Month: December 2024 (Page 2 of 11)

“Card Crafting meets 4X! Sail the high seas and choose your path to victory!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/276182/dead-reckoning
Playing Time: 90-150 minutes
Weight: midweight
Genre: Card Crafting Open World Piracy Game
Designer: John D. Clair
Players: 1-4

John D. Clair is the patron saint of the card crafting game. He’s now made at least 5 games that use the mechanic of putting transparent card pieces into a card sleeve to Frankenstein together a ‘card’ that gets more powerful as you play. Dead Reckoning is, for my money, the best of these.

A sprawling open-world pirating game, Dead Reckoning allows players to wander freely the open seas, exploring islands, indulging in trade, perhaps building some industry and occasionally relieving some merchants of their excessive merchandise. Each path is viable, and how a player upgrades his crew will largely guide his crew’s fortunes.

The player’s crew is the central engine of the game. A player will draw a handful of these at the start of the turn, and each ‘card’ is upgradeable in its own right – players can not only acquire upgrades to their abilities that let these characters do more things (each card has room for 3 upgrade slots) but at the end of each turn, they can also ‘promote’ a character – flipping or rotating a card so its core ability is better (each character has 4 levels based on the four orientations). Level up your gunner if you favor piracy, or your purser if you hope to instead build a life of maritime industry.

Like most open world games, the game ends once a certain number of player achievements are acquired. The end result is my favorite ‘sandbox’ experience, and indeed my favorite pirate game altogether. Truly, this is a game that lets you imagine another life on the open seas.

“The looking glass has shattered and war has come to Wonderland!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/227935/wonderlands-war
Playing Time: 45-125 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Territorial Control & Bag Building
Designer: Tim Eisner, Ben Eisner, Ian Moss
Players: 2-5

The first thing you notice about Wonderland’s War is the aesthetic. It’s an absolutely gorgeous, beautiful take on Alice and her fantasyland that is somehow whimsical and hauntingly dark. The board is beautiful, as are the components.

But there’s a lot of game in here too. The game is played over three rounds, each broken into a tea party phase and a war phase. During the tea party, players will take turns taking cards which let them deploy followers on the world map and add new chips to their bag.

During the war phase, each territory’s control is resolved. In each one, participating players pull tokens out of their bag and raises the strength of their attack by the token pulled, with some tokens having multiplier effects or other modifiers that keep things interesting. But there’s a press-your-luck element: pulling a madness token will kill one of your followers, and if all of your followers succumb to madness, you are defeated.

Wonderland’s War is one of the most impressive new-to-me games of the year. An absolutely gorgeous production. A territorial control game that plays so much faster and lighter than a full-on wargame. A ton of variability of units inside the box. This game has the juice.

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/291453/scout
Playing Time: 15 minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Set Collection
Designer: Kei Kajino
Players: 2-5 Players

SCOUT has become my go-to filler card game, a tense but silly game with a theme that’s just pasted awkwardly on. Apparently you’re a recruiter for the circus and you’re trying to find acts from your competitors to recruit? It doesn’t REALLY make sense, but who cares.

Each player is dealt about 12 cards, and each one has two numbers on it – one on top and one on bottom. When players pick up their cards they rotate each to have the number they want on top, and then put them in order. After this happens, their cards CANNOT be rearranged in their hands.

One contestant will then put out a ‘show’, which is a combination of cards that is either a multiple number of cards (i.e. three of a kind) or a straight. Each subsequent player can try to beat that show with a better show (more or better cards) but if they can’t, they’ll ‘scout’ instead, which is to say take one card to put into your own hand. If you do so, you weaken the ‘show’ so a later player can beat it (and hopefully you’ve also made your own hand better) but if everyone ‘scouts’, the player wins the hand.

SCOUT works by combining manipulation and greed with social trust. It’s lightweight and easy to teach, and comes in a box that easily slips into a coat pocket. For filler games, SCOUT is very hard to beat.

“Tend to your sheep on the South Island of New Zealand.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/380607/great-western-trail-new-zealand
Playing Time: 75-150 minutes
Weight: Heavy
Genre: Deckbuilding & Rondel
Designer: Alexander Pfister
Players: 1-4

Be a shit-kicking cowboy, and drive your herd along the range, looking to upgrade your livestock along the way. You’ll need high-points livestock to really push your scores, but your lower, entry-level cows are cows you can exchange earlier on the path for much-needed resources or other cows. Along the way, you’ll be traversing a rondel (a circular series of stops) and you can add your own stops to the rondel in the form of constructing new buildings, which both act as powerful enablers for your own game and irritating obstacles for your opponents.

The Great Western Trail series has always been a big hit for those favoring heavier board games. The combination of deck collection and creating your own custom rondel has always attracted would-be cowboys, and you can’t go wrong with any of the three versions (the base, Argentina or New Zealand). And while I feel like a counterfeit Texan for saying you should abandon your cows for the sheep-shearing of New Zealand, I still think it’s the best of the three, as it smoothens some of the rough edges of the base game, adds a second scoring path (shearing vs meat) and better explores the deck construction aspect of the game.

“Deliver goods, build the city and your tableau using a unique dice selection method.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/314582/amsterdam
Playing Time: 60-120 Minutes
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Territorial Control
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 1-4

In Amsterdam, players will play as trade merchants, working to build trading houses in town to gather resources, establish remote trade routes, and help build the dyke that keeps the city safe.

