The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Author: Damion Schubert (Page 8 of 136)

70. Nidavellir (2020)

“Assemble and prepare a formidable crew of dwards to fight the mighty Fafnir!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/293014/nidavellir
Playing Time: 45 Minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Auction
Designer: Serge Laget
Players: 2-5

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A simple bidding game, where players are bidding to build the best dwarf army. At it’s core, it’s a set collection game, where each color of dwarf has different scoring rules.

The auction system is the engine of the game. Players start the game with a small handful of coins of different denominations. Each round, cards to purchase are put at one of three locations, and players put one coin at each location (highest bid at alocation gets first pick of the cards there, and so on) and add the dwarf to their tableau.

But if a player bids with their ‘0’ coin, they can upgrade one of their unspent coins – basically conceding getting the last pick on a location for the ability to place bigger and bolder bets in the future. The end result is a light, tight auction game that still has the ability to explode at the top end into long, combotastic turns.

71. Cascadia (2021)

“Create the most harmonious ecosystem as you puzzle together habitats and wildlife.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/295947/cascadia
Playing Time: 3-45 minutes
Weight: Light-to-Medium
Genre: Tile Drafting
Designer: Randy Flynn
Players: 1-4

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A simple, nature-themed tile drafting game, players will compete in order to build the best tract of Pacifica wildlands.

At the start of a turn, the player chooses to draft a land tile, and a critter tile that has been randomly placed with it.  The land tile has rules about what can be placed on it.  As for the critters, well – they have different scoring criteria chosen randomly at the beginning of a game. For example, bears may only score points if not placed next to other bears.

And…. that’s pretty much the whole game.  It may not sound like much, but it’s got plenty of thinly puzzleness going for it, while still being simple to teach and with a wildlife theme that has proven repeatedly to hit well with more casual board gamers.  There’s a reason why this one blew up – it’s a great, simple game that does what it does extremely well.

72. Hens (2023)

“Place hen cards in the yard, create large groups, gather eggs and collect medals.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/348447/hens
Playing Time: 15-20 mins
Weight: Light
Genre: Chicken-Based Tableau Builder
Designer: Giampaolo Raxxino
Players: 1-4

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Once upon a time, there was a wonderful game called Arboretum, a game where players would try to build the perfect tree park in front of them. It haunted this list for years before eventually falling out of favor because, frankly, the scoring for the game was a beast, a complicated affair that took an otherwise simple game and made it difficult to teach.

Hens takes the same engine, but simplifies the endgame scoring. Players will take turns drawing two cards (either blind or from the top of the discard), and then discard one while adding the other to the 4×3 tableau in front of them – following some strict rules about what can be placed next. Once 12 cards are in front of each player, their barnyards are scored – but only a couple of groups are hens – their largest and (if different) one group of hens they chose halfway through the game.

This game works better than Arboretum because while Arboretum let you place more freely but punished you in the scoring phase, Hens instead gets to simpler scoring with harsher placement rules – you can only place cards next to cards that are the same breed of hens, or with a number off by one. By moving the thinking here, the game gets more restrictive but its far easier for players to internalize when they’re being successful.

73. Anachrony (2017)

“Use Exosuits & time travel to ensure your vision for the future after the cataclysm.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/185343/anachrony
Playing Time: 30-120 Minutes
Weight: Heavy
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Dávid Turczi, Richard Amann,Viktor Peter
Players: 1-4

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The world has already suffered ONE apocalypse, and your scientists have warned you that the worst is yet to come. You’re going to need to bend heaven and earth to get off this rock before the sun explodes, which will take not just scavenging across the ravaged hellscape that is our planet, it will also take… time travel.

At it’s core, Anachrony is mostly a worker placement game. However, the time travel is the clear differentiating feature of the game. You have the ability to go forward in time and borrow resources from yourself. The catch is, of course, much like in Avengers: Endgame you also got to go and put those things back, or the resulting paradoxes will wreak havoc upon your efforts and may doom you entirely.

Anachrony is a massive beast of a game, but it’s not nearly as complex as its intimidating board would suggests. It does have a lengthy playtime, so you’re not going to play it too often. So if you go shopping for this game, know that while you definitely DO want the cool Mech Suit upgrade, you probably DON’T need any of the expansions.

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74. Century- Golem Edition (2017)

“Snatch up costly crystals and synthesize them to create wondrous golems.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232832/century-golem-edition
Playing Time: 3-45 Minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Engine Building
Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi
Players: 2-5

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Splendor sucks, play this instead.

This is an incredibly simple, easy-to-teach order fulfillment game where players will purchase cards that allow them to acquire and convert resources into the needed gems required to summon golems. You can teach it in 5 minutes and play 3 games in an hour. Just a nearly perfect filler game with a beautiful presentation

75. Orléans (2014)

“Craftsmen, scholars & monks can help you reign supreme—but who will turn up to help?”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/164928/orleans
Playing Time: 90 minutes
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Bag Builder
Designer: Reiner Stockhausen
Players: 2-5

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The progenitor of the genre of bag builders, it usually competes on my list with Altiplano, a fine game that’s a little better out of the box if for no other reason than it has Llamas.  But this list tends to consider games including their expansions, and the expansion support for Orleans is very good.

