No Meeple Left Behind

Welp, that took longer than expected. Welcome back to No Meeple Left Behind. Its Button Shy week, the company famous for 18 card wallet games released once a month. So we're trying something different. We're doing eight whole reviews; we've included every one we own and then an extra just for good measure. To keep this manageable, the reviews are much shorter, with brevity prioritized. We're trying this new format out and seeing how we feel. Let's get into it.

Skulls of Sedlec

As a kid, I played a flash game online called “Phage Wars”. I won’t get into specifics but it was a sort of territory control game that was simple in both concept and execution and so there were a million iterations by different developers. “Mushroom Wars”, "Tentacle Wars”, “Cell wars”, the list goes on. If you haven’t already guessed, so too are tile placement games. Its not that they are bad (neither was Phage Wars), they’ve just been done already. Thus, your twist on the genre, your innovation to board games, better be pretty damn good to justify you being here.

“Skulls of Sedlec” has no twist on the genre. Or rather, its twist is that they managed it with 18 cards and no other components. Which is a feat to be sure, but only for price point and packaging, and does not really elevate the gameplay experience. You select cards from a central pool, with the added sprinkle of having the other player or players have to sometimes reveal options for you, and then you put them in your pile, trying to fulfill the 5 different skulls’ scoring conditions.

And it's good, I guess. It scratches the itch. It is tile placement at its most distilled with no rough edges but also little personality. I probably would’ve been more disappointed in this game if I had paid for it, except I borrowed it from our library instead. I think my biggest beef, then, is not that it's bad, because it isn’t, but rather that button shy can do, and has done, better. Our next two games also see you placing tiles but have replay value beyond cracking the puzzle once or twice. 

Skulls of Sedlec *does* have a host of expansions, though, currently boasting 4 bundles each containing 3, 6-card expansions, as well as several solo expansions sold on their own. Hell, there's a roll-n-write version I’m probably going to print and play before returning the game. And honestly, if this game was designed and marketed as a $30 box with all expansions included in which you could modularly pick 2 or 3 extra packs to play with each game, I would probably buy it. But even its “essentials pack” includes only 5 of the 15+ expansions and, as far as I can tell, recommends playing them 1 at a time. But as a core product, just Skulls of Sedlec is satisfying, if a little bland. 

Circle the Wagons

I won’t bury the lead here, I have already stated I think this is a better tile-placement game than Skulls of Sedlec. It also, interestingly, was my first Button Shy game. And though it’s often overshadowed by its cooperative spiritual successor (and the next game on this list) “Sprawlopolis”, I might argue that “Circle the Wagons” is the best of our first 3 and maybe the best one I own.

The draft pool is a circle, where you can select any card in the order you want, but every card you skip over goes straight to your opponent. This already creates a fun puzzle to solve, with the ramifications being the basic tile matching. Additionally, 3 cards from the batch are flipped to instead be the scoring conditions for the game, and add neat twist each play. Finally cards you place can overlap previous cards, breaking that decision space wide open.

I think only the best Button Shy games feel like the 18 card limit isn’t actually limiting. Here, I think Circle the Wagons doesn't need extra cards; it’s not a larger game stuffed into an awkward 18 card box. Instead its a full game that happens to only need 18 cards to play.

Sprawlopolis

Widely considered one of the best button shy games, Sprawlopolis’s co-op tile-place-iness is a niche worth occupying, especially considering the others I know in its field, namely 2022’s “Dorfromantik” and “Mists over Carcassonne” are both bigger boxes with longer playtimes. Sprawlopolis, then, seems like a slam dunk. And while still quite good, I’d argue its a little less focused than it could be.

The scoring and placing is nearly the same as Circle the Wagons, reusing the beloved overlapping cards mechanic and again repurposing 3 cards as scoring conditions. But instead of drafting from a central dial, players just pass a hand of cards around the table, adding their one card into it when the hand comes to them, and then placing one of the cards into the shared tableau. Finally the hand continues around, and the player passing replaces their missing card.

This structure is a bandaid on the frequent co-op issue of “Quarterbacking”: the process of someone running your turn for you, effectively cutting you out of the fun. Sprawlopolis tries to create hidden info and increase table talk to mitigate this, however lacks the sharpness of any rules that fully solve this problem. And besides, I don’t know to what degree it is the game’s responsibility to even fight against quarterbacking, and how much friends should just police it among themselves. The game is very fun, but does occasionally stink of a great solo game haphazardly made multiplayer. 

Revolver Noir

The rival to Circle the Wagon’s crown for best of the batch, “Revolver Noir” is a two player game oozing with thematic touches. Its hidden movement, like the famed “Scotland Yard”, except both of the two players are hidden, and both are tip towing around each other. This gimmick alone is worth the price of admission, but the sense of setting and theme instantly sells me on the whole affair.

Players spend their turn using two actions to maneuver around a shared house in which the lights are out, and neither character can see. Alternatively, they can listen for footsteps, set traps, fire blindly into a room, or announce where they are to use their current room's special ability.

Frankly aside from the hidden movement aspect, and consequential, tableless play space, this game’s design is a little generic. “Action points for one of a few actions to find and attack someone” is a fairly played out system. But the heavy lifting of the story: two agents in a house stalking each other silently, springs this game to life. Each action now feels weighty and narrative. Sneaking off to the basement, resting in the kitchen before setting a trap and slinking past the foyer, jumping the rail of the balcony and firing wildly into the dining room, its all tense and full of story beats that evoke explosively colorful imagery.

Count of the Nine Estates

“Count of the Nine Estates” is my most recent edition to my Button Shy collection, and unfortunately, it tries and fails to be a mid-weight solo game. It packs a lot of punch for the 18 card limit, even more than the 9 card original edition, but just fails to deliver even a palatable first impression.

I struggle to convey the rules here, mostly because the designers themselves struggle to explain the rules in their own rulebook. You make use of resources on “active cards” (named as such because there simply is no theme justification for what these are) as well as built structures to construct one of these same active cards or one of the available estates. Built cards score you points. And some built cards are prerequisites to others, as well as to those higher scoring estate cards.

There's a puzzle here, and arguably a really good one, but it trips over its own presentation and rules on its way onto your table. I’ve left out a *lot* of specifics of how the game moves; cards have to be in specific places with specific direction throughout just to approach clarity of intent.

 Puzzle-y solo games require the player to have a full grasp on the knot they are trying to untie, but Count of the Nine Estates is problematically counterintuitive and obfuscated in its mechanisms. The cards serving quadruple duty as single use resource, resource generating building, scoring mechanism, and prerequisite for other building is not beyond the scope of a game, just maybe a 18 card microgame where all this must be conveyed through card orientation and position.

This doesn’t mean it's impossible to learn though. So, if we get through the tough outer rind that is the rules, is the fruit worth it? Maybe; I hesitate to say ‘yes’ for one main reason. The game relies heavily on a strong understanding of the deck of building cards (and simultaneously, resource cards) placed before you. Playing well, or potentially at all, means memorizing that deck front to back with a level of specificity that I couldn’t muster in my 5 total plays. All this makes it much like an undersized pomegranate: laborious to access with sparse, albeit potent, payoff.

A la Food Cart

On the other side of the over-ambitious mid-weight microgames coin is “A la Food Cart”, a 2 player worker placement game that seems all but lost to time in the Button Shy family catalogue. With a 6.4 rating on BGG and a criminally low number of actual reviews, this game doesn’t even appear on most lists of their games that I have found. Weirdly, though, I actually quite enjoy this design and think it is deserving of far more praise than it has received.

Every round players place workers on a row of 12 recipes and actions, covering any two. Recipes give you ingredients to use in cooking and actions provide you substantial game altering effects. Covering these two spots blocks them for your opponent, as no two workers can ever overlap. Then, once all 4 workers are played (2 each), players use the ingredients they have gathered to move across their scoring grid, covering a new row or column only if they have every ingredient shown.

There's some more sugar on this souffle, mixing and matching the score grids make for unique player profiles, and the powers each player has can drastically change the way you play. Frankly, its two-wide workers are novel enough to justify my attention, and the whole design inspires the same sort of denial-focused drafting you’d expect from something far more involved.

The rub, of course, comes once again with the rules. Though far clearer than Count of the Nine Estates, there is a typo in my editions’ setup, as well nearly no edge-case or interaction clarifications to be found. The designer is doing their best answering directly in BGG forums, but the responsibility shouldn’t fall between them and the community when a professional, established publisher is involved. Despite this lack of clarity, a decently well-read board gamer will have no issue interpreting and house-ruling their way through what is otherwise a delightfully tense design.

Food Chain Island

I am tremendously bad at “Food Chain Island”, entirely due to my lack of patience. I failed to realize this until I played by committee with Mika, who, in slowing me down, was able to improve my score on their first game (and then again on their second). But despite being quite incapable of thinking through the consequences of my actions before acting on them, I really enjoy this game.

Here, you lay out a grid of cards numbered 1 to 16, with each being an animal. Animals can move orthogonally to slide on top of other animals 1 to 3 smaller than them, "eating" that animal and activating that predator's ability in the process. The fewer stacks you have at the end, the better.

