The best board games tell a story. In Galaxy Trucker, you’re transporting pipes across the galaxy by building ships out of them and hurtling through space. In Food Chain Magnate, you’re the CEO of a burgeoning fast food empire, as long as you can stay one step ahead of your opponents. In the Hall of the Mountain King, you play as trolls who were forced out of their home by the gnomes who took up residence in the halls the trolls built. But Earth is on your side, and collapsed in on those gnomes. Now, each troll clan is embarking on re-tunnelling through the mountain to unearth statues and place them in their rightful, honourable spots next to the heart of the mountain.
Designed by Jay Cormier and Graeme Jahns, with art by Josh Cappel and Kwanchai Moriya and published by Burnt Island Games in 2019, In the Hall of the Mountain King is a polyomino tile laying game with some strict resource management driving it. You start the game with a row of basic trolls, and on your turn you either need to recruit a new troll, bringing more resources into your control, or spend resources you control to dig some tunnels. The unique part of the game comes from the trollmoot, which is how you gain more resources. When you recruit a troll, you build a pyramid with your cards, and a newly acquired troll activates themselves (which produces the resources on that card), and every troll below them.
If a troll has resources already on their card, they don’t get to produce again, creating a really frustrating moment of wanting to be efficient and producing the resources you need at the moment, but also not wanting to waste potential resources by producing resource before all of your trolls are ready to receive them. It’s a fascinating resource management puzzle.
Most of the resources you’re collecting are used in building tunnels. Instead of hiring a troll on your turn, you trade in those minerals you collected to build a tunnel. The number of minerals you trade in determine the size of the tunnel, while the quality of minerals determine how many victory points you earn from that build. When you place a tunnel, you might need to spend hammers, if you’re attempting to hew through particularly hard rocks, and if you lay your tunnel on spaces on the board that have a resource or statue on it, you get those benefits.
The statues are one of the main way to score glory (or victory points). Another resource your trolls provide you are carts, which are spent to move those statues from tunnel to tunnel. The closer to the centre of the mountain those statues are, the more points they’re worth. And if you can get them onto a pedestal of the matching colour, their points are doubled. The other way to amass points is to turn your tunnels into great halls. By building large squares of tunnels, you can choose to dedicate it into a hall, and if you manage to arrange a statue into a place of honour, it’ll bring you even more points. Who knew Trolls were so into feng shui?
By now, you might notice that all the aspects of In the Hall of the Mountain King are tied together fairly well. You get trolls to get resources, spend those resources to place tunnels on the board, which earn you points. But the game tries to pull you in different directions at once. You need to build towards the centre of the board to have your statues be worth points, but all the statues and bonus resources are along the edge of the mountain. You want to save your minerals to build a big tunnel, but you have very limited number of opportunities to produce resources. Once your trollmoot is full, you may trigger the end of the game.
Actually, it’s the second player who completes their trollmoot that triggers the end of the game. In one of our games, we had a player complete their troll moot two or three rounds before anyone else. They spend all their resources on a big final turn, but then no one else recruited trolls, leaving him destitute for his last 4 turns of the game. If you’re going to hire your last troll, you really don’t want to be very far ahead of the other players, because your ability to acquire resources has just been kneecapped.
The game board has two mountains to choose from, depending on the number of players at the table. The smaller player counts have a smaller map, because the major point of interaction for In the Hall of the Mountain King is the fact that your tunnel network can never connect to another players. There are specific tiles called workshops that can abut tunnels from multiple players, but that’s the extent of it. This does mean on the higher end of the player counts for each map will feel like a much tighter and cutthroat game than the lower end of the player counts. Players have more room to hoover goodies up when there are fewer players to compete with.
I really like that the two halves of the main action propel each other forward. You’re either gathering resources, or spending resources to dig tunnels, and the gathering resources aspect is with brings the game to a close. I do worry about replayability, as the trolls themselves aren’t wildly different, and the game board doesn’t change at all, unless you count changing which entrance you’re starting at and the order of the statues.
What’s really going to informs strategies and create variability in the game are the spells. Before you do anything, you have the ability to spend one of the purple gems to cast a spell, which can have some really lucrative powers. However, after each spell has been used 3 times, it’s exhausted and replaced by another one. These spells are fun to trigger, and clever use of them is certainly going to set you apart from the rest of the pack. There’s probably a criticism to be made here about how some spells are just stronger than others, while others are wildly powerful in very narrow contexts, but I’m not bothered by it, as they’re publicly available to any player on their turn.
