The Pursuit of Happiness, a game created by designers Adrian Abela and David Chircop and published by Artipia Games in 2015, was pitched to me as “The Game of Life” for gamers. This brought back some nostalgic memories for me, as I have strangely fond recollections of that classic game. Those memories mainly stem from playing the computer version that came in a cereal box when I was a kid. I can vividly remember huddling around the computer with my sisters, engaging in hot seat mode, taking turns with the mouse, and poking fun at the randomly assigned professions we received, and the terrible 1998 3D computer graphics.
Well, you get what you pay for, I suppose!
How to Play
In The Pursuit of Happiness, players are attempting to live the most fulfilling life, beginning with a childhood trait to give you an edge out in the world, you’re tasked with living a whole life, balancing money, resources, and stress, all in an effort to attain the most long term happiness. Each round, players will have a limited amount of time, represented by hour glass tokens, to embark on projects, purchase items and activities, advance their careers, and take on romantic interests, all in an effort to acquire that elusive happiness.
The board has 9 worker placement spots, with 4 of them being dedicated to simply acquiring more of the game’s resources. Creativity, knowledge, influence, and money. One action is called Overtime, where you get 2 more time tokens to work with, but you incur 2 stress.
The four remaining spaces involve you taking one of the 4 types of cards. Project, Items/Activities, Get a Job, and Get a Partner. Each of these cards work in different ways
Project cards come in 3 different styles, basic project, group projects, and one-time projects. With basic projects, you must start at level 1, pay the cost, and reap the benefits. On future turns, you may spend 1 time token to advance to level 2, and so on until level 4 has been achieved. Group projects have you taking the card into your play area, and other players can spend 1 time token to contribute to the group project, enhancing the benefit for everyone who contributes at the end of the around. The one-time projects have you taking the project, and choosing which level to pay for, and then that’s it. You’ll reap the corresponding reward, but you won’t be able to progress this project any further.
The Items/Activities generally cost money, but when you take the card into your play area, you can choose which level you want to start at, and can spend time tokens on future turns to progress deeper into that hobby. Many hobbies require you to pay a resource during the upkeep phase, but will provide you with a benefit for doing so.
The Career is unique in that you can only have one job at a time. When you take the job action, you need to pay the entry cost, and you’ll earn some money. During each upkeep phase, you’ll need to spend time and some resources to keep your job, but you’ll enjoy the benefit of income, hopefully enabling you to do the things you really want. During your turn, you can spend a time token to get a promotion, which allows you to advance to the next level of the same job type that you currently have. You pay the resource cost for the promotion, then search the card row and the deck for the next available card of the same job type, and replace your existing job. The next upkeep will demand more resources and time from you, but your compensation will be higher.
Going on a date allows you to take a partner into your play area, and generally get a small benefit. On future turns, if you have whatever your partner’s prerequisite are, you can spend a time token to progress your relationship. On future upkeep turns, your partner will demand some time tokens, but give you long term happiness in return. If you take a second partner, you immediately get a stress, and will get another stress per partner in excess of 1 during every upkeep.
So that’s the bulk of the cards, you can only have 3 cards active at a time, except for items and activities. If you take a 4th, you immediately incur a stress, and will get more stress if you have more than 3 cards during the upkeep phase. If you want to discard a card, you can, but you’ll incur stress and lose one short term happiness. If you have positive short term happiness, you pay one resource less for projects (but not activities), and vice versa for negative short term happiness. If you rest or relax, you can remove some of your stress, as long as you remain in the same colour area. The only way to go down to the next colour is by getting a heart from one of your cards, which are quite rare.
Review
I want to start with what I enjoyed. I loved the stories that The Pursuit of Happiness generates. Early in one game, bear took on the project “seek funding”, then proceeded to ignore the job cards for the rest of the game, while the charismatic Bigfoot promptly got married and started a family, while also becoming CEO, locking up 5 of his 6 time tokens at the start of every round. The hardworking family man only had 1 time token to do anything, which he ended up spending to get just enough knowledge to maintain his job position until the end of the game. At one point I, while happily married, decided to seek the short term happiness by taking a second partner, stress be damned.
We all found an emergent narrative to justify our decisions, and that’s easily the best part of this game. Joking and laughing with your friends at the ridiculous situations your fictional persona has embarked on. The theme is baked into every card and action, making it easy to understand what you’re doing, or why something behaves in the way that it does (like raising a family gives you less time for activities).
I adore the art in The Pursuit of Happiness. The cartoony style exudes a whimsical charm. One thing that truly impresses me is the inclusivity that comes with the design of the partner cards. The fact that they are double-sided, with identical stats, offers players the freedom to choose the character that resonates with them the most.
