I feel compelled to complete this series before 2021 ends. I had no idea how much effort it was to write about 100 games when I started this series! Luckily this is the point where I move from games that I list as ‘like’ to games that I ‘like like’. These are the games I would ask on a date to see if they want to go steady with me.
40 – Santorini
Santorini by Gord! (or Gordon Hamilton) is one of the few abstract strategy games that actually tries to have a theme. Players are builders constructing the city of Santorini by taking turns to move one of their workers, then building once. The theme falls apart pretty quickly as the winner is simply the person who gets one of their builders onto the third level of any building. What takes Santorini from a fine game to a great game is the 30+ Greek gods that imbue players with a special ability. I absolutely love the way the gods interact with each other. Giving each player a specific way to wrinkle the strategies delights my brain and leaves me wanting to create a spreadsheet to track the wins and losses of every god matchup. I’m not going to, but I’m tempted.
Santorini‘s production should not be glossed over. Not only does this game contain a delightful strategy game, but the components feel excellent and the table presence is outstanding as the ivory white buildings grow and brilliant blue caps dot the skyline. Santorini has an excellent toy factory that makes people eager to get their hands on it!
Unlike the previous game where it at least attempted to create a coherent theme, Splendor leaves it’s flavour more ambiguous. Thankfully, the game mechanics shine on their own. Splendor, designed by Marc Andre was one of the first engine building I ever played, and it set the bar fairly high. In Splendor players are taking gems or spending gems to buy cards. The cards you obtain also provide a perpetual gem, meaning that as the game goes on fewer of your turns will be spent taking gems from the supply as you’ll have enough perpetual gems to buy whole cards.
Splendor is an engine building race; the first to hit 15 points ends the game. It’s the kind of game that burrows its way into your head, creating a growing urge to play it again and again.
38 – 7 Wonders
7 Wonders by Antoine Bauza is a modern classic at this point. I’ve seen it played in groups large and small, experienced and inexperienced, and by players of all ages. 7 Wonders achieves several feats of game design: Plays well with any number of players between 3 – 7, check. Takes around 30 minutes no matter how many players are at the table, check. Easy enough to play with my mom, but deep enough to make me want to play it? Check!
7 Wonders has become one of the most common games at our family gatherings. The short games lets people drop in and out with ease, the rules are straight forward, the iconography is clear, and it is downright fun! If you have played 7 Wonders and are left wanting more, there are numerous expansions available, but for me and my family, we love the base game as it is, no expansions necessary.
37 – Kingdomino
Dominos was not a popular product where I grew up. I have vague recollections of playing Mexican Train with my grandmother, but my memory says I did not enjoy the core gameplay. Drawing tiles and just hoping that you have a match isn’t something that I found interesting.
Colour me amazed when Bruno Cathala took the core concept of Dominos and made an interesting game out of it. Kingdomino is a bright, colourful, and quick game to play that can be enjoyed by gamers of all proclivities. I reviewed it during the summer when I was visiting my mom’s place and we were playing it almost every night. Kingdomino is so easy to get a game started with nearly no setup needed, a fast play time, and a decent number of interesting decisions compelling you to play several games back to back. For someone like me who rarely plays the same game more than once in a night, that is high praise!
36 – Russian Railroads
Do you like tracks? Do you like engines? Do you like games with exponential growth? Russian Railroads by Helmut Ohley and Leonhard Orgler is sure to tickle your fancy. Played over 6 rounds the general rule of thumb is that you need to be earning as many points per round as your total sum of points so far. Round one will close with the top earners accruing anywhere from 5 to 10 points. Round 2 lets players earn 20 more points. In the final round of the game it’s not uncommon for points to vastly exceed 150 points.
It’s rare that a game offers exponential point scoring opportunities, but Russian Railroads manages to pull it off well, which is why it sits at slot 36 of my favourite games. Russian Railroads is available to play online over at Board Game Arena.
The original Viticulture by Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone is the project that began Stonemaier Games. Viticulture itself has had an expansion (Viticulture Tuscany), then a re-release with some of the expansion content included called Viticulture: Essential Edition, then another expansion called Viticulture: Tuscany Essential Edition, which has become my favourite way to play.
In Viticulture you are tasked with growing your winery by building structures, planting and harvesting grapes, crushing them into wine, and delivering orders all in the effort to earn the most victory points. Originally I thought Viticulture to be an engine building game, but lately I’ve started viewing it as more of a race. I was always so hesitate to use any cards or spaces that took away resources for a measly couple of points. Those are resources I could be using to build a more powerful economy, I need to be working towards the wine delivery cards at all times!
By framing Viticulture as a race (as the first person to hit 25 points triggers the end of the game), I became far more willing to scrape points from all possible locations. Viticulture is an excellent worker placement game, and the Tuscany Essential Edition expansion adds even more things to explore while fragmenting the worker placement spots into 4 seasons, forcing you to bump elbows with the competing winemakers.
34 – Five Tribes
Five Tribes (which only accommodates 4 players, a fact that constantly causes all kinds of cognitive dissonance within me) by Bruno Cathala twists the common worker placement mechanic by inverting the formula. Most worker placement games begin with players having a certain number of workers and a plethora of action spaces available to them. Five Tribes begins with 90 meeples spread over the 30 tiles, and on your turn you take all the meeples from a single tile and place them on adjacent tiles, with colour of the last meeple you place dictating which action you’ll take that turn, and the action being better if there were more meeples of the same colour on that final tile. In addition to your meeple action the final tile may also give you an action, or other benefit.
If you manage to clear a tile, you ‘own’ that tile, placing a camel of your colour on that spot. Come the end of the game a large portion of your points will generated by the tiles that you own. Another key twist is knowing when to bid victory points to go first in a round, and when to save them, letting other spend their money to take the first actions.
