Zen Of Design

“Explore an island to find resources and discover the lost ruins of Arnak.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/312484/lost-ruins-of-arnak
Playing Time: 30-120 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement Deckbuilding
Designer: Elwen, Min
Players: 2-4 (1 with solo expansion)

Lost Ruins of Arnak is a game that combines worker placement with deckbuilding. This is a relatively new genre, but one that has resulted in some absolute home runs, including Dune Imperium and Endless Winter. But Lost Ruins of Arnak comes out on top for me due to its more relaxed feel and swashbuckling Indiana Jones-esque theme.

The game is played over five rounds. During each round, you’ll place two workers, and play from a hand of cards. In early rounds, you’re not doing too much as you’re trying to collect more valuable cards and build your card engine, but in later rounds the game really unfolds. Games are tight but the games still never feel stressful.

I’m a sucker for new worker spots opening up in worker placement games, and Lost Ruins does it incredibly thematically. Players go explore new tombs which earns them victory points and other bonus resources. In future rounds, these newly discovered tombs act as more lucrative worker placement locations for players to exploit.

Lost Ruins of Arnak has been hovering in my top 10 for a couple years now, but the new Missing Expedition expansion pushed it to be my top game of the year. The expansion adds a campaign mode, which is designed to be played solo or in two-player coop mode, and while I tend to roll my eyes at all the campaign modes for games I’ll never play to, going through this was quick, extremely fun, added some very new challenges to the core formula, and was more than enough to push Lost Ruins of Arnak to be my #1 game of the year.

“Disrupt the ritual and slay the Elder Gods in this co-op dice chucker.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/253344/cthulhu-death-may-die
Playing Time: 90-120 mins
Weight: Light-Midweight
Genre: Cooperative Dungeon Crawl/ Boss Battler
Designer: Rob Daviau, Eric Lang
Players: 1-5

Most Lovecraftian-themed games center on frail humans facing and trying to escape unspeakable horror. Not this one. In Cthulhu: Death May Die, you’re going to wade into the depths with a shotgun and go Leeeroy Jenkins. Unspeakable horrors will die, and they will die en masse.

The cornerstone of Cthulhu: Death May Die is the insanity system. Yes, like most Lovecraftian games have some element of managing your sanity, but here Sanity is more than a second health pool – reaching thresholds of sanity will unlock new powers for your character, so in many cases it’s advantageous to stare into the mouth of madness. But it’s a press-your-luck scenario – go too crazy, and you WILL succumb to madness and your party will lose the scenario.

Each game combines a boss with a scenario, where the scenario contains the conditions for summoning the boss – killing the boss will earn your team the win, but the variety of boss/scenario combinations creates an almost limitless number of possibilities. The newest expansion just came out, and a new expansion is being crowdfunded as we speak.

“Gain glory by defending a Viking harbor town against trolls, draugr and other beasts”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/172287/champions-of-midgard
Playing Time: 60-90 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement Euro with Dice Chucking Combat
Designer: Ole Steiness
Players: 2-4

Get this if you like Euros with a little YOLO.

Champions of Midgard was my number one game last year, and it still deserves to be near the top of the list. Players will place workers to gather resources, mostly in the form of warriors (represented by different colored dice with different faces), and then take them into battle to try to take down big bad monsters, in hopes of earning ph4t l007 and victory points. It’s a solidly midweight game that acts as a great gateway from Ameritrash into more thinky strategy games – without losing the Ameritrash dice chucking.

The best design feature in this game is the Valhalla expansion. The core design is great but it is possible for players to just get unlucky, get a bad roll of the dice and have their whole armies crushed for no reward. Valhalla reverses this – players get tokens for their dead vikings, and acquiring the right tokens earns them even bigger rewards – which makes even the most suicidal assaults potentially lucrative (and can set up some delightfully degenerate strategies).

