I’ve always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to people reviewing games that they haven’t been fully played. Not 100% completed, like, collect every token in every stage or see every single ending a game has to offer, that’s in no way realistic. But I expect reviewers to have pushed through the main campaign to see the end credits. My opinions largely stem from reading review after review of Final Fantasy XIII and the waves of criticism it received for being a “ series of hallways,” only for the game to meaningfully open up beyond the point many reviewers managed to reach. Reviewing a game you haven’t beaten yet always felt a little presumptuous to me, like judging a book before its Act 2 has even started. And yet, here I am, about ten hours into Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, only two chapters deep into a sprawling fifteen-chapter campaign, and I’m already forming opinions that feel too defined to ignore. Turns out that age and limited gaming time have a way of softening my old convictions, and so rather than wait for a full conclusion on a game that I may never finish, this is how I feel about Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.
There’s something immediately compelling about Tainted Grail’s premise that hooked me long before the systems started to wear me down. The idea that the great heroes set out on a grand adventure to save the realm, but failed to return so now you need to figure out what happened to them, creates this melancholic, haunted tone that permeates everything. Kamelot is no longer a shining ideal but a looming, foreboding structure, coated with the grime of a century of greed and avarice. The land of Avalon is choked by the Wyrdness, and whatever remains of Arthurian legend feels distorted and uncertain. You’re not stepping into the boots of a chosen saviour, but instead you’re picking through the aftermath, trying to piece together what went wrong. I’ve always loved this kind of narrative framing, where you’re following in the footsteps of legends rather than becoming one outright, and Tainted Grail leans hard into that mood, leaving a breadcrumb trail for you to follow. It’s strange, bleak, and consistently intriguing in a way that makes you want to keep pulling on its threads. That is, when the gameplay allows you to progress the narrative, at least.
Exploration is where that narrative lives. Moving between locations, unlocking new locations and story passages, and making choices that branch into further consequences. Often a location or path will ask “If you have part 1 of this quest line, go to this verse, if you have this status, go to this other verse. If you have this item, go to this third verse. Otherwise, go to this verse”. It’s intriguing and when you manage to hit one of those conditions, it’s exciting to feel like you’re progressing, plumbing the depths of the world. But there’s no strong system for tracking those where those threads are left, so it often turns into a vague sense of “wasn’t there something back there?” whenever we manage to get a new status or learn part of a quest line. I suppose I could be keeping a journal and be writing down every keyword and location we come across, but that’s overly onerous. Getting back to those locations isn’t always trivial either, and the energy requirement of movement and exploration often means that revisiting old ground always comes with a tangible opportunity cost. What should feel like uncovering a living, reactive world instead sometimes feels like trying to recall half-forgotten notes from earlier sessions two months while wading through a waist deep bog and your food supply has run dry.
I’ll stop beating around the bush, the resource management systems are where most of my frustrations lie. Everything in Tainted Grail revolves around scarcity, and not in a way that feels empowering or satisfying to overcome. The path forward can only be explored when adjacent to a Menhir. Lighting Menhirs generally requires a bounty of resources. You will have to spend significant amounts of your actions just gathering the resources to dump into a Menhir, just to reveal the next 3 location cards. Adding to that, travelling to locations and exploring them cost energy, which is limited. At the end of each day, you can rest and recover your energy back up to it’s maximum (depending on your health, but I’ll get to that in a moment). If you happen to have dipped into the 1 or 0 section of your energy, you’ll only recover 4 points, but avoiding that will leave you with 2 unspent energy, which will often recover up to a max of 6, so you’re often only recovering 4 points anyway? And your energy limit is capped by your current health, meaning if you’re close to death you’ll be given even less opportunities to find the resources you need to come back.
Healing opportunities are limited enough that every point of damage carries some long term consequences. Each day when you rest, you consume a food and heal 1 point of health. But the resource dumps that are the Menhirs are constantly ticking down and need to be relit, creating a background pressure that never lets up. You can’t idly explore each nook and cranny, lest you run out of resources and your Menhir’s light goes out, leaving you alone in the myst. So instead of doing something you want to do, like exploring ploy threads, you’ll spend hours of your gameplay grinding out encounters to stockpile the resources you need to survive and light the next Menhir, all so you can maybe explore one or two more cards before you go back to the resource grind.
