Month: December 2024 (Page 4 of 11)

“Develop your small, glass-making domain in the woods of the Black Forest.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/420805/black-forest
Playing Time: 60-120 Minutes
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Weird Dial Manipulation
Designer: Tido Lorenz, Uwe Rosenberg
Players: 1-4

Some observers have said that Black Forest is a slightly meaner rework of Glass Road, but I can’t speak to that. What I can say is that I spent most of the last day of BGG.con fighting to get my hands on a copy and it’s the first Uwe Rosenberg game I’ve loved in a long time.

Players travel from village to village, placing their meeple in between two tradespeople. Each tradesperson does different things but most commonly they will grant or convert resources, and the player can activate both neighboring tradespeople. The player also has a limited ability to move tradespeople around, creating more desirable locations (or making life more difficult in the process). The resources they get are used primarily to complete projects and build buildings, which can offer powerful abilities as well as grand end game victory points.

But the real center of the experience are the wheels where resources are tracked. Players have two wheels, one focused on making food and one glass. As players spend resources, they are spent from the wheel. But when players GAIN resources, they may actually autocreate resources. If you have all the resources you need to make glass – and aren’t full of glass, then you turn the dial and one glass is automatically created. It’s a very neat twist on resource management which, when combined with the very dynamic worker placement locations, makes for a very novel game experience.

“Craft the best stained-glass windows by carefully placing colorful transparent dice.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/199561/sagrada
Playing Time: 30-45
Weight: Light
Genre: Dice Drafting
Designer: Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews
Players: 1-4 players

A gentle, focused dice drafting game where players compete to build the best stained glass window. Each player starts with a pattern of colors and numbers, and take turns drafting dice in hopes of completing their pattern. The task is made easier by the fact that all patterns have plenty of blank space that can hold other dice, but complicated by the fact that you can’t put two dice that share a characteristic (number or color) next to each other. Players try to complete their patterns, as well as achieve other dice placement goals.

Sagrada has been a staple filler game at my place for ages. It’s easy to teach, quick to turn, but still capable of providing quite a brain burner of a challenge. You can dodge the (overpriced) expansions, though – the base game is more than enough.

“Build your way to the best Tavern in town with this deckbuilding dice drafting game”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/269207/the-taverns-of-tiefenthal
Playing Time: 60 minutes
Weight: Light-to-Mid
Genre: Press your luck tavern simulator
Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Players: 2-4

A game of Taverns of Tiefenthal is broken into several rounds, each broken into two phases. In the first, players fill their tavern, drawing cards until all the tables are full. In the second phase, players roll dice, and use these to activate various locations, primarily focused on using beer to satisfy customers or cash to upgrade their inn.

The upgrading is the fun part. A player’s board is broken into several pieces, and flipping part of the tavern upgrades it to it’s more upgraded side, which may result in being able to roll more dice, generate more beer, or modify a die result. The most powerful upgrade, though, is getting more tables. At its core, Taverns of Tiefenthal is a press your luck game, and being able to draw more cards always feels just a little deliciously like cheating.

“Manage and rule all aspects of Ancient Rome with a clever action selection mancala.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102680/trajan
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Weight: Mid-to-heavy
Genre: Mancala-based Eurogame
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4

One thing I have to caution people about Trajan is to not try to play it drunk. You see, the central action mechanism is a mancala, which is a series of 6 dishes, each of which has some number of colored token in it. Players take actions by taking all of the tokens from one dish and then placing them, one at a time, in other dishes in clockwise order. Each dish corresponds to a player action, and the player’s action for the turn is the action tied to the last dish they placed a peg in.

Players also get bonuses for dropping certain colors in certain dishes. The end result is a thinky puzzle where players have to balance claiming those bonuses with the action they want to take, and try to figure out how to set up the NEXT turn with where each peg ends up. A delightful challenge most of the time. A devil of a task with a couple beers in you.

The rest of the game is a relatively straightforward collection of euro minigames – a mixture of set collection and territorial control. But that’s a good thing, as there’s more than enough depth to the core mancala puzzle, certainly enough to make Trajan one of the very best games by one of the industry’s very best designers.

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376893/cyberion
Playing Time: 20-40 minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Solo Set Collection
Designer: Shadi Torbey
Players: 1-2 (really, 1)

As I’ve been getting into solo games more, the ‘Oniverse’ games have been demanding more attention. They are the line of games put out by Shadi Torbey and all share a similar aesthetic and complexity. The most famous of these is Onirim. I’ve played several and the one that stands out to me is Cyberion.

In Cyberion, players will have a deck of problems to solve, which is represented in card collections – things like ‘two 4s’ or ‘three red cards’. They will have 5 of those problems to solve and a hand of five cards they can use to assemble the cards they need to solve them. Along the way, the problems will get more difficult to solve, but the player will be able to spend solve problems to unlock upgrades, which allow them to draw more cards, get cards out of the discard, or solve problems with fewer cards.

The nice thing about Cyberion (and all of the Oniverse games I’ve played so far) is that the core game is simple and challenging without being HARD hard, but each game comes with 4-5 modules that you can mix in to make the game different and more challenging. This allows you to freely tune the game based on whether you want a mindless timewaster or a brainburning puzzle – a level of customization that suits solo games well.

