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.
Every year I play a lot of games, but rarely am I at the bleeding edge of the new releases. I don’t go to any big conventions, I rarely back crowdfunded games, and the bulk of my board game purchases happen through the local used market. A “best games of 2023” from me would be fruitless, as I really only played 4 games released in 2023. Instead, I’m taking this opportunity to highlight the 10 best new to me games I played in 2023. Here we go!
Starting off the list is a game that I played exclusively on BoardGameArena, and one that I wasn’t really a fan of to start. As I said in my review, after my first game, I felt like I had absolutely no control. That the game was all luck, and if you didn’t have any, you were absolutely toast. Thankfully the adorable origami art pulled me back in for a couple more rounds, because eventually Sea Salt & Paper opened up to me, and I’ve had some very enjoyable games over the past few months. Sea Salt & Paper by Bruno Cathala and Theo Riviere will be high on my list of games to pick up in the new year, assuming a copy didn’t make its way into my stocking for Christmas.
9 – Mists over Carcassonne (2022)
I’ll be honest, I actually thought I was ‘over’ Carcassonne. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it, and it’s a great game to pull out with people who are just starting to get interested in board games. It’s a classic, but it’s not one that I was ever itching to play. When Mists over Carcassonne was announced, promising a cooperative spin on the classic gameplay, I was dubious. But I’ve had some real great experiences with competitive games turning into cooperative experiences (Viticulture World and Orleans come to mind).
I was quite surprised at how much I enjoyed Mists over Carcassonne. I wrote out my thoughts back in July, and while I haven’t dashed out to buy myself a copy, I find myself drawn to it each time I end up at my local board game café. Both my wife, and my game group expressed quite a bit of enjoyment with this game. I do like the scenario approach where rules and mechanics are slowly introduced, giving a real nice introduction to the game.
8 – Wandering Towers (2022)
A birthday gift from my mother in law, Wandering Towers, by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, has actually been fun for the whole family. I didn’t touch on it during my review, but my 3-year-old has become really excited to play with the stacking towers and hiding the wizards. I shuffle the wizards up, put them into various levels of the tower, and I make her guess which colour in on the next level down.
All of that to say that the toy factor for Wandering Towers is powerful enough to capture the attention of a toddler. The actual game is a joy to play, with snickering and giggles abound as a pile of towers falls onto your opponent’s head, and another two players move the whole stack. It’s very easy to lose track of where all your wizards have gotten off to, but that’s part of the fun. The reveal when the tower is lifted, and the piece you were so sure was there has gone missing. I adore this game, and I can’t wait to introduce it to my extended family.
7 – Applejack (2022)
I remember Jon Purkis of Actualol once said something along the lines of “If you want a game to have a high BGG rating, release it on Kickstarter first. If you want it to have a low BGG rating, release it on BoardGameArena first”, and I suspect that’s the case for Uwe Rosenberg’s Applejack. I adore this game, you can read my full review here for the details, but it’s languishing with a 6.9 rating on BGG.
Regardless of what the BGG users say, Applejack was a bright spot in my BoardGameArena experience this year. It had a slow burn, at first I dismissed it as being lucky, or pointless. But after half a dozen games, I started to see different strategies, and found so much joy in arranging my orchard to group the apple varieties together. I don’t own a copy of Applejack yet, but as soon as a copy hits the used market, I know I’ll swoop in to pick it up.
6 – Space Alert (2008)
Hey look, the first game that isn’t from 2022! Space Alert by Vlaada Chvatil is one of the games that I regret only playing once this year. A real time, cooperative, action queue game, players are trying to survive a 10-minute onslaught of threats before leaping into hyperspace and sailing off to victory.
Within my game group, I’m known as the ‘real-time’ fanatic, and I have a feeling that my friends are only middling on the concept. That said, everyone I played with enjoyed Space Alert, and I have no doubt that I would have any trouble getting it back to the table. Of course, the challenge with real time games is that everyone has to know all the rules before you begin, lest accidental cheating throw the whole game sideways.
