Windmill Valley: Blooming Sails – Justin Bell
On my way out of my meetings with Board&Dice at last year’s SPIEL Essen 2025, our marketing contact asked if I wanted a copy of the new Windmill Valley expansion, Blooming Sails. I thought the base game was fine, certainly not at the top echelon of Board&Dice’s other, better, more combotastic Euros such as Tiletum, Nucleum, or even recent hits like Reef Project and Tianxia. Still, I love games, and one player from my review group really enjoyed Windmill Valley, so I agreed to bring a copy home.
The expansion addresses what most players I know agree to be the weak link in the base game’s design: the Foreign Trade action, where players would drop a tulip bulb to get two meager bonuses—maybe a tool, a point, maybe another tulip bulb—or take all the bulbs on a card to get a lot of bulbs at once. I’m not a Windmill Valley expert, but it was always the action I would cover with another action tile first because I used Foreign Trade so infrequently. The expansion blows that portion of the game up, using a new side board, new Crate bonuses, and a separate boat token used to navigate to better bonuses granted during the Calendar phase when a player laps their own action wheel.
I do think Windmill Valley: Blooming Sails improves on the base game by making Foreign Trade worth the trip. Other parts of the game are now supercharged, including pre-printed double tulip bulb tiles that automatically fill two spaces in a player’s garden, making it much easier to complete rows. Still, I don’t think Windmill Valley is as strong as other recent comparables because the early rounds of Windmill Valley are still a bit dry. It’s a looker on the table, and I’m still impressed with how much happens in just two hours of playtime. If you liked the base game, buy this expansion, but if you didn’t like the base game, I don’t think Blooming Sails is the expansion that will tip the scales.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★☆☆ – Wouldn’t suggest it, but would happily play it
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
Aeon’s End: War Eternal – Andrew Lynch
Keeeeeeeeey-riced this is hard. War Eternal was the first big box expansion to Aeon’s End, and with several of the more recent boxes under my belt, I can tell they decided the best way to expand this already-punishing game was to make it more punishing. Bless. The quality doesn’t dip in the slightest, and the good news is that the Mage powers are as juiced up as the bosses, but boy. Sweaty, sweaty stuff.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★★☆ – Would like to play it again
Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.
Rise of Babel – Andrew Lynch
There are enjoyable things about Rise of Babel, but they are undercut by other decisions. The scoring, which is largely a tile-placement puzzle involving materials, is satisfying, but it would be better if player interaction were possible in any sort of meaningful sense. By even the middle of the game, the tumult in your supply lines is such that other players cannot make any long-term decisions based on what you have available to you. It changes so drastically over the course of your own turn that you can too easily pivot and adjust. Rise of Babel aims for a frictionless and enjoyable time. Make players suffer, I say.
There are a few different winning strategies to pursue, but the deck-building isn’t particularly dynamic, and the cards do not feel balanced in any meaningful sense, by which I mean certain cards can feel overly-powered but it doesn’t seem like the game itself knows that. By the end of my first game, I had such a powerful loop of cards going that I was unstoppable. My elephants were moving up and down the board so fast that there’s no chance they didn’t kill someone. I should have opted for a more robust worker’s comp plan with my insurer.
Pushing a system to its breaking part is part of the fun of both engine- and deck-builders, but my positions was so much further developed than anybody else’s, and in a way that did not feel earned. To underscore the point, I ended up winning with a score around 180% higher than anybody else’s.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.
The Pirate Republic: Africa Gambit – Justin Bell
The Pirate Republic: Africa Gambit appears to be the second edition of The Pirate Republic. That means one should rightfully assume that issues with the first edition were smoothed out with this newer title. That is absolutely not the case. The Pirate Republic: Africa Gambit labels itself as “a thematic deck building, sandbox adventure game for 1-5 players.” On a turn, the active player rolls an event die before attempting to, for lack of a better term, “pirate”: move their pirate ship around the map, fight almost anything else on the map except other players, “declare infamy” to build their deck by buying crew cards, or establish a pirate haven by placing a cardboard token on a neutral space.
