I know I’m not alone when I say that I don’t get to play board games as often as I would like. Between being a parent, a husband, and an employee, my hobby time feels like it’s constantly shrinking, and it’s the first thing that I choose to cut when something comes up.
My first fallback when I’m experiencing a drought of board games is Board Game Arena. Personally, I don’t really like playing with random strangers, so I never join games unless I’m invited, or it’s arranged outside the site, such as on a discord server. I don’t know why accepting an invite from someone on The Nerd Shelves Discord server is different as opposed to just joining an open table for the game I’m wanting to play, but it is.
Actually, I do know why it’s different. It’s because every time I join a random open table, I get obliterated. In both Race for the Galaxy and Tobago, I would join an open table, excited to learn a new game, only to be matched up against someone with hundreds if not thousands of games under their belt. Those experiences kind of chased me away from playing games with random strangers.
I wonder how many days it would take to play all these games, assuming we were playing games for 12 hours a day.
All that being said, Board Game Arena isn’t a long-term sustainable fix for my board game habit. Eventually, I yearn to have the physical pieces in my hands. And when I can’t play games, I start to seek ways to acquire new to me games. I constantly have to remind myself that buying games does not equal time to play games.
When I can’t play games, I sometimes feel like the only way that I can engage with the hobby that I love is by buying board games. Retail therapy is a real thing that taps into my little lizard brain and gives me a rush of happiness. Adding items to my board game bliss cart, or popping into my favourite friendly local game store, can make me feel the same happy feelings as I felt when I was last playing games with my friends. Unfortunately, these feelings aren’t an adequate replacement for the hobby that I enjoy so much. And it can even kick off a downward spiral of shame when I’m staring down a shelf full of unplayed games.
I tell myself that I get a lot of joy out of unboxing and organizing my new games. I love the feeling of punching out the cardboard tokens from their sprues, and the satisfaction of having a game perfectly organized and ready to play it. I justify my purchases by saying “I’ll play it solo!” but honestly, my solo games are few and far between.
This did not feel like joy. This felt overwhelming
What really inspired this post was when I considered my board game acquisitions over the past few months. At the end of November my partner and I had a baby, and I’ve only been out to my regular game group, like, once since he’s been born. But in that time I’ve bought, like, 12 games. 5 of them I bought used for a really good price, and 5 of them came in via a math trade, but now my shelf of shame has grown dramatically during a period where I’m just not playing many board games
I don’t even really have a conclusion for this, I have no solutions to anyone who may be suffering from the same ailment as I do. The best I can offer is to look for opportunities to engage with this hobby in ways that make you feel connected. If you lack a regular gaming group and are filling your hobby needs with consumerism, consider joining some board game discord channels or engage with your favourite board game content creators on social media. This is inherently a social hobby, and engaging with others who are equally as passionate about board games as you are creates some special bonds that can lift your spirits when life otherwise gets you down.
New (to me) games I got in Janurary’s math trade
Just be aware of the FOMO that comes when those creators go to large conventions and post their ‘haul’ pics. It’s absolutely unreasonable to go and buy 30 to 50 games at one time. If it’s not obviously disclosed in the haul pic somehow, I highly suggest asking for clarification on which games they received for free and which ones they paid for themselves. It can help dispel the illusion that buying dozens of games at one time is reasonable or sustainable.
I sometimes forget that Kickstarter isn’t a thing that’s as well known outside of the board game circles. Every now and again I mention that I saw a project on Kickstarter to a work colleague or a parent at the playground, and I often get a “what’s a Kickstarter?”. It’s a bit wild to me that a platform that has become synonymous with crowdfunding to the hobbyist board game community is anecdotally unknown outside of this circle. I say this because I spend a significant amount of time reading about the games that are coming to, or are currently on Kickstarter. The podcasts I listen to (The Secret Cabal and Blue Peg Pink Peg specifically) often talk about just how many games the hosts have pledged to. Something else that’s significant is, considering how much time I spend browsing Kickstarter projects, is how few I actually pledge for. Flamecraft designed by Manny Vega and published by Cardboard Alchemy, was one of those projects that very nearly had me pledging, but like most, I ended up passing on, then felt the cold sting of FOMO when my social media feeds were covered in a deluge of deliveries and gameplay photos.