“Claim your fame as the dominant merchant in Yokohama during the Meiji period.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/196340/yokohama
Playing Time: 90 mins
Weight: Mid-to-Heavy weight
Genre: Worker Placement Contract Fulfillment
Designer: Hisashi Hayashi
Players: 2-4

Yokohama is, at its core, a simple contract fulfillment game. Players place workers, and doing so grants them resources which they can use to fulfill contracts. Doing so gets you more resources as well as victory points, as all players attempt to profit from the sleepy Japanese village of Yokohama becoming an international trade powerhouse.

The worker placement is the real gem in this game. Players start with a handful of workers as well as a meeple which represents themselves. On their turn, they can place up to three workers in different locations. They can then walk from their current location to another location as long as there is an unbroken path of workers between the two locations. And the location they choose will grant resources based on how many workers you’ve placed in that location. Thus, the real game is figuring out how to manage your workers, create megaturns, and plan for the future.

I used to feel guilty about recommending this slightly hard-to-acquire title, but it should be easy this year as it just went through a reprint.

“Manage your race car’s speed to keep from overheating.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/366013/heat-pedal-to-the-metal
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Weight: lightweight
Genre: deckbuilding & racing game
Designer: Asger Harding Granerud, Daniel Skjold Pedersen
Players: 1-6

A simple deck-building car racing games. Players have a handful of speed cards, and the number of which they can play is based on their gear. The gameplay is quick and straightforward, but if they go too fast around a curve, they may wipe out, and any mistake or risk they take is countered by ‘heat’ cards which are useless and gum up their deck. Given they’ll cycle through this deck multiple times per game, this is a true ‘press your luck’ element that must be managed – and feels appropriate to the game.

I don’t like most racing games, but I do love this one. The reason I like it is because of the speed. While there are a lot of considerations (especially as you add in game modules and explore career mode), you never get to a point where this game is slow. Players are making quick decisions, seeing quick results. It helps that no mistake is so disastrous that you can’t work your way back into things, and all of this results into a game that has the fast flow and aura of an actual car race.

“Construct machines and collect resources from your new airships.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/301255/whistle-mountain
Playing Time: 60-90 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement on Crack
Designer: Scott Caputo, Luke Laurie
Players: 2-4 players

A VERY dynamic worker placement game – players are building an unstable structure climbing upwards, with each new location offering new placement locations to land their worker blimps and balloons. But players don’t just get the benefits of the place the place one of their workers on but also anything that their stuff is adjacent to.

Also, as the structure goes taller, the lower levels start to flood. New, lucrative placement locations are constantly being created and destroyed, and resources turn on a dime from abundant to scarse as the water rises. The end result feels like surfing chaos – and I mean that in the most complementary way possible.

“Mutating diseases are spreading around the world – can your team save humanity?”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161936/pandemic-legacy-season-1
Playing Time: 60 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Cooperative Disease Control Legacy Game
Designer: Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock
Players: 2-4

You play cooperatively with other players as a team of dedicated researchers, attempting to stop a worldwide pandemic – four of them, actually – which you will do by gathering and exchanging ‘research’ cards and traversing the globe to administer aid. Each player has a ludicrously strong special ability, and you’ll need to work together to use every one optimally, as the end of each turn results in new towns becoming infected, and sometimes those infections chain uncontrollably across the world.

Pandemic is a stone-cold classic and one of the most influential board games ever made. It is one of the all-time great games, in the pantheon of godlike predecessors like Dominion and Catan that enabled the whole hobby, and you really can’t go wrong with any Pandemic title. But this one is better. The difference is ‘legacy’.

A legacy game is one that’s played over several sessions, so the true Pandemic Legacy experience will take form over at least 12 games representing each disastrous month in one 2020-style year (or more – failed months are repeated). Along the way, players will encounter new story beats, unlock new rules, gain new weapons they can use against the fight, and even encounter newer, more deadly diseases. Representing the truly one-way nature of the game, their game will get disfigured. You’ll occasionally be asked to destroy cards or cross out benefits on the map. A particularly destructive April in Moscow can result in that city being a smoking, uninhabitable crater for the remainder of the game. A legacy game is a board game CAMPAIGN, and Pandemic Legacy is such a great one that it’s not uncommon for players to literally frame their game boards once they are completed.

