Designers: Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer

You are an architect in a medieval italian port city. In Porta Nigra, you’ll be building towers, which means you’ll also be spending a lot of time down at the brick market buying all sorts of exotic bricks.

Interesting Mechanic: 3D building. The game is fun because of the visual appeal of building the towers, which is fun for stacking buildings. There are various ways they leverage this mechanic – players get bonuses for every three levels they build in a city quadrant, and there are missions, effectively, that act as building goals for any player to try to accomplish.

Porta Nigra is a game that I feel is overlooked. Relatively simple to play, deep to master, and with a board that just gets beautiful as the game progresses. It is prone to some last turn analysis paralysis if you’re playing with those kinds of people, but still worth it in my opinion.

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(Photo Credit: Pimp My Board Game)