I like a clever resource distribution mechanism, and In the Hall of the Mountain King certainly has one, and it’s used to great effect here. Players are given interesting decisions to make and are forced to choose between short term benefits and long term goals. There are multiple strategies to chase here, ensuring repeat plays don’t feel identical. You can dig long, narrow tunnels to cross the mountain, or build big squares to dedicate them into great halls. All the mechanics feed into each other to create a unique and satisfying game that I’m keen to return to.
Disclaimer: This product was sent to me free of charge
Usually when a review game lands on my door, I can trace down where it came from. I don’t have a large media presence, so unsolicited review games are rare, but not unheard of. I debated on even giving this game any oxygen on my website, but halfway through a glass of Bourbon and after two plays of the game, I was feeling a little spicy.
Starting off, the box arrived after, seemingly, been through war. Contained within two bubble wrapped envelopes, every corner of the box was crushed, and there was a hole punched through the back of the box. The text on the back of the box seems as if it was run through Bing translate a few times, and references a sponge that doesn’t exist. The last paragraph is copy/pasted twice. Just, sloppy.
This is every stone provided in the game. No contest.
Inside the box, a plastic baggy holds the string and magnets. The string is simple, yellow. It may as well have been taken off a sneaker. The magnets on the other hand, while they have some slight irregularities in their shape, are smaller than my thumbnail. The instructions were rolled into a tight cylinder, and crammed into the box. Again, the English is awful here. Grammer, typos, referencing the sponge that doesn’t exist, all incredibly poor. For example: “Each player takes turns placing a piece in any groove of the sponge. As you and your opponents take turns in banishment, as theplayers droptheir pieces, there are magnets that are attracted to each other. Youwill then receive the attracted maget piece in your hand,so in the process offalling, you should try.” (typos are not my own).
Thankfully, I already knew of the game that this one was ripping off, Kluster, by Paula and Robert Henning. In Kluster, the magnets are much larger and heavier, with a larger field of attraction. Players divide the magnets between each other and take turns placing their magnet into the rope circle. Should two magnets attract and collide, that player takes them into their hand. The player to empty their hand first wins.
Kluster is a fine game in its own right. It’s a dexterity game that focuses on precision placements, but I find that it lacks some of the tension that I really enjoy in dexterity games, such as the opportunity to make a Hail Mary move that completely swings the final outcome. Instead, what happens most often is when one player places a piece poorly and causes a collision, they may as well just give up at that point because they’re very likely to lose. After all, they have to take all the magnets into their hand, have no opportunity to play more than one during their turn, AND their opponents now have a wide open space to play into. That said, when you place your next magnet, you can slide it against the string to stretch the play area to force some more interaction between players.
Kluster is exciting when the end of the game is nigh, and placing a magnet on the table causes others to wobble ever so slightly. When they collide, the chaos cascades into other magnets in a very exciting way. In Kluster, with the big, chunky magnets, the rocks zoom together with speed and force, crashing, and bouncing across the table, causing more of that chaos. It’s just fun to play. Magnetic on the other hand, with their pea sized magnets, are just so much less effective. They slip together with a tiny click, and that’s the end. All the tension of a limp noodle.
Magnetic is sold on Temu and Amazon for less than $15. This cheap knock off version of the game is not worth your money. It’s listed under a dozen different names, such as Magnetic Chess or Battle Chess, but it’s really not. You cannot trust the pictures on the selling page, as the product you’ll receive is so inferior to Kluster. If any part of what I wrote above sounds appealing to you, pick up Kluster from your friendly local game store. But stay away from Magnetic.
It’s still cool to review games that are almost 20 years old, right? Sweet.
In the Year of the Dragon is an action selection game by designer Stefan Feld, and published by Alea in 2007. Players take on the role of Chinese rulers around the year 1000, and strive to earn the most prestige during a month in which a lot of bad stuff happens.