The effect here is like a spruced up version of a classic Peg Solitaire (like you see at Crackerbarrel). It’s weirdly replayable and keeps enough puzzle each play to be engaging with about as little friction or overhead as possible. Again Food Chain Island feels right at home with 18 cards. It’s a tight solo game that delivers more than you’d expect.

Tussie Mussie

A last minute addition to the list, we happened to find ourselves in possession of a copy of the complete Collection this past Thursday. And what a delight it was, not just to find but to play this 1-4 player “I cut, you choose” game, packaged as a small box with all content able to be mixed and matched (looking at you Skulls of Sedlec).

And like Skulls of Sedlec, “Tussie Mussie” is also not a revolutionary game. It has one interesting picking mechanic, namely that one player looks at both cards on offer, flips one face up, and the other picks which card each player gets. And you do this 4 times per round, for three rounds. The rest of the game is then designed to give that one mechanic teeth. Almost every additional scoring mechanism on each card and expansion is written with this in mind.

Consequently, a game that should fall flat suddenly has legs, just enough to carry it back to the table again and again. If I were to bicker with this game's design, I’d say that randomness smashes its one mechanic flat for the offerer occasionally by dealing them a lose-lose hand. But with a round taking at most a few minutes, it's breezy enough to slide you right back into the action whenever this happens to occur. Its soft and subtle, with decent expansions; I’m already ready to give it another play.

Conclusion

Too many games and a couple of stinkers later, we've reviewed ~5% of button shy’s catalogue. There are a lot of games here, and 1 a month is a breakneck pace. I think the things I learned this week is that rule clarity is just as important as mechanics. If I don't know how to play your game, it doesn't matter how good it is. (Unless you're “City of the Six Moons, in which case that's the point). Next week we're looking at Symbology and board games with some rules-heavy titles. See y'all then.

Hello, sorry we’re late! Welcome to Week 7 of No Meeple Left Behind, where there is nary a theme to be found in this batch of games. Instead there are some fun vibes, decent design, and a few good mechanics carrying a crunch-light week. We’re still feeling ahead of the curve, though my Bargain Basement Bathysphere obsession is slowing things down. But regardless, we're making good headway. Let’s get into it.

Euchre

Trick-takers have been having a moment for a few years, culminating in trend-ending epics like “Arcs” using the system. There are a *lot* of ‘em: “The Crew”, “Rebel Princess”, “Sail”, “Fox in the Forest”, and “Tricky Kids”, just to name a few. But frequently Classics outpace the newcomers the same way that modern abstract strategy games have a hard time beating “Chess” in popularity (and “Go” in quality). 

Enter “Euchre”, an early to mid-1800’s game of effectively unknown origin. This game is core trick-taking, filling the small-hands niche left by “Spades” and “Hearts”, which play instead with the full deck. I have played a fair amount of Spades in my day, but distinctly more Euchre, having gone as far as to enter (and lose) a tournament at STL’s “Geekway to the West” with Mika. And more importantly, I have *taught* a lot of Euchre, and often re-taught Euchre, given the stickiness of the rules.

The game goes like this: Each player is dealt 5 cards to play a standard trick-taker with (one person leads, everyone follows suit, trump suit beats lead suit, etc.). Before beginning the hand, each player has an opportunity to decide the trump suit by either ordering up the top leftover card, and making its suit trump or, if everyone passes on that round, just declaring any other suit. The ordered up card, if any, goes to the dealer, and then the left of the dealer leads. The team that decided the trump suit then tries to get 3 or more tricks, lest they get “euchred” and give a hefty helping of points to the opponent. If they do manage to get 3 or more, they instead score themselves a point or two, and first to 10 points wins. 

Seasoned Euchre players have already spotted a few core rules I’ve skipped here, and not without good reason. For example, The jacks of the trump suit’s color (called “bowers”) are the highest 2 trump cards in the game. And here is my first critique of Euchre. There just is no good way to teach this rule. It's arbitrary, it's counterintuitive, and yet it's critical to gameplay. Consequently the first 2-5 full games of Euchre for a new player are chock full of reminders that the left bower counts as trump despite not being trump suit, and the jack is actually higher than the ace, but only for diamonds and only this hand. Its all a bit of a mess.

But in Euchre defense, it's not really *for* new players. Some games are built to be picked up, experienced a handful of times, and put down. The novelty is the joy, and the teaching experience is designed with this in mind. Euchre, though, is meant to be mastered, the learning is the laborious precursor to the good part, playing and playing well. So how does Euchre feel as a game played well?

Well, its hard to say. In Euchre, there are really only two strategic decisions you get to make. During a hand, you *might* get an interesting moment where you have to decide what to lead or how to follow; this happens about once every other hand. But before a hand, you have to decide trump, and this is the real meat of Euchre. Skill expression in this game is about 75% your instinct of when you can call trump and when you have to pass. And through this lens, the design decisions here start to make sense.

If the juicy part is the bid, then keep hands short, keep information limited, and keep taking a single trick high impact. And the decision to add “Going Alone” (an option to score more points if you can sweep without your partner) also just serves this end; The bidding is the game. And the bid is tense and chewy and its ramifications get to unfold before you in the subsequent 2 minutes, keeping the game pacey. Sure, the teach traps new players in the weeds, but once you get out, the smooth ease of play has a lot to offer, more than you’d expect from a dusty old classic.

Things in Rings

“Things in Rings” is another tiny box game from the folks over at Allplay with design from “That Time You Killed Me” designer, Peter Hayward. It came to us at Gen Con 2024 where Mika triumphantly presented it to me after playing it without me earlier in the day. And you can almost immediately see why they were drawn to it. The Dr. Seuss-ian art on this guy is extraordinarily charming and the rings it splays across a table have a presence only Allplay seems to deliver.

The titular things in titular rings, then, refers to those artful card being placed in the venn-diagram created by these loops of string. Each loop has a label, "attribute", “context”, and “word”, corresponding to a secret card held by the clue giver. For example, the secret cards may be “Contains wood,” “Found in most offices,” and “Uses the letter ‘R’”. The rest of the players must then place their things in the diagram. Correct placement lands them a second turn, failed placement is corrected and instead earns them a replacement card. First to shed their hand wins.

Lets start with the obvious and joyous upsides of this design: This game is playful. Its funny, but not like “Card Against Humanity” or “We Didn’t Playtest This at All”, who each have a joke to tell and have a hard time landing it twice. Things in Rings instead is a sort of comedy of errors, as a sense of cautious comradery immerges among the players as they bumble through blind placements, each against the clue giver, who is furiously trying to decide if a window counts as “having a hole in it.”

But this brings in the first minor critique, both a bug and a feature. The clue giver often has to make judgement calls for some things in some more subjective rings. And while often this leans into the comedy of the game, sometimes it can either cause the players to feel duped by some bad discerning or cause the clue giver to have to stress over every little ‘apricot’ or ‘yacht’ that gets placed.

But my real gripe with this game is that the players too rarely get it right. Because the game can end from correct guesses, without know the categories exactly, players can often trip into a win facefirst knowing *maybe* the word card. Games like “Alan and Bobby’s Block and Guess” which ask of its players the impossible, are most fun when the players occasionally succeed anyway. But here, the design is just a bit too hard, and players never get the satisfying resolution of nailing it. Rather they vibe their way through the game and eventually win, a little anticlimactically.

But quite honestly, this softness, this non-punishing design that lets a player win an unreasonably difficult game without “getting it” first, makes this the perfect to break out for non-boardgamers. Plus, as previously mentioned, looking this colorful and engaging doesn’t hurt either. So it has its spot in my collection, never a mainstay of choice of game nights but always making it back to the table when new players are around.

Bananagrams

“Scrabble” is a good game that has fallen victim to a strange place in culture. Its competitive scene has been cursed with the chess-ification of play; 75% of strategy is rote memorization. And casual players either hate Scrabble or like it a suspicious amount. Word games aren’t for everyone. “Nertz” (or as my family called it, “Pounce”) is also mostly enjoyed too much by the victors and not much by anyone else. And at its strange intersection, we find “Bananagrams”. A game that, on paper, is for shockingly few people to really, *really* enjoy.

Bananagrams is played much like Scrabble, building a grid of letter tiles with words going vertically and horizontally, allowing word to intersect at shared letters. But, much like Nertz, you have a personal board, in lieu of a shared one, and in place of turns is a frantic real-time free for all. Additionally, in Bananagrams, words made are not set in stone, so you can rearrange any letters at any time. When you have a fully legal board with no leftover pieces, you declare “peel”, and everyone draws another tile, you included. When there are no more tiles to draw, next peeler instead wins, shouting “bananagrams”

As previously mentioned, this game would seem, from its rules, to be for Scrabble and Nertz loving freaks, and maybe that is true, as someone who does love both games. But I think, like a decent stew, this game has more to offer than the sum of its parts, even if both ingredients are still good alone. Experienced Scrabble players will be flummoxed by the lack of structure or time to work their words out, having their 7 optional tiles replaced with 20-ish extremely mandatory ones. And Frequent Nertz players will be thrown off by the necessary forward planning and structuring this game requires, often opting instead to build 5 of few letter words wherever possible, boxing them out of places to form game-ending words later.

