Author: Damion Schubert (Page 11 of 125)

Designer: Matt Leacock

The grandfather of modern cooperative gaming, Pandemic is one of the most popular games that has ever been made. You play a member of a team tasked with fighting a world crushing epidemic.

Interesting Mechanic: Epidemics. How epidemics spread is interesting. Every turn, you will flip over a couple of cards to determine which cities will get one disease cube. If a city gets more than three cubes, shit goes sideways fast. However, if a player draws an EPIDEMIC card before this phase, you will draw a card from the bottom of the deck, then shuffle the discard pile – which includes the card you just drew – and put it on TOP of the deck before revealing your epidemic cards. This rule means that the same handful of cities are the ones under constant threat, and players have a good idea of which cities are always at risk and can accomodate accordingly. Understanding the cycling of the Epidemic deck is the key to success in Pandemic.

Pandemic is one of the games that I’ve played the most on this list, but it’s since been surpassed by other coop games – some of which appear on this list. Still, I consider it to be one of the classic gaming essential gateway games that should be in almost any board gaming collection.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)

Designed by: Frank Brooks, Stephen Hand, Kevin Wilson

In this assymetrical game, you and your friends will hunt Europe for everyone’s favorite bloodsucker, determined to kill him. Then one of you will find him, and go ‘fuck, I’m totally not prepared to go mano a mano with Dracula’ and running away like a frightened child.

Interesting Mechanic: Hidden Trail. Every other character in the game has a pawn on the board, and is clearly visible to everyone. Dracula, however, is not – he moves without leaving a trace, by playing cards tied to locations that leave a trail. Other mechanics the hunters have allow them to find traces of this trail, that allows them to spiral onto Dracula, corner him until help arrives, and then try to bring him down before Dracula wins by causing Bad Things ™ to happen.

Fury of Dracula is somewhat of a confusing game, and it’s likely that players won’t ‘get it’ the first time they play it. However, once you understand the mechanics and the limitations of what Dracula can do, it’s a very tightly balanced game that almost always provides for a tight, tense ending.

(Photo Credit: Sorted Gaming)

Designer: Matt Leacock.

In Roll Through the Ages: the Bronze Age, you’re running a fledgling civilization. You’ll need to roll some dice, which translates directly into the food and resources you need. Those resources can be used to build Monuments (i.e. Wonders), technological advancements, stave off disaster, build new cities (i.e. unlock new dice) and, of course, feed your people, who frankly can get a little whiny if you don’t.

Interesting Mechanic: It’s got to be the pegboard, right? I mean, that’s just fun.

Roll Through the Ages: the Bronze Age is a simple, compact, short gaming experience that does a great job filling in between heavier games. I haven’t played the followup (set in the Iron Age) but reviews of that one suggests that it’s more complex and not as streamlined as the Bronze Age is.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Scott Almes

In Tiny Epic Galaxies, you are a space-faring civilization, looking to colonize new planets blah blah blah. You know the drill by now.

On player’s turn, they will roll a handful of dice. The dice results will grant them resources: energy and culture, or they will let them colonize, expand or activate a planet. Their goal is to gain 21 points, which they can do by either colonizing planets or by upgrading their home world, which grants them more ships and dice to roll.

Interesting Feature: Culture. The energy resource can merely be spent to reroll dice on your turn. Culture, on the other hand, can be spent on another player’s turn to copy their action. This allows those players to leap ahead of other players by getting free actions. Culture is a great mechanic in that it keeps you engaged on other player’s turn. It’s also the strongest move in the game, and feels overpowered until players understand that culture-generating planets need to get off the board as quickly as possible.

Tiny Epic Galaxies fits a solid, hour-long galactic expansion game into your pocket. It’s relatively easy to explain and fun to play.

(Photo Credit: Gameology)

Designer: Ted Alspach

Don’t you want to be a city planner? Suburbia gives you the chance to zone your city just the way you want. So go ahead, put those undesirables next to the airport and the garbage dump!

Suburbia is a simple game: players buy tiles and add them to their cities. Every turn, players buy one hex, and add it. Where the hex is added will have effects on their cities, including the population, the popularity and the income of the city. Residential zones will add population, for example, whereas building a commercial sector will bring the bucks rolling in. All three things need to be managed and maximized to be successful.

Interesting Mechanic: The Real Estate Market. The prices for various buildings depend on how long they’ve been on the market. Something that you really want may come on the market on your turn, but have the most expensive price possible. This is an incredibly simple mechanism that creates a dilemma – while you are tempted to wait a turn to let the price fall naturally, there’s not guarantee it will still be there if your opponents snag it before you.

Suburbia often gets compared to Castles of Mad King Ludwig which is a game by the same designer. Suburbia is less wacky, and many players prefer the simpler pricing mechanic of the Real Estate Market. The biggest problem with Suburbia (that Castles solved) is that the game does require you to have a tad too much awareness of what’s happening in your opponent’s cities (airports score based on how many exist in all cities, for example), which can be hard to track. It’s still a game that is likely to appeal a great deal to people who like things that feel like SimCity.

