What if I told you that Go-Fish could be fun? What if I added a memory element? Wait! Come Back! Hear me out. In Trio, designed by Kaya Miyano and published by Happy Camper (in Canada) takes the core conceit of Go-Fish, but manages to create some actually engaging and fun moments.
The set-up is simple. Deal everyone an equal number of cards, plus 8 or so, out to the centre of the table, face down. On your turn, you can ask any player to show their highest or lowest card, or, flip over a card from the centre. Then, you do it again. If the two revealed cards match, you get a third action. If no match, the cards go back to their owner’s hand. If all three revealed cards are a match, you claim them and keep them face up in front of you as a trio.
In the simple game, a trio of trios wins the game, or, claiming the trio of 7’s always spells victory. In the spicy variant, each trio has a spiritual partner, such as the 2’s and the 5’s. Claiming both of those trios is how you claim victory. Or, again, the trio of 7’s on its own wins the game.
That’s very much it. Trio plays from 3 to 6 players, and takes less than 5 minutes per round. The memory aspect scared me at first, as I am a dummy. But the memory aspect almost turned out to almost be a moot point. The information is sort of ever-changing and flowing. Because you can only ask someone’s highest or lowest card, as soon as that trio gets claimed, you can reset that information in your brain. You don’t need to remember where all 36 cards are, you only really need to remember 4 or 6 or 8, depending on the number of players.
I’m awful at counting cards, it’s the reason we lose so many games of The Crew. Once a hand or trick has been played, I void the information from my brain immediately. Trio was gentle with my head, which I very much appreciated. The 8 cards on the table are easy enough to track, and the excitement when someone else reveals the key information you need is exhilarating. Similarly, that moment of doubt when you reach for the centre cards, and suddenly doubt yourself which card was the right one. And when someone fails that test, you’re free to swoop in and claim the trio for yourself.
The golden 7 cards are wildly appealing. Getting dealt one or when someone is forced to reveal one, it’s enough to give your heart butterflies. And when you get the enough information to collect that trio, every second that passes until your next turn is tense. And the elation that comes when it’s finally your turn again, and you reveal all three 7’s, it’s utterly magical.
On one hand, I find super light or simple games difficult to review, because there’s not usually much to pull apart and discuss. On the other hand, these are the kinds of games that leave a positive impression because they’re just fast, fun, and accessible, so I want to highlight them here on my blog. Trio is the kind of game that you’ll bring to a family gathering, and by the end of the night, half the table will be looking to buy their own copy. Similar to SCOUT, there’s a ‘theme’, or rather, a motif, but it doesn’t really matter, not does it influence or inform any of the rules. It’s just window dressing on a really fun game.
If you had told me that one of the first games I recommend in 2025 would be a mixture of Go-Fish and Memory, I would have called you crazy. I can’t think of a single other game that has a memory component that I would even be willing to play again. Yet here stands Trio with a wholehearted recommendation from me because it really is just that much fun to play.
Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization by Vlaada Chvátil is the 2015 refresh of 2006’s Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. This is a semi-abstracted take on the Civilization building genre of games, and I feel it does a phenomenal job imparting the feeling of progress to players and simulating a civilization building game.
In Through the Ages, players are trying to build the best civilization through resource management, developing new technologies, appointing appropriate leaders, building wonders, maintaining a strong military, and developing a culture. A failure in any of these areas can and will be exploited by your opponents.
Through the Ages takes players right from the age of antiquity all the way up to the modern era. The primary mechanic of Through the Ages is card drafting. Everything in Through the Ages is represented by a card that you have to take. Cards flow through a river, refilling and cycling at the end of each player’s turn. The newest cards to be available cost 3 actions to take, while the cards that have been on the table for a few turns may only cost a single action to take.
