Author: Damion Schubert (Page 10 of 125)

Designer: Vital Lacerda

Who wouldn’t want to play a game about being a middle manager at a car factory? OK, so it’s not the glitziest power fantasy, but in Kanban you’ll live the dream! You’ll place your worker in one of several departments, which allows you to create prototypes, produce cards, research new advances, and play office politics.

Kanban is a super-dense point salad of a game, and it can be daunting to track everything, as one placed worker can touch three or four aspects across the board. However, if you have a group that likes heavy Euros, it’s an intricate and rewarding experience with a gorgeous, if somewhat overwhelming, presentation.

Key Mechanic: Boss Lady. Kanban is a worker placement game, where up to two players can take the benefit of a department per turn. The second person to place gets a minorly lesser benefit. However, the interesting twist is that an NPC meeple that represents your Boss moves through that track. She not only blocks placement in certain spaces, but if she visits your department, she will examine your board state (and either reward you for success or punish you for failure, depending on if you play the easy or hard version of the game). Furthermore, she only makes a certain number of trips through the factory, meaning players can tactically place their characters in a way to accelerate the game to the end, if it’s advantageous to them.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Mac Gerdts

War never changes. Young boys are sent to die, for the sins and umbrages of men, while filthy war profiteers callously laugh all the way to the bank. You are one of those war profiteers.

Interesting Mechanic: Investment Equals Control. Each country takes their turn in order. However, control of a country is determined by the players who have invested the most in each country. One player may have two turns in a row, setting two countries on a collision course, while another player may have no country and just be letting his investments work for him, and the third may be looting a country as fast as possible before its inevitable economic collapse.

The actual turns involve moving around a roundel. Doing so lets them choose to produce more troops, earn revenue via taxes and move to take over more countries. Meanwhile, players are playing a seperate game entirely, trying to figure out to ride the wave.

Imperial 2030 is a game that looks like a wargame, but isn’t. It’s more of an economic game, albeit one with tanks and troops. The power of a country determines the values of a player’s investments. Imperial 2030 is an unusual game, and one that is somewhat hard for player’s to wrap their heads around. But it is deeply interesting, and I’d argue has something important to say about the confluence of money and warfare as well.

(Photo Source: Board Game Cafe)

Designer: Antoine Bauza

Tokaido is a story of a magical journey, where travelers walk a lonely road and occasionally hop in a hot springs with a monkey.

Interesting Mechanic: In each turn, the player who is furthest back on the road goes first. The goal of the game is really to stop as many places as possible, but you’re also competing with other players to hit those locations and complete sets of cards, so players will need to pick locations well without getting too far ahead of the rest of the travellers.  Players can jump far ahead of their competitors to get something they think is very important, but that means followers can pick up things they skipped at their leisure.

He can choose which stops to stop at – acquiring meals, stopping in hot springs, giving alms at temples, making friends, or viewing beautiful panoramas.

Want to capture that feeling of going on vacation and not having time to do everything you want to do? Then this game is for you. Seriously, this is a seriously beautiful, almost zen-like game, that is simple to learn and to play.

(Photo Credit: Dude, I Want That)

Designers: Richard Launius, Kevin Wilson

Bad things are afoot at the museum. Bad, many tentacled things. You and your buddies need to deal with these problems before losing your lives – or your sanity.

Elder Sign is a cooperative game that centers on going to locations, and trying to solve crises, which will give you the resources you need in order to gather the resources you need to close portals to another world. The art is pulled straight from Arkham Horror, which means its superb.

Interesting Mechanic: Cooperative Diceroller. The bane of most cooperative games is that they frequently can be shanghaied by one strongwilled player. Other games have solved this by adding traitor mechanics (Battlestar Galactica) or hidden objectives (Dead of Winter). This game takes another approach – it makes the game so random that its hard for other players to direct the whole game.

The dice-based nature of the game does mean that things CAN go very wrong very unexpectedly, but if you like coop games, the Lovecraftian theme and rolling lots of dice, this is a good, fast one.