On the flip side, learning to play The Pursuit of Happiness can be a frustrating experience. Everything looks similar but acts in different ways, and there are exceptions galore. You can only have 3 cards, except for items. You have to start at Level 1 for projects, except for the one time project. You can jump down to any level in items, but not projects. If you put two time tokens on the same space, you get a stress, except on cards. Every rule has an exception, that makes it a burden to teach and learn.
There are a plethora of decisions on every turn. You have 9 action spots on the board, 16 cards to pick from, resources to manage, and card actions in front of you and other players that you can choose to do on any of your turns. The sheer number of choices is paralyzing, and simultaneously uninteresting. At one point, I was trying to figure out what to do, but realized that I didn’t really want to do anything. None of the actions were exciting, most were just different ways to trade some resources for other resources.
Initially, I was really excited about the push and pull of the stress track. I loved the idea of pushing up to the colour border, only to drop back down, and possibly even earn extra actions from lowering the stress level. But we literally saw a single heart throughout the entire game, making the stress track much more of a detriment. Bigfoot, who only had a single action per turn, was locked in his situation, unable to take a single stress, lest he push into the next colour section and lose his single action that was available to him. It’s easy to fall into a death spiral on that stress track, and I wish there were more ways to play with that aspect of the game.
Finally, the game is fiddly. From all the rules exceptions, to constantly converting resources from one type to another, I was frustrated by needing to turn on 6 cardboard chits to get 8 different cardboard chits in return. “I spend 3 social and 2 money and get 4 knowledge and 3 creativity, but I only have a 5 social, so I need 2 social back”. With conversions happening at nearly every action, this was by far the most annoying part of the game.
The Pursuit of Happiness has merit. As I said above, there’s charm, it generates great stories, and it’s really an experience worth having! But I don’t feel like there’s much depth. The game plays fairly similarly every time, and even when you find ways to buck the system, and avoid taking a job or partner and remain competitive, it’s not particularly interesting. My wife called it Ecclesiastes in a box, nothing really matters, your choices will all lead you to the same place ultimately. In all my plays, the scores between the winner and lose of the game were within 6 points of each other (winning score being around 65 points each time). Yes, you can choose to take on projects, and items, and jobs that strike your fancy, but in the end, you’re left wondering if your choices really matter.
I enjoyed playing The Pursuit of Happiness, make no mistake. But the short term happiness that this game provides just isn’t worth the stress that comes from learning to play it over again, and struggling through the myriad of decisions to arrive at the same destination every time.
A review copy of The One Hundred Torii was provided by Pencil First Games
As a teenager, I was an unabashed weeb. Growing up in a small town in northern Manitoba, I voraciously consumed as much anime as I could get my hands on, which, in the early to mid 00’s, was not very much. I had the local pharmacy special order me in Shonen Jump every month, I would use school computers to download fan translated episodes of manga and anime, distributing them to two others in my school on the down-low. I loved Japan, I wanted nothing more than to speak the language and travel there. Any time I got to choose a project in school, I’d use it as an excuse to learn more about Japan.
While I’ve not yet completed my dream of travel, and my consumption of anime and manga has waned in my 30’s, anything Japanese themed still always grabs my attention. Given the opportunity to marry my love of board games with my affinity for the theme makes for a very happy game night.
How to Play
Designed by Scott Caputo, art by Vincent Dutrait, and published by Pencil First Games, The One Hundred Torii proclaims that life is a journey, not a destination. In The One Hundred Torii, players are trying to earn the most points by expanding the garden, and walking through as many Torii gates as possible, accruing experiences in the form of monument sightings, and interacting with characters.
The game begins with a central tile depicting all 6 monument types. On your turn you can pay monument tokens to enlist the help of one character, then, you expand the garden by placing a tile adjacent to any tile. Each tile has a road on all 4 edges, meaning other than placing adjacent to an existing tile, there are no placement restrictions.
When you place a tile, you select one of the features on the tile and trace the shortest path to another one of those features already in the garden. If there’s a match, you earn a token depicting that feature. If you cross under any red torii gates, you’ll get additional tokens of that feature, and if you cross under any blue torii gates, you’ll earn any feature of your choosing, other than the one you are scoring.
The goal of the game is to earn the most points, and you do so by collecting these feature tokens. When you have 5, you turn them in and take a big 5 point marker of that feature type. Then, when you take 5 more, you turn those in, and flip the point marker over to the 10 point side.