Here’s what really happened, an aborted play that we killed off after just one, TWO-HOUR round of messy gameplay: we discovered that The Pirate Republic: Africa Gambit has no idea what it really wants to be. The rulebook is an atrocious mess, which is saying something in a world where I constantly complain about poor rulebooks. Because each player has to roll an event die every turn, turns are comically swingy: you might roll a negative movement stat, reducing your chance to even leave the home space of Nassau (this happened on my first turn of the game, meaning I had to pass on the game’s first turn!!!). Or, you might roll a +3 movement, which doubles your movement in the game’s early stages. You might roll a red Lookout symbol, which magically transports a random enemy to your current space for combat and might lead to your capture without you being able to take a turn. The artwork seems to not quite know what it wants to be either…the photorealistic style on the cover fares badly under close examination, while the card art goes in a different direction. The player aid details what each player can do on their turn, without taking the simple step of providing an icon glossary on either of its two sides.
The worst offender? Even after one round, the term “runaway leader problem” became the talk of the table. Players who are captured lose all of their victory points within their current reward tier. You might get to 83 points, then get captured, then lose 23 points as you drop down to the level IV tier of 60 points. Players who rise to level II, then III, secure massive bonuses while other players grind their way up. “The rich really do get richer,” one player commented. The Pirate Republic: Africa Gambit doesn’t help itself by saying it is a deckbuilding game; in our first two-hour round, players each added just a single card to their decks.
The Pirate Republic: Africa Gambit is easily the worst game I have played in 2026, and it’s one of the worst games I have ever played across the nearly 700 games I have discussed on this website. It is to be avoided at all costs, including no cost. If someone offers to give you this game for free, take my advice: refuse.
Ease of entry?
☆☆☆☆☆ – Gave up
Would I play it again?
☆☆☆☆☆ – No chance
Read more articles from Justin Bell.
Golem Run– Kevin Brantley
We at Meeple Mountain like to cover games of all shapes and sizes, from publishers all around the globe. Golem Run is a game you probably haven’t heard of, but it comes all the way from Finland.
Golem Run is an interesting mash-up of communal racing—much like Camel Up—where players don’t own specific racers, but instead bet on how they’ll finish. But unlike Camel Up, Golem Run layers on betting and trick-taking.
How could this possibly work, you might ask? A crazy casserole of genres. Spoiler alert: it works well.
A track is created with three Golems racing across terrain that varies with obstacles. Players start each round by placing three cards face down as bets. You’re betting on what the players to your left and right are betting on, along with your primary bet, which is both which Golem will be the furthest and exactly how many spaces they’ll be from the closest Golem.
The remaining cards are used in a fairly standard trick-taking game, except players can play single cards—or even pairs—which everyone else must follow. The winner of the trick moves the specified colored Golem the number of spaces shown on the card. Players can also pass for the round, which lets them redo their bets and swap out cards in hand. Once all cards are played, points are tallied based on correct bets, and play continues until a Golem finishes the race.
This game caught me off guard. It seemed like a game with one too many systems, like it would end up being too much. I was delightfully corrected, because the whole thing actually works. There’s deep strategy in which cards you bet versus which you hold, and you can even forfeit your play to rearrange your hand and set yourself up for a better payout. The rulebook is a little dense for how streamlined the gameplay really is (and it can trip you up), but once the system clicks, it becomes a really fun trick-taking/racing hybrid.
I can’t think off the top of my head of another trick taker that leans so hard into pairs, but that pairs play can really shake things up—especially since leftover cards at the end of a round are worth negative points.
This is a really solid game from a small indie publisher, and if Golem Run ever pops up in your gaming life, it’s a must-try (especially if you’re a trick-taking fan).
Ease of entry?:
★★★☆☆ – There were a few questions
Would I play it again?:
★★★★☆ – Would like to play it again
Read more articles from Kevin Brantley.