Beginning with Despotism as your system of government, philosophy for science, bronze as your best resource, and the barest thoughts of religion and agriculture, you’ll slowly grow and expand your civilization in different ways. There are lots of thematic touches in Through the Ages, such as having a peaceful change of government, or the violent revolution. Corruption siphoning resources out of your stockpiles, and famine causing workers to fall idle, everything in the game just makes sense when put in the context of a civilization game. That said, the theme falls away pretty quickly as you spend your turns min/maxing the options available to you, and how you can maximize your numbers.
All of the systems of Through the Ages are linked together. If you want to build a new building, you’ll need a citizen and some resources to build it. If you need more citizens, you’ll need to spend food to bring them into your civilization (and pay an upkeep, depending on how many workers you have). If you want to discover new technologies, you’ll need to earn science, if you have a large population, you need to keep them happy through religion and entertainment. As I said before, it’s vital to keep everything at a good balance, as any bottleneck will cripple your progress.
Another major aspect to consider is military. While having a strong military presence won’t outright win you any games, having a weak military will almost certainly cause you to lose. I’ve often found the rule of Mutual Assured Destruction can apply here. If no one has a military, no problem. But as soon as one player starts to arm themselves, everyone else must invest in their own military to keep pace. Should you choose to neglect your military, you may find yourself having your resources and/or food stolen, your science points stolen, your leaders killed, your wonders destroyed, or your culture siphoned away. I think it’s important to highlight here that conflict isn’t resolved by rolling dice, or moving units on a map. It’s literally just comparing your strength numbers, which the defender can augment by spending cards. Most of what Through the Ages is at the end of the day, is pushing numbers up and down.
There’s a lot of depth in Through the Ages, which makes each play more and more satisfying. I don’t consider myself particularly enthusiastic about Civilization, mostly because I tend to not enjoy direct conflict in my games. I really like how Through the Ages approaches player interaction. How everyone needs to keep each other in check, and if someone leaves their front gate open, you’re obliged to sack their court.
After dozens of plays on Board Game Arena and the app, I can confidently say that the digital version of Through the Ages is the way to go. Managing tokens, sliding cards, and keeping track of resources and scores in the physical game is clunky. In the digital form, these issues vanish, letting you focus on the puzzle-like strategy that makes Through the Ages such a cerebral delight.
And what a cerebral puzzle Through the Ages is. needing to manage so many aspects of your empire, and the consequences for mismanagement spreading throughout every other aspect, creates a tense and exciting game. The ravages of time will reduce your surplus population and leaders will die, forcing players to pivot and adapt instead of running a single strategy right from the start of the game. You’ll need to decide between building more mines or farms, but if you don’t have resources you can’t build farms, but if you don’t have food, you can’t staff your mines. Everything is pulling for your attention, and how you manage each of these pulls will determine who comes out as the victor.
As I said above, I don’t consider myself a civilization connoisseur. I’m a euro gamer at heart, and Through the Ages is firmly in the euro game category for me. It does feel unintuitive to streamline the whole of history into a card river and the technological advancements from bronze to iron as just numbers on a card. But even with thematics as a weak point, Through the Ages is a great game. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who likes to burn their brain a little bit, and I’ve been the direct instigator for a few people to buy the app on their phone (and their productivity at work taking an immediate plunge). I don’t think I would recommend to anyone to pick up and play the physical game. It’s certainly not impossible, but there are pain points that get smoothed away when Through the Ages becomes a video game. If you like big board games and haven’t tried Through the Ages yet, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.
It’s got to be hard to create a sequel to a beloved game. On one hand, you have fans of the old game, that want everything to just remain the same. On the other hand, this is your opportunity to capture a new audience, create some new fans. Perhaps address some of the criticisms that the first game garnered. It’s a unique opportunity, to be sure.
Glen More II: Chronicles is the follow-up to Glen More, both designed by Matthias Cramer, but this time the art being supplied by Jason Coates and Hendrik Noack. Many games get a fresh coat of paint after years on the market, and will sometimes come back as a “Revised Edition”. Glen More II is much more of a successor, it retains the core of the game, which is a clever time track, but includes a lot of new content as well. Let’s dig into it.