That menhir lighting loop can be exhausting, both mechanically and thematically. There’s a version of survival pressure that enhances immersion, making every decision feel meaningful and every success feel earned, but in Tainted Grail, so far it feels like busywork that exists to slow you down and gate the more interesting parts of the experience. Spending hours grinding for resources so that you can afford to take a handful of meaningful actions doesn’t create tension so much as it creates inertia. I don’t feel like I’m taking bold choices or making risks, I’m just stabilizing your position just enough to keep going, kicking the can down the road while the systems demand I spend more time amassing resources to dump into a bonfire. And then when I finally do have the resources to do something interesting, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place.
The encounters add another layer to this, and they’re probably the most interesting and most frustrating part of the design at the same time. The card-based combat system revolves around playing cards from your hand and building a timeline of events, where the matching icons put red cubes on your enemy. That, coupled with the different effects each card doesn’t, each encounter feels like a puzzle, asking you to make the most of a limited hand while dancing around the consequences of your actions. There can be a brief moment of glory when you manage to evade the enemy’s attack and set up a strong next turn, especially when you can coordinate with other players land that final blow to end the outcome in a dramatic flourish. In theory, it’s clever and engaging.
In practice, especially in a multiplayer setting, it can become a slog. Because the resource system is so punishing and resources are so tight, every decision feels like it needs to be optimized, and that leads to extended discussions about the best possible sequence of plays. A single encounter stretches into a 30-minute discussion as each player analyzes their options, weigh risks, then checks what the other players have landed on, only to go back and reevaluate their options again, all to end up with sequence of moves that has us taking one damage instead of two. And even when you do make progress, the combat system pushes back against you by just straight up undoing some of your progress, removing the cubes you’ve placed, moving the goal posts further away. It creates this rhythm where you’re constantly teetering on the edge of success, only to be dragged back to the start by a bad draw or an unfavourable tag, turning what should have been a moment of triumph into yet another round of recovery.
All of this is compounded by the multiplayer experience, which feels fundamentally at odds with how the game wants to be played. With three players, if the party separates, then individual turns become long, involved processes where one person is actively engaging with the story, reading the verses, deciding how they want to approach the encounter while the others watch and occasionally offer input. If you enter encounters together, you’ll spend 3 actions (one for each player), and everyone gets to be involved, but not all the rewards scale to the party size making this choice feel wasteful. It feels like both choices are bad, but to add onto this, Tainted Grail often forces players back together. Particularly because lighting the Menhirs require the party to be gathered before they can be lit, but also because you’ll often run into an encounter that requires specific traits that you might not have. Splitting up to cover the most ground seems like the best option, but that makes the game contort from a cooperative experience into 3 solo games where you need to wait for your turn with the encounter book.
What’s frustrating is that I can see a version of this game that works much better for me. Stripped of the multiplayer downtime, with pacing entirely under my control, I suspect a solo experience would allow the narrative and exploration to breathe in a way they currently don’t. The decision-making would feel more immediate, the consequences more personal, and honestly, I’d probably just enact a house rule and turn all the resource requirements down a touch. But I don’t really play solo games, let alone big narrative ones, and that makes it difficult for me to meet Tainted Grail on the terms where it might shine the brightest.
That friction, between what the game is and what I want it to be, runs through my entire experience. I genuinely enjoy the world that’s been created here, and I find myself drawn to its mysteries in a way that few campaign games manage. The reinterpretation of Arthurian legend, the sense of decay and loss, the slow uncovering of what happened to the heroes who came before you, all of it is so intriguing. I want to follow those threads, to see where they lead, and to uncover the larger picture that’s being hinted at in fragments.
But the gameplay systems wrapped around that world feel like they’re constantly pushing back against that curiosity. Every step forward is negotiated, every moment of progress paid for in resources and time. Instead of feeling like I’m uncovering a story, it often feels like I’m working a day job to earn the right to read a single chapter, before I have to return to the resource grind.
There’s also the lingering issue of the revised rules, the so-called “2.0” ruleset that supposedly addresses many of the complaints surrounding the original system. On one hand, it’s encouraging to see a game evolve and improve based on player feedback. On the other, it highlights how rough the initial experience can be, and I find myself resistant to the idea of needing to retrofit a game mid-campaign to get the “best” version of it. I don’t particularly want to print updated materials, rely on apps, or navigate multiple versions of the same system just to smooth out an experience that should have been fun, right out of the box.
