Author: Damion Schubert (Page 5 of 125)

Designer: Stefan Feld

A brilliant worker placement game, and arguably Stefan Feld’s best work. The Dice Tower guys rag on Trajan for being just a standard worker placement point salad experience with a Mancala tacked on – and they aren’t entirely wrong. However, the Mancala is central to the game experience, and brilliantly executed.

The game’s not perfect. It’s not a very attractive game, and the trade action is kind of clunky and hard to describe. It’s also got limited interaction with other players. Still, trying to plan 2 or 3 turns ahead is very difficult, and breaks your brain in very interesting ways. Trajan is a game I’ll constantly push to the table if given a chance.

Key Mechanic: The Mancala-based action selection. Scholars estimate that the Mancala is a game that has existed at least 1300 years, and a variant of it is the centerpiece of Trajan’s worker placement engine. Each player has a six bowls in front of them in a circle, which correspond with six actions the players can take. On his turn, the player takes all the beads in a single bowl, and puts them into consecutive bowls. When he places the last bead, the bowl that bead goes in dictates which action he takes (military, merchant, trade, etc). Beads are different colors as well — getting certain colors into certain bowls can trigger secondary actions or benefits – edges which are necessary to succeed.

The mancala is an absolutely delightful gameplay element.  That being said, it can really befuddle players if they try to plan too many turns in advance. Which is frequently hilarious. If you like games that break your brain in interesting ways, this is a great one.

(Photo Credit: Metagames)

Designer: Jacob Fryxelius

You lead a corporation that stands on the precipice of colonizing Mars, probably for the express purpose of strip mining it aggressively. However, to do so, you’ll need to earn resources and money to engage in various tactics that make the planet more livable, which includes tactics such as developing predators that eat your opponent’s pets, and frequently throwing a wide variety of asteroids at the planet’s surface. You know, for fun!

The core mechanic of the game is to purchase cards, and then spend resources to put them in your tableau in front of you, which generally makes you more efficient and helps you to heat the planet, provide it oxygen, and colonize it. As you play cards, you’ll try to maximize synergies, which means it very much is what many consider an engine-building game.

Interesting Mechanic: Starter Corporations.  It seems like a minor thing, but I love the way they handle corporations for new players. In most games, you ask new players to choose a role, class or whatever before they understand the game. This creates an early bit of choice paralysis for those players, and a sense of dread they aren’t playing the game correctly because they miss the trigger or using powers they have. Terraforming Mars gets around this by creating very simple Starting Corporations that players can choose for their first game. This corporation gives them a mass of money and a wad of early cards, but has no ongoing benefits to track beyond this. While these corporations are nowhere near as powerful or useful as the other Corporations, they eliminate the early problems for learning players, so those players can instead focus on what’s in their hand, and learning the game in general.

Terraforming Mars is really one of my favorite games right now, and one of the real pleasant surprises of the last year. It does tend to get a little long if you play with the expert cards that come in the base box, but in general, no one seems to mind the longer game if it’s not their first. Highly recommended.

Designer: Eric M. Lang

There are many territorial control games, but this is the best one where you will regularly scream “Blood for the Blood God!”

Chaos in the Old World is a wargame that involves the four gods laying waste to an Old Earth where, to be clear, it very obviously sucks to be a human. On your path to conquest, you will populate the realm, go to war with your other gods, and kill just oodles of human flotsam that manages to wander in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Interesting Mechanic: High Assymetry. The interesting thing is that the four gods have entirely different mechanics, which are driven by their action decks. Khorne favors the direct approach of just killing everything, for example, whereas Nurgle seeks to infect the world with his plague, Tzeentch seeks to unlock hidden mystic arts, and Slaanesh seeks to help the world get its freak on. Not only are the actions each god can do strongly different, but the objectives they are trying to complete each turn is very different as well, and each is pursuing a very strongly different avenue of victory points.

Chaos in the Old World is a fantastic game – easily my favorite ‘wargame’. It’s pretty quick to teach, but can take a couple games for players to really master it (the assymetric nature of the Gods means its hard to understand what your opponents can and want to do until their second game). The game’s biggest flaw is that it pretty harshly requires 4 – the assymetric sides stumble a bit when one of the Gods no longer has to deal with certain mechanics meant specifically to counter it.

Also, the Horned Rat expansion makes the game even better. FIrst off, it makes the game play 5 pretty well, and it does a balance pass on some of the gods power cards. The new god that is added is just a crazy, crazy sea of rats that just add to the titular chaos.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Friedemann Friese

Ever want to live the exotic life of an Enron executive with an interest in investing in literal garbage? Then Power Grid might be the game for you!