I don’t know where I’m going with this intro, but here we are. 2 and a half years after Flamecraft’s crowdfunding campaign launched, and I’m only just getting the opportunity to play it. The first thing anyone says about the game is just to mention how amazing it looks. The art is cute and charming, the names for the dragons and the shops are whimsical and adorable, the components (at least the deluxe upgraded ones) are absolutely stunning. Every single person who talks about Flamecraft will start with just how utterly gorgeous the game is. And for Flamecraft, that’s a very important point. The gameplay is quite simple, lending itself to be the kind of game that you use to coerce your non-gaming family and friends to the table.
Don’t get me wrong, a great looking game is an excellent tool for getting people to sit in the seats at your table. I’ve used Sagrada to successfully convince several people that board games aren’t in the doldrums like they used to be. Flamecraft is the kind of game that gets those around you to sit up and take notice. It’s not flashy, it’s charming. It has a quiet allure with its cute and colourful aesthetic. There is great value in looking good, and Flamecraft looks amazing.
Getting into the gameplay, it’s as simple as can be. On your turn you have to move your dragon pawn to any shop around the town board, then you gather all the goods at that shop (shops have a base value of 1, then each dragon in the shop gives another good, and each enchantment nets yet another good), and then either play a dragon card into a slot that matches the dragon from your hand (and gain the rewards from the slot) and/or use the fire ability of any one dragon in the shop, and if the shop has an ability, you may use that as well. Or, instead of doing all that, you can choose to enchant a shop instead. To enchant a shop, just pick one of the face up enchantment cards that matches the shop you just landed on, pay the cost, and Slide the enchantment card on under the top of the shop, then, fire all the dragons in that shop. Only If you want to, it’s not required.
Most of the game centres around gaining and then spending various resources to earn more points or get more dragons. All the normal dragons have unique names and artwork, but their abilities are static. Which at first I was a bit disappointed in, but after a few plays I realize how difficult it can be to parse just 6 abilities and 6 available shops. Giving every dragon a unique ability would have slowed the game down to a crawl, so I’m glad they chose to keep them all the same.
At the beginning of the game, you’ll find yourself looking at the enchantment cards and thinking, “how am I ever going to earn 4 leaves and 4 diamonds to complete Imp’anadas?”. But by the end of the game you’ll go to a shop, pick up 5 tokens from the dragons and enchantments, and fire a diamond dragon to gain an additional 3 goods. Flamecraft gives players an incredibly feeling of progression. Things get better, and faster, and easier, players build their engines up to a crescendo. Where there used to be poverty, and you were wondering about the 7 item limit that felt impossible to reach, suddenly you’ll find yourself buried in bread and having to throw some back into the supply.
In addition to the normal dragons, players can also earn Fancy dragons. The fancy dragons are a special type of card, and they come in two suits. Suns and Moons. The suns can be played at any time their conditions are satisfied for a nice little boost, while the moon dragons are end game scoring conditions, such as “have the most meat tokens” or “earn points if you have an even number of goods”. These can vary wildly, and if you just so happen to pick up 3 or 4 that work well together, then you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. It’s not quite a criticism, but more of a comment that I didn’t feel like I was in control of my own destiny when playing Flamecraft.
Flamecraft features very little player interaction. Most of it comes from just getting in each other’s way. When you want to visit a shop, but someone else is already there, you simply need to pay them a single good. A few cards will also see you distributing goods around the table for a bigger benefit for yourself, but that’s the extent of the interaction. You aren’t able to stop anyone from doing anything, other than doing it yourself before they do (such as completing those enchantments). And that’s fine, for a game that I’d use to introduce people to the board game hobby, I don’t want it creating any bad feelings. But for me, it makes me feel like I have very little agency. If I win, it’s not because I did the best, but just because I got lucky.
