2021 was a whirlwind of a year. The year began with a newborn in the household, we in BC were under heavy lockdown (in this case, heavy lockdown means no visitors) which continued until June!! My game group had been playing games via Tabletop Simulator since late March 2020 which gave us access to a ton of games that we wouldn’t have been able to play otherwise. Thankfully, come the summer we were allowed to gather again and we’ve been playing in person ever since, even including a Cabin-Con retreat!
This list will include several games that were not released in 2021, and that’s okay. This list is to showcase the best games that were new to me this year! While I am often a victim of wanting to play the newest games as they release, I do enjoy going back and finding the gems that I initially missed.
In 2021 I managed to get in 257 plays of 110 different games, 45 of which were new to me. Before I get to my top 10 games I want to mention that the ‘honorable mentions’ list is really strong. Q.E., Dinosaur Tea Party, Fantasy Realms, Forgotten Waters, Underwater Cities, The Isle of Cats, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Sheriff of Nottingham, Gods Love Dinosaurs, Under Falling Skies, and Lost Cities: Rivals. Most of these games are ones that I could classify as good, but I need to play more. Also, most of the games on the honorable mentions list were played digitally, which I’m sure influences how much joy I feel when thinking about them again. You’ll likely find some of these games hitting my Top 100 list the next time I put it together!
#10 – Regicide
Regicide by Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale was the biggest surprise to me this summer. I heard that there was an intriguing and challenging cooperative game using a standard deck of 52 cards. If you have a deck of cards, you can play this game right now!
I’ll admit that while it’s billed as a cooperative game, I’ve mostly played it solo. Regicide also has a significant amount of luck involved to win, so it’s not uncommon to get a bad card flip and find yourself just hosed. I’ll also admit that I haven’t been able to beat Regicide yet… I’ve gotten to the final boss, but fell just short due to an aforementioned poor card flip.
While you can play Regicide with any generic deck of 52 cards, Badgers from Mars has released a specific deck with some thematic artwork that looks fantastic.
#9 – Project L
Project L is spatial relation Splendor. I love the polyomino puzzles, the engine building, the colourful acrylic pieces, and the striking minimalistic visual design. I won’t reiterate all of my thoughts and feelings about Project L here as I’ve already written about it in depth, but I will mention that Project L continues to hit my table with groups both new and well versed in the board game hobby.
#8 – The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
I played a lot of trick taking games with my family as a kid, mostly games Phase 10 and our own variation called Sticks, but I really didn’t expect to love 2019’s The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine by designer Thomas Sing as much as I did.
Introduced to me at the end of a very long day during Cabin-con 2021, the whole group fell for this game hard. We played ~20 games back to back to back, just constantly going back for more. I’m kicking myself for not playing The Crew earlier; Otter kept bringing it to game night week after week and it just kept not hitting the table.
#7 – Cascadia
Cascadia by Randy Flynn is the Flatout Games darling child of the year. I’ve heard so many people talk so positively about this nature themed tile laying/ drafting game, and for good reason! Cascadia is a fun, light, attractive puzzle. Players draft ecosystem tiles and animal tokens and try to arrange them in perfect ways to earn the most points.
Cascadia is often compared to Flatout Games previous Kickstarter project Calico. While I prefer the latter, a lot of people report enjoying the easier, less restrictive puzzle of Cascadia.
#6 – Beyond the Sun
Beyond the Sun is a phenomenal game made even more impressive when taking into account that this is Dennis K. Chan’s first design. Beyond the Sun creates an analog experience for everyone’s favourite aspect of Civilization, tech trees. The big main board has several columns indicating the ‘level’ of each technology with lines going from left to right indicating each technology’s prerequisites. What makes this game interesting for repeat plays is that each level of technologies has a whole deck to choose from.
I’ve only played Beyond the Sun once, but I’m very excited to explore this game even more. I’m even looking forward to an expansion that offers some more asynchronous player powers, and am eagerly excited to see what else Dennis K. Chan has in store for us board gamers.
#5 – MicroMacro: Crime City
MicroMacro: Crime City by Johannes Sich is another game that I covered in depth this year. I played the demo and really loved the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ style gameplay mixed with a feeling of time passing. Being able to trace a criminal’s steps backwards through the city, or follow someone fleeing from an event like a bank robbery brought such joy to my wife and me.
I love that as you’re following the threads of one case you can start to notice other things going on in the periphery, things that you can make a mental note of something that you’ll probably need to come back to in a later case, but it’s not too obvious as to whats going on that you feel like you’ve accidently solved another crime just by stumbling upon a vital clue.