Instead, most players are left pleasantly frantic trying to make some longer words where possible before dotting their spare T’s and N’s and such across the board wherever they fit. In the best games of Banagrams, everyone plays an intense first few minutes before the initial peel is thrown, at which point that player often goes on a bit of a streak before catching a stray Q or J slowing their progress just enough for a rogue underdog to sweep in to take their place. It's quick and energetic with lots of action and little overhead. 

But not every game of Bananagrams is “the best games” and often a player or two is kinda left behind. Players not trained in word or speed games will feel pretty out of their depth with this one. And unless that describes your whole table, the experienced player can leverage this weakness painfully easily. But here’s I think Bananagrams’ greatest bit of trickery, there are rarely hard feelings; this game has no targeting or direct antagonism. So even a lost player will have the word or two they’re most proud of, and often will take some well-earned comfort in having thrown out something like “oxidize” during the chaos. So while us sick and twisted speed and/or word game lovers will continue to feast on our black licorice, I think bananagrams is a lovely game for us all to share.  

Ok Play (Cinco Linko)

I have an unverifiable memory of learning about this game at GenCon where, in a genius marketing move, they had an employee play against dozens upon dozens of attendees, and anyone who could beat them would win a free copy of this game (anyone who can verify this for me: it happened between 2016-2018). Part of my inability to recall is that I did not challenge the staff member, and instead demoed and then purchased “Ok Play” (now “Cinco Linko”), as part of my steadily growing, sub-25 game collection at the time.

For those uninitiated, the game is Tic-Tac-Toe, with a few gimmicks to give it some kick. First, it’s 5 in a row. Second, there is no defined board, just the infinitely expanding grid of the table/floor you’re playing on. And Third, when you run out of your 15 pieces, you start moving your already placed tiles. The only extra rule is all tiles must always remain contiguous, in one orthogonally connected group. 

I don’t have a ton of what would be considered “simple” games in my collection. I am a Board Game Geek user after all. But I do have some; “Skull” and “Spot it” come to mind. And these two represent either end of the spectrum for me for what a simple game can do. Skull achieves a lot with little, producing a weirdly in-depth bluffing game out of about 4 rules. Spot it alternatively, achieves little but hit that one note very well, scratching an itch but not filling a night, more like a heresy’s kiss than a meal.

Keeping the food analogy, Ok Play is much like the granola bar you buy out of an airport vending machine, with its main two attributes being portability and inoffensiveness. But in the game's defense it achieves both of these exactly, creating a game I often travel with so that when the people I’m with are bored, I have something to show them. Sometimes, fittingly, at the airport.

The problem with the game is that, unlike Skull, it doesn’t really achieve much strategic depth, I think, because the game is too transparent. People playing well could play the same game for ages, seeing every near-winning move and blocking it, and those not playing well will always lose on account of a failure to spot an obvious ploy to link up 5. It suffers, kind of, from the issues Tic-Tac-Toe does, except the game cannot end in a draw, and thus can only end in a mistake.

But its approachability does mean I can break it out both with grown adults and my 6-year-old niece, both of whom can enjoy it, at least a little. So while I hesitate to praise it for much, It does make it back to my table frequently, and that is worth something. Now, if only they could settle on a half decent name.

Conclusion

And there they are, a few classic and simple(ish) games just for playing quick. I think what I learned this week is that the first play is half the battle. A player’s experience learning, playing, and hopefully enjoying their first time through *really* colors whether they’ll play again, or like the game overall. Next week will be a bit of an experiment, hopefully, as we play and review as many Button Shy games as we can get our hands on. See y’all then!

Welcome to Week 6 of No Meeple Left Behind, where the games start rolling and they don’t stop rolling. Ahead of schedule and full of more games, we keep chugging along. A fun perk we get of having this much of a backlog is we can pick and choose which games to review right now and which to save for next week. So, we get to make more intentional groups with similar mechanics or themes than just “things we played this week”. And we did just that here. Let’s get into it.

Bargain Basement Bathysphere

As promised, the Print-n-play game review is finally here. And you can go play it, right now. The original source files for this game are free on BGG. While there is a retail version, I have only played the original myself. And given I printed at my local library and already had a pencil and 5-8 dice, I paid exactly $0.00 for this game. This fact kinda changes the whole color of this review, because while many games like “Final Girl” or “Crokinole” have been chastised for their price point, this one I can inversely praise for it.

In fact, there are a few similarities between this and Final Girl. “Bargain Basement Bathysphere (of Beachside Bay)” (BBB) is also a solo, dice based game. It's actually a sort of Roll-n-Write, games like yahtzee where you roll the dice and mark your sheet of paper. Here though, you are descending down the ocean, spending dice from your pool (usually of 5) to move down towards the depths or back up to the surface. Moving to new levels of pressure or past obstacles without landing on them will cause stress or other nasty effects eventually reducing your dice pool. Said dice pool can only be refreshed by spending oxygen, and spending all of your stress or oxygen will lose you the game. Finally, on the return trip, retreading any previously tread spaces will result in even more stress.

So the real trick here is seeing the writing on the wall and turning around when you still have enough oxygen and stress to make the return trip. Especially because the game never gives you a strict win condition (or at least, I haven’t seen one yet) but rather, points to judge how well you do and progress on overarching meta-mini-games. The result is actually more like a rogue-lite video game in its design than most board games. You do a run, gather some fish, lay some cables, then go on another run. And on each run BBB gives you another little morsel of mechanics, another wrench in your Bathysphere’s engine that you have to consider during your dive.

There is, as Mika pointed out, a shocking number of reversals, however, between this game and Final Girl for me. While both are similar in pitch, they differ in nearly every regard. Final Girl is theme-y at the risk of being unbalanced, while BBB is sharp at the risk of being abstract. Final Girl’s setup is laborious, BBB’s is seconds. Final Girl’s derivative, BBB’s inventive. Final Girl’s value proposition is hard to swallow, and BBB’s hard to beat. Heck, Final Girl tilted me into a negative review, while BBB coaxed me with win after win.

It’s just so clever. Every new wrinkle keeps the game fresh. The core puzzle feels just involved enough to keep me engaged without slowing down the pace. The theming and mechanics found in the meta-progression are incredibly smart. My normal gripe would be with production or cost here, but the game is clearly lovingly produced and provided free of charge.

There are nitpicks to be had, of course. Short games with new mechanics between provide a chunk of down time reading rules instead of playing. I don’t mind rules lawyering but there are many who could get caught up here. Additionally, the abstractness of the tutorial throwing people in without a clear victory condition can absolutely disorient new players. And finally, I have not finished the game, so there is still time for the design to spit in my face. But for now, it has my full attention, and I am so excited for more.

Chinatown

“Chinatown”, like many games I own, comes from a “Shut Up & Sit Down” recommendation, the show that filled the gaping Wil-Wheaton’s-Tabletop-sized consumerist hole in my life. And it has continued to bounce to my table consistently under the promise of being “everything you wanted from the trading part of Monopoly or Catan”. And while the game is not without its hiccups, I feel confident in saying it delivers on this promises, time and time again.

Chinatown is played in 6 rounds, each representing a year of thriving business for 3-5 entrepreneurs sat ‘round the table. During a round players with each acquire property on the map and businesses to build there, but since these draws are mostly random, you're likely to have a disjointed scattershot of both. Thus, players can then trade any of these components with each other, as well as their hard earned cash, to try and create cohesive businesses. Bigger, better, complete businesses made up of adjacent tiles on the map earn you more money per round, with the winner being the one with the most money after all 6 years.

And that's it, everything the game needs to make savvy businessmen out of its players. “Zoo Vadis”, last week, had a lot of parallels drawn between it and Chinatown, because similarly, the game is not the rules but the conversations that the rules inspire. And these conversations are flawlessly energetic, occasionally to the point of being playfully heated. And unlike Zoo Vadis where points are points and favor with other players is the real currency, the different resources in Chinatown are asymmetrically valuable, and anyone could have them. This means you will likely have to make hair-pullingly tense deals with everyone around the table, and frequently, deals where both players have a lot to lose.

There are some speedbumps in the design here. Namely, that the granularity of the currency sometimes makes late game deals impossible. I feel strongly that a 5,000 dollar bill in the game would let there be room to keep negotiating even into the final round. Without it, the game often sings gloriously from years 2 to 4, starts to fizzle out in 5, and often falls completely flat by 6. This is possibly more of a feature than a bug, though, allowing the hard won battles from throughout the game to shine in a sort of post-climactic moment.

It’s still a really good negotiation game, and its theme does a lot of the heavy lifting. A theme that, notably, has been abandoned in the newer editions in favor of a cleaner waterpark aesthetic. I feel torn about this rebrand, because while I can see the value in abandoning the racially charged characters and businesses from a theme coined over 2 and a half decades ago, the subbed in setting is not half as evocative. It places me in a tight spot recommending this game to people, because while I haven’t played it, “Waterfall Park” feels sanitized. But in comparison, Chinatown feels aged. And neither feels like the perfect setting for what these genius mechanisms have to offer.

