I have this “want to play” list that is constantly growing. As new games come out and catch my interest, I put them on the list where they languish until the opportunity to play them comes along. Unfortunately, with my current gaming habits, the list grows faster than I can play them.
Perhaps a game has gotten a lot of media coverage from sources I enjoy, or reading about mechanics just gets me excited. Here I’ve listed the 5 games that currently have my attention, and why! Be sure to let me know what games have caught your attention in the comments!
Wonderlands War
This is somewhat of a controversial pick for me. In general, I don’t like direct conflict games, I’m not particularly keen on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and I’m not the biggest fan of the Quacks of Quedlinburg. Even with all that stacked against it. Wnderlands War by Tim and Ben Eisner and Ian Moss and published by Druid City Games has topped several “Best of the year” lists and has gotten quite good reviews throughout the year, and I can’t help myself but feel pulled to at least try it for myself!
The cover and art direction of Wonderlands War is absolutely striking. The black and purple box cover of the wild Cheshire Cat’s grin instantly draws my attention. The asymmetric characters piqued my interest, and the production looks unique at the very least.
Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition
If you had asked me at the start of the year if I liked trick taking games, I probably would have shrugged and said “Yeah, they’re alright”. But as the year wore on, trick taking as a mechanism has become more and more appealing to me. Between The Crew and Brian Boru crashing onto the scene, SCOUT stealing my heart, and the impending Arcs tempting me far more than it should have, trick taking as a mechanism in board games is my new darling.
Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition by Muneyuki Yokouchi and published in North America by Bezier Games is the trick taking game where all your cards are suitless, until you play them on the table. In a mind-bending concept, all the cards are black and white. When you play a card to the table, you get to declare what suit you’ve observed it to be. Should someone play a card and proclaim the same card that has already been played, then a paradox occurs (and I’ve read enough science fiction to know that’s a bad thing).
Floe
Listen, I know that I’m susceptible to marketing, but it’s not often that a board game announcement gets me frothing at the mouth excited with literally no details. My introduction to Floe by Henry Audubon was via a tweet: “Taking inspiration from classic Super Nintendo RPGs like Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger, FLOE has each player guide a character on a unique heroic journey across a snow-covered fantasy world”. Instantly my curiosity and attention was secured.
Reading more about Floe after the fact, gameplay starts by expanding the map by placing tiles, then taking actions with your heroes, or with the shared boats. Actions are to move and interact with locations. Heroes will power up throughout the game by equipping items, eating noodles, learning skills, finding treasure and constructing buildings. When you complete a heroic challenge, you place one FLOE stone to mark your achievement, and the first player to place all their Floe stones is the winner.
I’m very curious to see how Floe turns out. I was raised on SNES RPGs, and they still hold a special place in my heart (specifically and especially Final Fantasy II). I know Floe won’t be exactly like Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger, but if Henry Audubon manages to capture the feelings of those games, then we might be in for a special treat.
Tiletum
My enthusiasm for Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini’s games has only grown overtime. For a long while, I was sour on Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar, and I wasn’t a fan of Teotihuacan: City of the Gods. I could take or leave The Voyages of Marco Polo, but since playing Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan and Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun, I’ve really come around to these games. Tiletum is the latest game by the Simone and Daniele duo, and honestly, at first I wasn’t that excited. Another complex game with a hard to pronounce name, I mean, I have several of those to pick from already. But the more I read about the mechanisim, the more my desire to play Tiletum grew.
Much like Tekhenu, Tiletum is a die management game where the dice serve a dual purpose; they gather resources, and they preform actions. The dice are rolled and arranged on a circle, then on your turn, choose a die to gain the number of corresponding resources equal to the value of the die, then perform the associated action. The power of the action is inversely proportional to the value of the die, so the fewer resources you gain, the more powerful the actions you take and vice versa.
I really enjoyed the dice management in Tekhenu, so seeing the mechanism again excites me. While the theme of being rich merchants, travelling throughout Europe, fulfilling contracts and gaining the favour of nobles does little to draw me in. In fact, I’m excited to play Tiletum despite that bog-standard theme.
Turing Machine
When I first saw Turing Machine by Fabien Gridel and Yoann Levet, I wasn’t really interested. It looked like a light party game, and I’m rarely in a position where we have enough of the right kind of people where a party game is the best choice. But seeing it hit the top of a few peoples best games of 2022 list encouraged me to look a bit deeper into this game. It turns out Turing Machine is a logic deduction puzzle, featuring an analog computer!
Side story, my mom used to buy those Penny Press Variety Puzzle books. I’d flip through them from time to time, not knowing how to approach any of the puzzles. The one category of puzzle that I did really enjoy were the logic puzzles. Using the conditional rules and statements to suss out who ate which dessert (or whatever the theme of the narrative was for each puzzle) was always something I enjoyed.
Not many board games employ logic puzzles, and even less include an analog device for providing the answer. I haven’t delved into the nuances of the rules, so I don’t quite know how Turing Machine works as a competitive experience, but I find myself tempted to buy the game, even if just to play it solo!
And those are the 5 games I’m most looking forward to playing in 2023. Some honourable mentions that didn’t quite make it into this list: Flamecraft,Lacramosa, Weather Machine, Endless Winter: Paleoamericans, and Spire’s End: Hildegard. All for various reasons, but at the end of the day, I can say I’m looking forward to all the gaming goodness that 2023 is sure to hold!
It’s no secret that I love discovery. I crave new experiences, and will choose to explore a new game over a game that I’ve played before and know I like 9 times out of 10. For some, this character trait is annoying, but I am who I am. in 2022 I played 105 different games 235 different times, and of those 105 different games, 41 were new to me. I’ve compiled the games that were new to me in 2022 that I enjoyed the most
Now, these games may not have been released in 2022, but I played them for the first time this year. While it’s tempting to be seduced by the new hotness every week, it’s a reminder that sometimes you should look back a bit and see what gems you missed.