In Power Grid, you will buy power plants in an auction, and then buy the resources you need to power those power plants. You’ll then build buildings and connect them to your grid. The player who has managed to connect and power up the most buildings by the end of the game is the winner.

Interesting Feature: Resource Speculation. There are four resources for sale that power the various power plants you can build: coal, oil, garbage and uranium. The price is set firmly by the availability of the resource – resources heavily in demand will skyrocket in price, and savvy players will seek out plants that use underexploited resources. It’s a very simple yet elegant solution that creates healthy competition and encourages players to seek out alternative strategies.

Power Grid is somewhat of a dry subject matter, but it really is one of the best, most tightly balanced eurogames ever made. Players who like building infrastructure and auction mechanics should consider it a must-play.

(Photo Credit: Thoughts from the Gameroom)

Designers: Andrea Chiarvesio, Luca Iennaco

Kingsburg is a realm besieged. You have been tasked to defend it! However, Kingsburg is apparently a corrupt swamp, and the only way to actually defend it is to kiss the ass of various nobles, who after a little cajoling are willing to shell out the resources you need to defend the realm.

Interesting Mechanic: Dice Placement. You and everyone else will be rolling dice. Once rolled, you go in turn placing them – if you have a 1, 4 and a 5, you can place on the 1, 4, 5 spots with one die, the 6 and 9 spots with two dice, or the 10 spot with three dice. Each spot corresponds to a different advisor, and higher level advisors give more and better resources. Also, only one player can place on a spot at a time, meaning that good play requires tracking your opponent’s die rolls, and blocking their placement whenever possible.

After this phase, players use the resources to build buildings, which grant them victory points, defenses for the upcoming invasion, as well as various powers that let them break the rules (such as the ability to reroll dice in certain situations).

Kingsburg is a great game that never fails to get a good reaction, both from gamers and non-gamers, due to its simplicity but depth. Warning, though – if you get it, be sure to get the second edition. The first edition had a fatal flaw that required an expansion to fix, and that expansion is included in the second edition.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)

Designers: Bruno Cathala, Bruno Faidutti

You’re moving to colonize Mars, launching rockets from a steampunk-esque earth in Jules Vernian inspired spacecraft and assumedly while twirling your ridiculous Victorian moustache.

Mars is divided into several quadrants. Each quadrant will be scored based on who has the most colonists in them during each scoring phase. In addition, each player has secret objectives, that may strongly incentivize them to pursue specific locations or alternate strategies.

Interesting Mechanic: Role Selection. Each player is given 9 role cards, each of which allows them to try to get some colonists onto rockets (hopefully) heading for Mars, or to somehow mess with the board state. The explorer lets you move colonists on planet, for example, whereas the saboteur lets you destroy a rocket ship (and its inhabitants) on the launch pad. The roles are called in a specific order, which determines turn order, but two players may play the same role on the same turn. Several of the roles are fairly safe and go easy, but there are some high risk, high reward roles that may be ruined by the choices of players who have gone before them.

I love Mission: Red Planet. The art is fantastic, the gameplay is very simple, and yet it also has a significant (and somewhat surprising) amount of direct conflict with other players. This is a game a lot more people should be playing (and we likely will see more of now that it’s been reprinted).

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Peter Hawes

In Francis Drake, you are a privateer raiding the Spanish Main.  You will need to provision your ship, filling it with cannons, crewmen, and trade goods.  Then you’ll go on a lackadaisical cruise through the Caribbean, trading, invading and pillaging as you see fit.

Interesting Mechanic: Provisioning.  Provisioning is interesting in Francis Drake.  Players walk a one-way path in a hero placement game.  They can’t place any place that anyone else placed, and they can’t go backwards, which means that players have to compete for more important resources, which may limit how far they can sail or how ambitious their military aims can be.  Mastering the provisioning game is the key to mastering Francis Drake.

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Secret Location Choosing.  Once ships are placed, players take turns placing disks declaring their intention to go to a location.  Each disk is numbered from one to four, and is placed face-down.  Once all are placed, they are revealed, and players this do their turn in that order.  Given the first player to land on a location each turn gets additional benefits, this secret order placement allows for a certain amount of bluffing and posturing in order to make this interesting.

Super cool bonus thing: Treasure Chests.  When you capture silver, gold or gems, you get to hide it in a cool little cardboard chest.