Railroad Ink

I’m reviewing the categorical “Railroad Ink” here, but know there are an abundance of varieties to pick through for this game. Out of the 5 colored boxes and 7 expansions, I have played Blue and Green (though only forest) with some of the Electricity and Engineer expansions. It's a staggering franchise with an equally staggering value proposition. Getting the full set puts you back less than $200, the price of one mediocre Kickstarter legacy game. Each of these colors can be found for sub-$20, and are fully playable on their own. And expansions can be picked up for often around only $7.

But what are you getting with these boxes? The game is played in around 7 rounds (depending on expansions). Each round, the set of 4 white dice get rolled and each of the 1-6 (usually) players draw all the shown faces onto their board. These faces feature roads and railroads, turning and intersecting. Connecting up the road and railroad entrances on the edges of your board with these die faces scores you increasingly many points. There are some bonus points for longest road and railroad, as well as utilizing the middle of your board, and penalties for any crazy dead ends. It's about as classic as a Roll-n-Write comes.

But there's some extra spice to be had from these expansions, two of which come baked into every color. Bonus, colorful dice often allow additional scoring conditions from additional challenges. And the more advanced colors (green and yellow) add some extra little board mechanics and shared objectives. All-in-all, the game has a sleek core and a lot of potential flourishes on it.

And it's because of this sleek core that the game can get away with all these expansions. It’s essentially a solo puzzle that you mostly parallel-play with your friends, chewing away at where to place each bend and station. But it’s a damn good one. You start with big aspirations, placing tiles in disparate entrances and across ambitious gaps. And around round 3 or 4, you start to watch either every plan you had crumble around you, or, with a combination of clever planning and lucky rolls, everything click into place. Cheers and groans follow every dice roll, because despite everyone getting identical options, the board quickly diverge into unique strategies and approaches.

This game is, truly, exactly what I want from tile placement and Roll-n-Write, but consequently, inherits the downsides of both genres. The randomized tile placement can be unreasonably punishing. And the solo play of a Roll-n-Write keeps players from interacting much at all, which for many people, is the selling point of board games in the first place. But for me, it slots into my collection like the last piece of a puzzle and keeps making it back to my table as a result.

Twilight Inscription

As a consequence of the success of “Railroad Ink” and Flip-n-Write “Welcome to”, a bit of a Roll-n-Write craze began. Designers saw a winning mechanic and a place that their IP could easily migrate to, and in turn created a flurry of paper pads covered in markable spaces. There have been some real hits in this trend; “Parks: Roll & Hike”, for example, lands for me up with the best of ‘em. But no game was as tremendous an undertaking as trying to boil down “Twilight Imperium 4th Edition” into a 2 hour rolling epic.

But try they did: “Twilight Inscription” is a Roll-n-Write game for 1-8 players who take on the roles of galactic civilizations after the fall of the empire. Players go in rounds simultaneously selecting 1 of 4 sheets to spend the event card’s resources on. Then, the dice are rolled, and the players must spend the rolled resources on the same sheet. Resources beget resources beget resources beget points, as players earn and spend across their 4 sheets. I’m skipping over a lot here, but add some extra event cards featuring wars, votes, and special resources, and you’ve got yourself the intersection of the crunchy space opera, and the breezy Roll-n-Write.

The real question, though, is if these two great tastes taste great together. There’s some obvious friction as soon as you start playing. The Roll-n-Write genre keeps the pace of the game up by often allowing simultaneous play, with the downside being you rarely care what your opponents are doing. The results, here, is that a player with analysis paralysis has the potential to screech a game to a halt. And this player cannot be even blamed, because between wading through the rulebook and considering the math, a turn *should* take a few minutes of silent staring just to formulate. 

And I’d like to say the Twilight Inscription makes up for this drag by having a stellar puzzle to mull over but I’m not sure it does. The game turn to turn is interesting and offers a number of different strategies to choose between, but I fear that the impact of the 4 boards on your overall score might not be exactly balanced. I usually shy away from being “the boy who cried ‘broken’” because how can I, especially after just a handful of plays, know the intricacies of strategy *so* well that I can claim to know better than the designers.

Except I have yet to see a player even be competitive without spamming the Industry board for much of the early game, and god forbid you try to spend almost anytime in Warfare. And while this doesn’t make for a broken game, since we all have the same boards to choose from, it does make for a less interesting decision space, and fails to deliver on a core promise of the genre: multiple viable strategies. Now there is a variant of this game where the boards that each player has differ in small ways, so maybe it's just the symmetric board setup that carries this issue. But it is a big drawback for me that the meta is so strict as to be suffocating.

The game's still interesting, and I have fun crunching through it, but it just doesn’t hit either note perfectly. If I want a space opera, I’ll probably stick to “Arcs” or even give the original a try, and if I want a Roll-n-Write, I am at no shortage. It’s a game that I might get more out of if I played another half dozen rounds, but I don’t find myself highly motivated to do so.

Conclusion

So 3 Roll-n-Writes and a little negotiation later, we wrap up another week. I think our lesson this week is that what a game can deliver, and how good it is, is heavily dependent on what is asks of you. And there is a lot a game can ask: price point, player count, setup, rules teach, overhead, focus, and teardown, just to name a few. So when breezy games like BBB or Railroad Ink deliver a lot without asking much, you can enjoy them all the more. Next week we’re focusing on theme-light and abstract games. See y’all then! 

Welp. Thanks for that snow storm, mother nature. Welcome to Week 4 (and 5) of No Meeple Left Behind. We got struck by some weather in week 4 and trapped away from our tech, so here we are, a week late, with a pile of fresh reviews for ya. We had the great fortune during said snow storm to be trapped *with games*, so we have a backlog stretching halfway to the Indy convention center now that we’ll be working though for the next few weeks. Let's get into it. 

Zoo Vadis

Reiner Knizia is back again with updated design “Zoo Vadis”, the child of the 30+ year old game “Quo Vadis”.  This game is another find at our beloved KC Overstock store, which never fails to delight with quality board games. Our copy has been languishing on our shelf of shame for about a month, far less than average, simply because of a necessity for a higher player count than most. Sure the game boasts a 3 player mode, but anything shy of 4 or maybe even 5 on a group negotiation game feels risky. But when we broke this out this week with 6 whole players? The dang thing delivered.

Zoo Vadis is a political game, in the loosest sense. Players try to collect points by trading and moving forward through the zoo’s enclosures all while attempting to land an animal from their herd into the star exhibit, a necessary spot to even be eligible for a win. Players on their turn do 1 of 4 actions, with the simpler 2 being the most common. First, players can load an animal into the back of the zoo. And second, if they have at least half of the exhibit spaces in votes, either from their own fellow herd members or from negotiating with other players, they may leave that exhibit, taking the point token on the path they follow. The other two actions allow for players to try and bypass negotiating by maneuvering NPC tokens, but most of the time, you either drop a new animal or move an old one.

But don’t be fooled, there's some spice that powers these elections, not least of which are your powers. Players each have asymmetric player powers that are tremendously helpful, but can only be used on other players. They are a by-design bargaining chip that helps give everyone another currency to spend when negotiating. Furthermore the game has a few ways it rewards you for helping opponents, Points for spending your powers or voting for others keep the wheels of collaborating greased as the game evolves.

It’s hard not to compare this to “Chinatown” (now “Waterfall Park”) which pulls a similar magic trick with its design. It puts rules in front of you, but interestingly, not the game. The real fun instead lies in conversations around the table. Conversations that have just enough scaffolding to be supported without too many rules getting in the way. These games are fiddly kinds of designs to pull off, because they have the potential to frustrate players by handing their opponents the only path to victory, effectively priming a game for kingmaking. But if the game can thread the political needle, instead players are constantly doing a kind of delicious social calculus. You have to weigh when to build bridges and when to burn them, and how many points is it worth forgoing to remain popular, especially here, where only immediate deals are binding.

 The main drawback to this game over Chinatown is that, for better and worse, players' *only* path forward is negotiation from turn one. In Chinatown, you can stumble your way into the perfect tile, either for yourself or as a way to skim some money off of someone else. But in Zoo Vadis, players are all too able to putz around with their turns, keeping themselves out of negotiations and potentially even eliminating themselves from contention. It's a sharper game than Chinatown, and consequently, is all the more capable of cutting someone out. But that sharpness shows when you’re in the thick of it, and has definitely warranted a few more plays from me.

Telestrations

A little over a decade ago, almost every board game I acquired was a ripped suggestion from “Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop.” Telestrations, however, was one of the few games that predates even that era of my collection. It is one of the essential party games, coming just before “Cards against Humanity” hit the scene. And it has persisted in one form or another since (quick shout out to “Gartic Phone”). And like many of the party games pre-2010 you don’t need the retail box to play the game, and honestly, it might even be better without it.

Telestrations, known in the public domain as “Paper Telephone” or “Telephone Pictionary”, is exactly the halfway point of its two namesakes. Players each alternate either guessing what a drawing is, or drawing the previous guess. Points are earned for correct guesses or correctly guessed drawings (if you dare spoil this game by adding points and a winner). The first set of drawings, in the retail version, are of nouns found on a deck of cards. But often people just create their own subjects, adding a quick shot of chaos to the game.