#1 – Bullet⭐ (2022)
This one is a bit of a cheat in that it’s kind of an expansion to my favourite game from 2021, Bullet❤️ . And by expansion, I mean that it’s the full game again, just with 8 different heroines and bosses that can be mixed and matched from the original game.
If you’ve somehow missed my myriad of posts about Bullet❤️ and ⭐, here’s a quick rundown. Bullet⭐ is a push your luck pattern matching game for 1 – 4 players. Players pull bullets out of their bags, and assess the colour and number. The bullet slots into the column of the matching colour, and moves down the number of open spots. If the bullet hits the bottom row, BANG, you lose a life. Lose all your life, and game over!
I’ve exclusively played Bullet⭐ solo, which has become my favourite way to play. I love the symmetry of the bosses and characters, and I love mixing and matching, discovering which bosses are a cakewalk against which characters, and I love the push your luck gameplay. The multiplayer mode is also quite fun, if you’re a fan of real time games. It’s fast and exciting, but also, isolating. When the game is on, you are 100% focused on your own board, and all the interaction you get is flinging bullets back and forth between your opponents. It’s a fine experience, but the solo boss battle mode is where this game really gets to shine.
#2 – 6 Nimmt (1994)
6 Nimmt by Wolfgang Kramer is brilliance in a box. A mere 104 cards manages to contain a world of tension and excitement. 6 Nimmt pits players against 4 growing rows of cards. Everyone plays a card simultaneously, then they’re slotted into a row in ascending order, placed next to the card they’re closest to. If someone’s card would be the 6th card in that row, they instead take all those cards into their play area as their score. The catch of the game is, score is bad. The first player to hit 66 points triggers the end game, and once the game is over, the player with the least points is the winner.
6 Nimmt achieves what many much larger and more expensive games aspire to, generate tension and excitement and audible groans as the gameplay unfolds. I love the double-think as you desperately try to figure out what your opponents will be doing. If you’re successful, and you sneak in the 5th card in a row just ahead of someone else, it’s immensely satisfying. If you’re wrong and end up taking a terrible handful of cards, the jeers from your opponents do nothing to ease the sting of failure.
Luckily, 6 Nimmt only lasts for ~15 minutes. Once it’s done, you sweep the table and go again, no harm, no foul. If you like card games, especially simple to learn and easy to break out at the local pub, than 6 Nimmt is an excellent choice.
#3 – Viticulture World (2022)
One of the best things about having friends who are just as enthusiastic about board games as you are, is that when you buy them a game as a gift, they’ll generally play that game with you. It may be a little selfish, but it makes it really easy to buy gifts for your friends when that gift will facilitate a couple nights of hanging out.
Viticulture World designed by Mihir Shah and Francesco Testini is the cooperative expansion to Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone’s 2013 game, Viticulture. In Viticulture World, each player is still managing their own farm, and each player must reach 20 victory points by the end of the game, or the players lose the scenario. In addition to those personal goals, there’s another track that all players can contribute to that also needs to be pushed to its limit to claim victory.
I’ve complained about Viticulture‘s luck before, and how getting the right cards at the start of the game can launch you into a powerful position, and while that still holds true in this expansion, a player doing well benefits everyone. The goal isn’t to try to catch up to the leader despite the luck, but to take the situation the game throws at you and form a winning strategy out of it.
If I’m being honest, I don’t really want to go back to base Viticulture after playing Viticulture World. Now, I don’t always LOVE cooperative games, but this one is pretty special. There are great moments of collaboration, but players still get ownership over what they can contribute to the team.
If you want to read more, I did write a full review of Viticulture World, which you can read here
#4 – So Clover (2021)
As a seasoned gamer, I can often dismiss party games as not for me, as the vast majority of the games that I play are in serious settings. Four grown men silently sitting around a table with furrowed brows, pushing cubes for 2 hours until a final exclamation of emotions at the very end, is my idea of a good time. So when these word association party games show up, I’m perpetually tempting to crush them under the very weight of a superior game, such as Scythe.
I’m only kidding. I’m actually super impressed with how great a game can be with so little. So Clover has a few decks of cards with 4 words, one on each side of the card, and a handful of plastic clovers, so you can align the cards easily. Your goal is to connect the two words on the outside of each wall. What I like about So Clover over other great games like Codenames or Just One is that everyone is involved for a lot of the time. In Codenames, players sit and wait while the codemaster hems and haws over the clue they’re going to give. In Just One, the active player sits with their eyes closed as all the players write their words and compare notes. In So Clover, all players prepare a clover at the same time, then, players go through the clovers one by one, keeping everyone involved and engaged.
I had a blast playing So Cloverat Cabin-Con this year. The next time I go to visit my family, I’m going to pick up a copy of this excellent game, as I know it’ll be a hit anywhere I pull it out.
#5 – Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun
I’ve had a bit of a complicated relationship with the T-series of games (Tzolk’in, Teotihuacan, Trismegistus, Tiletum, etc). Initially, I didn’t like Tzolk’in at all. Then, I disliked Teotihuacan even more. Upon revisiting Tzolk’in, I found myself enjoying it much more than I remember. Then, I got my hands on Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun and found myself really enjoying the game.
If you haven’t played it before, Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun is a big and complex game, but the crux of the mechanics is an obelisk sits in the board and casts a shadow over some of the action spaces. Die are rolled and placed into each of the 6 action spaces, and the colour of the die dictates if that die is pure, tainted, or forbidden. When taking an action, the pip value and colour may affect the action, and the purity dictates where that die goes onto your scales of karmic balance. There’s a lot to consider in every action of the game, and the player who can balance all these aspects the best, will emerge the winner.
Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun has an incredible table presence. A plastic spire rises off the table, and chunky dice lie around it, displaying all the options available to you. There is much more to do than you could ever hope to achieve in a single game. I only got a single play of Tekhenu in this year, but it’s one I’m keen to return to.
#6 – War Chest (2018)
Once upon a time in cold, bitter Winnipeg, I had a roommate. This fellow and I were both avid gamers, but our time together was prior to my discovery of board games. We’d play Gears of War 3 and Borderlands 2 and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game into the wee hours of the morning. We also played a fair amount of Chess, Magic: The Gathering: and Yu-Gi-Oh together. Xel was the perfect opponent, we were both equally enthusiastic, evenly matched, and both grew in our strategies, developing a meta unique to us and figuring out how to counter that meta.
It’s my great regret that I left Xel behind in Manitoba before getting into the world of board games. He installed a deep love for two player direct conflict games in my heart that I still hold to this day, despite not having a gaming partner with the same proclivities over nearly a decade now.
War Chest by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson is the kind of game that Xel and I would have dove deep into. It’s an abstract game with a hex map. Each player has a different set of units available to them, each with their own unique abilities. Your units are represented by chips, and you take actions by pulling chips from a bag, and spending them. Some actions can be spent by using any chip, while others require chips matching the unit you want to use the action with. The goal of the game isn’t necessarily to wipe out your enemy forces, but to control certain points. While attacking and removing your enemies can be very helpful, I’ve won games without attacking a single time and while sustaining heavy losses.
As soon as I get a gaming partner who enjoys these two player direct conflict games, and we start playing games more regularily, I’ll be picking up my own copy of War Chest and any expansions that are available. I really enjoyed my plays of War Chest and can’t wait to explore it further.
#7 – Canvas (2021)
Canvas, by Jeff Chin and Andrew Nerger was a bit of a surprise to me. My wife and I went down to our local board game cafe and plucked this game off the shelf simply because it looked pretty. I vaugely knew that it featured plastic transparent cards. What we discovered was a pretty puzzle game about creating works of art and trying to satisfy the conditions of score cards to earn points.
Now, the actual artwork on the cards is unnecessary to the gameplay, the only thing that really matters is the icons along the bottom. Players take turns drafting plastic cards into their hands that feature different icons. They can then stack 3 plastic cards and slot them into a plastic sleve to create a masterpiece and submit it for scoring. Once all players have submitted 3 artworks, the player with the most points is the winner!
I know I just said that the artwork was unnecessary, and from a gameplay perspective, it is. But it gives the game lots of charm and a lovely theme, even if the composition of some of the artworks feels like it leaves a bit to be desired.
#8 – Pandemic: Rising Tide (2017)
I would never call myself a Pandemic expert, but i’m also no slouch. Playing on the normal difficulty on the app, I have about a 70% win rate, and I haven’t lost a game of Pandemic: Fall of Rome yet. So maybe I had a little bit of hubris when I pulled out Pandemic: Rising Tide by Jeroen Doumen and Matt Leacock. I strode in, expecting another easy Pandemic experience but with a different coat of thematic paint. What happened was I got lulled into a false sense of security thanks to plentiful dykes, then when they broke and water flooded all across the map and I started to panic then promptly ran out of water cubes and was left a broken shell of a person.
I’m being dramatic, but, this version of Pandemic thumped me good, and I’ve been thirsting to go back to it. If you haven’t played it before, Pandemic: Rising Tide is set in the industrial age in the Netherlands, tasking players with building modern hydraulic structures that will prevent the country from being swallowed by the ocean. The feature that sets this version apart from other Pandemics, is that there is only one colour of cube to battle against, and water flows across the map. If a section of map has 3 cubes on it, all adjacent sections will get 2 cubes, then regions adjacent to those regions will get 1 cube each. Luckily, dykes are in place to prevent the water from freely flowing across regions. Unfortunately, dykes break and the torrents of water are relentless.
It’s great, it’s hard, and it’s really hard to pronounce any of the dutch regions. I hope to play more soon so I can figure out where it sits in my personal rating of Pandemic games!
#9 – SCOUT (2019)
I think… I like card games. It’s not something that I logically find myself particularly drawn to. When I’m pursuing the shelves at my FLGS, my eyes are naturally pulled to the big impressive boxes. More and more I find myself charmed by little games that can do so much with just cards!
Enter Scout by Kei Kanjino and published by Oink Games. In Scout, players are dealt a hand of double sided cards, and are explicitly told, under no circumstances are they allowed to rearrange the cards in their hand (I absolutely love this mechanic). On their turn, they can either ‘Show’ or ‘Scout’, and once per round you can ‘Show and Scout’. If you show, you need to take cards from your hand and place them on the table, either a set of cards (cards of the same value), or a run of cards (cards with sequential ascending or descending value). If there is already a show on the table, your showing must be stronger than that’s already there (meaning more cards, or, if tied, a higher value). If you can’t, or don’t want to show, you can ‘Scout’. This allows you to take one of the cards from the current show and add it to your hand. Finally, once per round you can ‘Scout and Show’, where you do both actions on a single turn
The round ends when someone runs out of cards, or, when someone plays a show, and all subsequent players scout. Points are tallied and the player at the end of the game with the most points is the winner
Scout is a little delight. It’s so frustrating looking at your hand and seeing how close some of the cards are, and it’s immensely satisfying when you’re able to scout a card and place it in the perfect spot in your hand. The box for Scout is literally the size of the cards, making it easy to travel with, and the gameplay is fast and easy to teach. I think Scout is the kind of game that could live in my travel bag forever, and would be a hit at every pub I pull it out at.