In my review I wrote that I didn’t plan on keeping the first game around, as it’s kind of a one and done game. I did recently pick up the follow-up game, MicroMacro: Crime City – Full House but haven’t had a chance to break it out yet. From what I read, we can expect two more MicroMacro: Crime City games in the near future, and some cases that will span all the maps. We’ll see if those work well, and just how fun it will be to try and manage 4 different maps spanning the entirety of my living room floor, especially now that my newborn has leveled up to toddler.
#4 – Calico
Calico by Kevin Russ came to Kickstarter in October 2019, and delivered partway through 2020. I didn’t really learn about it until early 2021. My wife and I were in a game store perusing their selection when Calico caught my eye and wouldn’t let go. I loved the charming, cozy kitten on the cover and I had heard from a friend that it was quite the puzzle. They weren’t wrong, I found my head in my hands for most of the playtime as I compromised and was forced to slowly give up some of the points I was hoping to achieve, unable to fulfill all (or any!) of the scoring objectives!
Most of my plays of Calico were solo when I posted my review in June. Since then I’ve introduced a lot of people to the world of Calico and found nothing but praise. The aesthetic is cute and charming, the puzzle is satisfying, and the replayability is excellent. I love that Flatout Games includes scenarios in the back of the rulebook, allowing experienced players to add on some additional challenges. I absolutely love Calico and look forward to playing it every time.
#3 – My City
I don’t recall much fanfare around Reiner Knizia’s tile laying legacy game My City when it released in 2020. I first experienced My City during Cabin-con 2021, after a brutal, grueling game of Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile by Cole Wehrle, and a very late night of unboxing and playing Anachrony by Dávid Turczi, Richard Amann, and Viktor Peter. My City was exactly the game we needed; light, easy to learn and play, fast, and very little rules overhead. We played 6 games back to back, and then another 6 games the next day. Most of the group at Cabin-con agreed that My City was ‘the game of the con’, meaning it was the overall favourite experience
My City takes only 15 minutes to play, and plays a lot like Rüdiger Dorn’s Karuba (which I talked about breifly here). Each player begins with an identical set of polyomino tiles. Each turn a card is flipped up and all players must place the tile depicted on the card on their board. You can (almost) always choose to pass instead of placing the tile, at the cost of a single point. After all players are ‘out’, the scores are counted and the highest score wins.
We took to this game famously. Since Cabin-con it’s been often requested, more as a game to finish off the night, rather than make it the objective of the evening. We all liked it so much that when Black Friday rolled around and Boardgamebliss.com had it available for $20, we all bought our own copies, eager to introduce our families to this game during the holiday season. While I haven’t finished the legacy campaign yet, and haven’t played the ‘eternal’ game (without the legacy components), I can wholeheartedly recommend My City, especially at the lower price point compared to most other legacy style games.
#2 – Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated
I used to own the original Clank! a long time ago, but traded it during a local math trade as it just wasn’t getting any plays in my group. It was light and easy to play but we found ourselves favouring other deck-builders such as Paperback by Tim Fowers or Super Motherload by Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman. Because my main game group tends to prefer playing a large variety of games, the push-pull tension of Clank! just didn’t resonate with us. No one wanted to be the person to snag the cheapest, easiest artifact and escape the dungeon, even if that was the best choice. We just didn’t want to ‘waste’ a play by getting in and getting out as fast as possible.
So colour me surpised when Otter found a copy of Clank! Legcay: Acquisitions Incorporated for sale, used. It was fully unplayed and in mint condition, so we bought it. I had my misgivings before diving in, but I found my misgivings to be totally unfounded. I had an absolutely blast making my way through Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. We played 4 games back to back during Cabin-Con 2021, and another game shortly after.
Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated sprinkles narrative and discovery throughout it’s playtime, tasking players to reach certain spaces to access the next part of the story. It tickles my need for discovery just right. While the underlying game is still ‘just’ Clank!, I’m hopelessly excited for each new game. I immediately beeline to the next story section, eager to place stickers all over the board. Sometimes it pays off and I do very well in points, other times not so much! I have a blast every time and cannot wait to complete this adventure
#1 – Bullet❤️
I really didn’t know what to expect from Bullet♥︎ by Joshua Van Laningham and Level 99 games. No one I knew or trusted turned me on to the game. All I knew was that I liked Level 99 Games’ previous projects and that I enjoy the anime aesthetic.
What I found was an engaging action-packed, push-your-luck puzzle game, full of tense decisions. Now, I love real time games and I love puzzles so it’s absolutely no surprise that Bullet♥︎ appeals to me in the way that it did. Most of my time with Bullet♥︎ comes from the solo Boss Battle mode. I wrote about Bullet♥︎extensively here so I won’t rehash my thoughts too much. All I will say is that I continue to love Bullet♥︎ and I expect that if I can find a group to play this with more often, Bullet♥︎ will quickly climb up my list of top 100 games.