One of the largest critisims my friends have levied against Five Tribes is that there is an overwhelming number of decisions available to you on the very first turn, and the gameplay quickly diminishes the decisions available to you. Personally, I don’t find that to be a terrible downside, and the clever puzzle of moving groups of meeples around the board tickles my brain in a delightful way that leaves me wanting more.
33 – Castles of Mad King Ludwig
In Castles of Mad King Ludwig players each begin with a simple foyer. Through a series of rounds you’re tasked with building a sprawling and grand palace for King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Theme aside, designer Ted Alspach has released a wonderful product here. One player each round is designated the master builder, and gets to dictate the price for all the new rooms with the catch being that the master builder will be the last to buy a room. Rooms can be added to any doorway and often give or take away points based on what other rooms are adjacent to them (after all you wouldn’t want a bedroom right next to a bowling alley). If a player ever manages to ‘complete’ a room by having all of the rooms entrances lead to other places, they get a special benefit.
The ‘I split you choose’ mechanism is devious, letting players price certain rooms incredibly highly (if desired by opponents), but making the one who sets the price pick last offers great tension and quality decision making. Castles of Mad King Ludwig had a lavish reprint on Kickstarter recently that had me very tempted to throw the old edition to the curb and buy the all-in edition. Maybe that will be my next purchase after I finally buy myself a castle…
32 – Clans of Caledonia
One of the big contentious points within my game group is that I refuse to play Gaia Project or Terra Mystica (Both by Jens Drögemüller and Helge Ostertag). Whenever someone suggested them my veto is swift and decisive. I don’t know what it is about those two games, but I just cannot wrap my mind around creating an efficient economy that allows me to take more than 2 turns per round, while also juggling the mana that cycles through the 3 bowls.
Clans of Caledonia by Juma Al-JouJou is our compromise. I don’t know what it is about Clans of Caledonia that I find more enjoyable than Gaia Project and Terra Mystica (it’s very apparent that Clans of Caledonia draws a lot of inspiration from Gaia Project and Terra Mystica). Perhaps it’s the Scottish theme that makes me feel kinship with the clan power; perhaps its because Juma Al-JouJou has distilled the resources needed to buy things down to just coins; or perhaps it’s the dynamic buy/sell track that was added, allowing players to sell their excess goods to get more of the aforementioned coins that allows them to keep playing the game!
Whatever the reason is, I really enjoy Clans of Caledonia and suggest playing it whenever we’re in the mood for a longer, complicated Euro game.
31 – Navegador
It’s almost fitting that Navegador by Mac Gerdts sits one spot above Clans of Caledonia, as it had to be another major influence for Juma Al-JouJou. Navegador features a dynamic market that has players buying and selling goods to get money. The more goods you buy, the more they sell for, encouraging other players to take advantage of the other side of the market (you can only buy or sell a good per trade action). The symbiosis between players is fascinating. As you sell more and more of goods you directly make it more profitable and better for your opponents to buy that same good. In return, the more goods they buy, the more profitable it is to sell!
Beyond the dynamic market Navegador has players building ships, sailing down and around Africa, claiming colonies (that produce goods), build factories (that sell goods), as well as building churches and shipyards. The action selection is managed via a a rondel, limiting your next action to the next three segments (unless you pay dearly), which makes certain actions more expensive, depending on where you are on that circle. You’ll need to make some agonizing decisions on skipping over actions (as you won’t be able to access that action until you come all the way back around the rondel) while racing your opponents to achieve goals first.
I really adore Navegador. It’s fun, fairly fast and uncomplicated, and has positive player interactions, which I always enjoy. Games like Navegador and Concodia (spoilers: this will be featured on a later list) inspire me to seek out more games from Mac Gerdts.
Mechanics: Dice Rolling, Modular Board, Direct Conflict
It’s always fascinating when a piece of media tries to cross barriers between genres. I’m thinking of games such as Bloodbowl, which marries a strong fantasy setting with American football, or Forgotten Waters which leans heavily on story telling and role-playing elements to elicit joy in players instead of strong or clever board game mechanisms.
Most people know what they like. Personally, I know that I do not enjoy horror or sports, so any media catering to fans of those genres is lost on me. People who really love story-telling and role playing generally won’t enjoy games that don’t tell a story (looking at you, dry economic train games). If we imagine each genre of game as a slice of the bigger ‘gaming pie’, we all on some level know which slices of pie we’ll enjoy the most.
The reason I’m talking about proclivities is because I know I am not a war gamer. I know for a fact that I don’t like games with a lot of direct conflict, nor do I relish in games that rely on chance for resolving outcomes. I cringe when games like Root and Oath hit our tables because I know that no matter how well regarded or praised a game is, I know that I don’t enjoy games that involve a lot of direct conflict (I’ll refer to these as ‘war games’ going forward).
Apparently the way my game group convinces me to play a direct conflict game is to downplay the more random elements; “Eclipse is barely even a war game” they said; “You only have one, maybe two battles in the whole game!” they claimed. With these comments in mind, I sat down at the table to play Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy designed by Touko Tahkokallio.
How to Play
Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy begins with every player situated on their own system with naught but empty space between them. In the centre of the table is the Galactic core with a big ‘ol baddie just waiting for someone to rush in, pummel them, and claim their lucrative spot.
On your turn you can take one of six actions: explore, influence, research, upgrade, build, and move. Each action requires a disc and usually has you spending some of your resources in order to gain something in return. Exploring allows you to put new tiles on the board, potentially connecting your system with the other players in the game and discovering planets that will net you more resources during the income phase. Influence allows you to move discs from the central play area to your own board, and back again. Research lets you spend your science resource to discover a new technology. Upgrade lets you reap the benefits of your research and equip your various ships with better weaponry and shields. Building costs materials, but puts ships onto any hex you control, and moving lets you move said ships into adjacent tiles.