Space Alert was full of tension and stress and great problem-solving. I love the chaos that real time games bring, and having a soundtrack blaring alerts while players are frantically debating how to deal with the threats, and therefore potentially missing crucial information, was just full belly laugh fun.
5 – Mechs Vs. Minions (2016)
Mechs vs. Minions has been one of my grail games since it was released in 2016. Another cooperative action planning game, but this time designed by Chris Cantrell, Rick Ernst, Stone Librande, Prashant Saraswat, and Nathan Tiras and published by Riot Games. And I mention the publisher here because the production is stunning. A big box full of minis, bright and colourful cards, and all for a very reasonable price.
The reason why this has been a grail game for me, is because shipping to Canada has been abhorrent. I was never willing to pay $80USD to ship a $95USD game. So when a used copy became available locally, my game group got very excited to finally dig into it. And it didn’t disappoint! The game is structured around various missions, with the first handful being a stripped down version of the game to get all the players used to the rules. Even those games were fun, as the action programming leads to chaos and when you can’t stop players from spinning around and around in the corner of the map, all you can do is giggle. We played 4 games of Mechs vs. Minions this year, and I can’t wait to play more.
4 – Switch & Signal (2020)
I knew nothing about Switch & Signal when I picked up a used copy early this year. But as I said in my review, I can feel the seed of train-love growing in my soul, and I didn’t own any train games. Switch & Signal by David Thompson is a cooperative game about moving trains to pick up goods in cities, then manipulating the signals and switches to get the trains to drop off the goods at port. Every round a card is flipped over that dictates where new trains span, which of the trains need to move, and the number of spaces each train moves is based off the roll of a die. Players need to anticipate where each train is going to go and which routes to open up, lest the trains run into a closed gate, or worse, each other.
I feel like Switch & Signal flew way under the radar when it was published in 2020, but that doesn’t diminish how great of a game this is. It’s fast and cooperative, meaning it’ll likely be making its way into my rotation of games that I use to introduce people to the board game hobby.
3 – Kites (2022)
Another real-time cooperative game, Kites by Kevin Hamano tasks players with keeping their kites in the sky, or rather, keep sand falling in all the timers. Players play a card from their hand, flip the timers corresponding with the colours on the cards, then draw a card to replenish your hand. The game ends when either the deck runs out (winners!) or if any one of the sand timers runs dry (losers!).
That’s the whole game. There are some advanced cards in the box if you want to get crazy with it, but the base game is so much fun on its own. There’s frantic card playing and timer flipping. Players are trying to communicate what they have and what they need, but information is constantly changing. Every time a timer flips over, everyone has to recalculate what’s the next most important task to tackle. I adore Kites, and will be forcing this game upon anyone who shows even a modicum of interest!
Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition was the surprise hit of the year. Everyone I’ve introduced it to has loved it. It’s a trick taking card game in which you declare what colour your cards are as you play them. It’s a concept that sounds like it shouldn’t work, and yet, I adore this game.
The hook of declaring your card suits is one thing. In Cat in the Box, there are more cards than should exist. There’s 4 suits, yet 5 cards of each number, meaning one of those cards can’t be played. The other hook of the game is avoiding paradoxes, meaning playing a card that has been declared to be impossible. This can happen if 5 cards of the same colour are played, or, if you’ve previously declared yourself to be void of a whole suit, but then are in a situation where that’s the only suit that could possibly be played.
Cat in the Box isn’t a game that I would use to introduce the trick taking mechanic to someone who’s never played it before, but it’s an amazing mind twisting treat for those of us who have a small history with trick taking. Cat in the Box is delightful and unique and has been a joy at my table all year long.
1 – Akropolis (2022)
I was introduced to Akropolis in the springtime, and it’s been a bug in my brain ever since. I posted a glowing review in August, and since then I’ve acquired my own copy of the game and have subjected it to my entire game group in addition to playing a dozen times on BoardGameArena
I’ve sold this game as Kingdomino meets NMBR 9. You have the scoring style of Kingdomino (you score the number of points for each colour, multiplied by the number of stars of that colour. And 0 stars means no points. That’s the law of maths) and the vertical gameplay of NMBR 9. The resultant game is one that’s easy to teach, and deliciously satisfying when you can manage to nail a huge score, generally by really maximizing your points in a single colour.
