Every year, I tell myself I’m going to try to do this before the end of the year, just in case it inspires some last-minute Christmas shopping. And then every year, I’m realized what a colossal mistake it is. I mean, it’s not like we don’t all have shit to do in the month of December, including buying my family their Christmas presents, and trying to finish important milestones at work before everyone evaporates for the holidays.
Ah, well, too late to stop now. Hopefully a couple of you get something about it! Previous installments here: 100-91 90-81
Let’s move on.
80. Kokopelli
Released: 2021
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 40-60 minutes
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). 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.
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.
I almost punted this game this year, but my table insisted we pull it out over the last couple of weekends, and it wormed its way back in, for a few reasons. First off, it’s very unique, mechanically, and as a designer I place a lot of value on experiments that succeed. But even moreso than that, the core concept shows how you can get a lot of mileage out of very simple mechanics with lots of design space (I said something similar about Marvel United in the previous installment.
But perhaps most significantly, it’s a highly interactive game with a lot of ‘fuck you’ where you rarely leave a game with anyone’s feelings bruised. And there’s a lot of value in a box that does that.
79. On Tour
Released: 2019
Designer: Chad DeShon
Players: 1-8
Estimated Time: 20 minutes
On Tour is a very simple roll-and-write. Every turn, two 10-sided dice are rolled, and players have two write both combinations of those dice in two cities. Example: if you roll a 3 and a 7, you’ll put 37 in one city and a 73 in another. Cards are flipped that will tell you which region of the map your numbers must be placed in, and offer bonuses if you match a specific city.
At the end of the game, you’ll draw a path through the best (usually longest) path of cities where all numbers ascend in order. While there are some other twists, that’s about it. It’s simple, direct and easy to teach. The game also includes maps of Europe. A great little filler game that scales to high player counts.
78. Spirit Island
Released: 2017
Designer: R. Eric Reuss
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 minutes
People have been bugging me to give Spirit Island a shot for a while now. It’s a cooperative game that is often referred to as the ‘anti-colonist game’. You play as ancient spirits defending an ancestral island from explorers and soldiers coming in from some unknown land (probably Spain, amirite). You’ll be defending your villagers and trying to drive these interlopers off your land. This is, of course, the inverse of MOST board games with territorial control, where you play as the guy seizing territory. Very woke, amirite?
Here’s the thing – it’s pretty good. It’s an unusual premise, it has a great table presence, and the different powers that the spirits have create some very varied game experiences. It’s a little denser than I was expecting – I don’t think you’d want to slap this in front of your non-gaming significant other – but this is a game that backs up its rep with a good cooperative puzzle for players. And it’s got a huge fandom and a million expansions too.
77. Red7
Released: 2014
Designer: Carl Chudyk, Chris Cieslik
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 5 minutes
Red7 is a very simple game. At the start of your turn, you will be losing. You must end your turn winning or you will be eliminated. You can do this by playing one or two cards. You can add to the palette of cards in front of you, or you can play a card in the middle of the table which will change the rules of the game.
Example below: the game starts with the Highest Card rule being in effect (the red below). You can satisfy the game’s requirements by placing a higher-numbered card in your tableau. Or alternatively, you can change the rules (as an example, playing the purple card below which makes whoever has the most cards below 4 in their tableau the current leader). If you need to add a card to your tableau to make this happen you can do so.
This is my favorite game to keep in my pocket at a con. It’s very simple (although the tiebreaker rules are just a tad hinky), games are fast, and the puzzle breaks your brain in interesting ways.
76. Paladins of the West Kingdom
Released: 2019
Designer: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 minutes
Since the initial release of Raiders of the North Sea, Shem Phillips’ little company has released several games in their ‘of the’ series, and the game has a lot more hits than misses. Paladins is my second favorite of them (meaning, we’ll see Shem again later).
Paladins is a very interesting twist on a worker placement game. Players get a certain number of workers, of certain colors, at the start of their turn, and they place them on their own board. Most actions take multiple workers, and require certain colors, which can hamstring your choices. The end result is a 6 primary scoring tracks, of which players will find they need to lean into two – and compete with other players chasing those same tracks.
Paladins is probably this series’ most complex game to date, but this studio has a real gift for finding novel mechanics and leaning into them, and this game is exactly that, only the different mechanics intertwine in interesting ways.
75. The Reckoners
Released: 2018
Designer: Brett Sobol, Seth Van Orden
Players: 1-6
Estimated Time: 60-100 minutes
Another coop dice-chucking game, this one is based upon a book series by Brandon Sanderson that, frankly, I don’t know much about. The overall gist, though, is straight-up ‘The Boys’. Superheroes ended up being not so super. You and your motley crew of rebels will need to find weaknesses for all the supervillains, beat them back, until you can finally find the secret you need to take down Superman-gone-bad stand-in Homelander…. *checks notes* sorry, I meant Superman-gone-bad stand-in Steelheart.