Thanks for reading my list of top games that were new to me in 2021. Let me know in the comments which games were new to you in 2021 and which ones you’re looking forward playing the most!
The Evolution app recently launched the Climate expansion, which adds significant changes to the Evolution landscape. If you haven’t already, you can check out my thoughts on the base game of Evolution here!
What’s Different?
Evolution: Climate adds a weather mechanic that really comes into play during the food phase. All the cards that were discarded to seed the feeding pool now may influence the climate as well, shifting the ecosystem into either a new ice age, or a deadly heatwave. In colder climates, less vegetation is available and small animals perish easily. On the hot end of the spectrum, vegetation is plentiful, but the largest animals can’t handle the heat. On both sides of the climate board lay events that may get triggered and will all the animals, or the ecosystem dramatically.
Of course, with this new mechanic comes many more traits that allow you to mitigate the effects of the weather, at the expense of taking up one of your precious trait slots. Do you want to evolve Cooling Frills to survive in heat? Is it worth replacing your Hard Shell, potentially leaving you open to carnivores? You’ll need to adapt to survive!
The smaller, but just as important changes are that players all now draw one more card by default, and each species can hold 4 traits instead of just 3. This gives you space to add a climate trait, but the situation may demand you evolve along a different path. Also, if you’ve spent some time with just the base game, a few of the previous traits have been modified to negate some of the climate effects as well (such as Burrowing preventing some population lost due to heat and cold effects).
How is it?
The base game of Evolution had players struggle against the threat of hungry carnivores, and against the dwindling food supply. Evolution: Climate adds yet another threat to manage. As before, you can push your luck and play traits that primarily assist you in getting food, but eschewing your defence or neglecting to acclimatize to the shifting weather patters will lead to your extinction.
The climate marker only moves one space up or down each round, and with most games lasting between 6 and 8 rounds, the odds of hitting the ends of the track seems fairly limited (but not impossible). As expected, hitting the very ends of the climate track and trigging extreme temperatures can spell disaster for everyone involved. The available food plummets, all creatures suffer massive population loss, and the odds of trigging one of the cataclysmic events rises.
Wildfires, Volcanic Eruptions, and even Meteorites are all options if you let the ecosystem get hot enough
The Climate expansion does add a lot more variability to an already very variable game. Personally, I feel like it adds just a bit too much randomness, as your ability to control the weather is fairly low. Because the weather modification is tied to the same card that you use to seed the pond, it’s not uncommon for you to be in a bit of a pickle; you need to add food to the board, but the only card that adds food also makes it colder. Generally you’ll find yourself picking the lesser of two evils and then trying to adapt to survive.
That said, I do enjoy another threat being added that can punish an overly aggressive player. If the heat rises, larger animals begin to die. Carnivores depend on their large body size to eat their prey, which can give a player who has mustered an army of small rats a bit of a fighting chance.
Evolution: Climate is a great addition to an already great game. The new mechanic offers considerable depth with very little rules overhead. Evolution‘s mechanics already produce an emergent narrative, and Climate only adds to that story. I can’t help but think about the tale where my populous, but small animals narrowly avoided being chomped on by an overzealous carnivore, only to be saved by a sudden heat wave driving the carnivore into extinction.
As I said before, the Evolution app is simply excellent, and the Climate expansion adds even more content to play with. I really enjoyed my time with the app, especially because I have absolutely no qualms about becoming a carnivore and tearing into AI flesh. If you’re a fan of Evolution, adding Climate is a no-brainer!
Number of (physical) plays: 6 Designers: Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin Artists: JJ Ariosa, Giorgio De Michele, Catherine Hamilton, and Kurt Miller Release Year: 2014 Mechanics: Hand Management, Direct Conflict, Secret Unit Deployment Publisher: North Star Games
Introduction
When I’m not playing board games at a table, I’m often playing digital implementations of board games. And because I crave discoverability and am always trying new games, my ‘Games’ folder on my phone has slowly grown out of control.
In 2019 North Star Games released the Evolution Board Game app for Android and iOS, bringing their hit 2014 title designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin into the digital age. The app launched ‘free’ and allowed players to sample the core game. With a robust tutorial, 10 missions of the campaign, and one online multiplayer game per day, it was much more generous than many other apps that demand money upfront, or offer a severely stripped down demo.
I installed Evolution as soon as it became available and played through the free campaign. I had enjoyed the physical game previously, even if it had a tendency for players to pick on the player who falls behind.
