The longer I’ve been into board gaming, the more I’ve noticed a steady drift toward hybridization. Mechanisms get smashed together, so now a game isn’t just a deck-builder game or a worker placement game, but some intricate fusion of both, a la Lost Ruins of Arnak or Dune: Imperium. And while I genuinely enjoy seeing the interesting ways games meld mechanics, there’s something refreshing about a game that picks a single idea and simply executes it as cleanly and completely as possible. So with that in mind, let’s talk about 1997’s For Sale, designed by Stefan Dorra.
For Sale is basically 2 auction games in one. Your performance in the first auction game directly sets you up for the second one, which is the half of the game that’s actually worth points. In the first half of For Sale, players are bidding on properties represented by cards numbered from 1 to 30, with each number reflecting not just value but a property with personality. The 1 is a broken cardboard box, getting soggy in the street while the 30 is a literal space station. Everyone starts with the same pool of money, and each round a number of properties equal to the player count is revealed. From there, players take turns bidding to stay in the round, raising the amount of cash incrementally or dropping out entirely, at which point they take the lowest valued property still available. If the bidding has looped around the table, then the player who passed forfeits half their bid to the supply in return for the lowest property card available. Only the final remaining player in a round surrenders all their cash and takes the final and highest property for himself. It’s a system that’s easy to explain, but it quickly shows that it’s holding a surprising amount of tension once you’re in it.
That tension comes from the constant push and pull between risk and reward. If a spread of cards includes one terrible property and several excellent ones, the bidding naturally escalates as players try to avoid being the one stuck with the worst option. But the moment someone chooses to drops out, it often triggers a chain reaction, as everyone reassesses the value of staying in versus cutting their losses. That rule about keeping half your money if you bow out is so clever. It creates a question in the players heads, maybe they’re bidding a bit high with the expectation that someone will bid over them, and by the time the round comes back to them, the current lowest card will be gone. Not every bid is going to make it to the final result, but it creates a dance of wills. A game of chicken where players are constantly reevaluating how much they’re willing to risk and how much they’ll drop to take the lowest card at the table.
Once all the properties have been claimed, the game shifts into its second phase, and this is where For Sale reveals its second auction type. Any excess money you have is put aside, and the properties you bought are now what you’ll use to bid with. Just like the first half, a number of cards equal to the number of players is revealed, but this time the cards represent sale values. Instead of a bidding system that goes around the table, with the value slowly swelling, now it’s a simultaneous bind bid. Everyone puts one card face down and simultaneously reveal. The highest number property takes the highest value sale price, and so on down the line. Suddenly all the decisions you made in the first half come back to haunt you. Who thought it would be a good idea to have the 16, 17, and 18? Why is your highest card a 23? Your pragmatic nature has left you with a string of low value houses and a pocket full of change.
What I find particularly compelling here is how differently the two phases feel, despite being so tightly connected. The first is open, conversational, and reactive. You can smack talk your opponents and change your mind halfway through a bidding phase. The second half is quiet and psychological, all the tension is built around hidden information and the simultaneous reveal. You’re not just evaluating the raw value of your cards, you’re considering their value in relation to your opponents. If you can correctly read your opponents, and snake a high value sale for one of your weaker cards, you’ll be in a great position. Or, if you’re like me, you’ll constantly play a card that’s a single digit below your opponents, costing you 5 or 6 thousand dollars in final score.
For Sale is not a game I would ever claim to be particularly good at. Valuing properties, both in terms of how much to spend in the first half and when to deploy them in the second, is a skill that feels just out of reach for me. I can see the logic, I can follow the flow of the game, but there’s an intuition at play that I just haven’t quite developed.
There are some things that become more noticeable the more you play. Turn order, particularly in the first phase, can have a huge impact on how a round unfolds for a particular player. The player who wins an auction becomes the starting player for the next round, which creates a shifting dynamic where position can be either an advantage or a liability depending on the cards in play. Being the first to drop out of an auction will often trigger that cascade of passing players, but being stuck at the end of the turn order can mean facing a heavily inflated bid with little room to manoeuvre. You’re sometimes left choosing between overpaying for something mediocre or settling for the worst option available, neither of which feels particularly satisfying.
That interplay between luck and planning is always present. The distribution of cards, the order in which they appear, and your position relative to other players all shape the decisions you’re able to make. It’s not something you can fully control, and while the game is short enough that this randomness rarely overstays its welcome, it does mean that some rounds feel more dictated than directed. The key, as with many auction games, is learning how to navigate those moments, how to affect what you can and minimize your losses and capitalize on the opportunities your opponents let slip through their fingers.
Where For Sale really shines is in showing how much it can accomplish with so little. It’s fast, it’s easy to teach, and it consistently generates meaningful decisions. The dual-auction structure gives it a satisfying arc, turning what could have been a single-note experience into something with interesting texture and variation. Even when For Sale frustrates, it does so in a way that invites another play, another attempt to better understand its rhythms.
Sometimes, when you’ve been inundated with new and complex games, it feels refreshing to pull out a game from almost 30 years ago and revel in its simplicity. For Sale is a game that has stood the test of time, and sits among the greatest auction games out there. It gives you the same satisfying feelings from its auction mechanics that much larger and longer games struggle to provide. It’s the perfect game to keep in your bag and pull out anywhere you have a few friends and a few minutes to spare.
