Great Heartland Hauling Co., designed by Jason Kotarski and published by Dice Hate Me Games, is a clever little game packed into a small box. The rules for Great Heartland Hauling Co. can be distilled to a single card, making it perfect for teaching people who only have a cursory interest in board games.
No room for bananas here!
Great Heartland Hauling Co. uses the theme of truckers rushing up and down the American interstate, picking up goods and dropping them off at the next town over for a huge profit. While spending hours driving in one direction may be the bulk of a haulers job, it’s difficult to make an invigorating game about rolling your truck on a straight road through the flat prairies. Luckily Great Heartland Hauling Co. doesn’t focus on the dozen brain melting hours in-between stops, and focuses on the excitement of buying and selling goods, and pushing your luck that the correct waybills will appear just when you need them.
How to Play
This land is ripe for truckers
In the beginning, the landscape must be created. The distribution centre location is laid down in the centre of the table, where all trucks are born. Surrounding the distribution centre are location cards, each one loaded with 5 cubes representing the type of good that can be procured from that location. Everyone gets a hand of 5 cards, and the player with the best moustache or longest hair gets to go first.
In Great Heartland Hauling Co. there are two different types of cards: waybills and gas cards. You use any number of gas cards to move from one location card to another (max movement is 3). When your truck ends its move in a city, you may discard waybill cards to either load or unload goods at that location. Once you’ve moved and loaded, you refill your hand to 5 cards and your turn is over. It’s important to mention that two trucks cannot exist in the same city at the same time, for long haul truckers are territorial creatures and are likely to shank each other in the gas station shower.
It’s not recommended to have a wide variety of goods
If you find yourself beginning a turn without any gas cards, you can spend money to move instead; $1 for each space you want to move. Be careful to not rely on this however, as money also represents victory points. It’s also important to note that you may not mix gas cards and money for movement – you must choose one or the other for the turn.
Each location has a pair of goods they are willing to buy from your truck, as well as the advertised amount they are willing to pay you for said goods. Should you arrive with the appropriate goods and necessary waybills, you can unload those goods and collect a tidy profit. The first person to hit the money threshold ($30 in a 4 player game, $40 in a 3 player game, and $50 in a two player game) triggers the end of the game. The rest of your fellow truckers get a final turn, then money is deducted from each trucker for the goods they left to spoil in the back of the truck. The person with the most money is the winner.
Review
Great Heartland Hauling Co.’s small form factor has caused this game to live a life of constantly travelling in my backpack. I’m sure my copy of Great Heartland Hauling Co. has seen more of the British Columbian coast than most of my prairie saddled family! It’s a light game to drop into your pack and simple to pull it out at a coffee shop when you’re in Gibsons and have an hour to kill before the ferry back to Vancouver departs. Also, if you find yourself at a Serious Coffee table with 3 others and 90 minutes to burn between a wedding ceremony and the reception.
Pick-up and deliver is not a mechanic I often feel drawn toward. Games with this mechanism often feel like a race without the feeling of momentum or speed. Great Heartland Hauling Co.’s satisfaction comes from the quick turnaround of picking up goods and being able to deliver them the very next turn. It can be frustrating when you begin your turn with 3 pig cards, spend all 3 waybills to get those 3 pigs onto your truck, then several turns go by without any more pig waybills becoming available, so you’re forced to take those pigs on a countryside tour.
Don’t get caught with leftover goods!
One thing that I really appreciate in games is forcing players to make decisions. In Great Heartland Hauling Co. you are forced to move each turn, which makes you decide if you want to take gas cards or fill your hand with waybills,. Also, because you cannot exist in the same town as someone else, you may find yourselves tripping over one another, squatting in the spot you know they need to go to, forcing them to delay their payday by an entire turn! The various locations also offer different values for the goods they’re demanding. You can choose to ferry all the corn from one city to the next for $2 per ear, but if you haul it clear across the country they’ll pay you $4! It’s double the money, but also wildly increased shipping costs. If a game doesn’t offer you good or interesting decisions, then why am I even involved? Great Heartland Hauling Co. makes me feel involved.
As I alluded to before, Great Heartland Hauling Co. is a simple game to teach and play. Because of it’s small size and easy to learn nature, I’m constantly introducing this game to new players, and even using it to showcase that board games are more than just Monopoly and Connect Four. Because I’m always introducing this to new players, I haven’t explored the “Inspansion” content that includes player powers and special effects. I look forward to one day exploring the game further, but for now, I really enjoy the simplicity of play offered by Great Heartland Hauling Co.
One of the ways that I have changed things up a bit is by changing the shape of the board, utilizing one of the suggested map layouts. Unfortunately, this made Great Heartland Hauling Co. feel more like a dreary slog in a hot cabin with no air conditioning. While the idea of having a different board layout is exciting, the shape we chose had two long corridors running nearly parallel with only one space where you could move between columns. This ended up dragging the game out extensively. We spent more money to move further as there were less alternative towns to visit when the particular space that we needed to go to was occupied by another player. One time the economy was so choked due to us spending so much on gas and the highest paying customers being so far away from the goods they wanted, that we were ending up with a net profit of $1 per good delivered. This experience really highlighted the limitations of the game and how modifying the route structure makes it a significantly less fun game.