Where I’ve ultimately landed, at least for now, is that Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is not a bad game, not by a long shot, but it is a frustrating one. There are ideas here that I genuinely admire, and a world that I find compelling enough to keep thinking about even when I’m not playing. But the combination of punishing resource management system, drawn-out encounters, and a multiplayer structure that introduces more slog than flow, makes it difficult for me to enjoy the experience. I can see the version of this game that I might love, probably one that’s through solo play and house rules, but I shouldn’t have to house rule a game to make it palatable. The version of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon that’s in front of me feels weighed down by its own systems. I’m drawn to Avalon, but I’m increasingly exhausted by what it asks of me to stay there.
It’s kind of funny to say out loud that a game about silently sorting cards can be one of the most engaging things you’ll play all night, but here we are.
In Take Time, designed by Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière, and published by Libellud, you and your group are working together to organize the cards in your hands without speaking. In the centre of the table sits a clock, its minute hand pointing to one of several segments around the clock’s edge. On your turn, and without saying a word, you place one card face down into any segment. Once everyone has played all their cards, you flip everything over and count up the values in each segment, moving clockwise. To succeed, each segment has to be higher than the last, AND no segment can exceed a total value of 24.
Before each round, before anyone has even looked at their cards, there’s a brief window where you’re allowed to talk. You can discuss the puzzle ahead of you, throw out ideas, make loose plans. Maybe everyone agrees that a certain segment should aim for a specific value, or that everyone should prioritize a particular constraint by placing the perfect card into the right segment. It feels collaborative and clever, right up until the moment you pick up your cards and realize the plan falls apart instantly. Like, if one of the segments needs to have the lowest card in the game, and you decided that whoever has a 1 will go and place a 1 there, but no one has a 1 in their hand. So now you’re stuck in this silent standoff where nobody wants to be the first to break from the plan, and trying to figure out a way to communicate contingencies within the restrictive communication system. Maybe you’re holding a 3, it’s not impossible for a 3 to be the lowest card, but are there really no 1s or 2s out there? If you place your 3 somewhere else, are you dooming the round before it even starts?
There are small allowances for communication. Depending on the player count, you’ll be able to place three or four cards face up, giving your teammates just a sliver of information to work with. But for the most part, you’re left with nothing but instincts, vibes, and whatever shared understanding you’ve managed to build with the group. At its core, Take Time is about silently sorting cards together and hoping it all lines up. And it’s magical.
There’s a special kind of tension that builds in games like this, the kind that fans of The Mind or The Gang will recognize instantly. Everyone is locked into their own little world, staring at the information in their hand, trying to intuit what everyone else might be thinking, and then slowly, cautiously, committing to a play. When the last card hits the table, you’ll start the big reveal with bated breath. Sometimes your gambits work, and sometimes you fail together. But when it works, when everything lines up and the sequence holds, there’s this shared moment of disbelief that leads into euphoria. You didn’t communicate, not really, and yet somehow you managed to pass the test.
Take Time builds on the gameplay foundation of silently sorting cards in interesting ways. There are forty different clock configurations in the box, each one a new puzzle to overcome as they gradually introduce new constraints. Some might require specific values in certain segments, or restrict where your highest and lowest cards can go. Others might demand that only certain suits appear in particular sections, or that your first card be placed in a designated spot. As you move further in, the game starts to twist the formula in clever ways, even asking you to play your cards from left to right, adding a spatial element that feels reminiscent of games like Scout or Bohnanza.
There’s also a surprising amount of deduction at play. The deck is small, just twenty-four cards split between two suits. So information starts to emerge if you’re paying attention. If you see several high-value cards already revealed in one suit, and you know what’s in your own hand, you can start to piece together what might still be out there and where it’s likely to land. It’s subtle, but it gives you something to hold onto when everything else feels uncertain.
Which probably brings me to my biggest criticism of Take Time. If you play with dumb people, it’s going to be much, much harder. And I saw this as the dumb person at the table, I’m the fellow who plays trick taking games based wholly on vibes. The Crew is a challenge because I’m not counting the cards, I’m just doing what feels right in my soul, much to my companions’ consternation. Take Time feels slower, though. You’re only playing 3 or 4 cards each round, depending on your player count. This shrinking of responsibility does make me play smarter than The Crew, but I can certainly feel outclassed or that I feel like I’m missing what my friends are trying to tell me with their card placements.