And this is really the only place I think the retail box could have gotten a leg up on the paper version. Several games, like “Pictomania” and “Drawful”, know they succeed the most when they make their players fail in explosive, humorous ways. Consequently they ratchet up the difficulty beyond what you can reasonably expect from players with prompts that are truly impossible. “Distinguish between a senator and a congressman” they demand, or “draw this cat with a whistful, melancholic expression”. When you fail, its uproariously funny, and if you manage to eek out a win, its *still* uproariously funny.

But Telestrations just asks for a “detective” or a “can of worms” and while failing to render these still lands somewhere pretty funny, succeeding when the bar is so low just falls flat. But nothing is stopping you from simply… not using the cards, just as we didn’t use them this week. So is Telestrations a good game? Not any better than its public domain counterpart. But if the retail version gets more people playing, I can’t complain.

Planet

“Planet” was a Gen Con 2018 purchase for me and a steal at that. And like with Flip 7, not paying full price makes anything more fun. Additionally, it is (affectionately) a generic tile placement where you get little animals, which is a cheat code to getting to our table (shoutout Calico). So it is unsurprising that this game sees some play every few months despite the bloat of the collection. And while good, I fear the gimmickiness of this game relegates it to *just* good.

Planet is a tile placement game, now in 3D! Players take turns using a simple draft to acquire pentagonal tiles that they slap onto their planets: delightful and magnetic dodecahedrons. Each pentagonal tile has 5 pie-slice bits of territory from 1 of 5 types. The goal is to try to string together enough of 1 type to convince animals to pop-up on your planet rather than your opponents’. The catch is that these snow leopards don’t just want the largest chunk of tundra, for example, they want the largest chunk touching at least one piece of mountains.

So you compete, snapping together bits of tundra to make a more enticing planet for the snow leopards than your neighbor. But with about 2 dozen animals in a game, each with their own condition, and each scoring after different rounds, the puzzle gets interesting fast. Tile placement puzzles like this are deliciously chewy. They let players sit and think and weigh options to balance long and short term gains. 

But in directly competitive tile placement games, everyone's tiles need to be readable. You have to be able to look at an opponent and see what they’re trying to do and how they’re trying to do it at a glance. And this is the first drawback here, on a roundish planet, the tiles just aren’t. The game tries to solve this with poppy colors and high-visibility art, but asking another player to rotate their planet so you can check on their ocean is always a little clunky.

So the next question is does it make up for it? If the visibility is awkward, is the 3D-ness of the game play otherwise worth it? And I don’t know. Planet is hard. Thinking through this puzzle requires spatial reasoning that 2D games don’t ask of you. And there is a place for difficulty in games, but the line is razor thin. Doing your taxes and playing the video game “Papers, Please” is not that different. Both are hard, but only one is a game. And the distinctions and gamifications of “Papers, Please” are subtle, but highly impactful. I fear sometimes the 3rd Dimension in Planet is taxes.

This leaves the puzzle of the game feeling somewhat laborious, and the gimmick feeling a little unjustified. But none of this is to say it’s a bad game. The tile placement puzzle is still chunky and thinky like the best of ‘em, just that the best of ‘em don’t slow themselves down with a gimmick that might be more trouble than its worth.

Crokinole

Mika’s Father is great at “Crockinole”, which is mostly how it came to pass that, by number of matches, it was my most played game of 2025. That is not to suggest that I don’t love this game, just that I am not in possession of a crokinole board, a critical (and fairly expensive) component for playing. But Mika’s family? After our collective introduction to the game at 2025’s Meeple-a-thon in KC, they rushed out and bought the board with all its fixings.

This is because, despite rocking a bit of a price tag, this game is magic. Often played either as 2 or 4 players (solo or in teams), this is a flicking dexterity game. Players take turns launching wooden pucks across the board, trying at first to land in the center ring guarded by rubber pegs. And then, once the board has an opponents piece lodged on it, trying to touch that piece. Failure to make the middle or, if there are enemy pieces out, touch one of them, results in your puck’s removal. Scoring at the end of the round is based on which concentric ring your pucks landed in, with a juicy 20 point bonus going to anyone who can sink a puck in the satisfyingly small central pit.

I am partial to a good dexterity game, and adore the culture and tradition of a classic, so this 1800’s classic dexterity game stole my heart instantly. The experience of launching a shot and having it rocket through the pegs to perfectly remove your opponent’s 15? Exhilarating. But more importantly, the quiet shots between the exciting lineups, the bread and butter of the game, *also* creates little tense moments and interesting decisions, forging ever riskier attempts to just knock that one puck out and yours right into the middle. 

Dexterity games, as a genre, are chock full of the fun nuanced decision space I want from board games, since the game’s physical position *is* the board state. And so dexterity games always beg a bit of a question on every turn, asking things like “what if this pieces was 2 inches to the left, or even just 2 quarter inches.” And this qualily, this always interesting board state, crokinole has it in spades. The specific layout, the angles of the shot, the pegs in between, they all keep a simple game punching above its weight class. Its clear the second you sit down at a nice board why the quality in the components is so important.

But here is where we have to return to the big question. If the game is so good, why don’t I own it. And once again I have to bring up the price. Crokinole is a great game, but I don’t think I’d play it with the fervor of Mika’s family if I owned a board, making it hard to get my money out of a somewhat luxurious purchase. So I am content, for now, visiting the board at their house once in a while, and soaking up all the Crokinole I can while I am there. And to anyone else I’d say the same thing: play it whenever you can, and pick up a board if you must.

Conclusion

We played almost 10 additional games not reviewed here. Ranging from “Things in Rings” to “Twilight Inscription” and including the previously promised print-and-play game. The biggest lesson from this batch, though, is to not overlook the simplest of games. Sure the fluff and theme and crunch is fun, but stripping it down to its essentials, just the core mechanics alone and nothing else, can give you timeless dexterity classics and goofy no frills party games. Next week, I’m hoping to talk about those games with the fluff and theme and crunch, because as smooth as a round of crokinole is, there’s something magic about the hour (or hours) spent around a single, dastardly complex, beast of a game. See y’all then!

Guess who already forgot to mention and count a game we played last week? Yep, “Kingdomino” slipped under my radar, and I’m here to fix it. Welcome to week three of No Meeple Left Behind. We’re still trying to play catch up after my cold stuck around for longer than expected, but not even debilitating illness can keep me from gaming. This is our first semi-normal week, so we played a few of our regulars. Let's get into it.

Kingdomino

At Gen Con 2025, in a half drunk, half asleep stupor, I went on a rant about “Kingdomino” to a friend that rambled in circles, contradicted itself, and failed to communicate anything of substance. The core of the rant, though, was that Kingdomino is a pioneer of the since-propagated mechanic ‘draft order is turn order’, and that while others may have surpassed it in glory with fancier systems and longer playtimes, in my mind, Kingdomino *is* this mechanic.

The game sees 2-4 players drafting tiles from a central pool in turn order, and placing them in the mandatorily 5 by 5 grid of their kingdom. The twist is that every tile is ordered in quality each round (by a number printed on the back) and thus who ever picked the *least quality* tile gets to draft first next turn, second least is second on so on. Scoring these tiles, then, is done at the end of the game when players have placed all the tiles possible in their grid. You count contiguous groups of tiles and multiply the number of spaces by the number of crowns they contain.

And that's it. No finnick or special bonus rules, it is an entire game built around a drafting mechanic. A drafting mechanic, mind you, that has since been used elsewhere. The aforementioned rant was also referencing a 2025 Allplay release “Twinkle Twinkle” which does a very similar draft system with some key differences. But more importantly, it does more in general, more scoring systems, more types of tiles, they even use transparent plastic to let you flip them.

And this put Kingdomino in a tough spot. Last week, I marked down Final Girl substantially for having a better game with similar mechanics predate it (and also because it made me mad), but what do you do if a better game came after. Kingdomino has one or two interesting mechanics that propel a short but engaging game. Since then, however, games like Twinkle Twinkle or 2023’s “Pyramido” have taken a mechanic of Kingdomino’s and reimplemented them with more fanfare and nuance.

Not to say those games *are* necessarily better, though. Kingdomino has a certain charm in its unabashed simplicity that Twinkle Twinkle and Pyramido don’t recapture. Kingdomino is arguably the most flawless delivery of its core concept. A core concept that’s good, but not great by any means. On its own merit, Kingdomino is fun, but a little predictable, clever and engaging but lacking the replay value for a combative tile placement game, such as “Calico”, but short and simple enough to get away with it. Does it deserve a spot in your collection? I don’t know, but I’m happy it has a spot in mine.

Spirit Island

This is a weird review to write. “Spirit Island” is probably the “best” game we are going to review this year, or at a minimum, our favorite. It consistently makes the top 3 every time we try to rank our games. It is likely our most played game ever by hours spent. Hell, it's ranked 11 on BGG out of literally all games at the time of writing. We adore this game; it was the game we were playing when Mika proposed to me. All this being said, I can’t play it with my brother, because of how lukewarm he is, not just on this game, but on co-ops in general.

Spirit Island is a co-operative game. 1-4 players (or 1-6 if you have expansions) take on the role of spirits defending an island from the overtly European invaders, with the goal being to either destroy their… everything or to scare them away before they claim the island as their own, with both player objects, destroying and scaring, helping you complete the other. Players go in rounds, and during each round they’ll improve their spirits, use some cards, let the baddies do their bad stuff, and finally use some more cards before cleaning it all up and starting again. This core loop has a boatload of finick to it, but that’s the main structure.