In Glen More II: Chronicles, players each control their own Scottish Clan, and are vying for prestige amongst their peers. In the centre of the table sits the turn order track, totally littered with tiles that can be placed into your village. On your turn, whoever is furthest back on the track takes their meeple, and moves it to any tile on that track, taking it and placing it into their village. Once placed, it, and every tile adjacent to it (including diagonals) gets to activate its effect. Then, the tile track is refilled, and the player with the meeple furthest back on the track gets to take the next turn.
At 4 intervals, a scoring happens. Players compare their goods with whomever has the least in each of the scoring areas. Scotsmen in their home castle, landmark cards, whisky casks, and famous person tiles, and earn points based on the difference (obviously the player with the least number of each of those things earns no points). It’s important to note that players don’t need to turn anything in during a scoring, they simply need to have them, and get to keep them for the next scoring phase. After the final scoring has been triggered, each player compares the number of tiles they have in their territory to the player who has the least number of tiles, and lose 3 points per tile they have more than them. Most points remaining at the end of the game is the winner.
Glen More II introduces a whole other board to interact with, called the Clan board. Whenever you take a famous person tile, instead of slotting it into your territory, you instead get to take a bonus from the clan board. Sometimes you’ll need to pay money based on how far away the reward you want is from the next closest clan marker, but otherwise it’s as simple as picking your benefit from a menu of options and taking them into your supply. Once a benefit has been claimed, no one else can claim that benefit as well.
The components of Glen More II are quite luxurious. The tiles are thick and glossy, the art is rich, each clan has custom shaped meeples, the resources are all cut to shapes, and the game includes several sticker sheets to further accentuate each of the wooden pieces. Also included in the box are 8 chronicles, which can be mixed and matched to your heart’s content. Each chronicle includes a mini expansion that further tweaks how you can interact with the game. One chronicle introduces a dragon boat race, which you can sail around the board, visiting opponents, getting bonuses, and earning points if you make it back to your castle first. Another introduces a hill that requires everyone to drop off a resource when they pass it, or, a player can land on the hill to collect all the resources left lying around. Haggis, penny mobs, and so much more are just waiting for you to discover.
The turn order track is one of the biggest stars in Glen More. It’s a fascinating push/pull between leaping ahead to grab the strongest or perfect tile for your territory, but doing so could give your opponents several turns to really build and crank their engine. You’ll be doubly punished for doing this when it comes time to score, and you’re lacking in any of the scoring objectives. At the same time, if someone is leaping ahead, you’re incentivized to keep up, as having a glut of tiles is harmful at the end of the game. But hey, as long as each tile earns you more than 3 points, you’ll come out ahead.
The tiles themselves have a couple characteristics that give more depth to the decisions you want to make. First, you can only place a tile next to one of your Scotsmen, which means you want Scotsmen on every corner of your map, but you also want as many Scotsmen in your castle to score points. Some tiles have rivers on them, which can only be places to the left and right of your castle, while others allow you to overbuild on specific tiles, which would trigger every other tile surrounding it. There’s a ton of great decisions that you need to make on every turn, giving the game a great feeling of depth.
In the centre of the turn order track lies a market. During your turn you’re free to buy and sell goods to that market, allowing you to use money to shore up any deficiencies in your resource engine, or profit from your surplus. There are limits on this market, as you sell things into the market, you get diminishing returns as the market is flooded. On the other hand, if you keep buying a specific resource, eventually the market is tapped out, until someone else swoops in to sell their surplus at a high price. Another great push and pull moment.
The new Clan board is the aspect that I’m least enthusiastic about. I find the famous person tiles to be the least interesting part of the game, as you take them and just get a benefit from the clan board. Never again will they trigger, or having your tokens on the clan board will count for anything else. The faces are beneficial for scoring, AND the famous person tiles do not count at the end of the game for comparing territory size. They’re powerful tiles, ignore them at your peril, even if they are a less interesting part of the game.