Sometimes the challenges feel heavily dependent on the cards that you’re dealt. There are rounds that click into place naturally, and others that feel like an uphill battle from the start. There is a small mercy rule built in, though. If you fail, you’ll be allowed to have one more face up card the next time you attempt the same challenge. Sometimes you need all the help you can get, but sometimes you sail through challenge after challenge with nary a problem. There have definitely been lots of moments where even all the extra information the game can afford wasn’t enough to get us across the line.
But the highlight of Take Time, every time, is that reveal. The furrowed brows, the little sighs as people place their cards in what they perceive to be non-ideal locations. Then the collective pause and “Well, let’s see!” before everything flips. You count it out, one segment at a time, and sometimes, for a brief moment, it feels like it could go either way. When you had given up hope, but then a tricky segment passes muster, it feels incredible. When it doesn’t, Take Time is still compelling, but we’ve never ended a game night on a loss. A failure just means we HAVE to try again.
Take Time fits so neatly into the end of a game night. After finishing up something heavier, something loud or competitive, Take Time is a refreshful respite. It’s as simple as shuffling up a small deck of cards, pulling out the next clock challenge, and working together in near silence. It’s light without feeling trivial, and thoughtful without being demanding. As all good coop games do, it leaves you with a feeling that you worked together and achieved something.
And it doesn’t hurt that it looks great, too. The gold emboss on the cards is simply stunning.
Have you ever played Wordle? Of course you have, everyone has! But imagine how that puzzle changes if, somewhere in the feedback step, the game was allowed to lie to you. Not constantly, not chaotically, but just enough misinformation to make you doubt everything you think you know. That’s the core idea sitting at the centre of Fiction by Peter C. Hayward, published by AllPlay in 2023, and it’s a clever hook that immediately reframes the very familiar experience of Wordle into something a little more mischievous.
The version I’ve been playing is Fiction: Banned Books, which draws its words from excerpts of historically challenged or banned literature. It’s a nice bit of flavour, at least on paper, and gives the game a slightly literary framing, even if that theme doesn’t always carry through in a meaningful way during play. At its heart, though, Fiction is a deduction word game where one player takes on the role of the “Lie-brarian,” while everyone else works together to uncover the hidden five-letter word.
If you’ve played Wordle, the structure will feel immediately familiar. The Lie-brarian secretly writes down a five-letter word and provides the group with a starting letter. From there, the other players begin making guesses, submitting five-letter words in an attempt to narrow down the possibilities. After each guess, the Lie-brarian provides feedback on every letter, whether it’s not in the word, in the word but in the wrong position, or correctly placed. Just like you’d expect. The twist in Fiction is that for every single guess, the Lie-brarian must lie exactly once.
That single rule does a surprising amount of heavy lifting. It takes what would otherwise be a straightforward deduction puzzle that already works perfectly as an app, and injects just enough uncertainty to keep everyone second-guessing themselves. As the guessers, you might feel like you’re closing in on the solution, only to realize that one piece of information doesn’t quite fit. Maybe you’ve been banking on an C being somewhere in the word, but then suddenly you realize that it’s impossible. Maybe a pattern you were building toward starts to unravel.
The guessers aren’t completely at the mercy of the Lie-brarian, though. Each team has access to a small pool of “Fact or Fiction” tokens, which they can use at any time to challenge a specific piece of feedback from the most recent guess. Point to a letter, spend a token, and the Lie-brarian must reveal whether that particular clue was truthful or the required lie. It’s a powerful tool, but a limited one, and deciding when to use it becomes a key part of the puzzle. Sometimes you’re looking to confirm a strong suspicion; other times you’re just trying to find any solid ground to build from.
Both sides of the table have their own challenges to overcome. As the Lie-brarian, you’re trying to be consistent in your deception. You need to mislead the group just enough to slow them down, but not so much that your lies contradict each other and you give the whole plot away. There’s a subtle art to choosing which letter to falsify. Do you obscure something important, or do you plant a small, believable seed that sends the group in the wrong direction? At the same time, you have to keep track of every lie you’ve told, making sure that your future responses contradict don’t accidentally expose the truth.
And then there’s the simple challenge of remembering to lie exactly once per guess. It sounds straightforward, but in practice it’s surprisingly easy to slip up, either by forgetting to lie at all or by accidentally lying twice in a single guess. Either mistake can throw off the structure of the game, though I can’t blame the game for my own mental inadequacies. It’s a small mental load, but it’s always there, and it’s caused a couple resets when the Lie-brarian realizes their folly.