#10 – Ultimate Railroads (2021)
Much like Bullet⭐, Ultimate Railroads is a bit of a cheat. This version by Helmut Ohley and Leonhard Orgler is the ‘big box’ edition with all the expansions for 2013’s Russian Railroads. If you haven’t played Russian Railraods before, it’s a worker placement game in which players are trying to build a rail line to earn the most points. Unlike most other train games, in Russian Railroads there is no central map or pick up and deliver aspect. Instead you have tracks of varying grade, and as you build the weakest track you unlock the ability to build better tracks over the ones you’ve already build. As the grade of track goes up, so does the amount of victory points you earn.
One of my favourite aspects of Russian Railroads is how the amount of points you earn each turn pretty much doubles throughout the game. On the first turn, earning 5 points is reasonable. Then in turn two, you’ll earn another 10 points, then 20, and by the end of the game you’ll be earning 135 points and riding that locomotive to victory!
The only module of Ultimate Railroads we played with this year was German Railroads, which introduces coal (a module I wouldn’t bother with again), and a modular player board, letting you choose how the rail lines develop and what kinds of benefits you’ll earn from those tracks. I quite enjoyed that playerboard, even if I came in dead last by a wide margin.
And those have been the top 10 new to me games I played in 2022! What were some of your breakout hits? Any games you’re looking forward to playing next year?
Honourable mentions: The Red Cathedral, Acquire, Unsettled
Dishonourable mentions: Maglev Metro, In the Hall of the Mountain King, The Pillars of the Earth, Azul: Queen’s Garden
The final day of Cabin-Con is mostly just a clean-up. We need to be out by 11am, which leaves us with a small amount of time to game after we eat breakfast, pack our stuff, and leave the place in good condition. Last year, we managed to squeeze in 3 games of My City by Reiner Knizia in this time frame. This year, we learned a new game and finished the weekend off with a classic card game.
Explorers
Explorers by Phil Walker Harding is a flip and write game about traversing the countryside and accumulating sets of resources. Each turn, the active player flips a card depicting two terrain types and chooses one of the sides for themselves. They cross off three squares of the selected terrain type. The other players can choose to either cross off three squares of the other terrain type, or two squares of the same terrain that the active player choose. Players can cross off a square anywhere on the board, provided it’s touching an existing square, and crossing off icons on the board will award you with various benefits.
There are keys and temples on each section of the board, to cross off a temple, you first need to cross off a key. The value of crossing off a temple decreases depending on how many players pillaged the temple before you. Carrots, fish and apples act as a set collection each round, the horses give you a bonus wild X for the turn you cross the horse off, and the maps allow you to take the active players’ selection with no drawback. The village tiles also give you points based on how many adjacent squares you manage to cross off. Finally, emeralds will give you a point every turn, from the turn that you cross it off.
There are a lot of short term goals in Explorers, which can be a lot of fun. Do you beeline for a temple, hoping to be there first, or is it more valuable to collect a full set of food before the round ends? Making players choose between multiple goals is really fun, and the game has an incredible amount of variability. There are 8 terrain tiles, which can be rotated in any orientation, the food, villages, emerald, and temples have different scoring styles if you flip each of the components, and all the unused terrain tiles offer bonus scoring elements as well! Speaking of the components, the boards are colourful, thick, and glossy, making it very easy to cross off squares, and wipe clean at the end. All around a great production.
Explorers somewhat reminds me of Cartographers, which is great because I love Cartographers. It’s obviously quite a different game when you drill down into the details, but it still evokes the same feelings. If you enjoy Cartographers, but dislike having players place negative points onto your sheet (an aspect I adore), perhaps Explorers will be more up your alley.
6 Nimmit!
6 Nimmit! by Wolfgang Kramer Is a little card game that was gifted into our board game family. We played it online during the pandemic, and Bigfoot put it into his BGG wish list. Someone local reached out and offered it to him for free! Such generosity.
In 6 Nimmit, the goal is not to get points. The first player to hit 66 points triggers the end of the game, then, the player with the lowest score is the winner. The game starts with 4 cards placed on the table, and 10 cards in each player’s hand. Simultaneously, all players play a card, then, in numerical order, they’re placed into each of the rows. They’re not freely placed, however, they simply slot in next to the card they’re closest to in ascending order. Should a card slide into the 6th slot, the player who played that card must take all the cards in that row as their score, and their card becomes the 1st card in that row.
I’m perpetually amazed at how much tension and excitement can be achieved by a card game. The reveal as all players flip their played cards, the gasp as someone sneaks into a row you didn’t expect and the anguish when you’re forced to take a row with a dozen points or more is just delicious.
Cabin-Con Recap
There was a lot of thought and talk that went into planning this year’s Cabin-Con, and while the dust has barely settled, I’m reflecting on this year’s experience and deciding how we’ll want to change for next year’s event. As I said in my Day 1 post, the original impetus for Cabin-Con was to give us the opportunity to play all those big games we love, but couldn’t get played during our regular Wednesday game nights. We flung ourselves into this event, acquiring Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated with the sole intention of playing it back to back to back. Bigfoot had also recently received his Anachrony: Infinity Box, and Oath, both highly anticipated games at the time. You can read about our experiences in detail here, but what ended up happening was on the first day, we arrived, and played a few small games, Arboretum, Lost Cities: Rivals, and Cartographers, before breaking out A Feast for Odin after dinner. The next day, we played Clank Legacy from 10am until 5pm, making our way through 4 whole games before tapping out. Starting at 8pm that night, we unboxed Anachrony and literally spent 2 hours just sorting the pieces and learning how to play the game. I won’t lie and say I wasn’t filled with despair when the first turn was being taken around 11pm. The next day started with Oath, which ended up being a full 5 hours to endure one play through. Two players were duking it out back and forth in a war of attrition to decide the victor, while the other two players were having a miserable time, unable to get any kind of footing to do anything meaningful. That afternoon we tried My City and enjoyed it quite a bit. Finally, that evening we just played a bunch of small games that we already knew, including The Crew, Vikings, QE, Azul, and Project L.