The Chronicles seem like they were build specifically for me. I love discovery in my games, and adding in a new twist each time I play is simply a joy. Sometimes I feel like it’s addressing a specific problem (such as the dragon boat races being an excuse to use up extra movement points), while other times it’s adding in a whole new module to play with. Somehow I feel like there is an ‘optimal’ set of chronicles to explore, I don’t always feel the need to include any. The base game on its own is so strong and satisfying that the chronicles are just the icing on the cake. If I feel like playing with something new, they’re ready for me. If I just want to have a simple, great time, the base game is perfect.
Fans of the original Glen More may be a bit disappointed that all the new bits in Glen More II can’t be stripped out to play the old game they know and love, especially because the original was out of print for so long. And I’ll be the first to admit that all the things that I love about Glen More II are ripped directly from the original game. The turn order track, the tile placing, the competition between resources, the market that lets you buy and sell the goods that you’re missing, everything I love. I’d love to ignore the new Clan board, as it isn’t my favourite aspect, but I recognize it’s power and the need to engage with it, lest someone accrue every person tile and utterly punish everyone else at the end of the game for their massive territories.
In conclusion, I love Glen More II (as evidenced by it sitting at #9 on my top 100 games list). It’s been a fantastic game to play over and over again. I’ve hosted Robbie Burns nights where I force haggis and scotch eggs on my friends, then we play Glen More II while consuming too much scotch. It’s thematic, and a fantastic puzzle for eurogamers. Glen More II is a must-play game, and I’m so very happy that I own it.
Disclaimer: A copy of Between Two Castles: Essential Edition has been provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes
In a lot of other media types, mash-ups and crossover events are some of the most exciting moments. In comic books, having Spider-Man appear alongside the X-Men had fans frothing, heck, Deadpool & Wolverine was the second highest grossing movie of 2024. In music, mashups were exciting, combining the best and iconic moments from several songs into one banging track. While board games have had some iterative designers, such as Uwe Rosenburg with Agricola and Caverna, or taking an existing game and putting a new spin on it, a la The Crew and The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, there really haven’t been a lot of direct mashups.
Stonemaier Games already has a pedigree of inviting collaborators to use their games to build something bigger and better, like taking the Wingspan game by Elizabeth Hargrave, and spinning off the more complex Wyrmspan by Connie Vogelmann and the less complex Finspan by designers David Gordon and Michael O’Connell, but again, these are iterative designs. New games standing on the shoulders of giants, borrowing core mechanisms, but introducing new ideas.
In 2018, Stonemaier games released a true mashup. Designers Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset took their game, Between Two Cities, and smashed it into Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Ted Alspach. If you’ve never played either of those two games, let’s talk briefly about how Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays.
Sitting between each player, lays a castle. Each round, you’ll pick nine tiles into your hand. You’ll choose two to keep, and place the rest face down next to your neighbour. When everyone has made their pick, everyone reveals the tiles they kept. Then, you place one of the tiles they kept into each of the castles on either side of you. Each of your opponents will do the same. You’re collaborating with your neighbours, trying to build both of your castles to be the best they can be, as the castle of yours that scores the lowest will represent your individual score at the end of the game. Once you’ve placed a tile into both castles, you’ll pick up the seven tiles your opponent left you, pick two again, and on and on the game plays until you’ve completed two whole rounds. Then, you’ll score each of your castles and declare a player the winner.
If you have played Between Two Cities, you might be thinking “That’s exactly how Between Two Cities plays, where’s does Castles of Mad King Ludwig come into the picture?”. Well, how each tile scores is lifted directly from CoMKL. Each tile is a room, from activity rooms, to dining halls, to outdoor gardens. Each type of room has a different scoring objective, such as being adjacent to other rooms of specific types, or earning points for all the tiles of a type in a single row or column. In addition, when you get 3 rooms of a single type into your castle, you earn a bonus based on that room type. If you’ve played Castles of Mad King Ludwig, all that will sound very familiar.