In addition to collecting features, you also get rewards for interacting with the characters. At the start of each round, you can pay feature tokens to enlist the help of various characters. The Poet sits their bottom down on a tile, blocking one feature, allowing you to potentially really extend what the shortest path you’d create. The Samurai sits outside the garden, and prevents a tile from being placed in that spot. The geisha, allows you to place both of your tiles, but you only get to score the second one you place.
The first time you use a character, you take a 2 point scroll representing your interaction with them. If you enlist their help again, that scroll flips over to the 4 point side. And if you were the first person to use a character 3 times in one game, you get a big 3 point bonus.
Gameplay continues around and around, players enlisting help, expanding the garden, and claiming rewards until the tile deck is empty. Then all players take one more round and the player who has the most points is the winner!
Review
The One Hundred Torii features beautifully illustrated art on the cover, and equally delightful art inside. The characters, the tokens, and the tiles are all colourful and pleasant to look at. The cardboard quality is perfect, not thin and cheap feeling, but also not overwrought. The aesthetic of The One Hundred Torii is quite calming, so I feel that an over-done production would actually pull away from the experience.
The box comes with a guide in how to put it away, which I found surprising considering how small the game box is. Usually these guides are reserved for games like Scythe or Anachrony. After punching everything out and trying to follow the guide to pack everything away, I can see why it was included. There are piles and piles of little cardboard chits that have a propensity to scatter everywhere if the box is slightly tilted in the wrong direction.
The gameplay of The One Hundred Torii is simple; enlist the help of one of the characters, then place a tile, and collect your rewards. At first, getting through just one or two gates will feel like an accomplishment. As the game goes on, your actions can give way to other players being able to make even better turns than you, and vice versa. Alternatively, the most lucrative route will get closed off, and you’ll suddenly feel like you’re falling behind.
As the game wears on, the decision space organically grows and shrinks. Someone will place a tile with a monument that you were hoping to cash in on, in the wrong space, making your path go from 5 gates to just 1. But then, as play continues, the paths between monuments grow longer, and opportunities that didn’t exist a moment ago suddenly present themselves to you. Someone just so happens to cover a tile that perfectly assists you in achieving your goals.
Speaking of goals, the goals in The One Hundred Torii are very attainable, meaning players don’t really need to hyper-focus on a specific monument type. There’s fluidity in the achievements, which offers grace in the tile placement. Yes, sometimes your action will be less efficient than your opponents, and yes, sometimes you were kind of hoping to score 4 Inari Statues, but plans change, and you’ll pivot to collecting 2 arched bridges and a lantern this round instead.
The characters that you can enlist allow you to break the rules in perfect little ways. Just enough to get you out of a tough jam, but not too aggressive in that they’re horribly over-powered. They cost you some of your monument tokens every time you want to enlist one, giving you a delightful little push and pull of benefits and drawbacks. The game encourages you to use the same guest 3 times to maximize the points you’ll earn from those actions, but the benefit of doing so is incredibly small, giving you the freedom to diversify your friend group to fit your needs.
The One Hundred Torii puts genuine effort into educating players as to what each of the tokens and characters represent. From engaging with a Culture Consultant (Lisa Wilcut) to dedicating 5 pages of their 20 page rule book to detail the significance of everything in the game, to the personal letter by artist Vincent Dutrait crediting his inspirations and detailing the efforts he took to ensure the game looked authentic, alive, and exotic, I appreciate the efforts The One Hundred Torii goes through to pay homage and respect to its theme.
Getting back to the gameplay, The One Hundred Torii is a calm game. Yes, there’s some opportunity to stifle your opponent’s plans by placing a tile in the wrong spot, but there’s so many mechanics available to subvert that kind of play, that the game ends up being a calm, peaceful experience. We had a lovely time just sitting back, placing tiles, and collecting monuments representing the memories that come from strolling through the Japanese gardens.
I quite enjoyed The One Hundred Torii, more than I expected to, considering it’s just a tile laying game. This game is more than the sum of its parts, and I’m glad I got the opportunity to play it. The only thing holding me back from playing it more is the substantial number of cardboard tokens that need to be sorted each time I play. Nevertheless, I appreciate The One Hundred Torii for its gorgeous artwork and simple gameplay, and won’t hesitate to introduce anyone who is looking for a chill game to play while enjoying each other’s company.
Sometimes a game calls to me because of its theme. Racing ramshackle pipe ships through space in Galaxy Trucker, hell yeah! Growing a fast food franchise in Food Chain Magnate? Sign me up. Other games, I play in despite of their theme. Taking on the role of rajas and ranis to improve their estates and collect fame and wealth in 16th century India? Uh, I guess so? And that’s exactly where Inka and Markus Brnad takes us in Rajas of the Ganges.