Upon reflection of Cabin-Con 2021, we agreed that while we were glad about some of those big experiences, but we all agreed that the most joy came from just playing a bunch of shorter games. This lead us to set up Cabin-Con 2022 the way we did, parcelling out 4 equal blocks of time, where each of us could pick whatever game we wanted to play. Then the rest of the time was for ‘open gaming’, shorter games that didn’t need any extensive rules teaching, and a firm NO UNPUNCHED GAMES policy.
Cabin-Con 2022 came and went without a hitch. It functioned like a well oiled machine, the four of us all knew what to expect and slipped into our roles easily. Some part of me feels like the experience was dulled compared to last year, but that’s probably just because it wasn’t new. We knew what to expect, and we knew what we wanted. Each day we played games from 9am to midnight with only a short break for dinner and a campfire each evening. Leading up to the weekend, I was nearly vibrating with excitement, but during the con there was a calm air around us. Maybe we over-plannned the weekend, because we knew the games we were going to play well in advance. The weekend had a ‘business as usual’ vibe. There were no real surprises, no unexpected hits, just, great game after great game. While that doesn’t sound like a bad thing, I personally missed the excitement of discovering a whole new game.
What I didn’t expect what just how exhausted I was when I got home after the weekend! A lot of great and heavy games were played, and because there was very little rule teaching or punching games, it was just hit after hit to my poor feeble brain. 23 plays of 21 different games is no small feat. 1,760 minutes (or 29.33 hours) of actual game play time leaves a mind over-worked and soggy. As far as the winner of Cabin-con 2022 goes, Bigfoot won an impressive 10 games (Barenpark, Beyond the Sun, Cartographers, Karuba, Gaia Project, 7 Wonders, Glen More II, Twice as Clever, Race for the Galaxy and Explorers), Otter claimed victory over 5 games (Sagrada, Gaia Project, Scythe, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, and 6 Nimmit), I won 4 games (Arboretum, Karuba, Eclipse, and Food Chain Magnate), and Bear won a solitary game right at the end of the weekend (Race for the Galaxy). In case you’re thinking that my math is off, 5 games had no winners (Pandemic: The Cure, So Clover, The Crew x2, and Bullet⭐). Fortunately, while I do track plays and scores, none of us really put stock into who wins or loses the most. There are no trophies to be won here.
So what’s next? What might change for Cabin-con 2023? It’s hard to beat the raw efficiency we achieved this year, and playing great games that we already knew how to play means that there were a lot less negative feelings (Oath, I’m looking at you) or despair (starting Anachrony at 11pm was a bit of a mistake). That said, I somewhat lament the original reason for Cabin-con, which was to play games that we otherwise wouldn’t choose to play on our regular Wednesday game night. The vast majority of the games we played over this weekend, we’d opt to play during our regular game days. By contrast, we haven’t touched Anachrony since last year, despite all of us expressing interest in returning to the game. I suspect next year we’ll relax on the “No new games” policy just a little bit. Perhaps we’ll bring along more dexterity games, as those were notably absent. In the end, we all had fun, and I can’t wait to return in 2023
It’s Sunday Funday people! Our second full day of gaming means both Bear and I get to dictate what games we played! Yesterday we suffered through Gaia Project and enjoyed a very weird game of Scythe. But today I’m taking my friends where they never go willingly. To the world of fast food management.
Breakfast
Block 1 (Me!)
Lunch
Block 2 (Bear)
Dinner/Campfire break
Open Gaming
Bullet⭐
Being the parent of a toddler, it seems impossible for me to sleep beyond 7am. So as per usual I was first to rise. I took the morning to walk along the beach. When I came back, I prepped breakfast and made coffee. I was still the only one awake so I broke out Bullet⭐ and played a solo game as Rose Blanchett vs Starry Night Sky
If you’re curious about how the Bullet game plays, check out my review of it here. Bullet❤️ and Bullet⭐ are identical, except that the 8 heroes in each box are all wildly different from one another.
Starry Night Sky is a bit of a weird boss, their pattern requires that you don’t have a single bullet of a specific number on the turn that you break a shield. If you do, then you’ll lose a life. At the same time, you can’t just go wild in breaking shields, as if you break more than one shield in a round, you’ll lose a life.
I promptly lost this solo game, but I always enjoy exploring the different bosses and characters.
Eclipse: A New Dawn for the Galaxy
The first big multiplayer game of day 3 was Eclipse. Now, I’ve already written about my experiences withEclipse, but the more we play it, the more enthusiastic Bear seems to be to return to it. This time, I took control of the Hydran Progress, a science/tech focused race. I don’t know how other groups play, but for the first 6 of 9 rounds of the game, there wasn’t a single combat. There was a lot of building and upgrading, but no combat. Our forces swelled as we all kitted out our best fighters to tackle the problems that were on our doorstep.
I built out my galaxy tiles in such a way that there was only 1 way into my quadrant of the map. I then plopped 4 star bases on that doorstep and attached 2 missile modules to each and a high-powered computer. If anyone wanted to take my territory, they’d need to survive first. I also managed to take the only wormhole generator that appeared in the game, which allowed me to zip out the back door and take over several planets nearly uncontested in the end.
That being said, my star base strategy left me wanting for brown resources; my fleet was severally out numbered. But I doubled own on my smart missile strategies, shaving off the hull of my ships to fit more ordinance. The best offence is a great defense, as they say.