On the other side of the table, the guessers can quickly find themselves tied in knots. Without any constraints, it’s easy for a group to fall into long discussions, analyzing every possibility, debating every letter, and trying to untangle which piece of information might be the lie. That’s where the inclusion of a timer really helps. By putting a limit on how long players can deliberate, the game forces decisions to be made before everything is perfectly understood. Those slightly rushed guesses often generate more useful information than perfectly optimized ones would, and they keep the pace moving in a way that the game really benefits from.
The one area where Fiction feels a little underproofed is its theme, at least in this Banned Books version. While I appreciate the inclusion of classic works like 1984 and Animal Farm, and there’s a certain charm in reading the excerpts as the Lie-brarian, the actual gameplay doesn’t meaningfully connect to that theme. In practice, the words could just as easily come from a generic list, and the experience wouldn’t change at all. It’s not a problem, exactly, but it does make the theme feel more like a light wrapper than something integral to the design.
As a group Wordle-style experience, though, Fiction works really well. The idea of introducing a single lie into each round is simple, elegant, and surprisingly effective at transforming the very familiar puzzle into something more interactive. It creates moments of doubt, sparks discussion, and gives both sides of the table meaningful decisions to make. And once you’ve gotten a hang of the core game, there are asymmetric player powers for both the Lie-brarian and the guessers that adds a bit more texture and chaos to the experience.
That said, I’m not entirely convinced it’s the word game I’d reach for most often. Even within Peter C. Hayward’s own catalogue, I find myself more drawn to Things in Rings, which scratches a similar itch in a way that resonates more with me. But if you’re looking for a one-versus-many deduction game with a clever twist on a familiar formula, Fiction is easy to recommend. It takes something you already understand and adds just enough uncertainty to make it feel new again.
Quo Vadis was a 1992 game about ‘politics and intrigue in ancient Rome’, and boy. Does it look like a game from 1992. A flat marble texture on the front, faded stock image of people in white robes, and a graphic design that looks like it was created directly in Microsoft Excel.
Thankfully, in 2023 Bitewing Games crowdfunded a reimplementation, Zoo Vadis, ‘politics and intrigue in the animal kingdom’. And I’ll be honest, I never really gave this game a second look. Even knowing the designer was Reiner Knizia, I just am not interested in heavy negotiation games. Any game that features wheeling and dealing, or swindling, or even just loose trading rules don’t interest me. I hate the idea that my game can be hamstrung by someone else’s pure refusal to barter with me. I so much prefer games where the actions and consequences are clear and well-defined.
And yet, I’m smitten. In Zoo Vadis, players control an animal faction as they slowly move from the bottom of their zoo cages to the very top. The only way to move along these paths, however, is with the blessing of the pen that you’re currently in. Each pen has a number of spaces, and in order to move ahead, you need votes equal to the majority of your pen. So if your pen has 5 available spaces, you’d need 3 votes to move your animal out of that pen. If you control 3 of the animals in that pen, then it’s easy. You give yourself the thumbs up and move along peacefully.
But that’s very unlikely to happen. Instead, you’ll need to broker deals with those in your cage. The rules for this exchange are wonderfully loose, but also, non-binding. You promise favours, create mutually beneficial situations, and set the price for every single vote, but anything that cannot be transacted on this specific turn, becomes non-binding. If you agree on 2 votes for movement right now, there’s no taking that back. But if you promise to give someone votes later, there’s nothing holding you to that promise (other than the shame of being untrustworthy, of course).
Between each pen are victory point tokens, and the animal who moves along the path gets to scoop up that token. The animals who did give you a vote also get one point from the bank, presumably it’s the karmic benefit of being an aggregable party.
Each player also has their own special faction ability, but there’s quite a twist. In Zoo Vadis, you may never use your own player power. Instead, it’s a bargaining chip for you to dole out to your opponents. A rule-breaking, potentially game swinging feather in your cap. It’s a wonderful twist on the system, giving players somewhat intangible benefits to trade with instead of only the victory points and positioning.
All this is wrapped together in a beautiful package, with amazing art by the talented Kwanchai Moriya and thick, sturdy ani-meeples. It’s an attractive game, with rules that are simple enough to be taught quickly in the midst of a crowded convention hall. Which is perfect because Zoo Vadis shines at the higher player counts.