What makes Amsterdam truly unique is the resource primrose. At the start of every turn, six dice are rolled and players can choose two of them to generate resources for them – but there’s a twist. A purple six will generate six purple cubes – six turns in the future. Whereas a white one will generate only one cube – right now. As these resources are required to buy cards to build out a tableau that increases your power and generates end-game victory points, figuring out how to balance immediate needs with long-term windfalls is the key tension in the game.

Amsterdam is the remake of Macao (2009), one of Stefan Feld’s earliest games. And while Amsterdam is a superior production, it can be a tad pricey, and if you can find a gently used copy of the original, it’ll be worth it.

“Will you be a virtuous or nefarious servant of the king? Build your way to glory.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/236457/architects-of-the-west-kingdom
Playing Time: 60-80 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips
Players: 1-5

As royal architects of the realm, players have a charter to help build and improve their city. Some players will choose the path of virtue and focus their efforts on building the cathedral. Others will choose a more shadowy path, taking advantage of lucrative black market goods to build less showy but more powerful landmarks. And, of course, you’re all competing to earn the favor of the king.

The central mechanic is a worker placement game unlike no other. Each player has around 20 workers, and work spaces are (generally) not exclusive – you can go where people have gone before. Even more so, a space is more powerful the more of your own workers are there – place your third worker on the lumber mill, for example, and gain 3 wood. But be careful – if too many workers gather in one spot, your opponents can have them rounded up and taken to prison, and it’ll take a jailbreak to get them out.

Architects is the best of the “West Kingdom” trilogy – although truth be told there are no losers in this line of games – and in fact probably my favorite game from this studioi. And a huge reason why is that it does a great job of having some complicated ideas while still being relatively clean and easy to teach and smooth to play.

“Cast spells and summon fantasy monsters in the original collectible card game.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/463/magic-the-gathering
Playing Time: 20 mins
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Collectible Card Game
Designer: Richard Garfield
Players: 2+

Easily the most-played game on my list, Magic the Gathering just celebrated its 30th anniversary last year and shows no signs of slowing down. “Friday Night Magic” continues to be the lifeblood of brick and mortal comic book stores, Magic: Arena is a delightfully slick way to play, and “Commander” has in the last decade gone from fringe fan favorite game format to the favorite way to play large multiplayer games.

Magic does have a perception of being a ‘money’ game (i.e. the player with the most expensive deck wins) but this is really only a problem with certain formats. Drafts are the lifeblood of Friday Night Magic (being an ideal way to learn the game and build your collection) and formats like pauper (no rare cards allowed) have emerged to provide cheaper options. And if you’re just playing casually, buy a couple of duel decks and face them off against each other.

“Recruit heroes and conquer locations in a race to expand your kingdom under the sea.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/283393/aquatica
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Weight: Light-to-Mid
Genre: Tableau Builder
Designer: Ivan Tuzovsky
Players: 1-4

Aquatica is, at it’s core, simple. Players play as aquatic lords, and acquire and play character cards which will allow them to conquer or purchase territories. The territories they conquer will need to be ‘raised’ which is a multistep process. A territory only scores them points if the territory is fully raised from the bottom of the ocean.

The trick is that there are often resources or actions you get from raising a territory one step, which often can result in raising another territory a step. This means means that it’s quite possible – and a hell of a lot of fun – to set up ridiculous turns that never seem to end, as free actions cascade into each other in a wonderful ballet of free stuff.

As much as I’d like to wax more philosophically about the combos – which absolutely ROCKS – I do have to give props to the Manta Ray bonus chits. These cute little plastic things are adorable – and also each has a different bonus on it’s underside, which activates when you flip them over. Which means they aren’t just cute, they’re also the cornerstone of your engine.

“Become the most influential clan in Japan’s Himeji stronghold.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/371942/the-white-castle
Playing Time: 80 minutes
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Dice Placement
Designer: Isra C, Shei S.
Players: 1-4

The White Castle is a dice drafting game where players compete in order to curry the most favor with the denizens of Himeji Castle. They do so by tending gardens, defending the realm or schmoozing with the royal court.

The thing that makes The White Castle so interesting is that players only have 9 turns. When you first sit down to play, this seems impossibly small. Playing well will require careful planning and elaborate chaining of actions. The end result is a surprisingly tight battle reminiscent of a knife fight – albeit one in a lovely tang garden.

“Woodland rulers engage in debate in this tactical solo trick-taking game.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/334590/for-northwood-a-solo-trick-taking-game
Playing Time: 20 mins
Weight: Light
Genre: Solo Tricktaking
Designer: Wilhelm Su
Players: 1

I’ve played a lot of solo games this year, and there was a lot of interesting experimentation, but the standout for me was For Northwood, a small, elegant game that is a relatively lightweight and interesting puzzle. The player plays as someone who must curry the favor of 8 nobles in 8 fiefdoms, where each fiefdom is a mini-tricktaking game.

Making ‘solo tricktaking’ work is no small feat. When the player visits a liege, he will try to hit an exact target of tricks to take, where the noble is flipping cards off the top of the deck and the player is responding with cards in his hand, a task that continues until the player’s hand is empty. All of this is enabled with an ‘ally’ system, where players bring four randomly chosen allies. Each ally vastly changes the capabilities of the player, which adds a lot of the variety to the game. They can also acquire additional allies along the way, which is vital for taking down the nobles that require taking 7 tricks (out of 8) or somehow taking none at all.

#20 may seem kind of high for a small card-based solo game but I noticed that this was my go-to mindless game, and I’ve played it dozens of times this year. And that’s a pretty good indication this is about in the right spot.