Now we understand how each parent game donated its traits into Between Two Castles, I’ll briefly touch on what separates the 2025 Essential Edition from the 2018 original. And the answer is functionally nothing. The Essential Edition contains the original base game, the Stories and Soirees expansion, plus the two promo tiles that have been released. But if you were just looking at the player aids and the rulebook, you’d never know that the secret rooms or the ballrooms were originally expansion content.
Now, I said above that Between Two Castles feels cooperative or collaborative, and it does. You are working with your two neighbours to build the best castle possible, because your individual final score is equal to the lower score of your two castles. But it’s still a competitive game, there is only be one winner at the end of the night. But the friendly nature of the game ensures that no one has bad feelings during gameplay, except for the pangs of jealousy as you watch your partner to your left confer with the person to their left as they decide which of the two tiles they drafted are going to go into your shared castle.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays up to 8 players seamlessly. Much like how 7 Wonders scales up in player count so easily, each round you’re only really interacting with two other people. Your hands of tiles will flow around the table, and much of the thinking time and decisions happen simultaneously. There aren’t many games I’m willing to play at 7 or 8 players outside of party games, but I’d consider this a contender against 7 Wonders if I know that everyone at the table has some experience in the board game hobby.
All the rooms score differently, and you earn a different bonus when you get 3 or 5 rooms of the same type in your castle, which can spiral out the number of choices you need to make. Teaching Between Two Castles is kind of a pain, as by the time you’ve explained the 9th room type, no one really remembers what the first types of rooms do anymore. Thankfully, the game comes with 8 player aids which do a fantastic job of reminding you of the important information, once you have the context of the rules in your head.
Ever since I first laid hands on Wingspans rulebook, with it’s wonderfully luxurious linen finish, Stonemaier Games production quality has been second to none in my eyes, and that remains true here. The rulebook is big and clear with helpful examples, the tiles are thick and beautifully illustrated, although some of the iconography on the tiles is a bit small. The GameTrayz contains the game beautifully, and makes it a breeze to ‘setup’. You literally plop the trayz onto the table, and tell everyone to grab a stack of tiles. Bang, you’re already into the game. For ease of access, Stonemaier games earns top marks.
I had played Between Two Cities once before, and thought it was pretty fun. I am a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so I was excited to experience this mashup. What I found was a fun, easy to teach game that felt friendly and collaborative. Everyone was working with their partners well, conspiring to maximize the points on both their castles. The tile drafting created some interesting decisions as you can pick tiles, knowing what your partner is going to get next round, and just hope that they (literally) pick up what you put down. Between Two Castles has the satisfaction that comes from building and pulling off a plan with a partner that makes cooperative games so popular, while also giving providing one player the satisfaction of victory over your opponents.
Many of the scoring objectives are going to pull you and your partner in opposite directions. Maybe you’ll be wanting to place a specific tile because it’ll score 4 points for the orange tiles in a column, while your partner will want to pick a specific colour tile to gain the bonus for having 3 rooms of a single type. When you start triggering those bonuses, the game really starts to sing. The downside is that some of the bonuses can make for some much longer turns as players take time mathing out how to maximize their points, between drawing new tiles, or cards and placing everything perfectly. A slight frustration when they spend 10 minutes debating where to put something, and the difference between the two options is a single point.
Onto the question that needs answering. Is Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig greater than the sum of its parts? For my money, no. As a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, I’m left feeling sad that the bidding mechanic and whimsical and wacky castle designs were stripped away. But there is no denying that Between Two Castles is the more accessible option. It’s cooperative drafting, fun scoring style, seamless scalability, and polished production make it a fantastic choice.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition is a wonderful game. If you have larger player counts, it’s an obvious pick, as it scales from 3 to 8 players perfectly. It’s fast, unlike many other games that can support that many players, it’s gorgeous, even if the iconography is a bit small. There are two solo modes and a 2 player variant, the expansion content is folded in so seamlessly that you’d be left wondering what’s different between the essential edition and the base game. The puzzle tickles my brain just right, and while it doesn’t surpass the heights of the original Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Between Two Castles offers a unique and interesting spin on the scoring mechanics from CoMKL. This game is well worth a spot on my shelf.