At the end of the day, Cardboard Alchemy has crafted a beautiful and charming game, one that is sure to be a hit with those perhaps on the periphery of this board game hobby. I love seeing all the stories of people discovering how munch fun board games are via a play of Wingspan, and I feel like Flamecraft has a lot of the same qualities. I don’t know what secret sauce Wingspan has that made it such a seminal hit, but I would love to see Flamecraft held up alongside it as an excellent, charming, beautiful game for people of all walks of life.
I’ve often thought I’m very good for not judging a book by its cover. Some of my favourite books have the most boring covers, but I don’t let that deter me! The Book of Flying by Keith Miller comes to mind specifically. The cover to that book has some porcelain looking humans with bat wings leaping off a short tower, with the entire image awash in sepia. The story within is a beautifully written poetic story of a man, Pico, adventuring to find the book of flying so he can earn his wings and join his one true love in the skies as he was born without wings and therefore isn’t t accepted in the winged persons’ society.
I’m glad I fostered this habit when my hobbies transitioned into Board Games, because if I judged Concordia by its oversized cover, I would never entertain the notion of playing this game. Contained behind the box cover, emblazoned with a smiling woman buying cloth, reveals a map of ancient Rome and bagfuls of wooden shapes. Minor component gripe, the scale of the items seems off. The cloth is much larger than the bundles of wheat, and the bags of salt from the Salsa expansion absolutely dwarfs everything else. Perhaps it’s to represent how important salt was two thousand years ago, but it just ends up looking a bit silly.
The board of ancient Rome is colourful without looking garish, and the cards are clear, great for conveying information, which is important as the cards drive this entire game.
Players begin a game of Concordia with 2 colonists on the board. One land-bound and the other sea faring, plus one of each good, and a handful of cards. On your turn you play a card, do what it says, then play passes to the next player. In Concordia, when a card is played, it stays down, until you play the Tribune card, which allows you to take all those action cards back into your hand, plus a small reward of coins based on how many cards you take back. In addition, you can pay a food and tool token to produce a new colonist in Roma.
The Architect card lets you move your colonists, one step for every colonist you have on the board (although you can distribute your movement steps amongst your colonists however you wish). After moving, colonists can build houses in cities they’re adjacent to, for a set of resources and a small amount of coins. If there are already buildings in the city, the coin cost is multiplied by the number of buildings that will be in the city once the build is completed.
So what’s the point of buildings? Well, when someone plays a Prefect card, they can choose any province to produce goods into. Every house produces the good of the city it’s built on for its owner, and the player who played the prefect card gets a bonus good, which is the most valuable good available in the region. In addition, there is a Prefectus Magnus card flowing around the table, which doubles the bonus good for the player who played the prefect. Alternatively, the prefect allows you to take the cash reward, which resets the bonuses for each of the provinces.
So you know you can use goods to build houses and produce colonists, but with the Mercator card, you turn those goods into cold hard cash. With any Mercator action, you can trade 2 types of goods. This means you can sell 6 tools (if you have them) and buy as much brick as you can afford. The Senator action also allows you to spend goods to take new cards into your hand. Generally, the cards you earn from the Senator are better than the cards you start the game with. Finally, the Diplomat allows you to copy the last played card of any player at the table, which can be very important to stretch out your turns.
Concordia comes to an end in one of two ways. Either someone builds their 15th building, or, the deck of cards flowing through the senate runs dry. At game end, every card you won awards you victory points in different ways. A card with “Jupiter” at the bottom will earn you 1 point for every non-brick city you have a house in. Saturnus earns you a point for every province that contains at least one of your houses. Mars awards 2 points per colonist you have on the board, and so on. It’s not uncommon to stack up on a single type of scoring card to maximize your efforts in a single area, as it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do everything within the course of a single game.
I actually love this scoring system. It creates interesting points of tension where you’re willing to pay through the nose to snag a specific card, not because you want the action the card affords you, but because you want to end game scoring benefit instead. And unlike in traditional deck building games, having extra cards doesn’t ‘clog up’ your deck. You can play any card you want from your hand, and then play the tribune to bring them back to your hand at will.
Of course, the more often you bring your cards back into your hand, the fewer actions overall you’ll likely get. And the chances are that you will want to stretch out the periods between Tribunes, as there’s so much to do! From buying and selling goods, to building houses around the board, to moving your colonists to ensuring you have the right resources to produce new colonists when you do take that Tribune action, the opportunity cost of pulling those cards back is perfect.