I know that sounds incredibly critical, and it is, but here is where I come to grips with my opinion on Great Heartland Hauling Co. It’s a light, easy to teach game that is perfect for introducing people to the hobby. Having said that, it’s too light for my regular game group gatherings, so we naturally pass it over in favour of something more complex. Great Heartland Hauling Co. is a great game and it certainly won’t be leaving my backpack any time soon, but it’s rarely on the list of games that I’m desperate to play again.
Try as I might, I cannot fit my lunch in this box.
As we creep closer to the halfway point of my top 100 games, the variety of games begins increase, and dexterity games start to appear! Spoiler alert, I love dexterity games. Look forward to seeing more and more as the list counts down! In a wild departure from last time, this section of the list has no economic farming games!
70 – Pandemic: Fall of Rome
Pandemic: Fall of Rome Is a cooperative game designed by Matt Leacock and Paolo Mori that takes the main gameplay concepts from Pandemic and twists it into a struggle to survive against invading tribes. The biggest change in this version of Pandemic is that instead of having threats popping up all over the map and the need to cover a large area in a short amount of time, the threat cards push different tribes closer and closer to Rome in a (almost) straight line. It’s up to you and your Romans to set up defenses, push back the invading horde, and make the necessary treaties before Rome falls to the barbarian tribes!
I really loved this take on Pandemic. The mechanics felt vaguely familiar, but the challenge was wholly different. The change of having the barbarians marching toward Rome on a predetermined route added more predictability and allowed us to see our impending doom from further away. It also gave me the feeling that if we were better at the game, we’d be able to change our fate.
This is the version of Pandemic that I am eager to explore further. While I wouldn’t recommend this as a introduction to the Pandemic system, if someone told me that they couldn’t take the whole virus theme now that we’ve all collectively lived through a pandemic, I’d wholeheartedly recommend buying Fall of Rome over base Pandemic. Heck, these two games feel quite different, and I have no issues recommending having both in collection.
69 – Crokinole
Something that I’m discovering about myself more every day is that I have a deep affinity for dexterity games. Perhaps it’s the analog to sports, where you only have one chance to make that perfect shot, and although the tension mounts as the odds are stacked up against you, you get into the flow and manage to hit that triple ricochet to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It is something that most board games can’t compare to.
On the flipside, unlike most board games, if you make a bad shot you can’t just say “oh, I’m just going to undo and take my turn again”, like some people do. Instead you have to live with your mistakes and try to turn the situation around. At risk of sounding like a Scrooge, I firmly believe that when you take a turn, then pass play to another player, but then notice you made a mistake, taking your mistake back is poor form. Of course, I play games for fun so I’m not forcing my friends to adhere to my own moral standards, but the inability to undo a bad shot is a feature inherently baked into dexterity games, and I thoroughly enjoy it.
Crokinole is the classic family dexterity game. Each player takes turns flicking discs into the centre. If your opponent has discs on the board, you must first hit one of their discs for your disc to count. At the end of the round, you count up your scores and the first player to 100 wins. There’s also a rule about keeping your buttocks on the chair, and I’m just so happy that someone actually wrote “buttocks” in a rulebook.
68 – Hansa Teutonica
Hansa Teutonica has one of those “no, it’s good I swear” board games. It has terribly boring cover art, and an extremely boring beige board. However, Hansa Teutonica is an absolutely amazing and fun territory control euro game. My first experience playing Hansa Teutonica was at a friend’s house, where he pulled it off the shelf and said “I have this game up for sale online, but I kind of want to play it once before I sell it.”.
As the game teacher of the group I was handed the rule book and spent the next 20 minutes profusely swearing under my breath. Hansa Teutonica isn’t hard to play, but the rulebook has some peculiarities, such as having a “thematic” German name for every aspect. Also, certain concepts that are key to the game are quite difficult to conceptualize. For instance, having tokens that could either be in the general supply, your personal supply, or the board, and they move between those three places frequently.
Luckily the rulebook as been re-written for the big box edition of the game, and it makes learning the game so much easier. Hansa Teutonica is an excellent game about josteling your opponents out of your way while maneuvering yourself into advantageous positions. I get a kick out of placing my tokens in exactly the right spot then immediately trying to convince my opponents that it’s in their best interest to bump me (despite the fact that doing so would give me more power on the board). It’s just so enjoyable.
For the record, after our first play my friend immediately removed Hansa Teutonica from his ‘for sale’ list and still owns it to this day. If that’s not a recommendation, I’m not sure what is.
67 – Vast: The Crystal Caverns
Vast: The Crystal Caverns is similar to Hansa Teutonica in that it’s super hard to teach. Players who are tenacious enough to get past the barrier of a rulebook are rewarded with a great gaming experience. Vast is a heavily asymmetric game where every player is almost playing an entirely different game. Each characters goal lies directly in the way of another character’s goal; the Goblin wants to slay the knight, the knight wants to slay the dragon, the dragon wants to escape the cave, the cave wants to collapse in on everyone, and the thief wants to steal everything and get as much treasure out as possible. I, for one, am stoked to see that “the cave” is a character unto itself.
