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The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014) – Accessibility Teardown
While I don’t think Castles of Mad King Ludwig is quite as fascinating a design as Suburbia, it might well be a more fun game. It depends really on what you want out of a box like this – an emergent story of compromise and consequence, or something that sacrifices…
The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014)
The very first game I ever reviewed for this site was Suburbia. That was the title that sent me down a path of inquiry that would consume, at this point, almost four years of my life. Never before had I seen a collection of physical components that was so interesting…
Managing and Curating a Circulating Game Collection
Back when I was young I had two answers to the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’. The first was ‘a librarian, ook’. The second was ‘a fire engine’. Neither in the end turned out to be the path my life took, but I’ve spent…
The Estates (2018) – Accessibility Teardown
The Estates got a pretty rough ride in our review. It’s undeniably a well designed game, but one that leaves me so unhappy at the end of play that I just want no part of it. I’m not opposed to a streak of meanness in my game. I just don’t…
The Estates (2018)
The Estates is a well-designed game and I don’t like it. Worse, I don’t want to like it. That’s an awkward pitch for a review. The last time I had a similar issue was when I reviewed Catan – a game that makes me so angry I can only play…
No Thanks (2004) – Accessibility Teardown
No Thanks is a marvellous design for a game. It’s like a behavioural economics experiment in a box, teaching you which of your friends will jump on a grenade to save the group. Spoiler – it’s probably none of them. We gave it four stars in our review, although it…
No Thanks (2004)
The games about which people often get the most excited are the ones that look substantial. Big, bold, beautiful games. Thematic monsters with miniatures and rulebooks thick enough to choke an otter. Complicated games are difficult to get right because they have so many different elements that need to be…
Top Eleven (Twenty-Two) Best Board Games I’d Like To Ship – 2020 Edition
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…