It worked well in the end, I took several planets from Bigfoot, but he managed to survive my volley during my siege of the centre tile. It was my first time even using the missile tech, it’s not a strategy our group has really explored. While Bigfoot managed to hold the centre, I took the win of the game due to the tiebreaker.
Glen More II: Chronicles
Up to this point we had played a LOT of space games, but now it was my turn to pick the game. My first choice was Glen More II: Chronicles, with accompanying soundtrack provided by The Real McKenzies
Glen More II: Chronicles is a tile placement and resource management game. Players take turns moving their workers around a tile selection roundel, moving from the back of the line onto any tile they want, then placing it into their kingdom and activating all adjacent tiles. Then the tile row is refilled and the player who is now in the rear may take their turn. If players leap over several tiles to claim a particularly important one, then it may be several turns before it’s their turn again.
The goal of the game, is to have more of certain resources than your opponents, as scoring is almost entirely dependent on “How many more of X do you have than the player with the least amount.” For example, if I have 5 whiskey barrels, while Otter only has 1, then I have 4 more than he does, which would net me 5 points at the end of each round.
Now you might think to yourself, “If someone leaps ahead, then I’ll just scoop up every tile left behind!” Unfortunately, at the end of the game, players lose 3 points for every tile they have in their kingdom, more than the player with the leanest kingdom. Urban sprawl is punished here.
Glen More II: Chronicles is always a delight, and I love the production. The custom meeples are charming, the art is bright and green, and any excuse to put on punk bagpipe soundtracks is a win for me.
Food Chain Magnate
Because Glen More II is a slightly faster game than the ones we’ve played this weekend (Eclipse and Gaia Project, looking at you), we also managed to squeeze in a game of Food Chain Magnate with a couple expansion modules, namely Coffee, Parks (Lobbyists), and Fries!
The first four rounds of the game are generally quite quick. I know some people complain about rote openings, but I don’t mind them, personally. In my game group, two players generally take the recruiting girl while two others take the trainer, and from there, the strategies diverge. I quickly put up a burger billboard in the top left corner on a house with a garden, with the expectation that players would fight over delivering that good, then I’d cash in on the coffee sales. Unfortunately, Bear beat me to placing the coffee shop right on their driveway, but thankfully, Bigfoot won the bidding war and sold the burger, which ran right by my restaurant, allowing me to sell my coffee.
Bigfoot and I hit $100 on the same turn and both generated the CFO. He placed a park in the lower corner, touching two more houses, and a mailbox campaign started generating interest. I put a second coffee shop right next to Bigfoot’s restaurant, and one next to the park. Now I’d sell 2 coffees to each of those houses every time they ate at Bigfoot’s Blues Bar. I picked up the luxuries’ manager, and now my strategy was set!
What I didn’t anticipate was our CEOs dropping to two open management slots when the bank broke for the first time. I had plans to play trainers and generate coffee at the same time, as my coffee production was still quite low. Should I skip producing coffee for a round and let my trainer work, so I can produce even more coffee in future rounds? Should I eschew the luxuries manager and take less money and train? It’s quite hard to know which way to go sometimes. In the end, I succeeded at selling 3 coffees at a base price of $20 to houses with gardens, making it $40 per coffee, and my CFO worked his financial wizardry to turn that into $180 in a single turn. Bigfoot was selling several goods, but at a base price of $7, plus a $5 benefit to some of his goods.
The bank broke just in the nick of time, as one more turn would have spelled disaster for my luxury coffee strategy. One more round and Bigfoot would have doubled my income easily. As it stands, the game ended with me in the lead with $395 to Bigfoot’s $362.
This play left players a bit salty on the coffee modules, claiming it’s too hard to counter. Unlike selling food to houses, you need to ensure that you have the demand, and you’re selling it less than or closer to your opponents, but there’s no way to steal someone else’s coffee sale. The combo of the luxuries’ manager with the coffee seems really strong. My rebuttal is that my coffee production just couldn’t scale. I’m lucky the game ended when it did, as one more turn would have dropped me into second place. In any case, I really enjoyed myself, as I always do when I play Food Chain Magnate.
Twice as Clever
After dinner and a fire, we returned for an evening of casual, open gaming. The first game that got pulled out was Twice as Clever, the second in the That’s Pretty Clever line of games. I’ve only played That’s Pretty Clever a paltry handful of times, as roll and write games generally don’t light my world on fire.
If you know how to play the first one, you’re 80% there on Twice as Clever. The active player rolls all three die, chooses one to place on their scorepad, take the action corresponding with the colour and value of the die, move any die with a value lower than the die they took onto the platter, then roll the remaining die. They continue this until they have 3 dice on their sheet. Then, all the inactive players may choose one of the rejected die and make a mark on their own sheets. A round consists of each player having a turn being the active player, and the game concludes after 4 rounds.
One of the trademark features of a roll and write game is triggering cascading combos. Marking one thing off your sheet that lets you make another mark over here, which gives you this bonus, and that lett’s you do this thing… you get the idea. Twice as Clever does that very well, and it’s an absolutely fine game, but it’s not one that I would ever see myself reaching for again. Inactive players sit and stare at the dice they want while the active player ponders their own pad, then that blue 5 you desperately needed gets re-rolled. If you enjoy roll and write games, I think this will be a hit, it does all the things you expect from this genre of games, but like I said before, these games just don’t excite me.
Race for the Galaxy (x2)
Before anyone says anything, I only own the base game of Race for the Galaxy, and I love it. I’ve heard the expansions are pretty rad, and I’ve dabbled a bit on Board Game Arena, but I’m pretty content with the base game.
