Author: Damion Schubert (Page 9 of 125)

Designer: Donald X Vaccarino

Once upon a time, there was a game called Magic: the Gathering, a collectible card game. In this game, you build a deck outside the game, and bring it into battle. It did okay, but then Dominion came, with a different core idea — what if building the deck was actually the game?

The box art suggests that you’re trying to build a town or a kingdom or something, but the theme is pretty pasted on. In actuality, you’re building an engine. You start with a handful of copper cards, and use them to purchase available cards, which may be better money cards, victory points, or cards that let you draw more cards, thin your deck of useless cards, purchase more cards per turn, or mess with other players. It is the original deckbuilding game, and one that has been copied extensively by other games. We will see many more deckbuilders on this list.

Interesting Mechanic: Stable Source Piles. I could just say ‘deckbuilding’, but that would be too easy. Instead, I wanted to call attention to something that Dominion does that most of its copycats don’t do. Most of the competitors have a rotating market of cards – when one is purchased, it is replaced by a different card, which means that it might not be there when its your turn.

Dominion doesn’t work that way. It has about 16 stacks of cards, and each stack is identical. Someone else can buy your card and, assuming the pile isn’t fully depleted you can buy it too. This makes it much easier for you to try to target the engine you want to build. Furthermore, ten of the card stacks are chosen randomly from each game, and now that the game has a gazillion expansions, that random means a great deal of variance between games. Each game is, therefore, a different puzzle, with each player trying to figure out how to make the best engine out of the same available ingredients.

Dominion is only so low for me personally because I’ve played it so much I’m a little weary of it. Still, I do consider it an essential gateway game, and I’d go even farther and say that this is a game that literally every game designer should own.

(Photo Credit: Geek Dad)

Designers: Michael Palm, Lukas Zach

There’s a new sheriff in town.  And pretty much everyone wants to kill him.  But not everyone, and some may want to kill everyone else too.  And frankly, some people aren’t too bright, and just need to be put down.  Welcome to Bang! The Dice Game.

Interesting Mechanic:  Mostly Secret Roles. This game really revolves around the secret roles.  Unlike most Werewolf-inspired games, the bad guys know exactly who the sheriff is. However, one of the players may be a deputy, who is on the sheriff’s side.  And one of the other players may be a renegade, who is in fact trying to kill everyone at the table.

While the mechanics of this game seems to suggest that the Sheriff should lose more often than not, I’ve been repeatedly surprised at how often he manages to pull through.  This is a quick, fun party game that works great for casual gamers, and as a fill-in game for hardcore gamers between longer sessions.

Designers: Michael Keisling, Wolfgang Kramer

Compete with other players to find a beautiful, unspoiled island in Indonesia, exploit the fuck out of it, and then earn victory points by throwing a massive party to celebrate the ecological ruin you’ve wrought.

You are a ruler on the island of Java. You will take six actions. Actions include placing a tile, adding or moving citizens, building palaces in a city, dig irrigation or draw cards. The ultimate goal is to control large cities, and throw a festival in them.

Interesting Mechanic: Verticality. Java is a tile-laying game, but the tiles don’t lie flat, they stack on top of each other. Which answers the question of ‘how players take control of a city’. The player who has control of a city is the one with the highest citizen in it – only that player can actually score the city.

Java is out of print and hard to find nowadays, but it’s still a gorgeous game that adds a new verticality to the concept of territorial control.

(Photo Credit: Hiew’s Boardgame Blog)

Designer: Ted Alspach

You are an architect. Your boss is certified nuts. But he’s rich! So I guess you’ll just have to deal with his insane, nonsensical building requests. Hey, this actually reminds me of working in the games industry.

Each turn, players purchase new castle extensions, and attach them to their castle. Players are trying to make their castles meet certain victory conditions, but each player also has some secret objectives they may be trying to meet as well.

Interesting Mechanic: Crazy Castles. The best part of this game is that players will end up building a lot of castles that are just absurd – staircases that go down and then straight back up, for example. Or ampitheaters right next to a butchery. This game is surprisingly fun, mostly because all of the castles end up will be so absurd.

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Price Setting. When players buy new rooms, they don’t pay the bank. One player sets the prices for each of the rooms, and players pay that player. Doing well in the game depends on you correctly figuring out what pieces players are chasing, and figuring out how to make them pay top dollar for it without chasing them off.

Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a tidy little building game that usually elicits a few laughs. It does get a little repetitious and players with fat fingers are less enamored with manipulating some tiny pieces, but it’s a good game for ‘just beyond gateway’ level gamers.

(Photo Credit: Smashface)

Designed by Bruno Cathala, Mark Paquien

Yamatai is a lovely, isolated series of islands that the Queen has recently been interested in – just waiting to be exploited by speculators such as yourself!

In Yamatai, you will sail boats throughout the rivers in a valley. You will wander through this valley, collecting blessings, and building buildings, temples and arches. Building a building requires the player to deliver the appropriate type of boat to the island you want to build it on. Successfully doing so earns you victory points, but the boats you place can be used by your opponents to build as well. Most of your points are earned by placing buildings, but earning blessings is crucial for allowing you to collect advisors, most of which have huge game-changing effects in your favor.

Interesting Mechanic: Turn Order. During each turn, there are five face up randomly selected actions that the player can choose from. Each player grants some resource boats to the player, and may also have some secondary effects. The most important thing, though, is that the actions also have a number on them, which determine the turn order of the following turn (more powerful actions push your next turn later). Savvy players will learn to manipulate this in order to chain turns to be able to make strong moves without fear of interruption by their opponents.