“Develop future cities on the seafloor through politics, production, and science.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/247763/underwater-cities
Playing Time: 80-150 minutes
Weight: Medium-To-Heavy
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4

Vladimir Suchy is one of the industry’s most promising new designers, and so far, Underwater Cities is his most resilient and successful design. In this city, players will compete to build a network of cities, connect them to each other, and construct farms to earn more resources to further expand their empire. Fairly straightforward, although I do love the little domes that represent your city.

The engine of the game is a worker placement engine, unsurprisingly, but with a nice twist. At all times, players have a hand of three cards, representing crew members of three different colors. Worker placement locations also come in three colors. When you place a worker, you toss a card away. If the color of the card matches the color of the placement location, you get a bonus action as represented in the card. If not, the card does nothing (the worker you placed lacked the skills to go above and beyond the call of duty.)

Taking a lesser space may be worth it if the auxiliary action on the card. Conversely, somebody blocking you out of a color entirely may unknowingly hose you out of a key secondary action. The end result really muddles with the formula of a worker placement game, in the best brain burny sort of way.

“A wild west elimination dice game with secret teams.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/143741/bang-the-dice-game
Playing Time: 15 minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Dice-based Social Deduction
Designer: Michael Palm, Lukas Zach
Players: 3-8

A dice-based social deduction game. Each player is dealt a secret role facedown. Among those roles are a sheriff, a horde of outlaws trying to kill the sheriff, a deputy trying to help him, and a renegade trying to kill everyone. And no one knows who is who. On your turn, you’ll roll dice, and from the results, and deal damage to players within range. Hopefully, the person you’re shooting at is someone you actually WANT dead, but a huge part of the game is to lie to people about whether or not that’se the case. At any rate, if you lose all your health, you flip over your role card, and the table erupts as your role – and all of your lies – are exposed.

There aren’t a lot of party games on my list – I’ve always preferred smaller, cozier game nights with 3-4 people than bigger, more social-oriented games. Still, Bang: the Dice Game is definitely the source of some of the most hilarious nights of gaming I’ve ever had, so it remains stubbornly on the list as a reminder that I really should play more of these.

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126163/tzolkin-the-mayan-calendar
Playing Time: 90 Minutes
Weight: Mid-to-Heavy
Genre: Worker Placement & Resource Management
Designer: Simone Luciani, Daniele Tascini
Players: 2-4

Whenever people see Tzolkin on the table, they’re immediately intrigued. It’s the fuckin’ wheel, a beautiful choreography of gears turning, one that invites wonder and curiosity. And for good reason: mastering the wheel is how one masters the game.

Players start the game with 3 workers and on each turn, must either place workers on or take them off of various gears which are all connected to the central wheel. When you place them on, they’ll go on near the origin of the wheel, and when you pull them off, you’ll get rewards for doing so based primarily on how long they’ve been riding the gear. Letting some workers ride for a bit is crucial to getting big paydays, but you also need to compliment this with some short-term thinking, to be sure you have the resources you need to build and the food you need to feed your people.

Tzolkin isn’t a perfect game – it takes a little longer than it should and despite having tons of promise and intrigue, the gameplay path of building construction and wonders never seems to pay off. Despite all of that, it’s a meaty, thinky take on worker placement that will likely never leave your collection once it calls it home.

“Art is so subjective! Don’t like the color? Change the rules so you can win!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161417/red7
Playing Time: 5-10 minutes
Weight: light
Genre: Rule-changing card game
Designer: Carl Chudyk, Chris Cieslik
Players: 2-4 players

If you see me out at a con, odds are Red7 is in my backpack – an extremely quick brain-burny card game that game designers just seem to love.

Each players have a hand of cards and build a tableau in front of them. In the center of the game is a rule, such as ‘highest card’ or ‘most even numbers’. When a player’s turn arrives, there is one central rule – they have to be winning when their turn ends. They can do this by playing a card to the tableau, or instead putting it in the middle, overriding the central rule. They can even do both, but burning your cards too fast can leave you high and dry.

This is a fast, brutal play – it is entirely possible that you won’t have a legal play in your opening hand. But the hands are quick and fun enough that no one ever seems to mind when that happens.

Battle together to fight off zombies in the Old West… or die trying.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/331224/zombicide-undead-or-alive
Playing Time: 60 mins
Weight: Medium
Genre: Horde bashing ‘Dungeon Crawl’
Designer: Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien, Nicolas Raoult
Players: 1-6

I’ve played several of the Zombicide games and none of them really spoke to me – until this one. I don’t know what it is, I think the western theme really just speaks to me.

Like all Zombicide games, your motley crew of cowboys is given a simple task (usually ‘find a foozle then get out of town’), and then everyone needs to work together to make it happen. Zombies die in waves quickly and satisfyingly, but they also spawn in waves, so there’s that.

But something that seems different – at least to me – about Zombicide: Undead or Alive is that the characters are well-designed enough that stories just generate themselves. In my last game, I was chucking dynamite from a brothel window to clear a path so that a straggling player could jump a train that was close to leaving town. Normally, missions in games like this feel mechanical, but after this one was over, we all just wanted to talk about how we wanted to watch the movie version of this experience. Games are most magical when they can create moments that memorable.