Yes, it’s as adorable as it sounds, and it’s a lot of fun.

Moley moley moley

The concept is simple. Each player starts with a sheet of paper with a garden on it divided into a grid. All over that garden are stones, flowers, coins, mounds of dirt, and other bits and pieces. Your mole has a starting point at the middle of the garden and has to dig tunnels around underground to collect the things littered around it. The tunnels you dig all have a shape, and that shape is dictated by the card drawn from the top of the pile. Each shape has a name based on the shape it describes, and they’re well-observed and funny.

As with many games with Tetronimo-type shapes, you can flip and rotate the shape as you see fit, as long as it retains the same overall shape. The catch comes with how you place the next shape, and it’s probably the hardest concept to get across to new players. Each new shape can only share one edge with the existing tunnels. Sounds simple, right? In reality, it’s a little more complicated. It means your new square shape can’t place both blocks along a straight tunnel, because that’s two edges/faces. The same goes with trying to add a tunnel to a corner.

Take that First Aid shape in the image above. Tunnels can only ever join on the ends of the arms of the cross, which makes it a more difficult shape to fit than you might expect. It’s not really a ‘tetris’ game in the same way as something like Patchwork, Silver & Gold, or even A Feast For Odin is because for most of the game, you’ve got to leave spaces, rather than trying to fill them all. Once you understand that, it’s fine, there’s just a little learning curve for younger (and older) players.

Hip hip hooray, for Superworm!

Ot not, as it goes, as the worms in Molehill Meadows are all there to be eaten. Their sacrifice will not have been in vain, however, because eating worms allows you to charge up your various worm powers. Every worm eaten lets you tick off a box next to one of the powers, and once a power is full you can expend them for bonus effects. Things like drawing the next shape twice, allowing you to touch more than one face with the next tunnel, or even drawing your own, additional tunnels in a shape you choose.

Those of you looking for something a bit more challenging in your games will enjoy these powers, especially when it comes to combining them. Let’s take making connections as an example. If you can connect the pairs of flowers, ants, or streams across the map there’s a potential for big bonus points. It’s not always easy to do, but it becomes easier if you employ some cunning mole strategy. Invest your worms in the ‘draw the next tunnel twice’ and ‘dig an additional 6 square tunnel’ powers, and then use them both at once and bam! All of a sudden you’ve made a 12 square passage right across the map.

The strategy doesn’t end there. At the start of each game, a pair of goal cards are chosen at random which gives you something to aim for. Those yellow flowers on the sheet aren’t worth anything usually, but get a goal card which rewards them and all of a sudden you’re digging tunnels north-west to try to get them all. It’s another little thing which adds some longevity to the game and stops it from getting stale too quickly.

Final thoughts

Molehill Meadows is super cute and a lot of fun. If you like flip-and-write games, you’ll love it. It’s as simple as that. I own a ton of this style of game, so I knew I was likely to enjoy it, and I wasn’t wrong. If you’ve ever played and enjoyed Silver & Gold, Aquamarine, Pioneer Rails, Demeter, Patchwork Doodle, Cartographers, or The Guild of Merchant Explorers, you’re going to enjoy it. Another very cool fact is that the game is being produced in an eco-factory in Europe with no plastic being used. The cellophane equivalent used on the box and cards is bio-degradable. That’s a huge deal and a really good example how how it can be done if publishers are willing to spend the money.

Other than the ‘tunnels may only touch one face’ rule, the only thing I found which caused any kind of problem was with some of the more complicated shapes. Befuddled and Cloud in particular. They’re made of more than four squares, so the geometric awareness needed to rotate and/or mirror the shapes can be confusing for children (and some adults) to get their head around. This is a friendly, fun game though, so there’s no reason not to help one another out.

I’m delighted to see another new game from Unfringed, and also to see something in a completely different style to Zuuli. It’s just the kind of thing we need more of, and we’re very lucky to be getting it from not only Chris & co, but also the folks at Dranda Games, Postmark Games, and other indie studios. Long may it continue. At around £20 it’s very easy for me to recommend Molehill Meadows. Go back yourself a copy now on Gamefound.

Preview copy kindly provided by Unfringed. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Molehill Meadows (2024)

Design: Chris Priscott
Publisher: Unfringed
Art: Clemency Bunn
Players: 1-99
Playing time: 20 mins

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Mystery Machine

Scooby-Doo (as I’ll shorten it to now) is a part of the Coded Chronicles series from The Op, a series which boasts this and one other game – The Shining: Escape from the Overlook Hotel. If you’ve played any of the Exit or Unlock series of games then the guts of Scooby-Doo will be immediately familiar. As you play the game you’ll gather cards as you explore rooms in the mansion, and by combining them and your character standees – and a little brainpower – you solve puzzles and progress through the story. Essentially, it’s an escape room game, and I’m a massive fan of escape rooms and puzzles in general, so I was excited to get a dose of childhood nostalgia at the same time.