Player board at the end of the first round
Action taking continues around the table until players decide to pass on further actions. Once all players have passed, the game moves into a combat phase. Any tile that contains more than one colour of tokens breaks out into combat. Players roll die according to their units initiative toresolve the combat. By default, a 6 is a hit and deals one damage. Upgraded weapons will deal more damage per each success rolled, computers will lower the number required for a hit, while shields raise the number required to hit your ships(6’s ALWAYS hit and 1’s ALWAYS miss). Once a ship has taken damage exceeding it’s hull strength, the ship is been destroyed.
Once all combat is resolved, players gain income based on the number of planets they’ve occupied. Finally, upkeep costs need to be paid based on the number of discs that you have out. Having completed this phase, the next round starts.
At the end of the game your score is derived from the points on the tiles on which you have a disc, any reputation tiles, any ambassador tiles, discovery tiles, monoliths, and your progress on the technology tracks. The player with the most points is the Supreme Galactic Ruler!
Review
The “How to Play” section above isn’t meant to be a comprehensive tutorial on how to play Eclipse. After all, the rulebook is 25 pages long and offers plenty of examples to help players navigate the considerable depth of rules. Board Game Geek’s forums also has a lot of discussion on some more edge-case rules questions, but it can be tricky to navigate as there were some rules changes and balance changes that happened between editions of the game and the expansions.
My friends weren’t lying when they said Eclipse is barely a war game. Rather, it is more of a resource management, economic game. As players take actions and spread their influence across the galaxy, they’ll be putting discs from their player board onto other things. The more discs you take off your track, the more money you’ll have to pay at the end of the round. If you can’t pay for your actions, you go bankrupt and may be forced to return some of your influence from the board to cover your shortfalls.
If I take any more actions, I’ll end up with a trade deficit But I won’t get very far on a single action per turn…
Like many games in the 4X genre (eXplore, eXploit, eXpand, eXterminate) the first couple of turns have players individually exploring the area around their home, gobbling up any resources to really kickstart their engines. While exploring, you may run into an neutral enemy called an ‘Ancient’. The Ancients aren’t terribly difficult to destroy (especially after a few researches and upgrades), but this is where the first instances of luck can start to make or break your Eclipse experience. It’s not unrealistic for one player to draw tiles that contain no threats and offer a variety of benefits. Plentiful planets, artifacts, and useful wormholes that make it easier to explore even more. To add to the momentum, artifacts can often give a player a bunch of resources that greatly assist them in their next few actions.
Conversely, If you explore and happen to find an Ancient, you’ll need to use a subsequent action to move some of your ships into that space. Then, after all players have finished taking actions and the game has moved into the combat phase, you’ll roll dice to resolve the combat. Assuming you win, you may put an influence disc in the sector and gain the rewards and/or place cubes on planets. It feels stifling to get surrounded by Ancients on your first few explore actions, while watching your opponents easily gobbling up planets left and right.
He who controls the centre, controls the universe
Eclipse is a resource management game, make no mistake. During each of your actions you move a disc off a track which dictates how much money you need to pay at the end of the round. If your actions exceed the amount you pay, you may end up going bankrupt. If your faction expands too far and you just happen to not find any orange plants (which increase the amount of money you generate at the end of every round), you may find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place, deciding to go bankrupt and lose discs off sectors (which also return any cubes on planets to their tracks), or choosing to end your turn early.
Combat in Eclipse is anything but deterministic. Ships come in a variety of shapes and abilities and players can tweak their powers to fit each game. If you’re going up against someone who is very likely to hit, but does little damage with each success, you may want to improve your hull to survive multiple hits. Perhaps your opponent is a glass cannon; dealing 4 damage on every hit, but has no hull. In this case its worth investing in missiles, which only fire once per combat, but always shoot first. Of course, all of these modifiers and add-ons are locked behind specific technology tiles, which are randomly drawn at the beginning of every round, meaning sometimes the technology you really want just isn’t available, or the first player took it before you even had a chance. In addition to needing the technology to be available to buy, you need to pay for it using the science resource (pink). Hopefully during your explore actions you managed to find some pink planets to plop your cubes onto.
Bigfoot! Get out of my galaxy!!!
A lot of progress in Eclipse is cumulative; the more success you have early, the more you can do later. The more techs you research, the cheaper future techs are and the more upgrades you can slot onto your ships. The more sectors you explore the more cubes you’ll put onto the board which gives you more resources, allowing you to take more actions and buy more ships. It’s a pretty classic engine builder in that regard, including how your game can grind to a halt as soon as someone throws a wrench in your plans.
My most recent game showed a nasty edge of Eclipse. Otter had some bad luck with his explore actions right at the beginning of the game, leaving his starting hex adjacent to two Ancients. Simultaneously his neighbour Bigfoot explored right to the edges of his tiles, and laid them in such a way that Otter couldn’t reach the rest of the board, save for one single tile that he could use to reach the centre, that happened to have another Ancient guarding it. That tile was then quickly occupied by Bear (whose faction could occupy tiles guarded by Ancients), who promptly turned it into a stronghold, gating Otter into his own little sliver of space from which he could not escape.