The goal of the game is to amass the most victory points. But if you yourself don’t manage to get one of your meeples into the pen at the top of the board, you are ineligible for victory. It may be tempting to fill up the bottom of the board with all of your meeples so you can influence every movement, but neglecting to move yourself will spell disaster. Conversely, greedily rushing up the board may get you into the prize pen, but you’ll have a lot less influence among the bottom of the board.
Now, because you can’t always rely on your fellow players to play nicely, there’s a neutral party in play. The peacocks. They sit on spots, and you either pay them 2 points for a vote, or, chose to move them up the tracks, taking up precious spots further up the chain.
Zoo Vadis ends when the prize pen is full. And there’s a delicious ramp up to the end of the game. After the first two or three meeples make their way into the pen, new players won’t feel the jaws of defeat closing in on them. Little do they know that it’s not uncommon for three or more players to rush those neutral peacocks into position, and then use special powers to suddenly fill up the final slots, bringing Zoo Vadis to a sudden conclusion.
I can only speculate, but I have to assume that Zoo Vadis will play differently with different groups. If someone is being a jerk, then players will leave the game with bad feelings. If someone just refuses to participate, again, the experience will suffer. I don’t think the onus is on the game to facilitate a good experience, but it’s something to be aware of. If you have a group of friendly, but loudmouthed people who like to haggle, then Zoo Vadis is a pretty special experience.
Unlike most modern euro games, Zoo Vadis is pure player interaction. Nothing really happens unless other players allow it, and if someone is doing something the whole group wants to prevent, then there are plenty of ways to stymie their progress. You can negotiate with multiple parties at the same time, make promises for future favours, and trade those favours away. The player powers don’t necessarily feel balanced, but because everything is up for negotiation, Zoo Vadis is almost self-balancing. Some powers are obviously attractive and sought after, while others will require that players sell the possibilities to the others.
It’s almost a crime, how good Zoo Vadis is, compared to how simple the rules are. There’s not much more than a board and victory point chits, and yet, Zoo Vadis has left a strong impression on me. Zoo Vadis hasn’t converted me into a negotiation gamer, but it has convinced me that, in the right hands, negotiation can be brilliant. I feel like Zoo Vadis is the exception, not the rule when it comes to negotiation games, but I will say that I am happy to have finally found a negotiation game that elicits joy in my heart.
A copy of Mountain Goats and The Big Mountain expansion was provided by AllPlay for review purposes.
The last time I talked about Mountain Goats, I framed it in comparison to Can’t Stop. On the surface that comparison makes sense, both games involve rolling four dice and moving pieces up numbered tracks. But the more I’ve played Mountain Goats, the more I’ve come to realize how much of a disservice that framing actually does to it. The similarities are superficial. Underneath, they’re trying to create very different experiences.
Can’t Stop is one of the purest push-your-luck games ever designed. The entire experience revolves around that moment where you ask yourself if you should roll the dice one more time, knowing full well you might bust and lose all the progress you’ve made. The tension comes from risk and greed. Mountain Goats, on the other hand, isn’t really about that kind of gamble at all. If I had to place it in a category, it feels much closer to a light area control game. Yes, you still roll four dice every turn, but the way you use those dice is far more flexible. If you roll a four and a five, you can combine them to climb the ten track twice, or push the five track four times, or split them up and advance on both. There’s none of the rigid pairing that defines Can’t Stop, and because of that freedom you’re rarely stuck without options.
That flexibility means you’re almost never losing entire turns. Sure, sometimes the dice won’t cooperate. Like, you might be desperate for a nine and just can’t seem to roll the right combination, but there’s almost always something productive you can do with what you’ve rolled. The game itself is made up of six numbered tracks, and each player is trying to climb those tracks with their goats. For most of the climb nothing particularly dramatic happens. As long as you’re somewhere along the track and not sitting at the summit, you aren’t earning points, but you’re also completely safe. No one can block your movement, knock you down, or interfere with your progress in any way.
That is, until you reach the top.
Once your goat hits the summit of a track, that position starts generating points for you every time you commit dice to that number, and will keep doing so for as long Mas you remain there. The catch, of course, is that the summit of each track only has room for one goat. The next player who manages to climb to the top immediately knocks your goat all the way back down to the bottom. That’s where the real tension in Mountain Goats lives: sitting comfortably at the top of the mountain, collecting points while watching the other players inch closer to you from below with daggers held between their teeth.