Bear on the otherhand, had vauge memories of distaste for this game, so this was finally the opportunity to re-teach the game to him, in a safe, welcoming environment.
Race for the Galaxy is an action selection tableau bilding game designed by Tom Lehmann. It’s often critisized on being brutally difficult to teach. Luckily, 3 of the 4 of us already knew how to play, so I could focus all my attention on teaching Bear.
I spent the bulk of the teaching time showing him how to read the iconography, as every card is laden with icons. The downside of this approach is it repells new players. The plus side of the iconography is once you know how to read the language, you can parse a lot of information very quickly.
We played twice in a row at Bear’s request, which is fairly unusual for our group. We’re very much a ‘play it once and move on’ kind of table. After the second game Bear had warmed up to the system and was able to find the joy in the game (probably because it was the first game he won all weekend). I suspected it would, as he’s a big fan of other tableau building games such as Terraforming Mars and Ark Nova.
Hopefully with this revelation, Race for the Galaxy will hit our table with much more frequency.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
To cap off the night, another space game. Much like last night, our brains were pretty fried from the long weekend of heavy games. We played 10 rounds or so and lost 8 in a row. One day we’ll be less tired and more successful, but it won’t be this day!
And thus ends Day 3! Day 4 will only contain two short games, but will also have my concluding thoughts on throwing a cabin-con!
Saturday is our first full day of gaming. The schedule for Saturday was:
8am Breakfast
9am – 1pm Block 1 (Bigfoot)
Lunch
2pm – 6pm Block 2 (Otter)
6pm – 8pm Dinner/Campfire break
8pm+ Open Gaming
Gaia Project
Bigfoot had the first block of time where had full control over what game we would play, free from veto, but not free from my derisive sneers. He could pick any game in the world, and he chose one of his absolute favourite games, Gaia Project, which I’ve written about in my Bigfoot’s Trash Taste post.
Gaia Project, designed by Jens Drögemüller and Helge Ostertag is the spiritual successor to Terra Mystica (another of Bigfoot’s favourite games). In Gaia Project, players control an asymmetric faction and must terraform neighbouring planets into their home environment before developing colonies and improving their infrastructure. This is a big game with a lot going on. Players are tasked with balancing several resources as they expand into the far reaches of space.
I can see why Gaia Project (and it’s fantasy partner Terra Mystica) are so beloved. The decisions offered here are wide and varied. With 14 different factions all playing differently, there is depth to be plumbed. This is a tough game that rewards appropriate planning and capitalizing on being a turn ahead of your opponents. There’s no randomness to throw you off your game, everything is deterministic, which I generally enjoy. I still think it’s still a bit too much for me, after we finished our 5 hours game I had a splitting headache, but there’s no way I can say that this game is objectively bad. For my money, I’d say Gaia Project is better than Terra Mystica, even if only because it jettisons the need for priests. One less resource to juggle means one less bottleneck to force yourself through.
Maybe Bigfoot’s taste isn’t as trash as I remember… but don’t tell him that.
7 Wonders: Armada
Our game of Gaia Project went longer than Bigfoot’s allotted time, but wanting something light to buffer between big games, Otter chose to play 7 Wonders with the Armada expansion
7 Wonders is a classic game that serves as the introduction to modern board games for many players, and amongst our group of board game enthusiasts, 7 Wonders remains a tried and true favourite. So of course we’re going to change it by adding expansions!
If you haven’t played 7 Wonders before, it’s a civilization building card drafting game, where players simultaneously choose cards from a hand, reveal their choices, then pass the hand of cards to the next player. At the end of the game, the player who has accrued the most points, or culture, has won the game.
7 Wonders: Armada adds a whole extra board to the right of your normal player board. When you build a non-resource card, you can spend additional resources to progress a ship of the same colour up its track. These tracks will offer some naval combat power, inflict taxes upon everyone at the table, a flurry of victory points, or, the opportunity to settle an island, which can offer some unique enhancements to your civilization.
This expansion also adds a few cards into each of the ages, meaning you’ll play 7 cards per age instead of the usual 6. These extra cards offer more ways to interact with the players who are not your neighbour, like, granting you the ability to buy a resource from someone 2 seats away, or, choosing someone to combat with, meaning at the end of the round you’ll evaluate 3 combats instead of the usual 2.
At the end of each age, in addition to the usual combat with your neighbors, there is now a naval combat that all players participate in. Whoever has the strongest naval military of all the players earns points, while the weakest loses points.
These may seem like small changes, but they actually address a lot of the problems I have with 7 Wonders. I like being able to interact with more players at the table, I like using leftover resources, and I like the little boosts the island cards offer (even if I ignored them to my own demise). I’ve seen this expansion on sale for as low as $8. At that price, I cannot recommend this one enough.
Scythe
Otter had pre-planned on having our friend Clare arrive in the afternoon. Clare is a sometimes guest to our gaming group, but one of our great experiences was playing through the entirety of Scythe: Rise of Fenris together. I actually really enjoyed that campaign, as the ending felt climatic. Depending on your performance throughout the campaign, you got some significant benefits, but the final battle was for all the marbles. I enjoyed the feeling of “anyone can still win this”, and the final game was TENSE. It probably helps that I won that final game, but who can really say? 😉
For those who haven’t played before, Scythe by Jamey Stegmier is an action selection game where the threat of combat is often more powerful than actual combat. Set in an alternate history version of 1920 Europa. Workers farm the land with scythes, while heavily armoured mechs loom on the horizon. Each player takes control of an asymmetric faction that offers various abilites and powers when the mechs have been built, and, each player’s action selection board is different from each other. On your turn, you’ll place your pawn on one of the four actions on your action selection board. You’ll take the top action, which can be Move, Bolster, Trade, or produce, and if you have the necessary resources, can take the bottom action as well, which can be: deploy, upgrade, build, or enlist. Players keep taking turns building up their forces until one player manages to play their 6th achievement star. The end game scores are tallied, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Scythe is high on my top games of all time list, and probably my favourite game that includes direct attacking. I generally enjoy the arc of the gameplay. Everything starts slow, your factions move at a glacial pace, and everyone is locked into their own island, cut off from the world by a river. Only by building the mech that grants Riverwalk can you adventure forth and spread your influence.