Because Otter couldn’t explore, he was getting a paltry amount of resources during each income phase. He poured everything into defeating the Ancients and then trying to break down the gate setup by Bear. Unfortunately he just couldn’t compete with Bear who had access to twice as much space as Otter and was reaping the rewards that comes with colonizing that much space. His game was absolutely frustrating right from the first turn.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the downsides of randomness. I’ll give Eclipse credit where it’s due: the randomness does create very exciting and tense moments. In one game, I pushed my luck and attacked the centre tile on my second turn. Had I been successful, it would have set me up to absolutely dominate the game (I failed and ended up bankrupt, but that’s not the point of the story). In other games, factions build and prepare their ships until finally they crash into each other, each player rolling half a dozen die each, but sometimes a horrible upset can happen! A single starbase defending against a dreadnaught, or a pair of small cruisers dominating against a force three times their size.
Inevitably, the centre tile is a common battleground for the final round of the game as it ends up being easily accessed by everyone, and is worth the most points. I do love how the tension crescendos at the end of the game where suddenly players have nothing to lose and everyone strikes out for the final battles, trying to snatch poorly defended points away from their neighbors.
I’m not sure if Eclipse succeeds in satisfying both the Euro gamer crowd and the war gamer crowd. All the randomness I’ve listed above is more than enough to sour the experience of someone who doesn’t enjoy randomness in the first place. The action-efficiency puzzle/engine building aspect doesn’t seem like it’s something a war gamer would particularly enjoy; ‘senseless bookkeeping’ is the term that comes to mind.
That said, if you’re the type of person who can enjoy both sides of the gamer pie, Eclipse is a solid design. Highly dynamic gameplay, incredible replayability, and strategic depth that allows players to change their strategies from game to game (and allows other players the space to adapt and counter), all within a 3 hour play time! Eclipse has the potential to be a brightly shining star in your board game collection, if you can stomach the luck.
In November 2021 my gaming group (Bear, Otter, and Bigfoot) and I rented a cabin and spent a weekend playing board games all day and night. Here’s how it went, and at the end I’ll let you know what I loved and what I would change for next time.
Prelude
A little background about our group; we meet every Wednesday around 6:30PM at one of our homes (the person hosting rotates evenly) and play games until around 9PM or 10PM. The four of us are each avid gamers, so our lists of games that we want to play grows faster than we can play them.
On some level I have always looked at the big conventions with envy; booking off three whole days to just play board games sounds like a dream. We have gone to a couple local conventions to meet others and play new games, but we have found that we always gravitate towards just playing with each other. We have known each other for almost 7 years now, we all love a lot of the same games, and we know that we can trust each other to be appropriately invested in the game. We avoid the uncomfortable situation of having a player who does not respect the hobby. For instance, at one of the local conventions a fifth player asked to join our table, and then he was on his phone through the whole rules explanation and had to be told it was his turn every time. Each time his turn came up he’d ask ‘alright, what happened?’ and ‘How do I play? Can I do this?’, making it obvious he did not listen to the rules, or even bother to engage with us at the table.
We talked as a group about going to a large convention, but eventually decided that there wasn’t much point in going to a whole big convention, paying the entrance fee, renting a hotel room and travelling only to play games with each other the whole time. We decided we would prefer to rent a cabin locally instead. Thus the idea of Cabin-Con was born.
Leading up to Cabin-Con we created a Google Sheet to curate our game selections for the weekend. We each listed the top three games we wanted to play over the weekend. Bigfoot had received his all-in Kickstarter pledges of Anachrony and Oath during Covid and was eager to have those hit the table. I purchased a ‘used’ copy of Clank Legacy from someone locally (they had bought the game, took the shrink off and punched the tokens, but their game group never got around to playing it), so I wanted to add that to the experience. Bear was particularly eager to play Eclipse, as we had played it a couple weeks ago and he wanted another chance to become the supreme leader. We all included many other lighter games that we owned and each had a chance to mark which ones we wanted to veto, or lift up as a priority.
The master play list became:
Clank Legacy
Food Chain Magnate
My City
A Feast for Odin
Oath
Anachrony
Eclipse
Thursday
Originally check-in was listed for 5pm, but the cabin owner allowed us to check in early, around 2:00pm. We arrived, unpacked the coolers of food and drink, and assembled the game library.
By 3pm we were unpacked and ready to begin. We started the weekend with a round of Arboretum by Dan Cassar, which is always a hit. We learned and played Lost Cities: Rivals by Reiner Knizia, and we each really enjoyed it! It was interesting how our first few auctions sold 2 or 3 cards for 6 dollars, while subsequent auctions were giving away 8 cards for 4 dollars! I look forward to breaking this out again to see how the auctions change on repeat plays and with experienced players.
Cartographers by Jordy Adan came up next, which was my very first time playing in person. I really love Cartographers, to the point where I’m likely going to buy my own copy so I can play with my family when I visit them for the holidays.
With three 30 minute games under our belt we unboxed A Feast for Odin and learned the rules (Our group usually learns new games by putting it on the table and I read over the rulebook, speaking out loud the important parts with each of us clarifying what we find ambiguous. It’s a system that seems to work well for us). With A Feast for Odin set up and learned, we paused for dinner, provided by Bear (who pre-made a bunch of meals and froze them, so only a re-heat was necessary).
I had only played A Feast For Odin by Uwe Rosenberg once in 2017. My vague recollections helped keep me with the pack. I focused on breeding sheep and shearing them to cover the negative point spaces on my board, but found it quite difficult to keep up with the rest of the group. In addition, none of the occupations I pulled were particularly helpful until the end of the game, making my resource engine stall early. The final scores were 58 (me) 64 (Otter and Bigfoot) and a massive 104 point victory for Bear.
I made a note to myself to spend some more time with A Feast for Odin in the future, as it’s quite the intriguing puzzle! It also helps that I really enjoy a lot of Uwe Rosenberg’s games, although my favourite remains Agricola.