(Photo Credit: Dad’s Gaming Addiction)

Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede

Carcassonne is a great game, but honestly gets old and simple after a while. Since then, there have been several derivatives of the game, most of which are as good or better. Carcassone: the City is my favorite.

Player take turns placing tiles. If they complete a feature (such as houses, roads, castles or markets), they score it. Very Carcassonne.

Interesting Mechanic: The Wall. In the base Carcassonne, the city may grow organically in any direction. This is not the case in The City. Once you are a third of the way through the game, completing and scoring a feature allows players to extend the city wall around the city from the gate. This constrains your building option, and forces completion of features for scoring. Players can also put guards on the wall, which scores for players based on the number of special features they see.

The tile-laying game is a simple, intuitive genre and the wall adds a new, interesting scoring mechanic to it which also helps to constrain the building and push the game to the end. This game is both simpler and yet more strategically interesting than base Carcassonne, and has a very satisfying table presence.

(Photo Credit: Cardboard & Wood)

Designer: Philippe Keyaerts

In Evo, you control a dino species vying for domination amongst your fellow great beasts before a meteor smashes into the island, thus proving the futility of life and trying to make an effort to excel at all.

During your turn, you’ll place dinosaurs, migrate them, occasionally attack each other, and then build your own dinosaur. At the end of each turn, a climate wheel will turn, which will determine which biomes are too hostile to support life, forcing you and your opponents into conflict with each other to escape the coming genocide. The game ends when you flip the tile showing the meteor.

Interesting Mechanic: Build Your Own Dinosaur. Once per turn, there is an auction for new mutations for your dinosaur species (using a very clever auction mechanic). Examples of mutations are feed (increases monster speed), horns (increasing attack power), eggs (reproduction rate) and fur (increasing resistance to cold), among others.

I first played Evo with Will Wright, when I was contracting for Maxis. He looked at it as a source of inspiration for Spore, thus the game has always had a goofy place in my heart. That said, I did like the First Edition better, as I preferred the goofy, cartoony art.

(Photo Credit: Clever Move)

Designer: Andreas Seyfarth

San Juan is a trading game game, where players attempt to manufacture and trade goods in order to build a larger and larger trade value. Players will choose roles, and then use the cards in their hands to produce goods, sell those goods, build buildings, and other actions in order to build a Caribbean trading empire.

Interesting Mechanic: Player Roles, Actions and Privileges. Each player chooses an player role, which comes with an action and a privilege. Other players also get to perform the action, but not to perform the privilege. An example is that the everyone can build when the Builder builds, but only the Builder gets a discount for doing so.

San Juan was designed by the creator of Puerto Rico, and it shows. An elegant, simple trading game that is easy to teach but difficult to master. In many ways, it is similar to Race for the Galaxy, which may have more depth, but San Juan gets the edge on being easier to parse and teach.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Philip DuBerry.

The palace ballroom is a place full of conniving snakes vying for favors from the noble classes, and you are ready to prove that you are the greatest of all kiss-asses.

In Courtier, there is a tableau of various members of the elite royal class, including notable merchants, generals, clergy and the noble class. You will attempt to curry favor with these individuals, playing cards which let you place influence blocks next to these. If you have more cubes than anyone else on a noble, you control that noble. Your goal is to complete quests, which require you to target specific nobles for control. Also, having more influence in one sector of the ballroom will grant you additional powers — the person who controls the clergy can generate influence twice as fast, for example.

Interesting Mechanic: The Queen. The queen is the center of political intrigue, and she moves things along based on her whims. Whenever someone scores a quest, she flips a new card, which can dramatically reshape the politics of the ballroom (the queen is a fickle one, and cadres can fall in and out of favor quickly). One of these cards is the grim news that the Queen has been arrested. When this card is flipped, the game comes to an end.

Courtier is a lighter game that has drawn comparison to Steve Jackson’s Revolution (which I haven’t played). It’s a tad simplistic, but its easy to turn and is often a hoot.

(Photo Credit: Wired)

Designed by Bruno Faidutti.

Get money, use it to invest in real estate, and dodge hit men. No, this is not the New York mob scene, but a game called Citadels.

Interesting Mechanic: Action Roles. At the start of each round, players will draft one out of several possible roles. Then, each role is resolved in order based on the speed of the role. Each role has strong powers that interact with the board – the Assassin can kill another role, for example, which prevents that role from actually taking his or her turn (note that the player controlling the Assassin has no idea who has that role, and in fact, it may be that no one does!). The Warlord can destroy another player’s buildings. The thief can steal gold. So on and so forth.

After the action is taken, players then take their actual church, taking money, building buildings, or putting new possible buildings in their hands to be built later. The game ends when one person builds 8 districts.

Citadels is in a lot of collections because it is a simple game that seats 8 players. It can be a lot of fun, but it can also drag a little, if your game has too many directly offensive roles.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)