The gameplay is simple. Each round, the 7 action tiles are shuffled and placed into even-ish groups. Each player in turn order places their dragon at one of those groups and takes an action corresponding with one of those action tiles. If a player wants to go to the same group as a player who went before them, they have to spend 3 Yuan (currency) to the bank for the privilege of doing so. These actions include things like earning money, getting fireworks, building more castles, harvesting rice, and so on.
After everyone has done an action, each player has the chance to hire a single artisan, adding them to one of your palaces. Some of these workers improve your actions in future rounds, others come into effect during the event of each month.
After everyone has hired someone and slotted them into a space in your castle, an event happens. There’s a face up track of 12 events, which also tracks the end of the game. The first two months are peaceful, nothing happens. But after that, famine strikes, which requires you pay a rice token for each castle you own, or release a worker from their service for each rice you’re missing. Some events are a plague that require you to lose 3 workers, but having a healer in your employ will soften that blow. Others like the fireworks show have players compare the number of firework tokens, and awards points to whomever has the majority, then requires the players who earned points to discard half their tokens.
Finally, at the end of every month, some points are scored. At the end of the 12th month, a final scoring takes place, and the player who has the most points is the winner!
Overall, In the Year of the Dragon is a pretty simple game. Setup is quick, with the most tedious aspect being the need to separate out the worker tiles. The rules are easy to learn and teach, and each round of the game is quick and satisfying. It’s fun to try and figure out what’s important to you in each moment, as you might be preparing for the impending famine, or you may be looking ahead to a greater danger.
It’s kind of fascinating to go back and play games that are almost 20 years old to see how games have developed over time. For instance, the idea of losing some of your workers is pretty hard to come by in a more modern game. Most designers are aware of a players’ loss aversion, and avoid explicitly taking things away from a player. A large part of the game is just mitigating the disasters and planning how to eke out a few points in between your disaster preparations. Another thing that feels aged, is that there’s no catch-up mechanisms at all. In fact, it’s often the player who is doing poorly that gets punished even further (like when the invasions happen and the player with the least soldiers loses a worker).
I enjoyed how interactive In the Year of the Dragon is, for a euro game. Players can get in your way, but you can always spend money to do what you wanted to do anyway. Turn order is hugely important, as it ensures you’ll always get the workers you want, and you’ll never be blocked out of any action tiles.
I’m not sure how many different paths to victory there are. In the Year of the Dragon is a very low luck game, and there is no hidden information, which I enjoy. I think a lot of player’s strategy is dictated by the events row, and how players manage to mitigate the bad things that happen. In one of our games, a player used their very first action to purchase a major privilege, which bestows 2 points per round. But then they ended up getting blocked out of the money spot and lost 2 workers to the Dymo’s tribute event. They still won the game, but I was a mere 6 points behind them, and I didn’t buy a single privilege throughout the entire game. In the Year of the Dragon is tightly balanced, and if players don’t make mistakes, then everyone will be separated by single points for most of the game.
Something that really annoyed me was that there is no balancing for being first, second, third, or last. The first players get first picks, and subsequent players cannot make the exact same move as those who precede them. The first player gets first pick of the actions, too. If the first action is to buy a privilege, no other player can follow them, it just seems like a pretty clear advantage.
In the end, In the Year of the Dragon is a simple euro game. It’s fast to teach and play, offers plenty of interesting decisions, and lets players interact with each other in fun ways. It’s not fun to lose some of your staff due to tragedies, but nevertheless, In the Year of the Dragon is a game that I would happily play anytime. I don’t think any subsequent games would feel drastically different, nor are there a myriad of strategies to explore, if exploration is vital to your enjoyment. But it’s still a fun game, and one that I would never shy away from playing.
Disclaimer: A copy of Curses & Covens was provided by Good Games Publishing for review purposes
There aren’t many One vs. Many games that hit my table. I think the only other one that I’ve talked about on this blog before has been Beast, and that wasn’t exactly a glowing review. But let’s not dwell on the past, lets focus on Curses & Covens, designed by Samara Jethwa and David Walsh, with art by Samara Jethwa, and published by Good Games Publishing (in Canada).
Tiny witch hat included
In Curses & Covens, one player takes on the role of the witch hunter while everyone else scrambles to keep the coven safe. It’s a battle of wits, whispers, and wildly unlucky guesses. The witch hunter wants to capture any five witches, while the townsfolk win if one of them reveals three witches of the same suit in their hand, or by tricking the witch hunter into snagging two ritual cards.