I don’t know exactly why Akropolis rose to the top of my board games of the year, all I know is that I love it, and I yearn to play it over and over again.
Thanks for reading my rundown of the best new to me games of 2023! I probably should have just named this list ‘the best of 2022 – a year late’, considering most of the games were from just last year! Either way, I hope you enjoyed this list, and let me know what your favourite gaming experience in 2023 was!
It’s 15th century France, the Loire valley. As influential nobles, you do your best to lead your duchies to prosperity through careful trade and – stop. Let’s be real. No one actually cares about the theme of a game that’s as generic and overplayed as The Castles of Burgundy, right? How does the theme relate to the mechanics of the game? What do the dice even represent? None of that really matters. What you’re here for is to see if the dice game version of The Castles of Burgundy is fun to play or not, right?
In my The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Gamereview, I mentioned that I was hoping that it would be a distillation of the main game, streamlined and slimmed down to a smaller box, faster play time, and hopefully retain that Castles of Burgundy feel. I was disappointed with the card game product, but I’m back to take another stab at the apple, and see if the dice game is what I was actually searching for.
The Castles of Burgundy: The Dice Game, designed by Stefan Feld and Christoph Toussaint, comes in a very small box, about the size of a paperback book. Inside are 5 pencils, 5 dice, and a book of 100 player sheets, all double-sided. There are about 50 copies of each of the 4 different duchies for variability, and that’s it. To play, all players are given a single sheet, and a pencil. While the components in the box limit the number of players, there’s no reason you couldn’t play with as many people as you can find pencils for.
Two of the dice have colours on each face. Two of the dice have the normal 1–6 numbers, and the remaining dice has 1 or 2 hourglass symbols. Gameplay is just have one person roll all 5 dice, mark off the number of hour glasses on the time track in the top right corner, then choose a pairing of dice to fill in on your player sheet. One colour and one number. All the different provinces in your duchy have different requirements. The purple monastery hexes require a 1 or a 2. The Mines need a 3 or a 4, and the shipyards need a 5 or a 6. The green castles need to have the same number as an adjacent tile, the yellow animal tiles all must be the same number within a single province, and the orange city province must have all different numbers. When you complete a province, you’ll earn points based on the ‘era’, plus points based on the size of the province. Furthermore, once you complete a province, you’ll unlock a benefit that you can use later. Be it a worker that allows you to change the number dice to any number you want, a monk who does the same thing, but for the colour dice. A silverling that allows you to take a second pairing of dice, or goods you can ship for more silver and points.
Roll the dice, pick one pair of dice, and colour and a number, mark it on your sheet, and roll again. Continue following this pattern until all 3 ‘era’s’ are complete, and the player with the most points is the winner. The only bit of interaction between players comes in the form of completing all the hexes of a single colour to earn a small amount of bonus points. Beyond that, it’s a heads down, solitaire experience where you’re just trying to amass the most points, with nothing but the dice to get in your way.
If the goal was to have a shorter Castles of Burgundy experience, I think The Dice Game nails it. It plays start to finish in about 15 minutes, max. With a maximum of 10 and minimum of 5 dice rolls per era, this whole game exists within 15 to 30 actions. Sometimes you’ll start the game with nothing to do, as the colours and numbers rolled just don’t exist next to your starting tile. Not much to do but take a worker, then move onto the next round.
I don’t play many roll & write games, so I can’t really compare this game against others that share the mechanism. I do know one of the things I look forward to in these types of games is triggering cascading combos, and that doesn’t happen here. Players are restricted to only using one bonus on their turn, so the most you can do is “mark off this one, which completes this province to get points and this bonus, and I’ll use this bonus to take another pair, which marks off this one over here, which completes that province for points and a bonus”. That’s it, that’s the biggest turn that will happen in this game. Maybe if both of those province completions also trigger the “first to complete all of a colour” reward as well, but that’s surely an edge case scenario.