In Orleans, you’ll start with a bag of workers, and every turn you’ll pull a handful of workers out of the bag, and these are the resources you have to play with Combinations of workers can be used to (among other things) acquire more workers, or alternatively wander the map and build trading posts.  The former also tends to unlock additional powers, whereas the latter is more about chasing pure points.

Like most other novel mechanics in surprise hit games, bag building has since made its way into a LOT of games, but few have managed to capture the magic that Orleans did, perhaps by focusing on simplicity. But there is one bag builder that does it a little better, and we’ll get to it in a bit.

76. Unsettled (2021)

“A cooperative survival game in the bizarre and wondrous reaches of deep space.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/290484/unsettled
Playing Time: 60-90 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Story-Driven Cooperative
Designer: Tom Mattson, Mark Neidlinger
Players: 2-4

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In Unsettled, players crash land onto an alien planet, where they must work together in order to find their way off. The mechanics are relatively simple – players can explore and scan, mostly, to find what they need to get off that rock – but the physics of each planet is different, and therefore the puzzle on each planet you find yourself on is completely different. Left relatively unsaid is that it’s pretty weird how your crew keeps crashing into planets.

One thing that really stands out in Unsettled is the writing. Normally, writing in board games is either very dry or very generic. Unsettled is… funny – unafraid to be cheeky and even point out the core absurdities of the game’s central premise. Which is important — a mission-based scenario system works so much better if players are eagerly looking forward to unlocking the next story nugget in the narrative.

Beyond that, the impressive thing about Unsettled is how differently each planet plays. I will confess that the replayability of each planet is somewhat limited – once you know the schtick of the planet and you’ve heard the big story beats before, they lose their punch – but there are 11 planets you can acquire and we’ve replayed the game tons and feel we are nowhere near exhausting even the planets we have visited. If you have a group that likes fun and silly cooperative experiences, this has a good chance to be a hit.

77. SETI – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2024)

“Search for signs of alien life by launching probes and analyzing distant signals.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/418059/seti-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence
Playing Time: 40-160
Weight: Medium-Heavy
Genre: Science-Based Euro
Designer: Tomas Holek
Players: 1-4

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A good way to think about SETI is ‘the next heavier step beyond Terraforming Mars and Ark Nova‘. It’s a relatively heavy euro that still feels accessible due to the scientific theme, which is well integrated. Players choose from a handful of actions, limited primarily by resources, as they scan the skies for alien radio chatter as well as launch probes into space and landers onto planets to continue their search. The center of the board is a delightful rotating solar system that constantly changes what you can see with your scans and adjusts the paths that your probes will need to take.

Favorite Design Element: Eventually, your table WILL find aliens – two different species, chosen randomly out of 5 – and each alien basically changes the game in significantly different ways. One might need to fly to jupiter to mine for alien fossils, or send radio signals out to space and recieve a response (and rewards) several turns later. The alien races tend to offer more powerful cards and abilities and more lucrative scoring opportunities – if you can figure out how to take advantage of them.

SETI is not without it’s problems. Of particular note, it plays much better at 3 than at 4. This is due not just to waiting between turns, but also in a reduced number of solar system rotations – which while delightful can also disrupt all your plans when it happens on another player’s turn. Still, if you like science-themed euros or chasing E.T, this is a good and rewarding experience.

78. Lords of Waterdeep (2012)

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/110327/lords-of-waterdeep
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Weight: light-to-midweight
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson
Players: 2-5

Image from boardgamegeek.com

Still very likely the best entrypoint for eurogaming, Lords of Waterdeep is a relatively straightforward worker placement game, where players place workers to gather resources, which are used to fulfill contracts. Only in this case, the player plays as a, well, Lord in the city of Waterdeep, and the resources the player is gathering are adventurers (warriors, thieves, clerics and wizards) which are used to fulfill contracts that are ‘quests’.

One of my favorite things in worker placement games is when the board expands with new placement options, and Lords of Waterdeep has a simple but elegant one, where players can choose to build new locations themselves (and then get a commission every time another player uses their space). It’s viable enough that being a pure builder is a completely viable victory path – provided you choose buildings other people want to use – and also ensures every game unfolds differently.

Also, do not sleep on the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion. Not only does it add a corruption mechanic (new, extremely lucrative worker placement spots are opened up, but they require taking costly corruption tokens to use), but it also expands Lords of Waterdeep to be a six-player game, and a good one. Turns remain quick, and there’s juuuuuuust enough interaction to keep the table honest and interesting.

79. Comic Hunters

“Try to add rare and valuable comic books to your collection.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/322616/comic-hunters
Playing Time: 60 mins
Weight: light
Genre: Auction & Set Collection
Designer: Robert Coelho
Players: 1-4

Image from boardgamegeek.com

A simple set collection with four minigames to build your collection. One is a basic draft. Another is a straightforward auction. The third is a press your luck element, but the highlight of the game is the fourth, which is a ‘walking the convention floor’ where you’ll slide one card inside of a 5×5 grid and then take all cards that match symbols in a horizontal or vertical line. Afterwards, players will build collections, trying to target more lucrative heroes and certain symbols (such as ‘first appearance’ and ‘epic fights’).

This game was the first major game for Robert Coelho, where it was a major hit in his home country of Brazil. This year, finally this Marvel-licensed game managed to become widely available in American markets.

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