The game starts with the census phase. If someone has no cards, they draw one, then everyone reveals their hands. Totally open information for everyone. If someone reveals 3 cards of the same suit, game over, the villagers win. If one player has two witches matching the spell, they may cast the spell, creating an effect for the round. Then, the town players can communicate. This is the only part of the game where the townsfolk can freely conspire and strategize, but remember that the witch hunter listening to every word. Once the census is completed, everyone picks up their cards and keeps them hidden.
Next comes the arrival phase, the witch hunter observes everyone entering the town. The witch hunter draws a card, looks at it, and hands it to the player on their left. The witch hunter repeats this until everyone has received one card. Now the witch hunter has all the information, while the towns people are left a little in the dark, unsure what new card everyone else got. Once everyone has received one extra card, the starting towns person gets to choose 1 card from their hand and give it face down to another player, ask another player to choose and give them a card from their hand, or, choose one card from your hand, and swap it with the forest card, which is just a face down card set aside at the start of the game.
A ritual card, and a decoy witch
Once all players have taken one travel action, the witch hunter strikes. They take two cards from the town players. If they pull a townsfolk card, they give it to a different town player. If they find a witch, they keep it face up in front of themself, and the player they snagged it from has to discard all their remaining cards to the bottom of the deck. If the witch hunter takes a fake witch card, all the witches they’ve captured up to that point run free and are discarded to the bottom of the deck. If the witch hunter stumbles upon a ritual car, it just goes in front of them. If this is their second ritual card, the townspeople have won the game!
After the hunt, the game goes back to the census phase, where everyone reveals their hands and can freely communicate again. Gameplay follows this loop until one side claims victory!
What Curses & Covens absolutely nails is its unique inversion of the social deduction formula. Instead of mere only breadcrumbs of information to make logical leaps off of, the game thrives on open information and collaboration. This dynamic keeps the tension high and creates moments of genuine suspense, as everyone knows what’s at stake. And then when the hunter’s mental map of the cards starts to slip, the moments turn gold.
Speaking of gold, the production quality of the cards is stunning. The tarot-sized cards are a visual delight, the diverse depictions give the game a refreshingly modern touch. The gold foiling all over the cards makes it feels like you’re playing with a deluxe set, which makes it a joy to bring to the table.
Once you get going, the gameplay is quick. At just 20 minutes, it’s an excellent opener or filler game. The mix of strategy and luck means everyone has a chance to shine, and injecting information after the planning phase can make for some really fun moments. If you were handed the lynch pin of victory, how can you adjust the plan without talking? If you hand someone a card before they take their travel action, will they figure out what you’re trying to do? It has all the great moments of tension like those cooperative trick taking games like The Crew. The moments where the witch hunter flukes a capture or the townsfolk correctly double bluff and transfer a ritual card into the right position to barely pull off a win are deliciously dramatic. The game actually reminded me a lot of Now Boarding, which is a fully cooperative game where new information is injected into the game after the planning phase, during a real time segment. It’s exciting to pivot your plans to the new information, but also, chaotic and stressful.
Curses & Covens isn’t without its struggles. For one, learning the game is weirdly difficult. Not because the mechanics are complex, but because the strategy is opaque. Is it better to cluster witches or spread them out? How do you actively work toward your win condition without giving away too much? No clue. The lack of clear strategic paths made some rounds feel more like flailing than planning.
Another issue is the communication restrictions. Discussing strategy as the townsfolk is both vital and stifling. Every word has to be said in the hunter’s full view, which makes it hard to coordinate without just giving the hunter all the information they need. This isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it can be frustrating for players who thrive on tactical planning and cooperation.
I generally don’t enjoy social deduction games. Coup and The Resistance are not my cup of tea, the genre as a whole often leaves me cold. But Curses & Covens? It’s different. It captures a unique energy that makes it stand out from the crowd.
Curses & Covens shines as a fast, accessible filler game or a convention experience. It’s the kind of game that ends with players, laughing about the wild guesses, then immediately demand a rematch. There’s a delight in its simplicity and tension that makes it perfect for casual yet competitive groups. I hope Curses & Covens finds a wide audience because it scratches a very specific itch for me. If I’m going to play a hidden movement or deduction game, this is the one I want to play. Gorgeous to look at, deceptively tense, and brimming with memorable moments. And who can resist that tiny witch hat!?