Originally we planned to have a fire each night, as the cabin had an outdoor firepit. Unfortunately, it rained heavily all weekend. We consoled ourselves with a game of Citadels by Bruno Faidutti, which felt unnecessarily back-stabby in my opinion. That said that, it was the only game I won on Thursday, so I’m sure that says something about me.
Friday
Friday morning began slowly with a cup of coffee and a walk on the beach while I waited for the rest of the group to get out of bed (one of the joys of having a child under one year old is that I can’t sleep in anymore). By 10:30am a breakfast of bacon and eggs had been consumed by all and we began the first full day by breaking out Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated by Andy Clautice and Paul Dennen.
We had played the original Clank! only a handful of times before we decided that it ultimately wasn’t for us. The tension of delving deep into the dungeon and trying to get out in time wasn’t terribly satisfying for us, as none of us were willing to be the person who grabs the cheapest, easiest treasure and gets out quickly. We also found that we prefer other deck builders like Hardback by Tim Fowers and Jeff Back, and Super Motherload by Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman. Nevertheless we were compelled to buy the game for the Legacy aspect alone.
We played 4 games back to back where it became clear that my goal wasn’t to win each game, but to hit as many story encounters as possible. Clank! Legacy satisfied my desire for discovery with every story that got read and every sticker that got placed on the board (which was a lot). I had somewhat hoped to playthrough the entire box during the weekend, but I bowed to the will of the group and packed it away after four rounds. I’ll be pushing them to play it again during our Wednesday night game sessions until we finish the entire campaign.
The rain had cleared up by this point so we chopped some wood, made a fire, and ate dinner outside. After dinner we just chatted while sipping whiskey. We’ve known each other for so long, but so rarely do we ever just sit around to talk. When we gather, we know that each other person is just as eager to play a board game so it becomes our default activity very quickly.
At 7:30PM we cracked open the Anachrony Infinity Box. The game was still in shrink wrap so we got to work on punching, sorting, and learning the rules for this massive game. Around 10:30PM as we took our first turns I saw the same fear in their eyes that would take the heart of me. A low-level despair had set in the group around the second half of the rule teach; 2+ hours is a long time to prepare to play a board game. Thankfully the first few rounds of Anachrony flow quickly and we all caught a second wind and carried through to the end, getting to bed closer to 2am.
I really enjoyed the theme and production of Anachrony. I recognize that having the thick, heavy mechs to hold your workers is entirely unnecessary, but now that I played with these toys, I’d have a hard time playing without them. They serve very little function other than to turn this 2D board game into a 3D spectacle, but I found joy in that spectacle. If there was one word to describe Anachrony, it would be “cool”.
Now that I know how to play Anachrony, I looked over some of the expansions (side note, expansion rule books are SO MUCH EASIER to read when you already know how to play the base game) and am very excited to return to this world soon to explore the modules and expansions included in the Infinity Box. From what I hear, the Fractures of Time expansion is more or less a requirement going forward.
Saturday
The plan for Saturday was to play two or three games of Oath, then My City and perhaps Brass in the evening. Inspired by Friday night’s pain of having to un-shrink wrap and punch the pieces before playing, Bear, Bigfoot, and Otter all got to work preparing Oath and My City while I made pancakes.
Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile is not the first game designed by Cole Wehrle that we’ve played. Bear is a huge fan of Root, and Bigfoot really enjoys Pax Pamir. I found it incredibly difficult to conceptualize the mechanics of Oath, even using the ‘first turn guide’. The rules questions came fast and furiously, which made me very thankful for The Law of Oath, which made it really easy to find most of the answers. We plodded through Oath with Bear as the Chancellor who took the Cursed Cauldron early and found a card that let him ignore all skulls on his attacks. From then on fighting him became an exercise in futility as we’d clash against him, push him out of a zone, and then he’d throw himself against us, his skulls not affecting his army, and his cauldron instantly regenerating his army. He was a force that couldn’t be reckoned with.
If Anachrony has a word to describe my experience (Cool), then the word I would use to describe Oath is ‘frustrating’. During the game I felt powerless. I had all my relics taken from me and my army slaughtered. I had no resources and felt like I was an ant fighting against a God. It was not a fun experience for me, and it took nearly a full 5 hours to play. Most of that play time I attribute to players taking agonizingly long turns, but I still do not feel compelled to return to this experience. I really appreciate what Cole Wehrle was trying to achieve with the living game aspect, and it’s entirely likely that I got some rules wrong, but direct conflict games generally aren’t my bag already, and even if I was on the winning side of this war, I don’t want anyone at my table to feel like they’ve just spent 5 hours at a game and had all their progress ripped away from them.
I may return to Oath, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up in the ‘for sale’ pile before I do.
After Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile my brain felt swollen. To decompress, we opened My City by Reiner Knizia. Little did we know, this would be voted as game of the con! My City is a polyomino tile laying legacy game. Played over 24 episodes, broken into 12 chapters My City eases players into the game by starting with an incredibly basic game, and slowly adds more pieces and mechanics over time. After each game the board is cleared of all pieces, the winners get to fill in some circles marking their achievement, and some stickers are placed on the board, with more helpful stickers being distributed to those with the worst score.
We played the first two chapters in one sitting (6 episodes) before packing it away. To mill the remaining time to dinner, we played The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine by Thomas Sing. The Crew is a cooperative trick taking game that like My City, eases players into the complexity over the course of several games. The Crew has a logbook of 50 mission it tasks players to complete, beginning with just getting a single card to a specific player. As we completed missions and moved through the story things began to get more complicated, ensuring players won tricks containing specific cards in specific order, and even one game dictating that one player could not win any tricks at all.