In this play of Scythe, we included The Wind Gambit expansion. This module adds in impressive airships with 2 abilities that can be swapped in and out each round, as well as an alternate ending condition. Following the advice of the rulebook, all the airships had the same power, units moving out of the airships space get +1 movement, and players don’t lose popularity when forcing workers to retreat. I think this combination of cards would have been more interesting had we gotten to the end game where stealing resources was possible. The new game end card said, “When the first player places a star in a category that has no stars, they earn $5. The game ends when someone either places their 6th star, or has $40”. Otter just so happened to get a great combo going where he could do the top and bottom sides of two actions back to back (Bolster, build mechs, produce, upgrade, then repeat). This got him 4 stars very quickly, but left his popularity in the toilet. The 4 stars, and the coins he earned from the bottom row actions, left him within striking distance of ending the game. A few turns later he earned his 40th dollar and ended the game just after the first combat and each other player had only 1 star on the board.
I think if the game had continued on, his engine would have spluttered out. Sure, he had a commanding lead, but I do think it would have made for an interesting end-game. Going forward, I wouldn’t play with the alternate ending conditions. I also didn’t feel like the airships added too much, other than general aesthetic.
Bigfoot already wasn’t a fan of Scythe, and this play didn’t change his mind. It was anticlimactic and didn’t have a chance to get interesting or exciting. This play may have also turned Bear off the game as well. Otter and I are still enthusiastic though, we’ll probably try to play through the fan-made campaign soon with a different group of people, but at the time of this writing, I have no idea when we’ll squeeze that in!
So Clover
So Clover was the game of choice while waiting for pizza to be delivered. If you haven’t played it before, So Clover, designed by François Romain is a cooperative word association game. Each player is given a plastic clover and 4 cards. Each of these cards slots into one of the four quadrants of your clover. Each card will have a word along each edge, but you only need to consider the words that are facing the outside edge of your clover. Your goal, is to write a single world on each edge of the clover that will allow the others at the table to re-assemble your clover once the cards are shuffled. Sometimes you’ll have words that just work well together, like Skin and Suitcase (clothes was the clue given in this case). Other times, a stroke of genius will have you connect two seemingly impossible words, like Quilt and Sausage (Homemade won the day here). And sometimes, you’ll get absolutely stuck on a word, unable to shake the meaning of a word, like Charge and Cow. I couldn’t think of ANYTHING other than electric milk, so I eventually just went with Amp and hoped the other three sides of the clover would lead them to the correct answer.
It did not.
It has got to be difficult coming out with a new word association game when there are such giants already published. Games like Codenames, Just one, and Decrypto are so fun and clever, I can’t imagine trying to compete against them. So Clover has done it, we had an absolute blast playing this, and I’ll be picking up my own copy for the next time I visit my family back in the Canadian prairies.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Ted Alspach tasks players with building an extravagant castle with no plan or forethought. Players take turns taking the role of the ‘Master Builder’, where they arrange the available rooms into different prices, then the other players take turns buying the rooms, giving their cash to the master builder, and finally, the master builder paying the bank for whichever tile they take.
Players need to place their tiles into their castle, matching entrances, scoring points based on adjacency, and scoring bonuses if they finish the room.
It’s mildly annoying that you’ll never finish your castle. The game ends after a certain number of tiles have been bought (dictated by the number of cards in the deck), and when the game ends, a final scoring happens. The player with the most points is the winner and players are left reflecting on their architectural failings. Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time getting the bowling alley to fit next to the flower bed, you wouldn’t have come in last place.
I really enjoy Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Years ago, I played this along side another Ted Alspach design, Suburbia. At that time, I proudly proclaimed that Suburbia was the better game and I cast Castles of Mad King Ludwig aside. Today though, I feel my tastes shifting. I like that the room market is controlled by the players, even if sometimes the Master Builder makes arbitrary decisions that shunts the room you desperately needed into the $15,000 slot.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
One of the highlights of Cabin-Con 2021 was The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, designed by Thomas Sing and published by KOSMOS. It was a light and easy cooperative trick taking game that was exactly what our brains needed after a brutal day of playing Oath. We blazed through a couple dozen games that weekend, and this year, we returned to our interplanetary adventure, hungry for more.
The downside, we embarked on this game at 11pm, after a VERY full day of big games. Brains were tired and SOME players (me) were incapable of counting cards. Foolish misplays were abundant, and we ended up failing against the same chapter 8 times in a row.
If you haven’t played The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, the game begins by dealing out the entire deck to all players. cards vary from 1 to 9 in four different suits, and 4 more cards, numbered 1 to 4 in black serve as trump cards. The story blurb is read out, and goals are distributed, based on the requirements of the specified mission. In general, you’re trying to make certain players win certain cards. The rub is, communication is extremely limited. You may not talk to your comrades, and you can only show one of your cards, which you place a token on to indicate that the card is the highest, lowest, or only card of that suit in your hand. If the card doesn’t match one of those three descriptors, then you may not show it.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is a great little game to play with friends. There’s very little at stake, losing just means reshuffling and trying again. Sometimes, multiple tries in a row.
And that’s all we played on day 2 of Cabin-Con 2022. Come back soon for Day 3!
