Okay, I’m going to be the first person to admit that this a bit of a weird one. I had the thought last night while playing Wavelength with Mrs Meeple. The notion tickled me enough that I was convinced there was a top ten in it, and lo and behold …
Archaeology: The New Expedition (2016) – Accessibility Teardown
We like Archaeology: The New Expedition a lot. It got four stars in our review, each of them unilaterally removed from the temple of an ancient sky god in a faraway land. It’s not looting. It’s preservation. They belonged in a museum. Provided that museum had massive amounts of cash…
Archaeology: The New Expedition (2016)
Archaeology: The New Expedition strikes me as a game I shouldn’t like. It’s very random, driven far more by luck of the draw than skill with cards. It’s very simple, comprising mostly of set collection and little else. It’s a little bit off-putting in its framing, explicitly casting you as…
Second Chance (2019) – Accessibility Teardown
Second Chance was… well, a kind of second chance for polyomino placement games on Meeple Like Us. Until they start getting meaner, our interest will remain muted at best. Interestingly, this game is actually worth your attention because of how aggressively it moves away from the obvious goal and into…
Second Chance (2019)
The last time I covered a polyomino placement game (Cottage Garden) I said that I probably wouldn’t look at another game of this type unless it actually captured what I feel to be the most important aspect of what I’ve occasionally referenced as ‘Tetris style games’. For me, that’s the…
MLU001 – A Free Training Workshop for Cardboard Prototyping
A couple of years ago I wrote a special feature on Cardboard Prototyping. It was a discussion of how I and my colleague Mike Crabb were using board games as a mechanism for teaching the intricacies of paper prototyping within our user centred design module. It’s a post that I…
Inis (2016) – Accessibility Teardown
While we can only review Inis as a two-player game, I have no doubt that when you try it out with a bigger group of people it’s going to shine like a damn diamond. Even at the (occasionally bumpy) two player mode it’s a gem of a game. Four stars…
Inis (2016)
I don’t really feel like I’ve given Inis the best possible crack of the whip. It’s been languishing on the ‘to review’ pile for a year and a half because I thought ‘I suspect this is a better game at higher player counts’, and I’d only managed to try it…
Doppelt So Clever (2019) – Accessibility Teardown
Every so often I have a kind of a ‘cheat’ teardown. It doesn’t happen regularly, but occasionally there is a game that is so similar to another that I can get along with saying ‘check out this other teardown, with the following changes’. Doppelt So Clever is sufficiently close to…
Doppelt So Clever (2019)
You might well remember a game called Ganz Schön Clever. We reviewed on the site a while ago. For a few weeks, it was pretty much all anyone on Twitter was talking about. Like many people, I fell hard into the depth of its moreish design. Like a kind of…
How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love ‘Self Promotion’
One of the greatest tricks the Devil ever pulled was convincing generations of Internet people that ‘external hosting’ was a sin against community building, and that ‘self promotion’ of content on external hosting was something of which we should be ashamed. That ‘marketing yourself’ outside a platform was inherently more…
Mint Delivery (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
We didn’t have much positive to say about Mint Delivery, which at least means our view is consistent since we also didn’t have much positive to say about Mint Works. ‘They are games that function’. ‘Full components in the tin’. Neither of those are blurbs likely to appear gracing the…
Mint Delivery (2018)
Given that I have already reviewed Mint Works and concluded ‘not for me’, it might seem like an act of masochism to take a look at Mint Delivery. They came as part of a single Kickstarter reward though and I’d always intended to eventually get to it. I intend to…
Isle of Trains (2014) – Accessibility Teardown
Isle of Trains was an unexpected gem – a game I initially played with no real enthusiasm but pretty soon realized I had something quite special on my hands. That doesn’t happen as often as I like, and I suspect it did here because this is a game that’s a…