How to Play
In Rajas of the Ganges, players are racing to accumulate the most money and fame points, with the winner being the first player to have those two tracks meet. The fame track moves clockwise around the board, while the money track travels counterclockwise.
There are 4 main locations to place your workers and take actions. The quarry is where you’ll trade in dice to acquire land to slot into your province, that will earn you fame and resources. The market, allows you to earn money based on the resources that are currently in your province. The River sends your boat flowing up river gently, offering a myriad of benefits depending on the space your boat lands on. And lastly, the Palace, where you’ll either get dice, or, gain a benefit depending on the value of the dice you’re giving up.
Each round consists of players placing their workers in one of the open action spots, paying the required resources (usually money or dice), and taking the action. When all players have run out of workers, the board is cleared off, and the start player moves. Rounds continue until someone’s money and fame tokens cross, then players get an equal number of turns, and the game comes to a sudden end.
Review
Rajas of the Ganges by Inka and Markus Brand is a worker placement game with a plethora of chunky, colourful dice. While at first glance it looks like a dice worker placement game, the dice are actually a resource that will dictate how some of your actions trigger. I do like that the pip value of the die isn’t automatically determinative; there’s good uses for both high and low valued die, you just need to be in a position to utilize those dice when they show up on your Kali statue.
The theme of Rajas of the Ganges doesn’t come through particularly strongly. The board is bright and colourful, each player has a Kali statue and the first player token is an elephant. As someone who knows approximately nothing about 16th century India, sure, the theme looks good. But upon even slight inspection, it starts to fall apart. Like, what do the dice represent? Why are they being used to build palaces and resources in your province? It’s fine, I don’t need an extremely well integrated theme in my euro games, but it’s worth mentioning that the theme isn’t going to inspire a history lesson.
We played the basic game, which means our Kali statues could hold 10 dice, and we only had access to 5 workers throughout the game. Each turn in Rajas of the Ganges is quick and snappy. Simply place a worker, do the action, and then the next player takes their turn. And yet, the opportunity for combos exist. Turns like “place a worker, get 3 money, which earns you one boat movement point which gains 3 fame points, which earns my 4th worker” are incredibly satisfying when they do show up. There are a myriad of different ways to use the dice, from spending the big ones to buy land tiles for your province, to using them for specific actions in the palace. Instead of making you feel like your dice are bad, it feels more like you’re just not in the right situation, which is an important distinction.
One of the main draws of Rajas of the Ganges is the mechanism in which the game comes to an end. With the money track and the fame track running opposite to each other, it’s a race to be the first one to have your tokens cross, but how you achieve that is up to you. Whether you chase a dozen buildings for ultimate fame, pull in vast amounts of money, or settle into a combination of both, you’re going to be tempted to build an engine, but in reality, this is a race. It doesn’t matter how far you can push your fame and wealth tokens past each other, the only thing that matters is that they pass. Once someone’s tokens pass, the endgame is triggered. Players sitting between the player who achieved this feat and that start player can place one more worker, then that’s it! To make this even more tense, the money track can fluctuate up and down. More than once I found myself single money away from getting a bonus resource because someone else took the slightly cheaper action spot right before I did. Frustrating, but also, exciting when you manage to do the opposite; collect the perfect amount of coin to trigger your next benefit, catapulting you into the lead.
As I mentioned above, the dice in Rajas of the Ganges are a resource, and a precious one at that. You need dice to do most of the actions in the game. What becomes a challenge is getting more dice into your supply. The palace offers spots to trade a whole worker for a single die, or, trade in one die for two others of a different colour. For some reason, that trade option feels so much stronger, but in any case, you’re still only netting one die. If you find yourself in a situation where you’ve run completely out of dice (because you just bought a province tile that needed 9 pips, which would be a minimum of 2 dice), you’re going to then have to spend 3 or 4 whole actions just acquiring dice while watching your opponents get further and further ahead. And in a tight race game, that can feel absolutely brutal.
It’s kind of amazing how well Rajas of the Ganges scales up at the end of the game. Several rounds go by and one or two players have gotten their fourth worker, then all of a sudden it’s “I earn 7 money and 8 fame points” and you realize that the other players are in striking distance of ending the game. Rajas of the Ganges doesn’t outstay it’s welcome, it takes 15 minutes to learn and an hour to play the basic version. The Navaratnas version introduces a fair bit more control over the bonus resources you can obtain, which I can see lead to some turns dragging as players try to consider all the permutations of their choices, but I was pretty happy with the basic version.
