Do you like the idea of Sushi Go but find it a little too twee? Does the idea of drafting a delicious meal leave you feeling emotionally malnourished? Do you still have a bit of room for Lovecraft in your already-diet? In the buffet of franchises that have been aggressively…
Category: Board Game Review
Exploding Kittens: NSFW Deck (2015)
This is a weird game to have blown up in the way it did. Despite what its name would suggest. The box proudly proclaims it is the ‘#1 most backed Kickstarter project ever’. It is the ‘#1 most-funded game in Kickstarter history’. The last of these is certainly no longer…
Dungeon Petz (2011)
Time is the only truly irreplaceable thing we possess. We hold it briefly in our hands and never really appreciate its value until it begins to run out. Some people look for reasons to kill time. I look for reasons to not spend it. We do a game a week…
7 Wonders (2010)
7 Wonders doesn’t really feel like a game that has aged well. It feels clunky and over-engineered. For all the speed of play it comes across as somewhat sluggish. It’s got a set of intuitive rules anyone can pick up but hides all the actual complication in the end-of-game scoring. …
The Fox in the Forest (2017)
I have many secret shames. Dark, terrible shames that nobody must ever know. Like the one where… wait, no. I can’t ever tell that story unless I want to spend the rest of my life dead in a Balinese jail cell. Hang on – if you’re a cop you…
Welcome To… (2018)
Welcome To is a pleasant game and that’s really all there is to it. It’s not particularly clever. It’s not particularly exciting. It’s completely inoffensive and you’d have no real justifiable complaints as a consequence of playing. ‘That was a pleasant way to spend twenty minutes’ you’d say and then…
Friday (2011)
There’s something about Friday that just rubs me up the wrong way. I think it might be the art. It’s certainly better than anything I myself could draw, but it just has a lazy and half-hearted aesthetic that makes me feel nobody cares about the way the game comes together. …
Flamme Rouge (2016)
If you ever wanted a game that combined the design ethos of Candyland with all the excitement of queueing while sitting atop a bicycle, then today is your lucky day. We’re talking about Flamme Rouge. It’s gets better than that too because you also get to mix the unbearable smugness…
Oh My Goods! (2015)
Modern society is built on the idea of successive chains of refinement. Seeds are planted into soil, and then grow into wheat. Wheat is farmed from fields, and refined into corn. I think. I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever stepped onto a farm in my life. Corn becomes…
Terraforming Mars (2016)
Stronghold publish some lovely, clever games but both this and Pit Crew are dramatically let down by boderline shoddy component quality. I’m a big believer in the immersive power of good component design – that nice, satisfying pieces help us suspend disbelief. Their job is twofold – it’s to serve…
Port Royal (2014)
I mentioned in our Merchants and Marauders and Jamaica reviews that I cannot be relied upon to exercise due detachment from any game that is themed around pirates. Pirates are awesome. Not the real pirates of history of course – they were basically sea-borne terrorists. The fictions of golden age…
Majesty: For the Realm (2017)
Majesty is a game that’s something of a disappointment. It comes relatively hot on the heels of Splendor – a perennial favourite from the same designer. It has all the hallmarks of the ‘tricky followup album’ that appears in the wake of unexpected chart-topping success – there’s a lot of…
Book: It’s All A Game (2018)
A review copy of It’s All A Game was provided by Atlantic Books in exchange for a fair and honest review. I didn’t expect to like It’s All A Game as much as I did, but that might be partly because of a change in tagline between the first and…
Coloretto (2003)
It’s going to be tricky to talk about Coloretto because it’s hard to see where the conversation should go. We can’t talk about the marriage of theme and mechanics because Coloretto basically doesn’t have a theme. We can’t talk about complex interlocking game systems of fiendish cleverness. Coloretto is, in…
Photosynthesis (2017)
There are few games I own that make me think ‘I wish I were a better photographer’. Mrs Meeple is the photographer in our household and she’s too busy to take the thousands and thousands of photographs I need for Meeple Like Us content. She has a proper camera and…
Hey, That’s My Fish (2003)
If ever you were looking for ‘An Inconvenient Truth, the Board Game’ then you should consider giving Hey, That’s My Fish a try. The box might suggest this is a cheerful game of happy birds grabbing fish from under the beaks of their compatriots in a friendly competition. The gameplay…
Villainous (2018)
Villainous doesn’t feel like a game that should be dissected on a hobbyist website. It’s a bit like being a structural engineer and complaining that the design of a Lego bridge doesn’t take into account the material science necessary for accurately modeled wind resistance. It’s almost certainly true, but you…
Chinatown (1999)
This is the review I never thought I’d write – a review of a game that gets the full five star on Meeple Like Us. I’ve said many times on the blog that Scrabble is the only ‘unofficial’ holder of that grade ranking as it does – even now –…
High Society (1995)
When you strip an auction down to its rawest, most essential component what you’re left with is a room full of people engaged in a collaborative nervous breakdown. The psychology at play in an auction is genuinely fascinating. The stresses and tensions of the real-time nature of bidding can throw…
Modern Art (1992)
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game before where so much effort has been expended in making the package look so ugly. There is so much misdirected energy here that it’s actually a little upsetting. This is a game of modern art monstrosities and the people that are desperately…