Often when players talk about interaction in game, it’s in a negative light. You take something from someone, destroy their buildings, take away their hit points, or get somewhere before they do. In Concordia, you freely choose any province in which to produce goods, and every house gets to produce the good associated with the city that it’s built in. This leads to players building next to each other, hoping to benefit from each other’s Prefect actions. This bit of positive player interaction is something that I absolutely love to see.
It also creates a very interesting dynamic at the beginning of the game. Do you strike out far on your own so only you benefit from a producing province, leaving the rest to suffer in their poverty, or do you establish a symbiotic relationship with another player; both of you prioritizing that province for production, earning you both a steady income? While in the early game this is a question in everyone’s mind, by the end of the game nearly every player has expanded to end nearly every province, meaning every Prefect action is doling out resources at an unprecedented rate.
The endgame scoring is so heavily abstracted and the cards that are bought at the end of the game have a significant impact on the final scores, it’s impossible to tell who really is winning until the points are being calculated. I feel like this keeps everyone engaged and active for the entirety of the game.
Concordia sits high on both the boardgamegeek.com ranking list, and in my personal top 100 games list, for good reasons. It’s a fairly easy game to play, yet it has depth. There’s mastery to be discovered here, and the positive player interaction ensures that no player leaves with a sour taste in their mouth. The gameplay is smooth, the rule teach is unobtrusive, there’s a ton of maps to buy for instant variability, it really is the whole package for any euro-gamer.
There aren’t many games that I would call a “must play”, but Concordia absolutely is one of them. I don’t own Concordia myself, but only because one of my close friends owns it, plus multiple expansions. But let me tell you, if he or I ever move away from each other, Concordia will be the first game I buy to replace the gaping hole that will be created when my game group is torn asunder.
Prefer to listen to my voice instead of reading these words? This post is available on the Talking Tabletop Podcast Episode 2, amongst other great board game contributors!
This weekend, I was chatting with my cousin about our new year resolutions in regard to our favourite hobbies. She mentioned that she read 170 novels last year, and is hoping to top that number in 2024. I asked how she managed to read a book every other day, and she reported that most of her reading were generic romance novels that were entertaining enough while being easy and quick to consume. My own reading habits are nearly the complete opposite. I read 3 novels in 2023, one of which left me emotionally devastated. My reading habits skew much more to the quality over quantity side of the spectrum, but it got me thinking about my main hobby and the rate at which I consume board games.
Books and board games share a problem with most forms of media. There is simply too much content to consume. There are an estimated 500,000 new books each year, 18,000 movies, 10,000 new video games, and 4,500 new board games, there are millions of hours of new content created every single year that our backlogs have absolutely no hope of keeping up, let alone going back to catch up on the gems we’ve missed. Under this deluge of content, I can see why we seek to put up some guardrails on our hobby time.
Of course, no one can experience all the content. We naturally winnow those astronomical numbers down. We ignore products that we know aren’t interested in (the entire horror genre gets ignored by our household). We count on reviews, both professional and user generated, to steer clear of stinkers. We push products made by our favourite creators to the top of the lists, and through these measures, we find ourselves with a much more manageable list of exciting new releases to spend our time, money, and energy on seeking out.
In 2023, I recorded 328 plays of 132 different games, 54 of those being new to me. A respectable showing, a little down from the previous year, but still a good year for board games. A few of the new to me games were big hits (like Akropolis and Cat in the Box) while others were stinkers in disguise (Beast and Shipwreck Arcana come to mind). Most of the new to me games fall in the “That was pretty good. No complaints, didn’t set my world on fire. I’d play it again if someone requested it” category. It’s not a bad place to be, it’s just where the average game falls in my estimation.
