Author: Damion Schubert (Page 9 of 136)

“Through dreams, Freud’s followers delve into their clients’ unconscious minds.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/329500/unconscious-mind
Playing Time: 60-120 Minutes
Weight: Heavy
Genre: Contract Fulfillment
Designer: Laskas, Jonny Pac, Yoma, Antonio Zax
Players: 1-4 Players

As a young analyst in the early days of psychoanalysis, you’ll be following the footsteps of Freud. Your primary task will be dream analysis as well as talking with comrades and publishing treatises, all in the name of hopefully curing some patients and increasing your reputation.

This is a heavy game with a wide array of moving parts. For me, the cool innovation is the mix of engine building and worker placement. At it’s core, Unconscious Mind is a worker placement game. However, each placement location is associated with an auxiliary action called an ‘inkpot action’, which is triggered as well. What’s interesting is that these inkpot actions can be customized, adding additional bonuses and effects to their firing, allowing the player to further customize his game in a direction that he likes.

Unconscious Mind is a relatively dense game, and the teach is no slouch. But the theme is unique, the interpretation of it is novel, the presentation is fantastic and there are some truly exciting and interesting game mechanics to be found within.

“Caesar and Pompey deploy units to battlegrounds across Rome to seize control!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/338957/caesar-seize-rome-in-20-minutes
Playing Time: 20 Minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Territorial Control Duel
Designer: Paolo Mori
Players: 2

A small, tight territorial control game for two. In Caesar, players take turns choosing a disc from a hand of three. Each turn, you’ll place one on a circle that borders two territories. Once a territory is completely surrounded, one of the two players claims that territories.

What makes this an interesting puzzle, though, is that each disc has two halves of it, and each half has a different strength. Thus, if you put your best army on a border with a mind towards capturing the territory you REALLY want, you’re probably putting a significantly weaker army on the other side of that territory, creating an opportunity for your opponent. Figuring out how to balance immediate rewards with long-term planning and deciding which territories you’re willing to concede to your opponent makes for a tight and contentious duel.

“Hire artists and offer performances to become the most famous circus in the US.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/371947/3-ring-circus
Playing Time: 45-75 minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Set Collection & Territorial Control
Designer: Remo Conzadori, Fabio Lopiano
Players: 1-4

When I assemble these lists annually, I feed a list of candidate games into Pubmeeple a few times to flesh it out. And I was quite surprised to see this game keep popping up in the top 100, but on reflection, maybe I shouldn’t be.

3 Ring Circus is a game about assembling a circus act and touring the country. The core puzzle is a set collection game meets country journey. You play small shows to earn the money to play midsized shows to attract the talent to play the big shows, which score big victory points. And there’s a tad of a territorial control game.

But the meat of the game is the set collection. You have three ‘rings’, each of which contains cards that increase in ascending order, and which often grant points based on the other cards in their ring. While playing big shows is a huge goal to guide you early on, the real points come from creating a 3-ring act where each ring has perfect scoring synergy with each other.

On top of that, the game has a wonderful aesthetic, from the circus-poster style aesthetic to the tiny little circus tents that are your meeples. And it’s cheap – you can pick up a copy for forty bucks. This, along with games like White Castle and Red Cathedral are really cementing Devir’s status as a premier board game publisher.

“Wealthy citizens of medieval Prague organize building projects to gain king’s favor.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/308765/praga-caput-regni
Playing Time: 45-150 Minutes
Weight: Heavy
Genre: Economic Town Builder
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4

Praga has a lot going on, but its’ the presentation that wins you over. You have two wall stands to build, as well as the action crane wheel and the nice little bridge. You’ll manipulate all of these to gather resources, build walls, complete the bridge, construct buildings and advance technologies.

The beating heart of Praga is the action crane wheel. This spinning disc contains beige tiles, each with two actions the player can choose between. However, each tile is on a wheel which spins around, and lines up with bonuses on the inner circle of the wheel. On top of that, tiles may have costs or bonuses on the outside. The net result is an action system that lets you take any action tile – if you’re willing to pay the cost, but on the flip side, sometimes it’s worthwhile to take an action you don’t REALLY want to take because the free bonus actions are just that worthwhile.

Praga Caput Regni is just a heavyweight of a heavy Euro, which combines beautiful presentation, deep strategy and a very novel core mechanic. Just a great grab if you like the heavy stuff. Also, how many of you noticed that this is literally the same blurb I cut and pasted from last year? Actually, it’s not, it’s heavily edited, except for this last paragraph here. Whoops, now that’s different too.

“Play cards to utilize the abilities on a unique set of ceremonies.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/322195/kokopelli
Playing Time: 40-60 Minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Tableau Manager
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4

Kokopelli is… an oddly difficult game to describe. It’s a tableau builder, I suppose, but with a twist. Players all start with identical decks of cards (3 each of 10 cards and 6 wilds – or 36 cards) from which they draw their playing hand. Every card that you play on your own tableau will grant you unique powers – more powerful card draw, or victory points for odd things, for example. So you try to build an engine from whatever is available.

The catch is that your neighbors can’t play the same card that you have close to them in a tableau. For example, the player to your right can’t play any card that you have in your right-most two slots. What they CAN do is place another card on your stack (you can do that as well!). If four cards are ever on the same stack, the stack is discarded, whoever played the last card gets a bundle of victory points, and you lose your power.