The meat and potatoes of these rules are written not just on the cards you are playing, but the spirit you’re playing as, allowing for some *very* fun character selection and team building before a game even starts. This, I have found, is actually a lot of new players' main draw to the game. Nothing lures in someone like a deck of almost 40 spirits (if you have all the content) and the promise that they are all different, with weird names, fun art, and cool abilities. And Spirit Island delivers on this promise, every spirit is vastly different in its rhythm, objectives, and style. 

There’s just something magical about the times I have played this game. The arc of play is satisfying. The collaboration between players is electric. The turns where everything aligns for you to pull off the perfect combo and use your spirit to its fullest? *mwah* chef’s kiss. This is not to say the game is without faults though. A learning curve is a generous image, because a learning cliff is more apt. There is no good way to teach this game shy of making someone play 1 or 2 games first, a real “it gets good in the 3rd season” kind of pitch.

And further, it's almost too well balanced as a game. The skill expression this game makes room for means that most competent and experienced players will breeze through games at lower difficulties, while inexperienced players will get slaughtered even at level 1. And, for better and worse, the game has almost no output randomness, only setup randomness, meaning you can often just win, accidentally crossing the finish line, without a climactic card flip or dice roll. I have taken to announcing, especially with new players “If we do ‘X’ this turn, we can win” because otherwise people have a tendency to casually look up from their board to see they’ve already won, and the fanfare is suddenly stolen.

I have more thoughts, more nitpicks, but at this point, it’s like critiquing a Monet. Sure if you’ve seen a bunch of ‘em, and a bunch of paintings overall, you can have some sophisticated opinions on the specifics of brush stroke and such. But simply, Monet is good and most people already know if they like impressionism or not. And Spirit Island isn’t for everyone either. If you don’t want to get caught up in crunchy rules or the idea of complex co-op doesn’t sound appealing, then skip this one. But for me, this game is a go to, and you’ll almost never catch me skipping an opportunity to play it.

My City

By designer powerhouse Reiner Knizia, “My City” has been mine and my parents’ legacy game for the past several months. It is strange to review a legacy game I haven’t finished, because it is simultaneously spoilable for me as the writer and you as the reader. Though as far as spoilability, My City is low on the list. Regardless, I will try to keep this review secret-free as I discuss the experience I have gotten from it. And, assuming My City sticks the landing, explain why this game is the best gateway into legacy I’ve seen thus far.

My City, like many Knizia games, feels more discovered than created. It's a simple core set of rules, with no individual mechanic feeling innovative, but with a final product polished to a shine. The core in this case has a deck of cards representing the different tiles everyone can play into their city grid. On each round, a card is drawn and everyone plays that building into their city. Placement must start by the river and expand outward, with each building adjacent to anything you’ve already played. Scoring changes from round to round for flavor, but generally the better you link up your tiles, covering empty space and keeping like color with like, the better you’ll do.

And in short, these mechanics are just a simple, tasty treat: draw a card, place a building. The game rewards players for being flexible and learning new tricks to conquer the new challenges before them, while mastering the central tile placement as a foundation for a sprinkle of new gimmicks to be laid atop. And each new gimmick doesn’t even need to be that good, they are here and gone before they have to hold up to scrutiny. Though, as if to prove a point, Knizia makes them good anyway.

It's simple, effective, engaging, but it is a legacy game. A deeply flawed genre that sells the fantasy more often than anyone actually takes them up on the offer. It’s a daunting proposition at minimum. If Spirit Island “gets good in the 3rd season”, legacy games are the anime “One Piece”. Sure they come out swinging, and have plenty to offer along the way, but who has the time and, in legacy games’ case, the scheduling skills, to get through that much content. I guess I do. And I will say, as everyone who ever finishes a legacy game will say, that it’s worth it and to give the genre a try. But quite honestly, if you just stick with “The Isle of Cats” so you can be done in 1-2 hours instead of 1-2 years, I wouldn’t blame you.

Mr. Jack in New York

I attend a few conventions here and there. And last year I attended STL’s main board game con, “Geekway to the West” for the first time. It was just me and Mika and we played a number of strong 2 player games, as well as a few others with some friendly strangers. One such 2 player game, on our last day, was “Mr. Jack in New York”, First Edition. I’m often delighted by my con finds, and even more so when they are a gem among the slag. Small studios, hand crafted components, weird designs. I am rarely hit, though, with something like Mr. Jack, a 2009 game with its time in the sun over, but a persistent design that ought to have stuck around.

Mr. Jack in New York is a hidden movement game… sort of. One player, as Mr. Jack, will randomly select 1 of the 8 visible suspects to be for the game. The other player, as the detective, has to deduce which character they are, and accuse them, before they escape. Players take turns drafting these characters from a set of 4 each round, moving them, and activating their special abilities. This means the detective can end up moving Mr. Jack without knowing it. 

At the end of each round, Mr. Jack must announce if he's visible, meaning he's near other characters or street lamps, or invisible, meaning he's isolated or in a garden, allowing the detective to eliminate characters as suspects. Importantly, Mr. Jack can only escape while invisible, leaving some tough choices for both players every round. The game has quite a bit to it beyond this: The character abilities each are unique, there are different types of terrain characters add and interact with, the informant allows players to gather more info secretly on which characters are or aren’t Mr. Jack. The list goes on. 

And all these mechanical angles risk making the design soupy. There's a lot that can be done with a turn and a lot of rules that you need to remember. And I’ll admit, I spent both of this week’s games bouncing in and out of the rulebook because I will never fully remember the nuances of Monk Eastman’s ability. But this game tightens the decision space and win conditions to try and make these things more digestible, and if you can digest it all, boy, is this puzzle sharp.

 This game is exactly what I want from a chess-y head-to-head game, you both staring at the board working out the possibilities. Pondering if you can squeeze out a win right now or need to slip back into hiding. Trying desperately to discern which lever to pull to keep your cover for one more turn. This game ignites into tense and combative problem solving from turn one, assuming you both have a tight enough grasp on the rules. 

And here’s the rub. These rules are like swords, if only one of you is wielding them, it's going to be a pretty short battle. It's hard to introduce someone to this game *because* it’s not too dissimilar to chess in its firm strategic punch. If one of you knows the rules better than the other, that person will probably win. So if one of you is on your first game, the other has to either intentionally misplay to give the newbie a shot, or shove them face first into the dirt, and neither feels good. But if you can get over that curve, when the table is at an equal footing, the game evolves to something thematic, tense, and delightfully think-y. Broad in its ruleset, yes, but making use of every square inch or real estate it takes up, and a worthwhile battle of wits to be sure.

Conclusion

That's another week down. This week's biggest lesson, I believe, is that setting, expectation, and audience are half the experience. The right game in the wrong context is the wrong game. It doesn’t matter how good Spirit Island is, if you’re itching for social deduction, crunchy co-op isn’t going to cut it. I’m hoping next week we can try to break into some good old-fashioned 4-player *crunch* but we’ll see if I can wrangle some other people to play with. Maybe, instead, I can dip my toe into print-n-play and see what all the fuss is about. See you then.

Isn’t it a funny joke to immediately have to quarantine in the second week of our blog about (social and in-person) tabletop gaming? Hilarious. Welcome to week two of No Meeple Left Behind, where the noses sniffle and the cough drops flow. Our week focuses on wrapping up some reviews from our January 2nd game night and a few solo games, which are (usually) way more interesting than “playing a board game alone” sounds. Let's get into it.

QE

I first played “QE” at my local board game cafe (shoutout to Pieces in STL) and then embarked on a 6 month quest to acquire it, before giving up and purchasing a copy on Amazon: a fate worse than death. QE is an earlier game from blog-favorite publisher Allplay, released in 2019, less than a year after their first game and back when their name was still “Boardgametables.com”. (We even still have a few relics that bear that branding). I was honestly a little surprised I was unfamiliar with this game before playing it at Pieces given its big name publisher and absolutely genius mechanical design.

QE is the kind of game that makes the rules reader at your table start to giggle before the game even begins. It's a bidding game, where you’re bidding on companies to score points in a number of ways. Except there is no monopoly-style money or metal coins to bid with. Instead you get a dry erase board and can bid *anything*. Wanna bid 100? Sure, but try 100 trillion. Any positive whole number is allowed. The catch is, if you bid the most of any player at the end of the game, you instantly lose. 

On first brush, it's easy to dismiss this mechanic as a gimmick in a novelty game. Fun for a round but lacking the strategic meat-on-the-bones you’d expect from a “real” strategy game. But weirdly, by making the entirety of the puzzle based on each other players’ open ended decision making, this game breathes life into what otherwise would be a cheap trick.

The game begins, in its first few plays, to gain a predictable arc. Namely, that the player who scoops up the first few companies by going biggest, fastest, will win by scaring everyone into spending heaps of money later just to scrape out a few measly points. But what happens when everyone knows this strategy? And later whenever everyone knows that everyone knows this strategy. Double bluffs, triple bluffs, quick deductions, hidden info, suddenly this game is sharper than it has any right to be. 