“Collectively develop a tech tree to fuel new discoveries and colonize space.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/317985/beyond-the-sun
Playing Time: 60-120 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement and Territorial Control
Designer: Dennis K Chan
Players: 2-4

If you’re the sort of person who spent more time on WoW patch day messing around in a talent calculator than you did actually playing the game, then you need to check out Beyond the Sun. Ignore it’s somewhat dry presentation, it is the game of climbing skill trees.

Beyond the Sun has two components – a small galactic map with a minor territorial control game is definitely a factor but the main entree is the central board, which is a huge skill tree. Players will take turns unlocking tech on the skill tree, acquiring the resources to climb higher, and giving them the ability to craft and move ships around the galactic map. At first, the game feels oddly off-balance, but once you embrace that figuring out your tech path IS the best part of the game, it just rolls.

An expansion came out called Beyond the Horizon, which focuses on the antiquities era. And while it has a couple of nice ideas in it, I can’t recommend it. They tried to make the territorial control game bigger and more important and, IMHO, it just doesn’t work. In this case, original flavor is superior.

“Crews race and shoot to be the last car standing.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/342070/thunder-road-vendetta
Playing Time: 45-75 minutes
Weight: light-to-mid
Genre: Demolition derby racing
Designer: Dave Chalker & more
Players: 2-4 players

“Let’s roll some dice.” Yes, Thunder Road: Vendetta is technically a racing game, but it’s also 90% a demolition derby. Each player manages a team of 3 cars that they try to complete a race, which is replete with road hazards and hidden surprises. This game is the ultimate game of ‘okay, let’s see what happens’.

The game is a chaotic mess – everytime a car enters a space with another car, dice are rolled as one of the two cars can spin into a random direction. And these actions can chain, meaning an opportunistic driver can turn the whole board into chaos, like a bowling ball knocking over dominos. Certainly, there’s a good chance any such action might backfire on you, but to be fair most of the time when you play Thunder Road Vendetta you care less about winning than you do about the spectacle of the whole thing.

There’s a host of various modules and expansions for this game, but to be honest, none of them are going to be a better spend of your money than going to Etsy to get a terrain upgrade set that makes your ramps and terrain obstacles look that much more exciting and deadly.

“Deck-building adventure meets tile-laying in the newest incarnation of Clank!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/365717/clank-catacombs
Playing Time: 45-90 minutes
Weight: midweight
Genre: Dungeon Diving Deckbuilder
Designer: Paul Dennen
Players: 2-4

Clank! Catacombs is another in the line of competitive deck builders where players race to the bottom of a dungeon, grab loot and get out.  Like always, the game is simple, clean, and frequently hilarious. The deckbuilding portion of the game is the engine, of course, with players buying tools and allies that will help in their quest, but the most powerful tools will generate ‘Clank’ – i.e. noise – and noise attracts dragons, and your character is crunchy and delicious in ketchup. 

You simply cannot go wrong with a Clank game, a game that is easy to teach, plays in an hour and is enjoyable to both hardcore gamers as well as the gamer-curious.  Almost every Clank game ends with the spectacle of one last straggler trying to escape before being seared like a filet mignon.  Which is to say, even if there’s a clear winner, the end of the game is ALWAYS entertaining, and how many games can claim that?

Of the variants, Clank Legacy is very good (and I strongly suspect next year’s entry on this list will go to its forthcoming sequel), but I gotta give it to Clank Catacombs, a variant who changes the formula with room tiles that are placed as you adventure, making the dungeon different in every game.  And the game make good uses of this differentiator, creating effects that rotate or move dungeon elements around the board, creating a new puzzle every time you play.