Meeple Mountain News Updates

In 1912, while working at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, Wilbur Lincoln Scoville created the "Scoville Organoleptic Test". This subjectively measured the pungency, "spiciness" or "capsaicin concentration" of various chili peppers*. Over the years, researchers have created a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) spectroscopy to scientifically measure the… Read more »

It’s hard to make a good game. Making a good product, an attractive physical object, is easier. There are a lot of great-lookin’ okay games out there, and I feel it is incumbent upon me as a reviewer to keep my eyes clear, to not allow production to obscure my… Read more »

The year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Dr Reiner Knizia’s career as a board game designer – his first published game, Complica, was released in a magazine in 1985 (although he’d self-published games before then as well). Since then, Knizia has designed and published over 800 games, many of… Read more »

Roaming the Rainforest As someone who is half Indonesian, I did a double take when I saw the name Hutan scroll by. Hey, that’s Indonesian for "rainforest"—is that a coincidence? To my delightful surprise, it was not. Hutan is a lovely game that focuses on planting flowers and trees to… Read more »

The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now… Read more »

Arena of Annihilation I have Mindbug Mania: it’s a game I want to play at every given moment. It’s a smooth, snappy, and satisfying card battler that captures the essence of a large TCG in fifteen minutes or fewer. So, when I heard about a new project from the same… Read more »

Who would have thought that a game about a fishing village would be an effective argument for both the welfare state and, dare I say, the working class owning the means of production? That’s Nusfjord, the best Uwe Rosenberg game that you probably haven’t played (yet). If wishes were fishes… Read more »

Goa: A New Expedition - Justin Bell My buddy Jacob had been trying to get Goa: A New Expedition to the table for the last couple of weeks, so a group of us jumped in for a play at a recent game night. Goa, designed by one of my favorites,… Read more »

I apologize in advance for all the shouting. HUANG I went into HUANG already knowing it would be great. This is a new edition of designer Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, which was first released back in 2018. It’s a tile-laying game that depicts the rise and fall of rival… Read more »

I’m not sure if it’s the decades of playing Mario Kart or a penchant for occasionally throwing my money away on the ponies (RIP Arlington Park racecourse) there’s just something exhilarating about having stakes in a tight race that nothing else can satisfy. Luckily, Downforce is here to fulfill that… Read more »