Francis Drake is a very cool, superinteresting eurogame with several different innovations that will break your brain in interesting ways.

(Photo Credit: Eagle Gryphon Games)

Designer: Corey Konieczka

Star Wars: Rebellion has frequently been called ‘Star Wars in a box’, and that’s pretty apt. You play as one of the two factions – Rebels or Imperials, and based on what you choose, you have an entirely different game experience. The Empire’s goal is to find and eliminate the rebel base. The Rebel’s goal is far simpler – survive.

The feel between playing the two sides is pretty stark. Playing as the rebels is smothering – the Imperials will at any given time have two to three times the number of ships on the board than you will, and some of them will be death stars. Their tactics will be limited to a game of sabotage, disruption and hit & run raids. The Empire, on the other hand, has overwhelming resources but quickly discovers it’s insufficient to quell a rebellion living by hit-and-run raids. They will need to split their focus between hunting for the base and more mundane pursuits, such as locking enemy agents in carbonite and blowing up planets for funsies.

One thing that does bear mentioning is that I don’t think I’ve ever played an assymetric game that is this well balanced before. Nearly every game I’ve played has really come down to the loser being one to two turns away from pulling it off. That being said, the game is long, and don’t be fooled by the player count on the box, it is meant to be played as a two-player experience. Also, frankly, combat is very clunky, far moreso than the rest of the game. Still, this is an excellent, excellent board gaming experience. And it will stroke all of your Star Wars feels.

Also, and I can’t stress this enough, there are tiny little death star figurines.

Key Mechanic: the Survival Timer. By default, the rebels need to survive roughly twelve turn to declare victory. But the rebels can shorten this by completing objectives, which are randomly drawn throughout the game. Defeating Darth Vader in a fight might shorten the timer by two, whereas freeing a subjugated system might be worth a point – if you have the card. In general, games tend towards 7-8 turns, in my experience.  But it makes for a compelling description of what the goal of the rebels is to do: simply survive.

These random missions really add to the frustrating feel of playing as the Empire attempting to deal with sporadic guerilla uprisings – you’re not sure WHY the rebels are attacking the places they’re attacking, and so you need to decide how to split your attention between countering their attacks and spreading out your search for the rebel base. Also, these missions really add to the overall thematic star wars feel of the game. There’s nothing like winning when you reveal that blowing up the death star grants you the victory points you need to steal a win when fighting in the same system as your rebel base.

(Photo Credit: Rock Paper Shotgun)

Designers: Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews

Probably the only game about building stained glass windows you’re likely to play. At the start of the game, players will choose a window pattern for their stained window, and then attempt to complete that pattern via dice drafting. Along the way, they’ll try to earn victory points by completing objectives on a couple of randomly drawn objective cards.

Sagrada takes about 30 minutes to play, looks extremely attractive and inviting on the table, and is easily grokked by even non-gamers. The primary downside is that the tools (a side mechanic you can use to mitigate bad rolls) tend to be a tad complex compared to the rest of the game. I’d consider playing the first game without them, even though they are essential for more competitive play to mitigate bad luck rolling.

Key Mechanic: Dice Drafting. Each round, one player rolls dice equal to twice the number of players plus one (i.e. 7 in a 3-player game). They then choose one die to add to their window, and then other players will choose clockwise until everyone has chosen, and then it goes back around (thus the player who rolls dice will get first and last pick).

One of the reasons that I love this game is that I love rolling dice, but I hate just rooting for big numbers. In Sagrada, you typically have a good reason to root for almost any number on the die. Still, just a great, great game and one of my surprise hits.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)

Designers: Christian Leonhard, Jason Matthews

Play as Nixon vs. Kennedy in a knife fight of a presidential campaign, which Nixon almost won by appealling to the most racist elements of America, but Kennedy managed to eke out a win based on pure charisma, a televised debate, and possibly by convincing some dead voters to get to the polls in Illinois.

1960: The Making of A President is a two player game made by the guys that made Twilight Struggle, and uses a very similar engine for the core mechanics. Many consider the latter to be one of the best board games ever made, but I prefer this one, because I’m a political junkie and this is by far the best game about American politics on the market.

Interesting Mechanic: Final Vote Tally. Counting victory points at the end of the game is normally not very interesting. However, in this game, you go state through state and decide who won the electoral votes. It feels very much like election night, and nails the overall theme of the game.

Now, just hope to god that no one updates this for 2016, because no one wants to relive that shit storm.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Meeple Lady)