Disclaimer: A copy of Frosted Blooms was sent to me for review
I have always loved polyomino based games. From Tetris as a young teenager to Patchwork being one of the games that made me fall in love with the board game hobby. So anytime a new polyomino game hits my table, I’m generally predisposed to enjoy myself.
Frosted Blooms is a pentomino (or 5-omino) tile laying game, designed by Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc with art by Simon-Pierre Bernard, and was published by Synapses Games in 2026. In Frosted Blooms, each player is building a tulip field by picking one of the pentomino tiles from the market, placing it into their personal tableau, and then playing a card to dictate which element on the tile they just placed will score that round. Taking things a step further, if you manage to create holes in your field, you get to place improvements, chunky wooden meeples that may give you a coin, and will give you big points when the end game rolls around.
The structure of the game is straightforward. Each turn begins with you picking a tile from one of the 5 tiles around the main board. You can always just take the next tile in the sequence for free, but you can always optionally use a coin to leap frog over a tile. The reason why you might want to do that is because each tile has 4 scoring elements on it. At least 2 of the squares are blue water spaces. The other three spaces on the pentomino are flowers. Every tile depicts all 3 colours, and the number of bulbs on each tiles always equals 6. But sometimes you really want to increase the number of purple bulbs in an area, and perhaps the next tile in sequence only has a single purple bulb on it. No tile is objectively better than any other tile, each piece’s power lies in the situation you happen to find yourself in.
After placing a tile in your tableau, you must play one of your scoring cards. You’ll have 3 in your hand at any given time, and each scoring card will either score two different elements for 1 points each, or a single element for 2 points a pop. So sliding in a 3 purple tulip tile into a field adjacent to 8 other purple tulips, as you play your 2 points per purple tulip card is a real sweet deal.
Adding another layer to the story here is the empty spaces between the tiles. A single 1×1 square will earn you a worker, which also nets you a coin (sidebar, what kind of farm gets income from their workers?). Having larger empty spaces can net you the 10 point barns, while a 2×2 square will let you place a yellow windmill, worth 25 points at the end of the game.
Frosted Blooms constantly pulls you in two directions. You want to cluster your tulips into massive scoring groups, but you also want to leave awkward gaps to build high-value improvements. Every good move towards one of those goals feels like it’s happening at the expence of the other. But when you can get them to sync up, oh, the elation you feel.
Adding another layer to your decision-making is the victory point market. At the start of the game you’ll lay out a number of objectives based on the player count. These objectives will task you with collecting a certain number of objectives, or scoring a larger number of tulip bulbs of a specific colour. Whenever you achieve one of those objectives, you’re free to take it. But the catch is that you can only have one objective of each type. So do you want to lock down your bonus points early? Or do you risk pushing on to get the higher value objectives, with the chance that one of your opponents will swoop in and steal it from right under your nose?
All of these systems intertwine in a way that keeps your decisions feeling meaningful without being overwhelming. You’re constantly weighing tile selection, placement, scoring opportunities, and future potential, but it all flows naturally from the core loop. It’s the kind of design where each choice feels small in isolation, but collectively builds into something satisfying.
And then there’s the production. It’s hard not to linger on it, because Frosted Blooms is a beautiful game. The tiles are beautifully illustrated, and the tulips on the tiles have gold foiling along the edges of their petals, catching the light in a way that makes every placement feel a little special. As your tableau grows, it starts to sparkle in the light. Adding to that glitter are the really chunky wooden improvements that add a satisfying height element to the table presence. It’s not the kind of game that will stop someone in their tracks in a convention hall, but it is the kind of beautiful production that each person sitting at the table will appreciate.
I can’t decide if the length of the game is a boon or a problem. Frosted Blooms lasts a mere 10 rounds, meaning you don’t have much time to pivot should things not go your way. Perhaps you draw all your purple bloom cards at the start of the game, and then you’re given a bunch of purple heavy tiles late in the game. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. At 2 players, it took us 20 minutes to play a full game, which is great. But also I was having fun building windmills, and I was sad that I couldn’t eke out a 3rd one before the game came to a sudden end.
I also found it really hard to fight against my natural tendency to place tiles in as close combination as possible. My dozens of plays of Barenpark really set me up for failure here. I’ve trained myself to pack tiles as tightly as possible, to hate empty space entirely, and Frosted Blooms actively punishes that instinct.
But also focusing too much on nailing those improvements will make each of your scoring cards feel anemic. There’s a trade-off to be had, and part of the fun of each game is deciding on which of those scoring objectives you want to chase. The opportunities to score contrast each other in a way that makes Frosted Blooms satisfying in a way that not many tile laying games are. There’s enough grit in the system to satisfy enthusiast gamers, while the flow and attractive pieces, coupled witt the short play time will entice more casual gamers to stick around.
Frosted Blooms is a thoughtful, satisfying tile laying puzzle wrapped in a genuinely lovely presentation. It balances tactical scoring with longer-term planning, rewards careful placement and finds interesting ways to make both filled and empty spaces matter. The twist of making the empty spaces matter combined with a lavish production elevates Frosted Blooms into a game that is sure to delight whoever sits at the table to play.
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.
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!