My only complaint stems from getting the same group of people to play the same game more than 3 times, ever. If you have a collection the size of mine and any more than 2 friends then it’ll take you 3-5 business years to get everyone in the group familiar enough with QE to not have to reteach the rules each game, let alone get beyond that predictable arc of play. But it's still so fun to introduce someone new to the gimmick that it keeps making it back to my table anyway, and will continue to do so for a while.

Flip 7

I should start by saying we received this game for free at a convention; ‘free’ makes any game more fun. But we have been playing nonstop since that fateful con in November, mostly because this has become the smoothest game to play that we own. It whips to the table, teaches in a minute, never overstays its welcome, and is unironically enjoyable for anyone like 6 or older.

The teach is as clean as possible. Cards are worth the points on them *and* tell you how many are in the deck. There is 1 copy of the ‘1’ card, worth a single point, and 12 copies of the ‘12’ card, worth the highest value, 12 points. On your turn, draw a card, or lock in points for the round, keeping the total value you’ve drawn so far. If you draw a duplicate number, you bust, and get zero points for the round. First to 200 total points wins. There's a little bit of fun they throw into this deck, second chance cards, 2x multipliers, cards that let you force anyone to flip 3 right now. But they can be taught as they come up.

And that’s everything (spare 1 rule I’ll save for later). The game is about as digestible as they come. Draw cards, get points, avoid busting. And the decision space is literally the narrowest possible in a game, 1 binary choice every turn; another card, yes or no? But the drama, the dynamic moments of someone flipping just one more card, they leap off the table even in the first round or two.

The only complaint I *would* have about this system is how easy it is to run away with 2 or 3 decent turns, except for the final rule to teach. If you ever get 7 unique number cards, the round ends for everyone and you get the total value of your cards +15 bonus points. AND you only decide who’s won once everyone finishes a round. This keeps everyone in the running, 1 great turn away from catching up, with the end game having a climactic build to it. Someone has passed 200 points and everyone just keeps drawing for a chance to hit the fabled 7 and usurp the win.

Unfortunately though, I love this game like a hole-in-the-wall bookshop. Its cozy, aesthetic, perfectly executes on its vision, but you kinda see the whole of its offerings in 1 or 2 visits. This doesn’t stop you from coming back, bringing friends, settling in for a bit. And god forbid they try to make it bigger and ruin the vibes. You just can only get so much variety out of it. But I’ll take a 1 trick pony who does a really good trick over 3 hours of putzing around any day of the week.

Under Falling Skies

“Under Falling Skies” (and the next review “Final Girl”) are solo games. These games are intended to be played alone, which some of you might argue defeats the purpose of board games. I often refer to board games as “tools to enjoy your friends” and here there are nary a friend to speak of. Weirdly though, video games seem to have no trouble being appreciated as a single player experience, and even get criticized as “friend slop” if you're expected to interact with your friends too much. So I decided to give Under Falling Skies a chance a few years back, but to play it with Mika as a sort of ‘decide by committee’ co-op game.

Under Falling Skies, which began as a print-and-play before graduating to full production by well-respected “Codenames” publisher, Czech Games Edition, has a simple enough rulebook befitting its history. Players (or I guess ‘player’) roll 5 dice and place them in their bunker to activate stations, with higher dice providing better effects. However, the sky above is full of alien ships, and when you place a die in each column, that column’s ship moves that many spaces closer to your fragile bunker. Tactful placements, and the missile spaces on your bunker, can help shoot ships on specific spots, resetting them to the top of the board.

This core loop, roll dice, place dice, move ships, and shoot ships, does have a few wrenches, but generally is the beating heart of the game. You repeat this until you are able to use labs to progress the research track to the top of the board, winning the game, or until enough ships (or the mothership) crash into your bunker, losing you the game. I should say here that this game has a campaign mode, as many solo games do, but we have only played the base few cities at a few difficulties, so we can only review that. But damn it, even just the base is so dang good.

These types of games are puzzles, there are always better and worse moves, with one or two “correct” moves bubbling up every turn. And thus the joy of this game is deducing that move, teasing out the solution to the puzzle. And this particular puzzle has some bite to it. The balance of long term and short term investments and a little bit of mid-turn calculable randomness with the dice rerolls keeps the waters murky so the puzzle isn't just a math problem.

It's honestly a shockingly clean design for what was once relegated to print-and-play. And I’m hard pressed to find a complaint. The rules are tight, the teach is simple, the game has fun crunch and scalable difficulty, the production is a joy to just toy with, and it all comes in a smallish, cheap box packed to the gills with content. It’s a pearl of a game, and if you’re looking for solo’s, look here first.

Final Girl

I will try to keep this review under 1000 words. Final Girl is a reimplementation of “Hostage Negotiator”, a game I played solo at Gen Con and, though I didn’t get too far into it, remember quite enjoying. After a few months of sitting on the idea, I decided I wanted to own the game and did some research, discovering a nuanced, but clear sentiment; “Both are good, ‘Final Girl’ has some more randomness but is generally better”. I distinctly remember feeling that additional randomness would be odd in a game like “Hostage Negotiator”, which already has a heaping helping of it. But the BGG rating is higher, the content more plentiful, and the theme more fleshed out in Final Girl. So against my better judgement, I went out to my local Barnes and Noble and bought the core box and two ‘feature films’.

I won’t bury the lead here, Final Girl is the most disappointing game I’ve played to date. Never before have I been so frustrated at the difference between my expectation of the game and its reality. It plays a lot like Hostage Negotiator, you cycle through a tableau of purchasable, 1-time-use cards that give you the chance to do powerful effects, if you roll enough successes on 1-3 dice. 5’s and 6’s automatically succeed, while 3’s and 4’s let you pay for a success with 2 other cards from your hand. Used cards return to the tableau next turn, so you keep the cycle up, buying cards, playing cards, rolling dice, discarding the card back to the tableau.

In Final Girl, though, there's a board covered in meeples representing you, the killer, and the many victims the killer might catch. The powerful effects each card grants, then, are movement, attacks, items, more currency to buy fancier cards, and so on. The game focuses on you maneuvering around the map, saving victims and attacking the killer, with the game ending only when you or the killer dies. Said killer can be selected from a number of ‘feature films’, modules that each contain a unique killer, map, and pair of final girls to play as. 

If this all sounds like too many mechanisms in one game, that's because it is. The game has a maximalist design philosophy that lends itself to theme and narrative above all else. And, in this game’s defense, the theme is bold and loud from the get go. But after some time pouring through a 30+ page rule book (plus extra rules for the killer and map) and learning the specifics of items versus weapons and minor versus major dark powers, I played my first game of Final Girl

And it sucked. The game was clunky and dragged, so I did some reading, googled some rulings and discovered I had messed up a rule or two, mea culpa. I reset, recalibrated, and played again. And it sucked. I lost quickly and without much fanfare. It was disappointing, but better than this first try, and at minimum played correctly, so I resolved to give it some time and try again. Months went by, ‘No Meeple Left Behind’ began, and I saw an opportunity to give Final Girl another chance. 

And it sucked. Me and Mika were playing a good, interesting game when we, out of nowhere, were one shot from full health by the killer. So I posted on the subreddit, asking for advice. ‘Maybe I’m approaching this wrong’ I reasoned, ‘People love this game’. I got some very kind, albeit same-y advice about being new to the game and trying different strategies, about how the game has randomness that I need to prepare for. So I resolved one last time, to play the game with some more tact, a positive attitude, and to take the RNG in stride.

AND. IT. SUCKED. The game was fun for the first 2/3rd of its playtime, as I maneuvered and out played the killer, saving victims and gathering items. But at a satisfying conclusion where a victory seemed narratively earned the killer narrowly survived because of the random revive mechanic. And for the latter 1/3rd I failed again and again to finish the job, only to be caught in a corner, one die roll away from an unmitigable victory. 80% chance of winning, 20% chance of losing, and I lost.

I tried very hard to keep tilt out of this review. The game isn’t bad because I lost it 4 times in a row. The game is bad because it hampers skill expression by adding narratively interesting but strategically frustrating randomness.  But even beyond this, it has a staggeringly obtuse rules set and an unjustifiably long setup time for a game that plays in less than an hour. And I simply cannot endorse a monetization model that locks so much content behind massive paywalls. I had to buy 2, $25 products just to play the game, and a third for any sort or replayability, and there are over 20 of these at time of writing. 

It's bad. And I could go into specifics about the mechanics that I think ruin individual aspects of the game or frustrate players in particular ways. But frankly, It's bad because it fails to be better than Hostage Negotiator, a game that is more accessible, cheaper, smaller, faster, and more engaging, all while *predating* Final Girl. And that sin is unforgivable.

Conclusion

And here we are, solos in tow. We ended up also getting to play Spirit Island this week at the very end, but you’ll have to wait until next time to hear the review of our most played game. In the meantime I think we learned this week that randomness is a spice that needs to be applied with grace. Too much or too little and your game’s unpalatable. And if that randomness can snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory, it better have a damn good reason to do it (looking at you Final Girl). See y’all next week with more games and hopefully less sneezes.