The Reckoners has lavish production values and a good rhythm to it, as players have to work together to figure out how to solve the puzzle, and deal with the randomness of the dice. Players can deploy their attacks in any order to maximize their attacks. Taking down normal supes isn’t hard, but Steelheart is a beast and he’s actively depopulating the planet, and there’s a real ticking clock on getting him down.
In all seriousness, a really solid coop effort if you like the deconstructing-superheroes vibe of things like the Boys. It is, I note something that doesn’t scale great – my 4 person group had a much easier time than my 2-person one.
74. Mystic Vale
Released: 2016
Designer: John D Clair
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 45 minutes
Deckbuilding has been a strong mechanic in gaming for more than a decande now. But in the last few years, there have been several attempts to make cardbuilding a thing. Of those attempts, my favorite is still the first one, Mystic Vale.
The player starts with a deck of card sleeves, some of which are populated with some light effects. The player will, over the course of the game, acquire new card components, which are on transparent paper, and slid into the sleeves. Each card has room for three components, meaning you can really Frankenstein a card together.
This is combined with a ‘test your luck’ mechanic. Each turn, you will play cards from your deck until you get two ‘spoilage’ symbols (red dots on the left-hand side). At that point you can collect materials and take advantage of whatever powers are on your card — or you can keep pulling cards. But if you draw a third spoilage, you get nothing for the turn!
Mystic Vale works largely because, beyond the card crafting system, the mechanics are generally pretty simple. The game is surprisingly easy to teach for the number of moving parts it has. That being said, it’s maybe a little TOO simple – this is one game where picking up a couple of expansions add just enough depth to keep it interesting.
73. Nidavellir
Released: 2020
Designer: Serge Laget
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 45 minutes
Nidavellir is a simple auction game with unexpected depth. Each player is trying to build up a dwarf army – each family of dwarf scores in different ways. Each player also starts with 5 coins (0, 2, 3, 4, 5). On each turn, they can use three of those coins to outbid other players at the various taverns around the city, in order to recruit them.
But what makes the game stand out to me is what you can do with the other two coins. If one of your three coins was your zero (0), then you can get a new coin that is the sum of the values of the two coins you gave up (merging a 3 and a 5 will give you an 8. The higher of the two ‘material’ coins – in this case, the 5 – is consumed).
This creates an interesting tension. Bidding low can cost you dearly, but it can also unlock heavy-duty firepower that makes bidding a lot easier at later levels. That kind of strategic pressure is a very interesting twist to the Auction genre.
72. Dinosaur Island
Released: 2017
Designer: Jonathan Gilmour, Brian Lewis, Ian Moss
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 minutes
A worker placement game where everyone is trying to build a theme park where the attractions will eat the guests. In this game, you’ll be building paddocks, staffing them with little dinosaurs, acquiring DNA to make bigger badder dinosaurs, and figuring out just how much to invest in being sure your guests don’t become dino hors d’oevres.
There’s a lot to love about Dinosaur Island, although I will say that it’s got a very ’80s visual aesthetic that tends to drive a love-hate reaction (I happen to love it), and the little dino meeples are very cool and fun to play with. This is on the heavier side, but the theme is a winner.
The expansion Totally Liquid adds new water dinosaurs to the mix. It’s got several modules to mix and match in – some quite good if you like a heavier experience. Unfortunately, the most-fun looking module (different powers for different players) isn’t very good as its wholly unbalanced, which is sad because it’s the module that gives you little goat meeples to feed to your… attractions. Also, I should note that the same team went on to do a more streamlined version called Dinosaur World last year, but that one I haven’t managed to get my hands on yet.
71. Sagrada
Released: 2017
Designer: Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-45 minutes
Absolutely the best stained glass crafting board game on the market. This joke landed differently when it was the ONLY one, but that’s not the case anymore.
Sagrada is a dice drafting game, and probably the best in its weight class. Over the course of ten rounds, players will take turns drafting two dice per round. They will try to slot those dice into their windows, following strict placement rules and matching colors and numbers on a target pattern. Along the way, they’ll be trying to hit bonus targets that are randomly chosen (such as ‘5 points for each row with dice of different colors).
Sagrada is easy to teach, and non-gaming muggles seem to enjoy it quite a bit. The puzzle is intuitive, the game moves quickly. The drafting results in more interaction than you like – games can get quite vicious once players start getting skilled enough to hate-draft the dice their neighbors need.
Welp, that’s another 10 games in the bag. Until next time!
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