I’m always on the lookout for interesting twists on action selection mechanics. From the most basic systems to interesting worker placement mechanics, to rondels, and everything in between, I find the way that games let you take actions to be a fascinating puzzle. Sometimes, when it’s too restrictive, I feel frustrated. But when there’s tension and trade-offs and I get to make interesting decisions, that’s when I feel the joy for board games that really hooked me into this hobby in the first place.
Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is a 2018 game by Seth Jaffee, and originally published by TMG (RIP). In Crusaders, players embody an order of knights that have a call to spread their influence across medieval Europe.
The theme is kinda weird. The crusades are a dark subject, considering the tragedies that were wrought at the hands of knights in the name of religion. It’s also weird that the holy lands aren’t even on the board, which was kinda the point of the crusades. Not to mention that the “crusade” action on the rondel is to crush or eliminate your enemies so you can build your house on their land. On one hand, I’m woefully ignorant of the historical nuance of the crusades, but when you name and theme your game after religious wars, but then do nothing to address the history of the event, it just feels a bit weird.
That’s all that I really have to say on the subject. As far as a euro style board game goes, Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done holds a pretty satisfying puzzle. Each player has a rondel of actions on their personal board, and a number of action tokens. When you want to take an action, you choose one of the rondel wedges, take the action with its strength based on how many action tokens are on that action, then, you distribute the action tokens clockwise from that action wedge.
Alternatively, you can choose to upgrade any of your wedges, which lets you flip it over and reveals a second action available for that spot. Now, when you take that action, you get to split the action points between those two actions. When you upgrade a wedge, you may choose to distribute the action tokens from any of your wedges, which is real handy when they’ve all bunched up on an action that you don’t want to take yet.
If there’s something Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is lacking in, it’s player interaction. You can get in each other’s way by being the first to build in a spot, as each hex can only hold one building, and in the higher player count games, real estate is at a premium. The other way to interact with your opponents is by crusading before they do, as a successful crusade makes the respective tribe stronger. There’s nothing pushing back against you, nor is there any mechanism to thwart someone who is starting to run away with the game. The most you can hope to accomplish is to sidle in and accomplish something before they can.
I’ve found Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done to be wonderfully replayable. Each player gets dealt two of the knight orders, each one with their own special ability and different number of starting action tokens. In addition to that, your action wedges have a randomized location each game, making certain synergies easier or more difficult to achieve.
The gameplay and flow is really smooth. Unlike another popular mancala game, Trajan, Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done has you choose the action, then you move the action markers, making it really easy to see at a glance how strong your actions are as opposed to moving markers and taking the action where the last pip lands. Each of the actions on the rondel are straightforward and easy to execute, and you only get to do one action per turn until you upgrade your action wedges, then you get two. This does make it difficult to pull off a cool or amazing combo, but it also means that it doesn’t take very long for your turn to come back around to you. It’s only slightly frustrating when you see someone about to do something before you, but you don’t really have a way of accelerating your engine to beat them to it. Just play better, I suppose.
My real gripe with Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is the fact that one of the actions on your rondel is literally “take victory points”, which is just boring. And what’s worse, some reports on BGG say that really focusing on that action is a reliable strategy. I hate it when the boring play is the good play. Building buildings offer you some points, as does crusade, but the ratio of action points spent to victory points earned isn’t equal, suggesting that almost always, taking victory points is the right thing to do. I want the victor to be the one who built the most, or travelled the furthest. Not the player who sat at home and just raked in the points (I know this is addressed in the expansion).
Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done is full of choices, but limits what you can do on your turn. The only interaction is someone getting to a spot before you, which is usually well telegraphed in advance. It’s an efficincy puzzle that I love to get behind. The gameplay flows well, and as you build your buildings, your actions get stronger, and you start to really rake in the victory points, creating a satisfying feeling of momentum. While some of the actions could be more exciting, I still easily recommend Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done. It’s a fast play for a medium weight euro, and the action selection mechanism is a fun puzzle to play with.
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.