I really respect the mission of Restoration Games. They take old games, refresh them for modern gaming sensibilities, a fresh coat of paint, and give the games a second chance. Games like Whosit turning into Dinosaur Tea Party, Star Wars: Epic Duels into Unmatched, and Top Race into Downforce. I love seeing how they manage to retain the core of the game, but breath so much life and character into these dated games.
Thunder Road: Vendetta is designed by Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Jim Keifer, and Brian Neff, and published by Restoration games in 2023. Ostensibly, this is a racing game, but more realistically, it’s a death run game. Each player has 3 cars, and are tasked with either being the first to cross a finish line, or be the last one standing. Basically at the start of a round, everyone rolls 4 dice, and on a turn you assign a die to one of your three cars, moving it that number of spaces. There are also some special actions that you can do once per round by assigning a specific die to do that special action.
If during your move you land on a spot that another car is in, you bump them, rolling two die to determine which car gets moved, and where. This can cause chain reaction bumps too. Now your three cars come in different sizes, large, medium, and small. Large cars get shot more easily, but they have the option to reroll when a bump occurs.
Now, the board that you’re moving on, has a side scrolling element. When someone reaches the end of the last board, you take off the earliest board and put a new board on the end of the track. I think the game ends after 6 boards, but we’ve never gotten to the end of a race. The board has road segments, dirt, oil slicks, and a bunch of face down hazards that might cause chaos. Also, impassible spaces that, if you’re forced onto those spaces, blam, that car is dead.
When cars take two damage, they’re incapacitated, and when a player has all 3 of their cars destroyed or incapacitated, they’re out of the game. At that point, the current final tile gets the finish line added to it, and the first player to get a car to that finish line is the winner, or, if there’s only one player left with operable cars, they’re the victor.
So, my game group is usually really boring. We like predictability, deterministic outcomes, economic simulations, you know, boring euro game stuff. But for some reason, the chaos that is Thunder Road: Vendetta gets us all cackling with laughter every time. In the game we played last night, one player put his car in between two impassible spots, and three people came and bumped him from behind. All three cars were thrown backwards into the impassible spot and were destroyed, on like, the second round of the game! Other things inject chaos too, like the damage tiles can make you blast off in a specific direction, or have you wobble around randomly, sometimes someone will damage you, then a piece of shrapnel will fly off and incapacitate their car in return. It just good fun to see everything go wrong.
The slams are a really fun and integral aspect to the game, but it’s also really flow breaking. You’re moving your car, then slam, then you have to stop and roll two dice, take a second to orient the direction die so you can see who is going where, decide if you want to reroll or not, and if that triggers a chain, then you do it over, and over, and over again. We’ve had a few slam sessions that chain 4 or 5 cars together, shuffling and reorienting a cluster of cars into something unrecognizable. It’s pretty fun, but it does feel like the game grinds to a halt during these segments.
Sometimes I feel like complaining about the dice rolls. In my last game, one round I rolled three 1’s, and one 4, so two of my cars just crawling along the back of the pack. Meanwhile, the other players all rolled a pair of 6’s, leaving me in the dust. It doesn’t feel very fun to move a single space, but on the other hand, there is a tactical advantage to being in the back. If no one is rushing the last tile and putting your cars in jeopardy of getting shunted off the board, then on the next round, it’s very likely all the obstacle have been cleared and you can just rush up and start shooting your opponents in the bum.
I’ve only played the retail version of Thunder Road: Vendetta, and as that product stands, it’s an excellent game. That said, I’ve found myself more than once looking over the plethora of expansions and salivating at the potential chaos that all these modules would add. From a big rig that is 3 big car pieces linked together to 5 little motorcycles, jumps, player powers and a demolition derby style arena that changes how the game is played altogether. I love the base game, but I’m so excited to explore all these expansions.
Thunder Road: Vendetta is a game about violence and player elimination. Sometimes you’ll roll poorly, and that’s just how it’s going to be. If you crave control, you aren’t going to find it here. Having a good time in this game is about embracing the chaos. Not always picking the safe, smart option, but the one that would make for a great story. Yes, you’ll more often than not crash into a ball of flames, but at least you’ll have a story to tell.