Rajas of the Ganges isn’t the kind of game that takes half a dozen plays before players ‘get it’, which is great, but it also doesn’t offer anything that really makes you want to come back. It’s fast to introduce new players, and it offers substantial strategies and choices right from the get-go, but it’s missing a satisfying hook or spark that makes me want to come back to a game over and over again.
Rajas of the Ganges is an enjoyable game to play. It offers a relaxing and attractive game, and makes you feel clever and special when you manage to chain off a combo and snag a worker a whole round before the other players. The strategies feel variable and powerful, and the extra modules give players even more control, if they feel like they want them. I hate how difficult it is to acquire more dice, considering how many actions require you to have them, but it’s hardly a criticism that should prevent you from playing this game. There are a lot of great mechanisms here, and they’re integrated with each other wonderfully. While Rajas of the Ganges didn’t hit a home run with me, I can absolutely see how some people fall in love with this charming dice game.
Disclosure: A review copy of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the lion was provided by Cephlofair Games
Introduction
If you had asked me my thoughts on Gloomhaven two months ago, I would have pointed you to my post on Bigfoot’s Trash Taste, where I boldly speak about how I find Gloomhaven frustrating and how I didn’t enjoy the dozen times I sat down to play it. So when the opportunity from Cephlofair Games to get a review copy of the smaller follow-up game, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion came up, I was surprised to find myself compelled to revisit the Gloomhaven system.
I recently wrote more in depth about the full sized Gloomhaven, the 21 pound big red box full of mystery, anguish, joy, and frustration. I talked about how a negative first impression soured my opinion of the game for nearly 5 years, only to have it slowly turned around by the digital implementation. So when Jaws of the Lion showed up at my door, I roped a couple of friends (Bear, from my regular weekly game night and his partner, Lynx) into playing with me. Bear has some experience with role-playing games, and his wife, an avid gamer in her own right, enjoys combative games. If there’s a throat nearby, she’s keen to punch it, but neither had played any Gloomhaven before.
With that in mind, over the past month we’ve made our way through the first 5 scenarios for Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. Before I really launch into how our games went, you might be asking yourself: “What exactly is Jaws of the Lion and what makes it different from Gloomhaven?” While Gloomhaven is a massive box with a ~100 scenario campaign, 17 playable characters, more than 30 different monsters, and dozens of map tiles to create wildly different scenarios, Jaws of the Lion is a much smaller box. Containing only 4 playable characters, 16 monster types, and a comparatively straightforward 25 scenario campaign. The goal of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion was to provide an easier way for gamers to get introduced to the Gloomhaven system. The first 5 scenarios are a tutorial that introduces the rules of the game gradually, instead of all the information overload that the full Gloomhaven game is. The setup for each scenario is simplified in Jaws of the Lion, due to the map tiles being replaced with a spiral bound scenario book that features artwork specific to each scenario.
How to Play
Here’s an extremely quick how-to-play. At the start of each round, you’ll play two cards from your hand. The number in the centre of one of the cards will indicate your initiative, that will dictate the turn order. On your turn, you activate the top action of one of your cards, and the bottom action of the other card. Every card for every character is different, and using your abilities to synergize with each other is key to victory. As you gain levels, you’ll have more cards to choose from, but the number of cards you can take into each mission is static, based on your character.
Most missions in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion are comprised of ‘kill everything’, and most actions involve moving and hitting. Each attack has you flip a card from your own attack modifier deck, which you can upgrade and modify as you accomplish tasks and gain levels.
Now, that’s basically it, but there are a ton of rules and nuance in Gloomhaven that are important to understand fully before you can understand the situations well enough to play through a mission well!
Review
Introducing Bear and Lynx to Gloomhaven via Jaws of the Lion was a treat. The tutorial structure introduces the very core mechanics with special, tutorial cards that include helpful text boxes of how to read the icons and apply the effects of the card. The enemies have one static ability, making it easy to plan your approach, and it feels like any group could stumble through this mission and come out the other end unscathed.
The subsequent missions add in all the elements that make up the full Gloomhaven gameplay experience. More cards, burning (or losing) cards after a powerful effect, experience points, gold, elements, modifier decks, monster attack decks, blesses and curses, pushing and pulling, status conditions, losing a card to negate damage, and so on. The training wheels come off and the tutorial launches the player into the full Gloomhaven experience. There are so many things going on in a regular Gloomhaven game that introducing someone to the full experience is quite a challenge. This, step-by-step approach worked wonders. At no point did any of us feel overwhelmed by rules. Each mission stretched our brains like pizza dough until we filled the pan. Gently, working each corner one at a time, careful not to tear our precious brains by roughly forcing too many rules in at one time.