Akropolis was my favourite new-to-me game from last year
When my cousin told me she read 170 books over the year, at first I was amazed, then I began to consider the parallels between her reading hobby and my board game hobby. Most of the books she read didn’t set her world aflame. They were content that got consumed, then placed aside. A number in a spreadsheet, an entry in Goodreads. She wasn’t changed by the book, her world view remains unaltered. Likewise, I played 54 new board games last year. None of them broke into my top 10 (in fact, shockingly few of my top games of all time saw a single play in the last year) but a few are peaking into my top 50. This isn’t to say that they are bad games, just that they didn’t shake my world. My world view remains unaltered, and now here I stand at the dawn of a new year, reflecting on what I’m doing with my hobby. I’m understanding why people subject themselves to these challenges. Why do I spend dozens and dozens of hours playing board games that I only “like” and not “love”? Why don’t I resolve to play Food Chain Magnate or Galaxy Trucker 10 times this year? Surely that would bring me more joy than the rat race of buying, unboxing, learning, and teaching new games every week. Should I consider pivoting to only playing the absolute hits and abandon my pursuit of new games? Would I be happier playing 3 great games over and over again instead of 170 good games?
Perhaps, but perhaps not. I know that I derive a significant amount of joy from discovery. The whole process of learning about new games, the thrill of acquisition, and the crescendo of finally getting a game to the table with my friends is part of what makes me happy in this hobby. All that being said, the rat race can get exhausting, and if you spend ALL of your hobby time just grinding through new releases, it’s real easy to fall into unsustainable habits and burn out on the deluge of new releases.
All of this to say, I hope this year you take some time to reflect on what brings you joy. If you’ve been feverishly acquiring games, or playing a hundred games a single time before moving on and feeling the burn-out that can cause, I hope you take the time to shake up how you engage with your hobby. Remember, buying games does not equal more time to play games, and if playing games is what really makes you happy, then it’s worth spending some time refocusing on what aspects of board games really make you happy.
Alright, this game is better than it has any right to be. At the very least, consider me charmed.
Bag of Chips, designed by Mathieu Aubert and Théo Rivière and published by Blue Orange Games, looks like a literal bag of chips, a plastic/foil pouch with a resealable top. Inside are a variety of plastic chips of different colours, representing flavours. The gameplay deals each player 6 cards, each with a unique scoring condition and a number of points based on how likely or unlikely the goal on the card is going to be satisfied.
In the first round, 5 chips are pulled from the back and placed on a card. Then, all players must discard 2 goal cards. Then 4 more chips are pulled out and players must discard another goal card. In the penultimate round 3 chips are pulled, then players are told to make a choice. One of their goal cards will count for negative points, while the other two will be positive, should their conditions be met. Then the final 2 chips are drawn, scores are calculated, and whoever has the most and second most points gets a golden chip. First to 4 golden chips is the winner.
Bag of Chip feels like a luck fest. You’re at the mercy and whim of the cards you’re dealt and the chips that come up. Nothing you do will affect which chips are drawn, nor can you affect the others at the table. The only thing you can do is hope that your score is higher than theirs. Ultimately, the only choices you’re making are which goal cards to discard from your hand. I got the similar vibes to Poker. The only choice you’re making is how much to wager and hoping the odds are in your favour. Yes, there’s bluffing, and reading your opponents, but mechanically. Now there are no wagers in Bag of Chips, but you can bluff. Tell your friends that your cards are trash, so they take the lower scoring but safer goals, only for you to achieve your shoot-the-moon goal and win it all.
Perhaps I’m putting a lot more stock into Bag of Chips that it deserves. I like Push-your-luck games, and Bag of Chips makes my risk senses tingle. The euphoria when I need that last purple chip to come out on the final pull, and then when it did, it made my heart sing! The goal cards are all unique, and you’ll win or lose your game solely on if you were dealt and then chose to keep the right cards. For some, the lack of agency is frustrating. But for myself, I found it relaxing. I enjoyed playing the odds and being delighted when my gambles paid off
Bag of Chips is a small game that could be argued is more of a distraction than a full meal. It’s best enjoyed with cold beverages and salty snacks, perhaps while waiting for the main course to start. I have a hard time imagining Bag of Chips being anyone’s favourite game, or even top game of the year, but it’s one that easily fits in a bag and takes nearly no table space, making it the perfect pub/restaurant game.
