Designers: Michael Keisling, Wolfgang Kramer

Compete with other players to find a beautiful, unspoiled island in Indonesia, exploit the fuck out of it, and then earn victory points by throwing a massive party to celebrate the ecological ruin you’ve wrought.

You are a ruler on the island of Java. You will take six actions. Actions include placing a tile, adding or moving citizens, building palaces in a city, dig irrigation or draw cards. The ultimate goal is to control large cities, and throw a festival in them.

Interesting Mechanic: Verticality. Java is a tile-laying game, but the tiles don’t lie flat, they stack on top of each other. Which answers the question of ‘how players take control of a city’. The player who has control of a city is the one with the highest citizen in it – only that player can actually score the city.

Java is out of print and hard to find nowadays, but it’s still a gorgeous game that adds a new verticality to the concept of territorial control.

Image result for java board game

(Photo Credit: Hiew’s Boardgame Blog)