The setting and story is dark and brooding. It starts with a missing husband, and very quickly you stumble into occult rituals and dark sacrifices. Unnatural abominations and living corpses are featured early on. That said, the gameplay is entirely combat; you’re trying to kill your opponents. If violence and malevolence turns you off, the narrative is going to leave a sour taste in your mouth.
I’m not sure what else to say about Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. If you’ve played Gloomhaven, it’s more of the great gameplay that you’ve come to expect, albeit a bit of the extraneous bits trimmed off the edges. If you’re new to the system, the tutorial is an excellent on ramp to the system. Once you’ve learned the whole game, Jaws of the Lion might feel a bit too streamlined for your liking. The four characters synergize extremely well together, and that’s by design. You don’t need to spend significant time and effort crafting each of your characters and decks, so they’ll work together. In the same breath, the missions feel easier than the base game. We’ve come close to losing only once, and that might be a byproduct of the built-in synergies of the 4 classes that come in the box.
At the end of the day, if you’re interested and inexperienced in Gloomhaven, you cannot go wrong with Jaws of the Lion. It’s cheaper to acquire, faster to set up, and guides you into the experience. I can absolutely see people completing the ~20 missions that come in the campaign, then launching themselves into the full game, only to really appreciate the guard rails that Jaws of the Lion has for its players. Those guard rails are helpful for some people, but restricting for others. Treating Jaws of the Lion as an epilogue for a group that actually managed to complete their Gloomhaven campaign may feel a bit unsatisfying. It lacks the long term goals and discovery that I think takes the experience up to the next level.
I never feel ready to make a “top games of X year” list when the new year comes around. The odds of me playing a significant amount of new releases is fairly small. As you can tell from my Best New to Me Games of 2022 post, and the fact that only 2 games released in 2022 made that list, I don’t play games the moment they get released.
Halfway through 2023 and I finally feel like I’ve played an adequate number of 2022’s titles where I can make a list highlighting the bright spots of this gaming year!
10. Wingspan: Asia
Number 10 on my list is Wingspan: Asia, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and published by Stonemaier Games. Wingspan: Asia is a stand-alone expansion to the very popular Wingspan. What makes this expansion a bit special, is that it contains everything that you need to play the game with just 2 players. It also includes a ‘duet’ board, which adds a bit of an area control aspect to the game. When you play a card that matches a feature on the board, you place a token of your colour on that spot. Many of the end of round goals that come in this expansion focus on your positions on this board. Some demand you have tokens on as many rows as possible, while others will reward a dominating force in the wetlands.
My biggest pet peeve with Wingspan: Asia is that the tokens you’re placing on that duet board are ying-yang shaped wooden pieces. However, only one piece can exist on each of the spaces, which makes me question, why use ying-yang pieces at all? They fit together perfectly! Surely that would serve some purpose, right?
Alas, it’s a minor gripe. Wingspan: Asia contains all the great engine building gameplay that you know and love from the Wingspan series. It’s a game that my wife adores, and I’m very happy to have a two player specific version to play with her.
9. One Deck Galaxy
One Deck Dungeon is a dice-rolling dungeon crawl adventure that I got mildly obsessed with when I picked up the app version. You pick a character, get a pool of dice, and throw yourself against various challenges, which in the end, will level you up, expand your dice pool, and culminate with a fight against a big boss.
One Deck Galaxy designed by Chris Cieslik and published by Asmadi Games is the space themed sci-fi follow-up. You embody a hero, facing off against a dangerous foe. You roll and re-roll your dice pool, and adjust the rolls with skills and abilities, trying to clear certain thresholds to bring the card into your fold, which will grant you new abilities, expand your dice pool, or upgrade your base, all in an effort to clear the thresholds that the foe has, before calamity strikes, and you are overwhelmed.
I really enjoy the tactility of rolling mitt fulls of colourful dice. One Deck Galaxy makes for an excellent solo game, with 5 heroes and 5 foes to test your mettle against, it makes for an excellent little package. I’ve only played a few times, but it’s currently sitting behind me at work, begging to be broken out during a lunch break!
8. Foundations of Rome
Designer Emerson Matsuuchi has quite a catalogue of games under his belt. From the Century line of games, to Specter Ops, toHerStory, and now, Foundations of Rome. What each of these games have in common is that they’re all reasonably light and quick. What makes Foundations of Rome stand out, is the lavish production that publisher Arcane Wonders put into this product.