After dinner we were compelled to return to The Crew, and ended up playing 21 games when all was said and done (only 12 successes though). The Crew is a dead simple game and one that I will introduce to my family as I know they’ll love it.
Once we exhausted ourselves on The Crew, we switched to an older favourite, Vikings by Michael Kiesling. We followed that up with the fascinating bidding game Q. E. by Gavin Birnbaum where players can bid anything to win, but the player who spends the most money is eliminated. In this particular game, the first bid began at $150, and bids quickly swelled up to $7,000 and beyond.
At this point Bear called it a night. The rest of us played another crowd pleaser, Azul, also by Michael Kiesling. This one ended with a sour taste in my mouth as on the last round Bigfoot drafted the final tile I needed to complete a colour and row. He couldn’t even use that tile, it went directly into his negative points pile! The betrayal! The audacity! In the end it wouldn’t have even mattered, his score eclipsed mine by nearly 20.
Finally for the day was Project L by Michal Mikeš, Jan Soukal and Adam Spanel. You can read more about my thoughts of Project L here, as my opinion still hasn’t changed. It’s a satisfying engine building puzzle that charms most people who get their hands on the fun little pieces.
Sunday
Sunday morning was full of wind and rain. Another breakfast of eggs and sausage while cleaning the cabin. With coffee brewed, bellies full and the cabin clean, we had 2 hours to spare before check-out. We played another 6 episodes of My City while discussing what highs and lows we experienced over the weekend.
Conclusion
This was our first time participating in an extended gaming marathon. The most we had done in the past was ‘game days’, gathering at someone’s home in the mid morning and staying into the evening. I really enjoyed gathering together at a cabin, as that level of separation left us each dedicated to the weekend. We weren’t thinking about the chores around the house that we weren’t getting done, or any major interruptions, nor did anyone have to drive to go home, leaving each person to drink as much or as little as they wanted with no repercussions.
I really love food, which shows in that I wasn’t willing to skip breakfasts, or even skimp on them. I enjoyed having a full breakfast each morning. Bear and I are both ex-cooks and were more than happy to prepare all the food while Otter and Bigfoot did the vast majority of the dishes. I don’t know how much they valued the home cooked meal, or if we could have just ordered pizza every night, but the food brought me joy. There was also no end to snacks; charcuterie, chips, candy, chocolates, muffins, you name it. We feasted like kings.
While the temptation for me was to use Cabin-Con to play as much of a legacy game as possible, or dedicate several hours to experiencing grandiose games, I concede that the most fun experiences were the parts where we played multiple games (most of which we already knew how to play) in quick succession.
Next time, I would demand that all games coming to Cabin-Con at the VERY LEAST need to be unshrinkwrapped and punched. I would probably even prioritize learning how to play the games ahead of time, even if only to ease the mental load of learning so many games in such a short amount of time.
This is not gonna happen next year
I recognize that I’m particularly blessed to have a game group that’s comfortable enough to dedicate an entire weekend to go to a cabin and play board games, and that we all have partners who respect our hobbies to let us disappear for days (this is especially true for the two of us that have children who are under a year old).
I look forward to doing Cabin-Con again, and I appreciate that it reminded me that sometimes the most fun isn’t always found in the biggest experiences, but the four 30 minute games that are tried and true. I’ll do my best to remember that from now on.
We’re past the halfway point on my top 100 games! I would quantify this as the turning point where I move from games that I enjoy to games that I’m enthuastic about. I worry that over the next couple posts I’ll get progressively more verbose
50 – The Isle of Cats
The Isle of Cats by Frank West is a poly-omino tile laying game where players are trying to lure cats off an island and arrange them on your ship to earn the most points.
Each round begins with cat tiles being placed onto the table from a bag. During the round you draft cards, then choose which you’ll be playing, taking care to not exceed your fish limit. Once cards have been drafted and played, players take turns collecting cats from the centre one by one until either no cats remain, or all players pass. The number of cats you can collect is limited by both your fish and the number of baskets out have.
Isle of Cats is a charming drafting game. It’s light enough to be accessible to a wide audience, assisted by the feline theme that everyone seems to enjoy. The art of the cats lounging in the sun is also charming and makes your ship board look great as it gets filled with content fuzzballs. Isle of Cats is a game I’ve only played once, but I enjoyed it so much. It’s been hard to get a hold of in my neck of the woods, but once I do get more plays in I’m sure this will be moving up the list.
49 – Quadropolis
Quadropolis by Francois Gandon is another tile laying game, this time themed around tasking players with building the best metropolis.
In Quadropolis all the available tiles for the round are placed on a central 5 x 5 board. Each player has four architects in their employ, numbered from 1 to 4. On your turn you place your architect along the outside of the edge pointing inwards. You count the number of tiles in from the edge matching the number on the architect, and take that tile from the central board. You now need to place this tile on your personal 4 x 4 board, but the tile must be placed in one of the districts that matches the played architect’s number.
It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but Quadropolis is a fairly intuitive game, and the player board does a very good job of reminding you of all of these restrictions. Your goal is to build a apartments, shopping centres, factories, docks, parks, and monuments in a way that maximizes the number of points you earn, crowning you as champion metropolis-ier
Publisher Days of Wonder has built a reputation on producing quality games and Quadropolis is no exception. The tiles are thick, the colours are bright and the included insert is useable, which is more than I can say for some other games!
48 – The Great Heartland Hauling Co.
The Great Heartland Hauling Co. by Jason Kotarski is a pick up and deliver game that I absolutely love. I’ve already talked about The Great Heartland Hauling Co. here so I won’t belabour the point again. I love how small the box is, but still manages to deliver a big experience. Also, any games featuring pigs is a big win in my books. Sheep are so grossly over-represented in board games that I’m taking a stand here and now. More pigs in board games!