(Photo Credit: Geek Dad)

Designer: Jason C Hill

Fortune and Glory is a big, bombastic game experience. It also happens to be dumb and silly, but still manages to be frivolous fun (I tend to over-index on shit that makes people laugh). Players are explorers in the vein of Indiana Jones, travelling the world to seek out (and compete to chase) rare artifacts. Along the way, they’ll be ambushed in cities, collect sidekicks and equipment, and compete against other players to get the best rewards. Don’t forget to download the accompanying music to add to the feel of the experience.

Fortune and Glory has one major flaw which is almost a killer, and that is that it has die rolls for movement. It’s no fun being the player who can’t seem to get out of North America while everyone else is raiding their second tomb. The other problem is, frankly, the box is a tombstone. It’ll eat the shelf space of four smaller games. But man, who doesn’t want a nazi zeppelin figurine?

Key Mechanics: Cliffhangers. When you face a challenge, you have to make some stat rolls based on your character’s attributes. If you fail – your turn ends instantly – it’s a ‘cliffhanger’, and you’ll pick up on defeating that challenge again on the start of the next turn. It’s a little clunky, but contributes awesomely to the feel of the experience.

Designers: Richard Amann, Viktor Peter, Dávid Turczi

Anachrony runs the unique distinction of being the first Time Travel board game that I haven’t thought was pretty dumb. And that’s pretty good.

In Anachrony, you are part of a post-apocalyptic society heading towards its final destruction. You are part of a colony of survivors, using the limits of time travel in order to prepare the resources you need to flee the planet. Or something. Honestly, I got confused.

Interesting Mechanic: Mech Meeples. You have four kinds of survivors. To place them, you will need to send them out in the wild in big mechs (slotting them into little slots in the mechs).  DIfferent survivors are better at different actions – getting bonuses to resources, for example, or being able to perform an action without resting. The idea that some meeples are better at certain actions than others is a very rich design space, and one I expect to see a lot more of in the future.

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Borrowing From Yourself. Missing resources you need to get what you want to do done? Why, just give your future self a phone call, and ask if you can borrow those resources! But if you do, don’t forget to get in your time machine later and repay yourself, or the resulting paradoxes may wreck your base.

Anachrony is a relatively heavy game and somewhat tough to wrap your head around. But if you like dense Eurogames, this is the one that finally manages to turn time travel into an interesting and believable mechanic.

(Photo Source: Punching Cardboard)

Designer: Ignacy Trzewiczek

Start with nothing, and forge a mighty empire, mostly by upgrading moldy ruins into fancy buildings, such as pyramids, casinos and circus tents.

Imperial Settlers is a tableau building game. Players will draw several cards per turn, and play them. Doing so will build buildings that adds to the capability of your kingdom – some generate resources every turn, others add effects that trigger when game events occur, and others give the players triggerable effects.

Interesting Mechanic: 3 Ways to play a card. Buildings you draw can be placed if you have the correct resources. However, these cards can also be ‘razed’ (thrown away) for a quick jolt of resources, or turned into trade routes (which allows players to pursue a steady resource stream). This mechanic helps ensure that almost every card you draw has some sort of utility, no matter when in the game you draw it.

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Factions. In many ways, Imperial Settlers is a reworking of 51st State, a work by the same designer set in a post-apocalyptic hellscape that narrowly missed this list. Imperial Settlers has one cool feature that makes this game a strong improvement – faction decks. Each player effectively has a unique set of cards that he draws from, and the decks are strongly assymetric, and lean on entirely different mechanics. This not only adds replay value to the formula, it also makes the game have much stronger and more ludicrous combos that fire off far more frequently.

Despite the above, many gamers still prefer 51st State for a few reasons – one that is frequently cited is the cutesy art style of Imperial Settlers. Still, if you like a relatively quick game that focuses on building an economic engine, either of these two games are great, but I’d have to give Imperial Settlers the nod.