Those moments can get surprisingly dramatic. It can feel quite tense, sitting at the summit when only one or two points remain in the stack, while two opponents are parked on the space just below you. Every roll of the dice, both yours and your opponents, has small prayer whispered that they don’t hit the number they need. When they miss the roll, and you manage to drain the last points from the pile before they can take your place, it feels fantastic. It’s not a huge, bombastic victory, you won’t be jumping out of your chair and shout your victory, but you surely will exhale out your nose, smugly satisfied that your gambit paid off.
There are also bonus points available for players who manage to reach the summit of every single track at least once. Completing that full set awards a nice chunk of points, though in practice I’ve often found it more efficient to focus on one track and squeeze as much value out of it as possible. Spreading yourself across the board means investing multiple actions just to climb into position, and sometimes that effort feels like it could have been better spent reinforcing a single scoring engine.
The Big Mountain expansion introduces another wrinkle to the decision-making. It adds a separate mountain track off to the side with spaces numbered from eleven to twenty-four. Whenever you want, you can commit one of your goats to that mountain by climbing onto one of those spaces, but doing so requires combining dice in larger values to reach those numbers. At the end of the game, the player who sits the highest on that mountain earns a sizeable point bonus.
There’s an important catch, though: you don’t get extra goats for this track. If you want to send one to the Big Mountain, you have to remove it from the main game. This is supposed to create an interesting little risk-reward moment. Maybe you’d rather sacrifice the chance to keep scoring on a regular track in order to secure those endgame points. In theory, it sets up a tug-of-war between short-term scoring options and long-term positioning.
In practice, what often happens is the big mountain lays empty until one or two of the point piles on the main board run out entirely, those goats naturally migrate over to the Big Mountain because they no longer have anywhere else to score. Part of me wishes there were a rule preventing goats from leaving the summit for the big mountain once they’ve reached it, just to create a stronger push-and-pull between staying put for points and abandoning that position for the endgame race. Still, even without that tension dialled up, the expansion fits so nicely into the base game.
The Big Mountain is the kind of expansion I immediately folded into the base game and haven’t looked back since. It adds very little rules overhead but solves a niggling little pain points that I had with the base game. Like, What are you supposed to do when one of the tracks runs out of points, what happens when your dice rolls don’t line up with the available tracks, especially if you roll four 6’s. The Big Mountain gives those scenarios a natural outlet, and because of that it feels a lot less like an add-on, and more like something that has been there all along.
One small surprise about Mountain Goats is the physical footprint it creates on the table. The box itself is tiny, a small square only slightly thicker than most card game boxes, but much smaller in length and width. You might reasonably assume that means the game itself would be similarly compact, but you’d be mistaken! Once you lay out the twenty cards that form the mountain tracks, the game demands more table space than its box would suggest. It’s not quite the portable pub or airplane game that the packaging might imply. This isn’t really a complaint so much as an observation. It’s a small box that stores everything neatly, and respects my limited shelf space, and then sprawls into a surprisingly large play area once the game begins. My expectations were simply shaped by other small-box games that tend to stay small once they hit the table.
Even with that slightly larger than expected footprint, it’s hard to not fall in love with Mountain Goats. The whole game takes between 20 and 30 minutes, serves some emotional highs and lows, the art direction is bright and playful, and the rules are easy enough to teach in just a few minutes. It’s light without feeling trivial. For such a small package, it manages to create a lot of memorable little moments, like the time you managed to drain the 6 pile before anyone could kick you off the track, locking them all out of the set bonuses for the entire game. I suspect my partner wanted to literally push me off the mountain after that game!
Let me start by saying that I adore the theme of Rebel Princess.
Classic fairy-tale princesses have generally always been trapped in a fairly grim narrative box. No matter how brave, clever, or capable they are, their ultimate “win condition” tends to be the same: get married. Roll credits. Rebel Princess turns that expectation on its head. In this game, the princesses have decided they’re done with proposals, done with princes, and absolutely not interested in settling down just because the story says they should.
What makes this theming so interesting is that it’s not just a coat of paint. The theme of Rebel Princess is built around rejecting marriage, and that idea feeds directly into the trick-taking gameplay in a way that feels intuitive. I absolutely love it when a theme informs gameplay.
Rebel Princess is a trick-taking game inspired by Hearts. If you’ve played Hearts, you’ll already understand most of the game, which is to avoid taking certain cards, because those cards will give you points. And points are bad. In Rebel Princess, those points take the form of proposals. Each prince card represents a proposal, and the goal of the game is very simple: avoid proposals at all costs.