47 – Container
I did not expect to enjoy Container by Franz-Benno Delonge and Thomas Ewert as much as I did. The box cover looks fairly bland and the theme of producing and delivering shipping containers to a non-descript island and the potential to bankrupt the in-game economy just didn’t inspire wonder within me.
Luckily I put aside my preconceived notions and give Container a whirl. It turned out to be a fascinating puzzle of producing the right amount of goods and choosing when to take money in and out of the economy. Choosing to deliver containers to the island when your opponents are flush with cash, and buying containers at a barging when they’re cash strapped. I really loved my plays of Container, and look forward to playing it some more.
46 – 10 Days in Europe
10 Days in Europe by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum is one of my most played games of all time. It’s a fairly small box so it travels when I visit friends and family. It’s easy to teach and play so it gets introduced to dozens of people, and my wife loves it, and will play it enthuastically, which inspires me to play it often.
I’ve reviewed 10 Days in Europe previously, and a new edition was recently released, making it a little more colourful and easier to acquire. This entry could stand in for any of the games in the 10 days series, but 10 Days in Europe is my favourite and I highly recommend breaking it out at every opportunity.
45 – Wok Star
Wok Star by Tim Fowers is a cooperative real time game about running a restaurant. Each player is put in charge of specific dishes and players need to work together to manage their ingredients, do the dishes, and earn enough money to keep the lights on for another day.
Personally, I love real time games. I enjoy the stress and challenge that comes with real time games, and I love the discussion and comradery that comes with co-operative games. Wok Star was a hit for me, but if you’re not a fan of either of these genres Wok Star isn’t going to change your mind. There’s also a significant luck factor, as each player is rolling dice at the start of the round and players need to work together to use them efficiently.
Also, any game with a food/restaurant theme will immediately grab my attention. The timer forces players to rush, and inflicts stress in their lives, which really makes me feel like I’m back working in kitchens again.
44 – Cartographers
I called Cartographers by Jordy Adan the “Best game I’ve never played” due to it being an excellent game, and having never played the physical game. I’ve played the Android app a lot, and my group played Cartographers half a dozen times on Tabletop Simulator and enjoyed every game. It’s fast, full of good decisions, and unlike a lot of flip and write games, offers some level of interaction between the players.
My only complained about Cartographers is that I just want more. I want more monsters, more cards, and more boards. Hopefully my prayers will be answered by Cartographers Heroes releasing later this year.
43 – Thurn and Taxis
I often forget how much I love Thurn and Taxis by Andreas and Karen Seyfarth, and part of that I attribute to it’s super bland beige board with German city names that I (as an ignorant Canadian) have never heard of. Don’t judge me! I grew up in northern Manitoba. If I made a game that featured “Opaskwayak, Cranberry Portage, Waboden, Lynn Lake, and Brochet” I doubt some German board gamers would notice or care.
Thurn and Taxis is a hand management route building game that won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award in 2006, and for good reason. Thurn and Taxis is a fun game to play! You take and play cards each turn building routes around the board, and choosing to end the route to place your houses on some of the cities that were a part of your route. The wrinkle comes in choosing if you want to draw a second card, play a second card, or complete a route a route and take one benefit more than you’re entitled to. You’ll feel pulled in multiple directions and the tension watching other players complete their routes is very satisfying.
Thurn and Taxis is available to play on Board Game Arena and I highly recommend that you do.
42 – Root
Root by Cole Wehrle is the cutest war game I have ever played. In Root each player takes control of a wildly different faction. The Marquise de Cat start the game with a soldier in almost every field, firmly controlling the woodland. The Eyrie are amassing a force to take back their forest. The Woodland Alliance is amassing underground support and the Vagabond is making back room deals with each faction, sowing discord and working toward their own secret objective.
Every faction is almost playing their own game, and have vastly different strengths and weaknesses. As the Game Teacher of my group I’ll be the first to admin that teaching Root is HARD. You’re essentially tasked with teaching for small games to each player, and hopefully the people at the table have good attention spans as you need to know each factions limitations in order to effectively hamper their advancement.
I talked about Cole Wehrle’s previous game Vast earlier in this series and a lot of the same praises and criticisms can be applied to Root. It offers great discovery at the expense of a high level of rules overhead. In order to really know each faction, you’ll need to play multiple games as each one, as some of their nuances don’t reveal themselves until you play against other, similarly experienced players.
41 – Hive
Hive is the worst. And by the worst, I mean the best. But it’s also the worst. I’m conflicted.
Hive is a masterpiece of game design. It’s an abstract strategy game that is endlessly replayable; one that will have you biting your knuckles when your opponent makes a clever play that you didn’t see coming. Much like Tak, this is an elegant design, highly addictive and brimming with strategies. Hive begins with the first player putting a piece down on the table. There is no board and the thick bakalite pieces means that Hive can be played anywhere. The goal is to surround your opponents queen with tiles, while ensuring your own queen has room to breathe. Each insect has their own rules for movement, and making the restrictions work for you will separate the winners from the losers. Players will take turns either placing more of their tiles into the play area, or moving the ones they control.
Much like Chess, Hive can be enjoyed by people of all ages. Once you grasp how each piece moves you’re off to the races. Hive also comes in a black and white Carbon Edition, and in a much smaller Pocket Edition. All Hives are good Hives and make for excellent gifts to those who love games, bugs, or both!
A pre-release review codewas provided by Direwolf Digital. I played the Steam version of The Fox and the Forest.