Yamatai is an absolutely gorgeous game that is simple to learn but deep in strategy, and one of the stronger eurogames to have come out in the last couple of years.

(Photo Credit: GamesQuest)

Designed by Andreas Seyfarth

Want to live an idyllic life on an island living as a rich asshole plantation owner, exploiting impoverished colonists slaving away in the indigo fields while you sip Mojitos on the deck listening to JLo? Maybe Puerto Rico is for you.

Puerto Rico concentrates on the agrarian life of early Puerto Rico. Players will grow various goods (corn, indigo, coffee, for example) and may build buildings to refine them, and ship those goods off island.

Interesting Mechanic: Roles (Actions and Privileges). It uses a similar role rotation system as San Juan, and it works even better in the board game version. Players choose roles that let everyone take an action, but they get to use it first. However, in Puerto Rico, the design masterfully uses limited space and resources to allow players to really punish people. Yes, everyone gets to take part in a shipping phase, for example, but there’s only so much room on the boat – if you are savvy, you can make the shipping action a dead action for your neighbor by blocking all of his possible exports, resulting in him dumping his spoiled cocoa into the ocean.

One of the great classic Eurogames, Puerto Rico is perfect for people who find farming and trade compelling stuff. It is considered one of the all-time greats of the genre, though, and that reputation for excellence is pretty well warranted. A modern classic.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designers: Several

This game is perhaps the best game to play with friends who are drunk and also, at their core, terrible people. It is a very, very bad game to play with people who are not terrible people. Because they will quickly learn that you are terrible.

Cards Against Humanity is the same basic game as Apples to Apples, only R-rated (or X-rated with the right group). One player chooses a subject matter card and reads it aloud. It will either be a question, or it will have a blank that is filled in. Everyone else gives the questioner one card face down. He shuffles them, reads them aloud, and then based on whatever criteria he deems fit, chooses a ‘winner’ (usually aided a great deal by guffaws at the table), who will then have to sheepishly expose themselves as the person who is, in fact, that terrible.

Interesting Mechanic: Rando Calrissian. Our circle of friends chooses to play with the optional rule that you throw one card in randomly from the draw pile. This provides a truly random answer that is usually head-scratching nonsense, but more frequently than you’d think, turns out to be more terrible than all of you (fate has a cruel sense of humor). People LOVE it when Rando wins a hand. I have once seen Rando almost win a game.

Cards Against Humanity is a game that many hardcore gamers have come to mock and disdain. Countless similar game mechanics have been tried. But still, no game has made me laugh as frequently and as reliably as Cards Against Humanity. But then again, I’m a terrible person.

(Photo Credit: Chicago Tribune)

Designers: Wei-Hwa Huang, Thomas Lehmann

Explore the Universe! Colonize planets! Build a trade strategy focusing on cheap plastic crap! Roll for the Galaxy is the dice game inspired by Race for the Galaxy and is, in my opinion, a massive improvement on the formula.

Each turn, players roll dice. They can then choose to allocate those dice in ways that lets them explore, colonize, produce and trade with other players. Players can build projects that let them change the rules, or colonize planets they can exploit for resources.

Interesting Mechanics: Roll Activation. The best mechanic in the game is the best mechanic from Race for the Galaxy – while players may have dice set to fire multiple actions (Colonize, Explore, Trade, etc), each player can only guaruntee that one role will fire – i.e. he will declare that Explore will definitely fire. If he has dice set to one of the other actions (such as Trade) that doesn’t fire, then that die ends up wasted. Savvy players therefore will seek to maximize each turn by trying to guess what roles other players will activate, to maximize their turn efficiency.

Roll for the Galaxy is a great, small game that is easy to teach, quick to learn, and involves rolling a metric fuckton of dice. It still leans towards having too much iconography (which is what tortures it’s big brother Race for the Galaxy) but still packs a lot of fun in a small package.

(Photo Credit: Big Red Barrel)

Designer: Kevin Riley

You play as a Breach Mage, the last line of defense against really big bad monsters eager to destroy the last desperate remnants of Civilization, who hang out in a place called Gravehold which, frankly, does not sound like a great place to party. There you will attempt to make civilization’s last stand against the darkness, armed only with a handful of crystals and a spell called ‘spark’ which is absolutely as ineffectual as it sounds.

Interesting Mechanic: Cooperative Deckbuilding. There are a hoard of deckbuilding games, and there are a hoard of cooperative games, but these streams don’t cross very often. Aeon’s End does so fairly elegantly. Deckbuilding stacks are constant (like Dominion), and each mage has powers to help heal and manipulate the spells of their allies as they race against a rather aggressive clock.

Aeon’s End isn’t an easy game, and the game is paced in such a way that you constantly feel like you are in more trouble than you actually are. However, it does a very good job of creating a sense of cooperative stress and panic that is the hallmark of good cooperative games.

(Photo Credit: Miniature Market)

Designer: Paul Peterson

Guillotine is the most fun you can possibly have chopping off people’s heads, and as a bonus is perfectly in tune with the current political climate!

You and the other players are executioners, killing various noblemen in the wake of a popular revolution. Each turn, you will play one card from your hand, which manipulates the line to the guillotine, and then you’ll behead the guy at the front of the line. The guy who beheads the best collection of pretentious useless societal overhead is declared the winner!

Interesting Mechanic: Silly Art. If you think about it, this is a pretty dark design. I mean, you’re straight up whacking politicians, judges, and occasional misunderstood peasants and piss boys. But thanks to the very cartoony art style, you never feel bad about this, and could easily play this game with parents who normally are made squeamish by blood and gore.

Guillotine is a light, fun game that’s a great time filler between heavier games.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)