#crokinole

When I walked in, the guy in charge of the room came up to me and immediately said:

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!