North Star Games hasn’t let this app become stagnant. Over the past two years, it’s received a multitude of updates, including Single Player Weekly Challenges, Monthly Tournaments, a Pass and Play mode, various new traits, Asynchronous play, and a ton of bug fixes. In addition to all these new features that have been added, one of my favourite aspects of Evolution is cross-platform play. I love apps that let me play with my friends, no matter their chosen device.
The full game (which includes the rest of the campaign and unlimited online matches) in unlocked via a single In-app purchase. This means if you generally share your purchased apps with members of your family via Google’s Family Library feature, each member will need to pay for the full game individually.
How to Play
I’m writing this section from the perspective of playing the game at the table.
Evolution’s gameplay revolves entirely around cards. At the beginning of each round players draw trait cards into their hand (3, plus 1 more for every species they control). Each player must discard one card (face down) to seed food into the central feeding pool, then in player order, may play a trait card (face down) to any of their species to give them a competitive advantage in the ecosystem, or discard a card to grow their species’ population or body size. Players can also discard a card to create a whole new species. Each animal can only have 3 unique traits at a time, but traits can be replaced; they aren’t necessarily permanent.
The first rounds usually have plenty of food for everyone
After everyone has had a chance to play cards to grow and evolve their species, the face down food cards are revealed and players have to start living with the consequences of their decisions. All the trait cards are flipped face up (and are now active), and beginning with the starting player, may feed one of their species. Herbivores take food from the shared central pool while any animals with the Carnivore trait eat other species around the table (Carnivores must have a larger body size than their prey).
Once all animals have fed as much as they can, the collected food is deposited into a bag (to be revealed at the end of the game) and a new round begins. If any species collected less food than their population, their population is reduced (and could go extinct if no food was gathered).
If the deck runs out of cards during the the deal cards phase, the end of the game is triggered. Players finish the round as normal, then score one point for every food in their bag and one point for every trait and population on your species that managed to survive until the bitter end.
Review
Playing Evolution with your friends can be dangerous. While the first round or two is a utopia, with plenty of food to go around, and a gaggle of herbivores happily growing their populations and evolving traits that allow them to harvest food more quickly than the others. The tenor of gameplay changes the second you see someone build up their body size and play a face down trait. Suddenly you find yourself double-guessing your friends. “Did they just develop a taste for flesh? Do I play the Long Neck trait or the Hard Shell trait? One will defend me, while the other gives me more food…”
Only after all players have had a chance to grow their population and body sizes are the traits revealed. This is such an exciting moment of the game where everyone’s strategies are laid bare. Taking the risk to gather more food (which is points at the end of the game) while eschewing defenses can be lucrative. At the same time, seeing a poorly defended animal gives incentive to other players to grow fangs and take a pound of flesh for themselves.
Evolution is rife with player interaction, and it manifests dramatically as soon as someone turns into a Carnivore. Suddenly everything feels scary and you scramble to build a defense. Warning Calls, Burrowing, and Climbing are all useful ways to ensure your precious creatures don’t become someone else’s snack.
Personally, I enjoy Evolution, but it almost always leaves me feeling just a bit sour, due to the fact that sometimes the best option is to kill someone else at the table, or, someone else has evaded my defenses and drove me into extinction. I’ve said before that I’m a conflict adverse player so it should be no surprise that playing a game with carnivores and tearing into my friends doesn’t exactly illicit joy in my heart. However, playing against AI opponents is an entirely different; there are no hard feelings when playing a cold, heartless robot.
The easy AI is real easy
Playing the Evolution app is a perfect way to enjoy this game design. The animations are fast and snappy, the AI ‘thinks’ quickly, and holding each of the cards brings them up on the screen for easy reading. The End Turn button even requires that you hold it for a few seconds to resolve the dreaded “mis-click”, which is a stroke of UX genius.
The first 10 missions (which are available for free) of the campaign ease you into playing. They keep some of the advanced traits out of the first few games, and even present you with situations to teach you some unconventional strategies (such as using the Intelligence trait to attack a species, which reduces its population, making its Defensive Herding trait useless, allowing you to attack it a second time).
Because the animations are fast, and the AI doesn’t slow the game down, it’s so easy to blaze through game after game of Evolution. I’m much more willing to explore different strategies when the time commitment is reduced down to mere minutes.
Between pass & play, cross play between devices, AI solo games with various AI levels, campaign, and weekly challenges, I have to admit that the Evolution app has everything that I look for in a digital board game adaption, AND the game itself is excellent! Take care that you don’t play the app too much, lest you become an Evolution master and crush your friends the next time you play the game in-person.
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.