 OKAY LET’S TAKE THIS FROM THE TOP

Welcome to “No Meeple Left Behind”, a review blog attempting to play 226 unique games in 2026, and in doing so, hitting every game in our 200-ish piece collection. A challenge that will require us to not just play Spirit Island and Flip 7 over and over, but to actually explore (and often reexplore) the depths of what board games can offer.

Luckily for us, we always begin the year by hosting a day long game binge on the 2nd with some old family friends, who always bring with them delightfully new-to-us games. So this week contains a few ‘after exactly one play’ reviews. Every review, in addition to my ramblings, will feature our rating out of 10, a few games we thought about while playing it, and Mika’s take on the game. Let's dive right in.

Train Dominos

To begin this fool-hearty endeavor I decided to bite off exactly more than I can chew and review dominos. Namely “Mexican Train Dominos”, as my very American family calls it (potentially problematically? My google search was inconclusive.) More specifically double-15 with 6 players, a style of play that is not recommended among *real* domino players.

This brings me to my first point. I have been participating in my family’s annual dominos game night since I was young and cannot definitively say that I have played the same ruleset twice. Train Domino rules are folkloric to a level seldom matched in gaming. And even as we played we couldn’t decide if you had to play on your train before the public one, or if you could satisfy the double by playing elsewhere. The rules were essentially by consensus for our games.

So we played *our* train dominos, rendering this review shockingly narrow in its scope. Each player starts with 11 tiles, trying to shed their hand or be stuck with a point per pip (points are bad). Play matching dominos into a line, either on your train, the public train, or a stuck player’s train. Draw when you're stuck, satisfy doubles, call uno, a fine set of rules.

And our train dominos is fun enough. If you want something to do with your hands while drinking a cheap wine and catching up with old friends, this fits the bill. It has the strategic depth of a dish of hummus and a level of player interaction to match, but it doesn’t ask too much of you. It has a level of tactility that is quite satisfying and the table presence of a much more interesting game.

From a modern lens though, it has too much randomness to feel fair and not enough humor to slide from strategy game to party game. Its ruleset is tight, but the resulting mechanics are far too bare bones to stand up to scrutiny. I like the game about as much as I like potato chips for a meal. Savory, but not as filling as I would hope. I guess this is what I get for playing an unendorsed and unofficial version.

Formula D

The spiritual successor to “Formula D”, “Heat: Pedal to the Metal”, raced onto our table last year and instantly became a mainstay game at our board game nights. After picking up a cheap copy at an overstock store in Kansas City, which is now one of our go to spots for game acquisition, we begged for excuses to bring this one to the table. Suffice to say, I was excited this week at the opportunity to play the original racing game (or more accurately, the 2008 reimplementation of the 1997 “Formula Dé”)

The rules of this one are the clear source of a lot of Heat’s systems. Race around a track by rolling a die, with higher gears providing more and higher valued die faces. But take a corner too fast, or bump into another player, and you risk taking damage. Too much damage and you are eliminated from the race. There are loads of extra little details listed under optional rules, as with Heat, but we have only played the core game for both, so that is all I can comment on.

To start, it's clear why “Heat” chose to run with this design, the core loop here isn’t just good, it's electric. Risky dice rolls in place of Heat’s card draws make for a tense moment when you choose to chance it for a few extra spaces, and the damage from bumping fellow players is both fun on the surface and strategic as you look deeper. The maps are formulated (no pun intended) for interesting decisions and exciting comebacks.

But much to my dismay, our game lacked a lot of that electricity. I launched into first quickly in our playthrough and was neither punished nor challenged by a single obstacle presented to me. The game forgoes catchup mechanics in favor of realism and suffers for it. I got good rolls, which kept me out of the scrum, which let me save damage for the final few turns, which let me keep a lead. And it just as easily could have been any one of the players at the table who might’ve led with a few good rolls.

Furthermore, I always wince a little at Heat’s rules set which, while integral to the exciting moment that game has to offer, are just a bit too much to wrap your head around the first few plays. I was surprised to find Heat actually pared down its parent's instruction. “Formula D” has an awkward and arbitrary start, and many rule-y speed bumps along the way. We at the blog actually only learned about the slipstream mechanic in “Formula D” after our game, because it was so finicky it simply never came up. I suppose this all serves the interest of realism, which does help the game pop in theme, but lag behind in actual play.

Summarily, the game is quite good, still. Deserving of its legacy and place in games history. That being said, I feel as if it has earned a retirement after a long and storied career, making way for its protege, Heat, to shine.

Spots

“Spots” leaps onto a table with some of the most charming design I’ve seen in ages. Before even cracking open the box I am obsessed with the dog art that is absolutely chock full of character. And as I dug deeper the visuals continued to deliver with charming choices making each card feel unique and noteworthy while staying cohesive, despite not every dog card even being a dog.

With its visual hooks in me, I was waltzed through a smooth teach and hopped right into my first game of “spots”. It plays a lot like many other push-your-luck games. Roll some dice, place matching pips on open slots on your dogs. If you can’t place them, instead bury them in your yard. If your yard ever has more than 7 pips worth of dice, bust, and clear all in-progress dogs.

The key here is what makes you roll the dice. Every game has a spread of delightfully thematic actions you can take: ‘Sit’, ‘Fetch’, ‘Beg’, ‘Run’, etc. Taking an action removes it from the pool until 5 out of 6 have been taken. The 6th is then sweetened with a treat (a way to reroll dice) and the pool resets. Finally, if you ever want to cash in on completed dogs, simply take a turn to flip them instead of taking an action from the middle, unless you are particularly lucky (or skillful) and complete all your dogs on the same turn, in which case the scoring is free.

And immediately these systems *sing*. Turns are snappy and impactful, rolls are chunky, and your only ever one good turn from rocketing into first, encouraging last place players to take riskier, more exciting turns. There are few rules and a heaping helping of randomness to keep the game light, but enough decision space and player agency to give it nuance and depth.

The only downside to “Spots”, I feel, is there just isn't as much going on in this one as, say, “Quacks of Quedlinburg”. It's not a very big game, but it's also not trying to be. To call this a flaw would be like criticizing a TV episode for not being a feature length film. And sure, when I’m in the mood for something feature length, “Spots” won’t be where I turn; there's only so far this kind of game can go. But if I am in the mood for something snappy and joyous, I’d be hard pressed to do better than “Spots”

Magical Athlete  (Tim’s Hack)

Statistically, no one who is reading this has played this game unless you’ve played it with me, specifically (Hi, Mom). And though you may have heard of its inspiration “Magical Athlete”, “Tim’s Hack”, as I’ve begun affectionately calling it, is a devilishly DIY version of the game that spikes the chaos up to an 11. Tim Is a board game youtuber, who proposes a print and play version of the game. A proposal that has, at time of writing, just over 5,000 views, making this review potentially even more niche than the dominos one. I may be better off reviewing a defunct improv troop given this review's applicability. That would be, if this game weren’t so dang good. 

This game's rules set is simple but a little daunting. Players participate in 4 races, earning points for medaling. At the start of the race you pick your runner, and on your turn you roll a six sided die, and move that many spaces. The spice here is that each racer has a wacky ability that, in the original “Magical Athlete”, is carefully curated by a team of skilled game designers, and in “Tim’s Hack” is written by you when you sit down to play the game. Player can write any power they want (within reason) and then shuffle the powers together and draft 4 à la “Sushi Go” or “7 Wonders”

The best I can say about this is the freedom here is hilariously intoxicating. Players will usually shy away from the opportunity at first, but hand them a few from your last game as an example and their eyes will go wide with possibility. Shuffle, gamble, slide, steal, switch, mosey, spin; you dream it, it happens. Players quickly learn to interact with each other’s designs, meaning even the powers that the author claims are “boring” rocket the game to dizzying levels of absurdity, fast.

I often feel as if board games, and potentially social games in general, are narrative generators. We love to tell each other about the perfect “Cards Against Humanity” plays or a tight “Tekken 8” comeback, because these stories are fun, and many games are built to make those stories happen as often as possible. “Tim’s Hack” is exactly this kind of game. At its best, a personalized culture of rules and racers constructs itself around your game instantly. This is further helped by the ingenious suggestion to save one racer per player between games, starting them in the next one’s lineup. 

At its worst though, this game does have the potential to sag a bit at times. Players can end up designing past each other, making a hypothetically interesting character effectively powerless. And the proposition does require a level of experimental buy in. There's just no way to get around the baked-in aspect of “making your own fun”

But this game does as much of the heavy lifting as it can manage. And if the lows are mildly low, the highs are peaks. Definitely worthy of a place at the table.

Conclusion

This week was a weird launch for sure. hyper-niche games, 30-year-old French classics, and strangest of all, dogs, all found a place in this week’s lineup. Granted, we also played QE and Flip 7, but we'll save those for a less jam-packed week.

I think what we learned this week is that a game is sometimes only as good as the story you tell while playing it. From “Tim’s Hack’s” bit-machine to “Formula D’s” catch-up killer, if the game arc is interesting, its chance of sticking around both in a collection, and the popular zeitgeist, is much higher. See y’all next week, when hopefully I can shake this cold I caught and get a few more plays in here.