditions (2018)
One of the problems that comes from revealing a review score right at the top of the text is that it’s hard to maintain an element of surprise. One of the first things you’ll have seen upon scrolling down the page is the sombre star rating, stamped at the top…
Lost Ruins of Arnak (2020)
Merry Christmas everyone! I bet you weren’t expecting the surprise gift of a Meeple Like Us review, but that’s only because you haven’t kept an eye on the Advent celebrational calendar. Friday is always Review Day, except when we’re on hiatus. And the times in the past when it wasn’t. …
Nusfjord (2017)
Uwe Rosenerg’s legacy as a game designer is remarkable. His curriculum vitae of releases shows outstanding versatility as well as a surety of touch that has a consistency that borders on supernatural. There are very few designers that show a range that can encompass Patchwork, Agricola and Bohnanza. He has…
Medium (2019)
I like Medium well enough. I also liked it well enough when it was the car game ‘Mind Meld’. It’s a perfectly good game that’s worth your time, but you can’t get away from the fact that boxing it up and selling it for actual cash money is the up-market…
Prisma Arena (2020)
One thing I especially enjoy about looking at a new entry from Hub Games is that there’s going to be something genuinely interesting in it. Blank is a design toolkit masquerading as a card game. Holding On did fascinating things with theme and with representing hazy memory as a gameplay…
Architects of the West Kingdom (2018)
Architects of the West Kingdom is a very good game but I confess my heart sank when I first opened the box. It so violently reminded me of Raiders of the North Sea that I thought I’d fallen for the board game equivalent of a Unity asset flip. The aesthetic,…
Trial by Trolley (2020)
I have more party games on my shelves than I have been invited to actual parties in my life.
Two. I have two party games on my shelves….
Spell Smashers (2018)
Some time ago now I wrote a special feature on the games I’d most love to see cross-bred in terrifying and unethical experiments. I just wanted some evil scientist to take DNA from one, inject it into the other, and see what grotesque hell-baby emerged as a result. One of…
Sanctum (2019)
It’s pretty clear what Sanctum is aiming for from the moment you pick up the box. The cover doesn’t so much remind you of Blizzard’s Diablo as it does conspicuously emulate it like a con artist trying to steal your identity. That’s not a bad thing, of course. Good artists…
Legacy of Dragonholt (2017)
Back in the 80s, a kind of cybertextual novel was all the rage amongst a certain grouping of literate nerds. For someone like me, with no friends, they opened up a world of story-driven campaign roleplaying that would otherwise have remained entirely inaccessible. Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, Joe Dever –…
Targi (2012)
Targi plays a bit like an economic striptease where part of the eroticism is that all involved dancers are packing guns. It’s great….
Corinth (2019)
Corinth from Days of Wonder is an excellent example of a perfectly fine game which does nothing new but still asks you for your time without ever justifying…
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…
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)
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…