One of the difficulties a game must address is that of abstraction. All games are abstractions in the end – some imprecise mapping of reality to representation. The fidelity of that representation is important – it has to be at the level people are expecting for the experience they are…
Category: Board Game Review
Secrets (2017)
Secrets makes a good first impression, on several levels. For one thing, the box art is very striking – bright, bold colours with an effective, cartoonish graphic style that evokes some of the light-hearted Cold War paranoia of 80s television shows. For another, it’s a game by Bruno Faidutti and…
Scythe (2016)
’ll say this about Scythe – it doesn’t shy away from making a flamboyant entrance into your life. While there is nothing ostentatious or brash about the box, it has what is perhaps the most enticing cover art I’ve seen in any game. Anachronistic and yet coherent. Ambitious yet grounded….
Assembly (2018)
I’ve said before that one of the things I like most in a game is when its packaging is appropriately scaled for its contents, and Assembly is a dream in that respect. It’s odd, but it always puts me in a positive frame of mind to know the majority of…
Samurai (1998)
There’s a sparseness to the design of Samurai that is typical of Reiner Knizia games – a mathematically inspired elegance in a game that wears its theme as lightly as an easily discarded cloak. It purports to be a game of feudal conquest – of bringing a recalcitrant Japan to…
Mint Works (2017)
The thing that I like about mint tin games is that they tend to pack a lot of ambition into those tiny containers. As gimmicky as the whole concept is, I’ve been impressed over the years by a number of the titles that have sought to miniaturise complex components into…
Caverna: Cave versus Cave (2017)
I own Caverna, but I have never played it. The first time I opened the box I spent so much time popping cardboard and bagging things up that I stood up from the table and said ‘That’s enough game time for one night’. I haven’t opened it since except as…
Shadows in Kyoto (2017)
I’m not going to lie – I bought Shadows in Kyoto purely for the art and the link it had to the rich mythology of the Hanamikoji franchise. I knew nothing else about it – it just appeared as an otherwise undistinguished entry in a ‘new stock coming soon’ list…
Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr (2018)
Content warning: bereavement
I spent the first few hours of my twenty-first birthday watching my father die.
I haven’t celebrated a birthday since….
Eminent Domain: Microcosm (2014)
If there’s one thing about space that we can all agree on surely it’s that it’s pretty big. Maybe even too big. So big that it can hurt our collective souls – as Carl Sagan once memorably said, ‘The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human…
Kamisado (2008)
Kamisado is the game you’d get if a military R&D department cross-bred Chess and Curling with the intention of weaponising the Stroop effect. It’s a marvelously simple game of moving pieces with the sole intention of getting one of your chunky ‘dragon towers’ onto your opponent’s front lawn. You pick…
News @ 11 (2015)
Hello there, and welcome to Meeple Like Us Radio – the radio channel for meeple… like you! I’m your friendly local anchor, Bobby Massive, and I’d like to thank you for tuning in. We have a very exciting programme for you today, and one by one I’d like to introduce…
Queendomino (2017)
It would be a good idea to check out our review of Kingdomino before you settle down into this review of this. Queendomino is simultaneously a younger and bigger sibling – brought into the world more recently but still possessed of a size and stature that dwarfs the older scion. …
Wits & Wagers Family (2010)
I have a kind of seething resentment for the enduring affection people have for of trivia in popular culture. The popularity of trivia games and game shows seems like a constant rejection of the true importance of knowledge. It’s a focus on the inconsequential and memetic rather than on anything…
Decrypto (2018)
It’s sometimes said that St James Park in London is so rife with spies meeting other spies that even the ducks around the Tin and Stone Bridge quack in code. While that’s almost certainly not true unless everyone is working from a uniquely monosyllabic decryption table, it’s certainly something with…
Iota (2012)
Iota comes in an absolutely tiny tin – a tin of the size you might more realistically expect to contain paracetamol or the large-print version of the positive case for Brexit. Let me tell you though, pain-relief is exactly the entirely opposite frame of reference you need. What’s inside is…
Dropmix (2017)
I’m going to say right up front that I don’t think you should run out and buy Dropmix. Not at the £120 RRP price point at which it was released. It’s not really much of a game, even though it purports to be one. Dropmix is more of a toy…
Scrabble (1948)
The camera pans over a worn but well-maintained class-room. Wood paneled walls draw the eye and upon these are hung various posters and swish infographics. You can see the frequency chart for English on one wall, with a graph of the evolution of the Arabic lettering system hanging beside it. …
Century: Eastern Wonders (2018)
I’m not as much of a fan of Century: Spice Road as Mrs Meeple. She basically wrestled the game out of my hands when it came time to review it, insisting that it deserved a more generous treatment than I might have given. I mean, don’t get me wrong –…
Telestrations (2009)
What is the thing you enjoy least about tabletop gaming? No, not the cost. No, not the logistics of getting people together of evening. No, not the fact every time you mention it people look at you like you’ve revealed some dark and twisted sexual kink. God, stop it –…