Trick taking games are a tale as old as time and have been ubiquitous throughout my growing up. My mom had a group of three other ladies who would gather and play Hearts until the wee hours of the morning. Later on in life, Euchre, Whist, and Spades were added to the rotation, with slight tweaks to the rules depending on who was joining the table that night and where they came from. As I got older, my family started playing Wizard during our reunions, and now we have reached the point where everyone in my family owns their own copy.
One thing most trick taking games have in common is that they often require three or more players. It is rare that a trick taking game works when only two players are at the table. Enter The Fox in the Forest by Joshua Buergel. The Fox in the Forest is a trick taking game for 2 players. No more, no less. Players are tasked with utilizing the cards in their hand to manipulate the game in order to win most of the tricks.
The Fox in the Forest offers a couple spins on the traditional trick-taking game model. First, there are only 3 suits available. Second, all of the odd cards have some kind of special ability that can spin the game in different ways, and third, you can earn a lot of points by losing nearly every trick.
How to Play
For anyone who hasn’t played a trick taking game before, some of these terms may be a bit foreign to you. Real quick talk about the core of almost all trick taking games – a trick is all the cards played in a round and ‘trump’ is the suit of cards that overpowers the other suits. In general, when the first player in a round ‘leads’ by playing a card, all subsequent players have to ‘follow’ by playing a card of the same suit if they have one. If someone doesn’t have a card of the lead suit, they’re free to play any card from their hand. Once all players have played a card, whoever played the highest card of the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump card was played, in which case the player who played the highest trump card wins the trick.
With that out of the way, you now have the basic rules to dozens of games. What makes The Fox and the Forest special is how it takes that basic concept and offers clever wrinkles and ways to manipulate the game state. Let’s talk about what The Fox and the Forest does differently.
First, Each player is dealt 13 of the 33 card deck, with the remaining 7 cards being set aside as the draw deck. The top card of the draw deck is flipped faceup. The faceup card is called the Decree, and dictates which suit has ‘trump’.
The non-dealer player leads on the first trick of a round. After that, unless specified otherwise, the winner of the last trick leads the following trick. The leader can play any card from their hand without restrictions. The follower must play a card of the same suit as the leader if they have one.
In The Fox and the Forest every odd card has a special ability. Those abilities are resolved as soon as the card is played, before any other cards are played or tricks are resolved. Some will have you drawing and discarding cards, others will have allow you to change the decree cards, and others will let you lead the next trick if you lose this one.
Play continues until all the cards in your hand have been played. At the end of the round each player totals how many tricks they won, and earn points based off the chart below. In general, you want to win more tricks than your opponent, but don’t get greedy or you’ll be punished with a big fat 0 points.
Shuffle all the cards back together and deal out another round. Play continues until someone meets or exceeds 21 points.
Review
My experience with the physical game has been a story of hardship and trials. I played The Fox in the Forest half a dozen times against the same opponent over the course of the last two years, and in every game I get pushed around. I start off the hand doing well, snagging up the first four tricks with no resistance, only to be denied every trick thereafter through my opponent’s clever card play. Or somehow even worse, to be deliberately giving away tricks, trying to achieve the Humble status, only to have tricks forced into my hand, causing me naught but pain.
The Fox in the Forest is a lovely game for a pair of players. Only being a 33 card deck instantly makes this a contender for travel or playing while out of the homestead. The art on the cards is lovely, and the theme is calm and serene. If you really want to get into the story, Foxtrot has published the fairy tale that inspired this design over on their website. Even more portable than a 33 card deck is your phone with the newly published app.
Direwolf Digital is no stranger to making digital adaptions to board games. Root and Sagrada both have excellent apps that live up to the excellent quality of game as it’s cardboard counterparts, but also exudes charm with subtle animations and good UX choices.
I enjoyed playing The Fox in the Forest on my computer. The sepia toned forest background made me feel at ease, in the same way that a lovely autumn walk does. The flourishes of colour and light when ‘cards’ are placed imbues a semi-magical feeling. My only qualm with the interface is that you had to drag the card to play it, not simply click it. I can only imagine that during playtesting someone was the victim of errant mis-clicks and the decision was made to set dragging your card as the best way to play.
The in-game tutorial does a very good job of walking you through the first half of a game, explaining what’s necessary to get you started before leaving you to discover the nuance of the special abilities on your own. Beyond the tutorial you have options to play locally against the AI (no pass and play options at time of this writing). I tried two games against each of the 3 levels of AI and honestly didn’t notice much of a difference in difficulty. I managed to thoroughly trounce each one of them, earning myself 7 or 8 points per round. I’d say maybe I just got lucky, but my experience with the card game and getting utterly trounced over and over tells me there’s more needed to win than luck.
The Fox in the Forest also includes challenges. The challenges offer different scenarios that introduce new aspects to the core gameplay of The Fox in the Forest. The challenge “Might Makes Right” throws out the Humble victory condition and tasks you with getting as many tricks as possible. The “Meek Shall Inherit” challenge flips the script with the player earning between 4 and 6 of the tricks earning the bulk of the points. One scenario randomizes your cards after every trick, and another adds an entire other suit! Each of these challenges come in two difficulty levels and offers a fun twist to test your mettle and mastery of the trick taking system.
Over all, I enjoyed the digital implementation of The Fox in the Forest. It’s fast to play, pretty to look at, and doesn’t waste your time with overly egregious animations. The Fox in the Forest is kind of game best played in a cool morning with a hot cup of tea while you slowly rouse yourself from your slumber. Direwolf Digital has created a faithful implementation of the original game, and has even offered interesting challenges to shake up the experience so the app isn’t just a plain recreation of the physical version. I’m hopeful there will be some updates, possibly with more challenges or with the implementation of a local pass and play feature. I’m excited to explore the online mode when The Fox in the Forest launches on Steam, iOS and Android on October 18th.