My biggest complaint with The Castles of Burgundy: The Dice Game is easily the graphic design. The player sheets are incredibly small, and there’s a lot of information packed onto each sheet. That itself doesn’t bother me, but the darker background and use of pencils feels like a major oversight. In theory, you’re supposed to circle a benefit when you earn it, then cross it out when it’s used, but the pencil lead blends in with the black circles, making it real hard to see at a glance what you actually have. More than once I passed whole turns, thinking I had no options, only to realize later that I actually had 2 workers waiting in the wings. Bigger sheets and white circles would have helped this problem massively.
That said, it is a fun little dice game. It’s a quick little puzzle that you can bang out during a quiet morning, or at any table in between activities. Playing with more players doesn’t increase the play time, but it also barely increases the tension. More players are competing for those “first” rewards, but at the end of the day, the only thing you’re competing against is your own score.
The Castles of Burgundy: The Dice Game won’t replace the full game anytime soon, but it’s a cute little distraction that I was happy to pick up. I enjoyed this much more than The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game, but it’s not a game that I’ll be pushing to play with anyone and everyone.
I was so excited when The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game was announced. It was fairly early on in my board game hobby, and I was seriously in love with the original The Castles of Burgundy. I was expecting a bite-sized version of the popular board game, Something that could travel with me and I could play in a fraction of the time. Not to spoil the review, but it felt more like they tried to stuff an elephant into a clown car.
The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game has no dice, no tiles, no boards, just cards. And more cards. And surprise surprise, even more cards. Some folks claim that CoB:TCG keeps the setting of the original Castles of Burgundy, but tosses everything else out the window, but it’s got plenty of parallels with the full game than you might think. You still snag farms, buildings, boats, castles, and “knowledge” cards from dice based locations, then you need to move those cards onto your estate. Your actions are tied to die results on the cards, and you can throw in some workers to modify your card flip dice pip result, and even the silver coins make a comeback. See? Plenty of shared history between these games.
That said, there are plenty of differences. No player boards, no completing regions, and it’s all about building sets of three cards of the same colour to rack up points. Boats got a 4-point symbol? Well, you’re not scoring 4 points when you build one; you’re scoring 4 points when you build three. Wanna score those 4 points again? Start another set of three. And those yellow knowledge cards that in the base game give you special powers and/or endgame victory points? Here they’re all the same, just two workers, no fancy variety. Plus, you’re getting one action per turn, unless you fork over silver or a card gives you an extra action. The ability to combo is much more restricted than the original game.
What’s to like about this card game? Well, for starters, it comes in a small box. And that’s about it.
Now, what’s not to like? I was hoping for a streamlined, quick card game, perfect for taking on trips, playing on tiny tables, while retaining the feel of the game that I loved so much. Nope, this game tried to do everything the original game did, except instead of using better and intuitive components like dice, they’ve proxied dice rolls with a card deck instead. And The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game is a table hog. You’ll end up with dozens of piles of cards all over the table, sometimes I feel like this game takes up even MORE space than the full board game. It’s chaos and I don’t like it.
It’s fairly simple to learn how to play The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game if you know how to play The Castles of Burgundy. But I tried teaching my mom how to play, and she nearly went cross-eyed. We ended up scrapping that game, as it was just too many little things all over the place, and the card form factor didn’t facilitate any kind of learning. While I don’t think there are many people who will be jumping right into this version of the Burgundy-verse, it’s worth noting that having the background knowledge of the base game feels required to on-ramp players into this game.
In the original version, the point salad scoring system forced players to trade off short term gains for long term plans, and players who could exploit their provinces and player powers could catapult themselves into the stratosphere in terms of points. In The Card Game, points come from completing sets of 3, selling goods, and collecting animals. There’s no interesting trade-offs, no oomph or zest in the scoring system to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s toothless.