If you’ve ever played an Exit game, you know the story is very loosely applied. It might be set in a pyramid or abandoned building, but there’s nothing really to make it feel like it. Scooby-Doo does things very differently here, by including a book for each of the characters. Without wanting to spoil the game, at various points you play as different members of the team, and as far as I’m concerned it should be obligatory to read out everything in character. The books are great; they’re bright and colourful, and the writing feels true to the cartoons. There are plenty of chances to ham it up and be the Velma you always dreamed you could be.

Pesky kids

I’ve played a load of games where you need to solve puzzles, so I’ve started to get to the stage where I can see the setup for something and think “Ah, this is going to be one of those”. I was expecting Scooby-Doo to seem simple compared to the likes of the Exit games I’ve played, or the Escape Tales games that I reviewed last year. I was half-right, I guess. Early on in the game, things are pretty easy, but you’d expect that in a game clearly aimed at families. When you get into the latter half of the game, however, it starts to require a bit more thinking. It’s done really nicely, there’s no sudden vertical ramp in difficulty, just enough of a slope to give a rewarding sense of success.

A lot has been done to make this game feel like Scooby-Doo. The characters’ voices in the text, the aesthetics, and the general scoobiness is all there. The way each member of the gang has a different skill works really nicely too. Each has their own speciality, which they can at least attempt to interact with different items and locations. Velma can research things, Fred can use stuff, and Shaggy and Scooby (perhaps predictably) eat and smell things. It doesn’t really matter too much who can do what, it’s just another clever way to add some flavour and theme to an already decent game.

The game system is really clever. The mansion slowly gets unveiled, and along the way you’ll be opening envelopes with all manner of secret stuff in them. My son was so excited every time we got to open a new envelope, and it adds a bit of theatre to the experience, which is super fun for kids and grown-ups alike.

Scrappy-Doo

When we finished playing Scooby-Doo, I got a real sense of deflation. Not because the story and the game weren’t good – both are great – but because it was over. More importantly, it was over, and it was completely finished. There’s just the one story in the box, and when you’re done with it, you’re done. You can reset it and start over, nothing gets destroyed in the same way it does in the Exit games, but it’ll just be the same story, same items, and same solution. That’s not a big deal when you’re buying an Unlock game for about £25 with three adventures in, or an Exit for less than £15. This is a game that’ll set you back nearly £30. Cost isn’t something I mention often, but it needs mentioning here.

HOWEVER…

My son didn’t mind one bit that the game would be the same the next time through. In fact, he’s already played it through twice on his own since. It’s a trait that other kids seem to share, if the conversations I’ve had with other parents is anything to go by. In the same way that I’ve watched Tremors a ridiculous number of times, they seem content to play something they know back-to-front, ad nauseum. It baffles me, frankly, but it’s the reason the game is still in my collection and not on the shelf at my local games café.

Final thoughts

If you like Escape Room games, you’ll have a good time with Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion. If you fall in the middle of that Venn diagram where Escape Room and Scooby-Doo fans intersect, you’ll love it. It’s great fun, but it’s over pretty quickly. It’ll probably take you a couple of hours to go through in total, longer if you’re playing with kids and let them take the lead on things.

The puzzles are good, and none are so abstract that you’ll need spoilers to solve them – no rubber chickens with a pulley in the middle here. It’s a really fun experience, it’s just the cost that you have to take into consideration. For some reason, the fact that it comes in a bigger box than the alternatives I’ve mentioned above, makes it feel like it should give you more than it does. If you’ve got kids, it’s a really worthwhile purchase, because they enjoy the experience of playing, more than feeling frustrated that they already know the solution.

One of the things it does have going for it, is that the game can be fully reset, so you can sell it on, or give it to someone else to enjoy. I really enjoyed the game, my son loves it, and I’m looking forward to trying out further games built on the Coded Chronicles system. Scooby dooby doooooooo!

Review copy kindly provided TheOp. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Scooby Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion (2020)

Designers: Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim
Publisher: TheOp
Art: Rob Lundy, Rick Hutchinson
Players: 1-99
Playing time: 120 mins

The post Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion Review appeared first on Punchboard.