Sitting at an impressive 17″ by 15″ by 14″, this massive cube will take up several spots on your game shelf, and catch the eye of anyone wondering by.
The game itself is fairly simple, on your turn you either claim a plot of land, take income, or, place a building down on the main board, assuming you’ve claimed adjacent plots of land. The buildings you build will either earn you income and points, or, provide you with citizens, which may inadvertently give points to your opponents if you’re not paying attention. There are also civic buildings, all of which earn points in different ways, based on the buildings they’re placed adjacent to.
Considering it’s much larger than average footprint and price tag, Foundations of Rome is a fast and easy game to play. Each player’s components are contained within their own custom plastic tray, making setup as easy as passing each player a tray of their preferred colour.
While I can’t fathom ever putting up the cash to own this box myself, I would happily play it whenever it’s available to me. Thankfully, our local board game cafe has a copy in their library, which may serve as a pull to get me in there more often!
7. First Rat
I don’t know where or when I became aware of First Rat, designed by Gabriele Ausiello and Virginio Gigli, and published by Pegasus Spiele, but the theme was immediately charming to me. Players take control of a colony of rats that are inspired by comics and fuelled by apple cores to build a rocket ship and blast off to the cheese moon.
The clever gameplay of First Rat starts by giving you two rats to control, and on your turn, you can either move one rat 1 to 5 spaces, or multiple rats 1 to 3 spaces. The caveat being that all the rats need to end their turn on spaces of the same colour. Each space gives you resources, and with some added bonuses of stolen backpacks and lightbulbs, your ability to accrue resources gets better and better as the game goes on.
First Rat has a great engine building feel. At the start of the game you’ll feel utterly accomplished when you manage to collect 3 cheese on a single turn, but come the end of the game, you might swing a turn where you could collect 9 to 20 cheese. The progression feels excellent. First Rat is also quick to play, and offers a variable side of the board, so you can mix and match the spaces, thwarting that one player who manages to find the optimum route on the first play. I’ve only played First Rat once, but I’m looking forward to more
6. Kites
I love real time games. If a game has a real time component, I’m instantly down to give it a shot. Kites, designed by Kevin Hamano and published by Floodgate Games, gives you 6 timers and a stack of cards, then tasks you with keeping all the timers going simultaneously via card play.
Each card has one or two colours on it. When you play a card, you must flip over the colours depicted on the card, then draw a new card. If any of the timers ever run out, you lose. If you manage to drain the entire deck and play all the cards from your hand, then you win!
It’s straightforward, elegant, exciting, and kinetic. You’ll be anxiously looking at the red timer getting close to empty, play a card to flip it, then the next player will play a purple and red card. The anguish and stress that comes from trying to quickly parse your cards and which timer needs flipping, all while those timers are constantly draining, is simply delicious. I’m not sure how much staying power Kites has, I imagine once your group figures out the ‘flow’, it’ll move from exciting to just an exercise in flipping timers. But I really enjoyed the two times I’ve played Kites so far, and I won’t hesitate to introduce new players to this fun game.
5. Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion
I’ve already talked about Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion at length on this blog late last year. We bought it as a birthday gift for one of our game group members, as Viticulture: Essential Edition was one of his top 10 games of all time. And he loves cooperative games, making this expansion, designed by Mihir Shah and Francesco Testini published by Stonemaier Games, a no-brainer.
If you don’t want to read my full review, here’s the summary. It’s great. I enjoyed playing Viticulture World more than the competitive regular game. If you like coop games, and you like Viticulture, this is a must get!
4. Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition
Most people have some kind of history with trick taking games. My mom had a game group where they would play Hearts into the wee hours of the morning. As I grew up, my family gatherings always included a game of Wizard. Many of the gamers I’ve talked to have a similar background, of a specific trick taking game being something that brings people together.
Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition, designed by Muneyuki Yokouchi and published by Bézier Games, puts an out-of-the-box twist on the trick taking game formula. All the cards are black, and are suitless until observed. And by that, I mean, you need to declare what suit each card is when you play it. It’s fascinating that a trick taking game still works when you just, let people decide which suits they were dealt.
There are still rules, like, if you choose to not follow the lead suit, you are declaring that you have no other cards of that suit in your hand. And a big wrinkle in this game, is there are 5 of each card number, but only 4 can be played. If you find yourself in a situation where you cannot play a card, you cause a paradox and the round ends.
I am looking forward to getting my hands on my own copy and introducing Cat in the Box to my friends and family!