I gave The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game a few tries, and every time I was felt like I should have just played the original. It takes about the same amount of time and table space, but offers a much more compelling experience. I love The Castles of Burgundy, but this card game version? It’s like the bland, no name product version of the game. The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game It’s an example of how to turn something interesting into a bland and forgettable experience. Skip this and go play the original.
At this point, trying to review a game like 2011’s The Castles of Burgundy is kind of like trying to review a Toyota Corolla, or a pizza. Everyone already has their own experience and opinions have already been formed. The Castles of Burgundy is a staple of the board game hobby, and it often comes up as the best ‘next step’ game for players who are ready to graduate their tabletop games into something a bit deeper and more complex.
Playing The Castles of Burgundy is simple enough. Each turn, all players roll both their dice, then in player order, they use both their dice to complete actions, such as taking a tile from the centre board into your personal supply, placing a tile from your supply onto your personal board, getting 2 workers (which will allow you to modify your dice), or shipping goods that you’ve collected for some points and silver.
The crux of the game is the pips of the dice dictate which spots are available to you. If you’re taking a tile from the game board to your player area, you can only take a tile from the area that corresponds with the pips of the dice you’re using. The same applies when placing a tile from your player board into your countryside, you can only place a tile on a spot that matches the colour of the tile, and the pip of your die. Of course, you can always use workers to modify your die pips to offset impossible situations, if you have them. You can always spend a die action to generate two workers, but that feels like a total waste of an action, so plan your turns wisely.
Every tile you place into your player board benefits you in some way. Many buildings give you a specific bonus action, grey mines will earn you silver every round, animals earn you points, yellow monastery tiles will either give you a persistent power, or, offer end game victory points. Furthermore, completing a province (a collection of same coloured spaces) will earn you victory points. More points the larger the province, and more points the earlier in the game you manage to do so.
All of these restrictions and bonuses makes The Castles of Burgundy feel like an intricate puzzle. Every action leads to more actions, and you’re constantly fighting between your short term gains and long term goals. Despite this complexity, the actual gameplay is broken down into bite sized pieces. On your turn, you have 2 dice. Some turns do spiral out of control when a player manages a wild combo of special actions that feels almost unfair, but for most of the game it’s just players quickly taking or placing tiles, then informing the next player it’s their turn.
The points in The Castles of Burgundy are plentiful and come from almost everywhere. The trick of the game is amassing more than your opponents. It doesn’t matter if you managed to score a respectable 186 points if everyone else around the table flew through the 200 point threshold. With points coming from a myriad of places, it can be hard to prioritize any one objective, especially when many of the big point scoring opportunities require more than the 2 actions you get on any given turn.
The most common criticism of The Castles of Burgundy is the bland, beige player board. There’s nothing exciting about a grid of hexes with dice printed all over the place. The next most common criticism is the luck factor, which inevitably comes up in any game where you roll dice to dictate your actions. It’s crushing when you roll double 2’s for four turns in a row. You exhaust all you can possibly do with those numbers, and end up burning actions to generate more workers in a desperate attempt to do anything. Further to that, it sucks when other players just happen to roll exactly what they needed every round. That said, there are 25 dice rolls per game, the luck should balance out with that many rounds.
In the years following the original release, two more editions have been produced. In 2019, Alea and Ravensburger published a new edition with updated artwork and a couple expansions included (the pictures in this post are from this version), then in 2021 Arcane Wonders crowdfunded a lavish new edition. While I haven’t laid my hands on the latter, I recently played with my friends copy of the 2019 edition, and felt quite disappointed. The new art is lush and colourful, but the iconography on the tiles is incredibly small and hard to read. I have read that this edition is more colourblind friendly, but it’s still not perfect. I vastly prefer my old copy to this newish edition.
As I said before, The Castles of Burgundy is a modern classic at this point. It’s been over a decade since its original release, some would argue it’s prolific designer Stefen Feld’s best game. It’s the kind of game that everyone who is interested in the board game hobby should play at some point, and while the original version is a beige map with a boring cover, the gameplay itself holds up spectacularly. It’s wildly satisfying to play and offers a great experience, even after a decade of playing board games.