The end result is a highly interactive game, with a lot of goofy power and a lot of ability to screw over your opponents, but at the same time, you rarely leave a game with anyone’s feelings bruised. There’s a lot of value in a game that does that. And while there are only 10 cards per deck, there’s a lot more in the box, which creates entirely new combo potential and a ton of replay value.

This game is probably one of Stefan Feld’s least known games, and frankly it’s a lot less showy than his other work. But Kokopelli is one of the most requested games in my game group when it comes time for a filler game, and that’s always the sign that a game delivers the goods.

“Sabotage rival clans by completing cloak-and-dagger missions in the city of Yedo.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/117915/yedo
Playing Time: 120-180 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Thomas Vande Ginste, Wolf Plancke
Players: 2-5

This is basically “Lords of Waterdeep but with ninjas”. Players play as rival clan leaders in Edo, competing for favor with the new Shogun. To do so, they’ll be directing their agents (i.e. ninjas) to gather weapons, resources and even geishas to be able to complete missions to increase their favor.

This is all relatively straightforward but the game does have a couple of twists that make it worthy of inclusion. My favorite is the night watchmen, a meeple who wanders the board in a preprogrammed pattern, effectively disabling worker placement locations and arresting any ninjas unlucky enough to be placed there. Normally, he’s relatively easy to avoid, but if you play on higher challenge modes, players actually can manipulate his movements, effectively sending the cops to arrest their adversaries.

On top of it all, Yedo has a beautiful aesthetic, with a charming board and beautiful pieces that really sets the aura of 16th century Japan.

“Become a gun-toting outlaw, or a law-abiding marshal in this Wild West sandbox.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232405/western-legends
Playing Time: 60-90 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Western-themed Sandbox
Designer: Hervé Lemaître
Players: 2-6

This is about as close to ‘Red Dead Redemption in a box’ that you’re going to get. Western Legends is a game where you can indulge in almost any cowboy fantasy you’ve ever had. Do you want to herd cattle? Be a poker ace? Run a brothel? Rob trains? Shoot the guys who rob trains? The world is your dusty oyster.

Well, some of it’s locked in expansions, but this is one of the few games where having all the expansions really pays off. Cardboard chits become great feeling poker chips. The Ante Up expanion adds a train you can rob – which has a nice plastic miniature to represent it.

The end of the game is reaching certain goals in victory points, but this really isn’t a game that focuses on winners and score. This is more of a game where your goal is just to be in this western world, and just make your way in it.

“Adorable bunnies build cities, harvest carrots, and go on missions to be ‘Big Ears!'”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/184921/bunny-kingdom
Playing Time: 40-60 Minutes
Weight: Light-Medium
Genre: Territorial Control & Card Drafting
Designer: Richard Garfield
Players: 2-4

The best rabbit-themed territorial control game on the market. You play as the leader of a nation of bunnies, looking to spread across the land. Doing so will require you to collect a series of territories – hopefully orthagonally adjacent ones – and build and upgrade towns and castles on them in order to harvest the resources within.

The engine of the game is a card drafting game – everyone’s dealt a hand of cards, and then they choose one, and pass the rest to the player next to them, and the process is repeated. This results in trying to plan ahead to figure out what you need to draft immediately and what can wait, as well as figuring out what to hate-draft to screw your opponents.

Bunny Kingdom is a midweight game but it also benefits from being fast to set up and extremely easy to teach. I will say that the scoring rounds ARE a little annoying and mathy, but this is easily counterbalanced by the easy gameplay and the absolutely adorable rabbit meeples.

“Outwit your rival by selecting where to place nomad workers on a dynamic desert grid.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/118048/targi
Playing Time: 60
Weight: Light-to-Medium
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Andreas Steiger
Players: 2

Targi is a legitimate classic, and it works partially because it manages to make worker placement make sense in a two player game. Cards are laid out in a 5×5 grid and then players take turns placing a total of three workers on a card on the edge of a grid. They then claim rewards where the rows and columns they’ve put workers on intersect (usually they’ll claim two rewards, as they’ll have 1 worker on a row and 2 on a column or vice versa).

This creates some incredibly interesting tension and decision-making. When you place your worker on a column, I can make an educated guess as to what row you’re going for. I then can decide if blocking you on that row (and chasing another column) is worth it, or if I need to hurry and claim that row because there’s something else on it I want. And finding ways to both get what you need while confounding your opponent’s goals is an absolute delight.

“Merchants build and trade throughout the Roman Empire to please the Gods.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124361/concordia
Playing Time: 100 minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Economic Territorial Control
Designer: Mac Gerdts
Players: 2-5

In Concordia, you play as one of several competing merchants in the Roman empire. Players will build settlements and trade routes throughout the Mediterranean, and then occasionally ‘harvest’ those settlements for resources used to further expand out their trading empire.

The beauty of Concordia is its simplicity. On their turn, players discard one card from their hand and do everything on it. On top of moving around, building and harvesting, other cards allow players to acquire new cards (thus new, more powerful actions), copy the action on top of a player stack or pick up all of their discarded cards, effectively resetting to maximum flexibility again.

This card engine has often been copied by other games, but arguably it works best here. Again, this is largely because of the simplicity of the core game, which makes the game easy to teach and the card market simple and easy to parse, which keeps turns moving quickly. The game also has had a ton of support, with a lively fan community and a wealth of officially released maps to offer greater gameplay variety.