(Photo Credit: Geek Dad)

Designed by Devin Low.

New York is under attack by the nefarious Magneto! You will need to fight back! But first, build a deck!

Legendary is a deckbuilding game in the spirit of Dominion. You start with a fist full of shield agents, which you can use to buy better heroes and fight bad guys. The better heroes you can recruit are all your classic heroes – Wolverine, Iron Man, or Captain America, but at this point they have so many expansions that you can play with almost any Marvel hero you can think of.  During the course of the game, you’ll want to recruit character that have good synergy with each other, and weed out the bad cards.

Meanwhile, the city is under attack. A new villain is drawn every turn, and every now and then they snag an innocent bystander to drag along with them.

Interesting Mechanic: Villains, Schemes and Master Strikes. Each game has a designated Supervillain. He’ll need to be defeated four times for you to win. Each supervillain has its own scheme, which is to say the mechanics that detail how they engage with the players. Most notably, there’s two cards that trigger the supervillain’s activities: ‘master strike’ abilities that trigger their attacks, and ‘scheme twist’ cards that move you further to the end of the game. The wacky thing is that the mechanics for each villain are all starkly different, which means that master strikes and scheme twists need to be handled very differently in each game. Not only are these mechanics usually thematically strong, they also add a lot of replayability to the game.

Legendary will often earn an upturned nose from hardcore gamers, but Marvel fans should love it. It’s also a ridiculously well-supported game. They’ve released a ton of expansions to this game now that have delved deep into the comic book hero vaults for new heroes, and do a good job of identifying potential new mechanics to add.

(Photo Credit: BoardGameGeek)

Designer: Antoine Bauza

If there’s a horde of crazed oni attacking your idyllic Japanese village, who ya gonna call? You, apparently.

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game where players take the role of mighty Taoist warriors, attempting to stave off the ghosts who are invading the village, attacking from all sides. Every turn adds one — or more — ghosts to the invading force, and if left unchecked, they’ll destroy the village. Players need to leverage their abilities and the innate abilities of the village locations, to survive this onslaught, which builds up to an attack by the notorious head honcho, Lu Feng.

Interesting Mechanic: The Village. Several coop games have randomly generated locations. However, the locations are more relevant here.  The Village is a randomly generated village of 9 buildings in a 3 by 3 grid, where each location offers different benefits to the ghost hunters. Skillful use of these location advantages is essential to success, which means that every game of Ghost Stories is a unique puzzle that needs to be solved.

Ghost Stories is very good, but very hard – one of the most difficult coop games I’ve played. The White Moon expansion helps soften this a good deal, but if you’re looking for an excellent coop experience that truly challenges your table, this is a good choice.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Vlaada Chvatil

In Codenames, you and a teammate will pretend to be spies, and then proceed to blame each other for ridiculous leaps of nonsense logic.

Codenames is a very casual game that plays about 10 minutes per game. Cards with words are laid out on the table in a 5X5 grid. Half represent your agents, and the other half represent the other team’s agents. On each player’s turn, the player will give a simple clue (such as “Milkshake: 3”) that tells the player a related word to tiles he wants his teammate to flip, and how many tiles that keywords points to. At that time, the other player makes guesses. If he reveals the proper hero, huzzah! The first team to reveal all of their agents is the winner.

Interesting Mechanic: Duet. The base game is designed for four players (two teams of two). However, Duet is a 2-person cooperative challenge. In this game, a random puzzle is assigned to players with double-sided cards, whereas each player only sees half of the puzzle.

Codenames has been a wild success for it’s designer Vlaada Chvatil, who let’s face it has one of the most remarkably varied work product in gaming (he also did the hilariously overcomplex Mage Knight Board Game). It has spawned multiple alternate versions, including a Disney one, a Marvel one, and one where the clues are just pictures.  Codenames is one of the most immediately successful gateway games released in years, and was an instant evergreen success when it launched.

(Photo Source: The Board Game Family)