3. Akropolis
I spent a couple of weeks in Saskatoon in April, and while I was there I met up with Ryan Rau of Mista Rau’s Gaming to just chat and play a few games. He pulled out Akropolis, and knowing absolutely nothing about the game going in, I was floored at how much I enjoyed this game.
Akropolis, designed by Jules Messaud and published by Gigamic, is a tile laying game where you’re trying to build up your own city. Each of the tiles consists of 3 hexagons in a triangle pattern, which each hexagon depicting one of the various buildings. Each building scores differently, the blue buildings must be touching, the purple buildings must be enclosed, yadda yadda. When placing a building into your city, you can choose to build on top of other buildings. If you cover white buildings, you’ll get stone, and if you cover point scoring buildings, they no longer count for anything. But the buildings that end up on top, get better. A point scoring building on the third level scores 3 times, turning those useless quarry buildings into copies of the colours you want!
In addition to the vertical planning required for building a game-winning city, you also need to pick tiles that hold the stars. As each colour, building will be multiplied by the number of stars that you manage to collect. And in case you were wondering, each player only starts with 1 blue star.
I’ve played Akropolis a few times now, and it’s immensely satisfying. Placing the tiles in the exact right spot, overbuilding useless tiles with ones that generate tones of points, and denying your opponent any stars of the building they’ve been amassing since the start of the game are all simple joys. I would not be surprised if Akropolis ends up becoming a beloved tile laying game next to Calico or Azul.
2. Bullet⭐
I’ve already raved about how much I love Bullet♥︎ and the amazingly puzzly solo boss battle mode. The 2022 expansion, Bullet⭐, designed by Joshua Van Laningham and published by Level 99 Games, is literally just more of the same game. 8 new heroines and 8 new bosses, perfectly intergratable with the base game, there was nothing for me not to love about this expansion.
The new characters are a bit more out there. Their powers push the game system in new and interesting ways. Between Jane Doe, a half girl half deer detective who has three special bullets representing her get in your bag that you need to pull out to use, and Nawa, who has no actions or action points, but has persistent recipes that can be used endlessly (provided the bullet requirements are met). The pattern cards can move bullets, but with only 3 of those per round, things get dicey, quickly.
It’s difficult for me to articulate why I love Bullet⭐ and Bullet❤️ so dearly, but they spark something in my soul. An excitement that reminds me why I love board games. This is a ceberal puzzle that I don’t really feel in other kinds of games. I’m so happy with this expansion, as it just doubled my possibilities with this system!
1. Paperback Adventures
This one is kind of a cheat, as I got the opportunity to review a digital version of Paperback Adventures back in 2021. But, the game actually released in 2022. But Paperback Adventures is so much fun that I can’t help but put it as my favourite game of 2022.
Paperback Adventures is a solo roguelike deck building word game, designed by Tim Fowers and Skye Larson. In Paperback Adventures, you take on the persona of one of three heroes, the Damsel, Ex Machina, and Plothook, each with a unique deck of cards. A game takes place over 3 books, with each book pitting you against a minion and a boss. Each turn has you drawing 4 letter cards, which you add to a persistent wild card, and a vowel card, depending on the enemy you’re facing, and tasks you with making a word.
Once a word is made, you choose to show (or splay) either the left side of the cards, or the right side of the cards, revealing symbols that will provide you with attack, defence, and energy. In addition to these symbols, the letter on top will activate its special ability, which is the text in the centre. The downside, is that the top card will then be removed from your deck for the rest of the combat
It’s not hard to use all your letters, but it is challenging to get the right letter in the right spot. Adding into the challenge, you have the enemy attacks, your items, and skills that all need to be considered before you commit to your attack. Your health doesn’t automatically recover at the end of each combat, either, so taking wounds could mean disaster down the line.
As you defeat enemies, you’ll replace cards in your deck, upgrade cards, which has you flip them around in their sleeve to make them stronger, acquire macguffins and items that drastically improve your abilities, and challenge weird and wacky bosses, each with their own reward cards, offering a disjointed, but lovely vignette.
There are criticisms of the production, mainly that the trays that you use to track health, boons, and poison on are too tight. And it’s true, they are, but after a couple plays, the plastic gets a little worn in, making that problem fade into the background. Still, to address this, Fowers Games has made replacement components available to anyone who wants them.
Paperback Adventures is my favourite game of 2022. Every time I play, I’m caught off-guard with just how much I enjoy this roguelike adventure. There are some coop two player modes in the box, but I haven’t had the chance to give those a try yet.
And those are my favourite games from 2022! If you have some favourites or think that I’ve missed some great games, let me know in the comments below!
