Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
For most of the last two years, I have had an article in my draft folder titled “I Think I Hate Games Where I Have to Read a Lot of Card Text.” It started years ago with a deckbuilding game where I had to lean over the board’s card market to read every card that hit the conveyor belt.
Understanding not only the card’s cost, but its abilities, was critical to success in that game, but it also meant I had to read a lot of card text before making any decisions.
2025’s The Hunt (designed by Renaud Crocombette, Remi Laumonier, and Antoine Pham-Minh) might have pushed me over the edge. That’s because the game is essentially a recipe fulfillment game with fugitive cards. The Hunt is set in the espionage theaters of post World War II Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, as players guide one of four unique agencies to chase Nazi war criminals down for capture. Taking 1-3 actions each turn, players will visit “investigation zones” to grab cards that match the requirements of the various criminals that must be hunted down during the game.
I typically enjoy games like this, and The Hunt does a great job of keeping the action speedy by forcing players to grab a bunch of cards and feed these “clues” and intelligence to meeples that are standing in the proper areas of the board to capture fugitives. The fugitive cards come in three flavors (based on the number and type of cards needed for capture), and they offer two different options for use from three categories: ongoing powers (Cooperation), one-time powers (Missions) and the ability to use captured fugitives to capture other fugitives (Hunt), my favorite way to thematically use these turncoats to grab more cards.
The trick with The Hunt is that the fugitive cards are critical, because capture grants the player boosts on various tracks, which are later converted into “World Domination” victory points. Once any player reaches 12 points, the endgame is triggered. But each round, new fugitives hit the three hunting zones of the board, so all players will need to hover over the board for a few minutes to really study which cards play best into both their existing strategy and any fugitive cards they are planning to deploy in the upcoming round.
On its own, this isn’t actually a big deal; most of the medium+ strategy games I whip out require a lot of in-game considerations tied to the board state. I’m going to lean over something to understand the best way to win, all good. But for some reason, reading a lot of cards (or, impossibly, reading the card tableau of all other players to understand what their tableau is currently capable of) became a bit of a drag during play in The Hunt, making an otherwise quick worker placement game a little slower.
On the positive side, the variety of the fugitive cards and deciding which power to exercise when those fugitives got into my hand was always interesting. Again, using these cards to hunt was always fun, but the tension between using them for a capture versus ongoing powers was fun. I played as The Network in my first play of The Hunt (a fictional, international syndicate that made me wonder what it might be like to work with S.P.E.C.T.R.E., if they were suddenly the good guys in a Bond flick), and that was a very different experience versus my time playing as the Americans, so The Hunt certainly can feel different by playing as each of the game’s four factions.
The Hunt never made me (or the various players who joined for these review plays) really feel the game’s setting or theme in the way the game’s designers likely intended. But, for a breezy 60-to-90-minute race to score the most points, The Hunt’s world was mildly interesting.