The deck is divided into four suits, numbered one through ten. One of those suits is the Prince suit, and that’s where the trouble lies. Each prince offers exactly one proposal to the player who takes the trick containing that card. Take a prince, take a proposal. The player with the least proposals wins the game. Also, just for a bit of an added twist, the green 8 is the Frog Prince, who is worth 5 proposals when he’s won.
So far, so familiar. But Rebel Princess is so much more than a straight retheme of Hearts. It layers on a couple of systems that dramatically reshape how the game feels.
The first and most important addition is player powers. Each player takes a princess tile at the start of the game. Each of these princesses are classic literature (or if you’re a millennial like me, from the Disney movies of our childhoods). Cinderella, Pocahontas, Mulan, and many more. Each princess comes with a unique ability that modifies how you can play the game. Some let you break suit rules, some let you manipulate tricks after they’re played, and others invert the hierarchy of numbers for a specific hand.
These powers do a fantastic job of pushing Rebel Princess beyond a purely reactive trick-taking experience. You’re no longer just counting cards and tracking suits, you’re actively planning around when to use your power, who it might hurt, and how it will interact with the rest of the table. I had one game where I successfully baited out the prince of frogs, only to swap the card I played for a much lower one, sticking that player with a nasty 5 proposals. Bam, gottem.
That being said, this is also where one of my small hesitations lives. The princess powers don’t all feel equally impactful. In my plays, some princesses use their abilities maybe once or twice per game, saving them for some dramatic moments. Potentially, other princesses can forget what your power is, because you’ve gone 3 rounds without using it. Others seem to fire almost every single round. That imbalance doesn’t break the game, but it’s noticeable, especially once players become familiar with the full roster. I suspect experienced groups will gravitate toward certain princesses more than others.
The second major addition to Rebel Princess are the round cards.
At the start of each round, a round card introduces a new rule that changes how the entire hand will play out. Often this begins with a card-passing phase: pass one to three cards to your left or right. Already, that small change can dramatically reshape your hand and your plans.
Then comes the twist. Maybe this round if you manage to take no tricks at all, you immediately take five proposals. Now you HAVE to win at least one, right? Another round card could be something like, every three card you capture this round is worth negative three proposals, suddenly turning low cards into high-value targets. These rules force you to re-evaluate what “good” play even looks like from round to round.
Together, the princess powers and round cards make Rebel Princess far more dynamic than a standard trick-taking game. You probably won’t fall into a single dominant strategy. What worked last round might be actively dangerous in the next. That constant change is what makes the game feel fresh even after repeated plays.
If you’ve played a lot of classic trick-taking games, Rebel Princess turns so many of the genre’s stables on it’s head. High cards are dangerous. Winning tricks is often bad. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself desperately trying slough off your highest cards and clinging to low numbers so you can dodge those pesky suitors entirely.
There are few feelings in trick-taking more satisfying than surprising your opponents. Those moments when someone thinks they’re going to get away scott-free, only for you to stick them with 3 princes, or even better, when you suddenly play off-suit and drop that 5 proposal frog prince right into someone’s lap.
The most dramatic moment of all though, is shooting the moon.
If you manage to take every single prince and the Frog Prince, you flip the script entirely and score negative ten proposals. Pulling this off feels incredible. And the tension, as you take prince after prince, the table growing the realization that you just might pull it off, and they’re powerless to stop you…
It’s one of those moments that players will remember long after the game ends.
I’ve never played the original Hearts, but I have played a lot of trick-taking games over the years, and Rebel Princess comfortably sits among the better modern entries in the genre.
The production helps, too. The card art is charming and expressive. While every card doesn’t have unique art, each suit has its own full-card illustration, which is lovely enough. The princesses tiles themselves are full of that rogueish personality that gives the game it’s name.
With a large roster of 12 princesses and 26 round cards, Rebel Princess has a lot of variability baked in. Mixing that with the natural replayability of trick taking games, you’ll be exploring new combinations of powers and rules often.
In the end, Rebel Princess is a smart, satisfying twist on a classic formula. It’s approachable for players familiar with Hearts, but deep enough to reward repeated plays. It manages to be playful, mean, thematic, and tactical all at once. That’s not an easy balance to strike.
I give Rebel Princess a full recommendation. If you enjoy trick-taking games and are looking for one that both respects tradition and gleefully rebels against it, Rebel Princess is well worth your time.