Because each character is so different, the game requires multiple plays in quick succession with the same group of players. As players become more familiar with the nuances of their own character, they start to realize how best to throttle each individual character to slow them down enough so they don’t run away with the win. The Dragon is great at slowing down the thief, but does poorly against the Goblins, for example.
I am always searching for the opportunity to play Vast more. This is a great game that’s waiting for me to delve deeper and uncover the gems that lay inside. The real unfortunate part for me is that as a gamer, I greatly value discovery, so I am constantly looking to discover new games. This game is fantastic for replayability, but my heart longs to discover new games. The list of new games I want to play and explore grows so rapidly I find myself leaving gems like Vast on the shelf for far too long.
66 – Just One
Just One is a party game by Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter that has been a consistent hit whenever I introduce it to people. In Just One, one player is the guesser while the rest offer clues. The guesser does not get to see the hidden word, and the clue givers are tasked with writing one-word clues to lead the guesser to the goal. However, if two people write the same clue, then that clue is removed from the game, giving the guesser even less information to use to form their guess.
My favourite way to teach this game is to just tell people to repeat the name of the game whenever they have a rules question. “How many words can we use in the clue?” “How many guesses does the guesser get?” “How many pieces of pie do I get?” The answer is always “Just one”.
65 – Mr. Jack
Mr. Jack is a clever 2-player hidden movement game from Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc. In Mr. Jack, one player has the role of the investigator, while the other plays Jack the Ripper. Jack’s goal is to sow confusion and escape the map, while the investigator’s sole goal is to capture Mr. Jack and hold him accountable for his actions.
The game begins with 8 characters on the board, a deck of 8 character cards which show each character’s ability, and a deck of 8 alibi cards, one of which is given to Jack to tell them which character they have to get off the board. Each turn 4 of the 8 character cards are revealed. The players take turns activating those four characters, moving them around the board and using their special abilities. Once all four are used, Jack must declare if he is visible or not (visible meaning next to another character, or in in the light of the gas lamps). After that declaration, any characters who can be ruled out as “not Jack” are flipped over to mark them as innocent.
Jack wins the game if his character escapes the map or hasn’t been caught at the end of the 8th round, or if the detective captures the wrong character. The detective can only win if they move any character on top of Mr. Jack’s character, capturing them.
Mr. Jack is an excellent and quick 2 player game. While the odds of winning do feel slanted towards the player who is playing Jack, it’s fast enough that once one game ends, it’s easy to just switch roles and start a whole new game, again and again.
64 – For Sale
For Sale by Stefan Dorra is a small auction game about buying and selling homes. A game of For Sale begins by auctioning off houses. Each round, a number of houses equal to the number of players is placed in the centre of the table. Players take turns bidding their limited funds to acquire one of the houses. If a player chooses to pass instead of increasing the bid, they take back half of the money they have bid up to this point and take the lowest value house. This continues until the all players but one are out of the auction. That player pays all of their money into the bank and takes the last remaining value card.
Once all the houses have been bought, it’s time to sell. Much like the first round, a row of value cards are laid out. Each player chooses one of their houses and simultaneously reveal their choices. The home with the highest number gets the most value, and so on. Once all the houses have been sold, the player who amassed the most money wins.
For Sale is the perfect game to begin and end a game night with. It plays quickly, and every turn has players wrestling with tough decisions. Your opponent bid 6 for that house, do you dare bid 7? Or, do you bow out to take the lowest house, but pay 2 for it? Is it worth paying 2 for a low house, or 7 for a high house? The amount of cost/benefit analysis going on in your head in a short period of time is just incredible.
63 – Star Realms
Star Realms is a quintessential deck building game. It has no extra boards or side mechanics to distract you from the goal of crafting the best desk possible and using it to crush your opponent. In Star Realms each player starts with the same weak deck. Turn by turn you earn currency by playing cards and buying new cards from a common store to add to your discard pile, which will be cycled into your deck eventually. Cards in Star Realms come in one of four suits, with many cards offering much stronger abilities if they’re played at the same time as other cards of the matching suit.
Star Realms has distilled the deck building experience down to an engaging and deep game that fits in your pocket. The entirety of the core game is comprised of 128 cards. Dozens of expansions exist if you happen to be one of those people who play the base game over a hundred times and really want to shake up the gameplay. Star Realms is a direct conflict 2 player game, so this isn’t the game to play if your partner doesn’t enjoy attacking or being attacked directly. With that caveat, if you and a friend or partner can enjoy a direct conflict game, and are looking for a fast playing 2 player duel that is eminently replayable, I suggest picking up the base deck of Star Realms and really getting lost in the game!
62 – Shogun
Shogun by Dirk Henn appeared on my table with a sticker from the local Salvation Army Thrift Store advertising that this game was purchased for the hefty sum of $4.00. Opening the massive box of bits, I was sure we’d find something terrible, like the box was just being used to contain grandma’s knitting needles. Fortunately, upon opening the box and performing a full inventory we were delighted to find that there wasn’t a single piece missing. I have often wondered if there’s a board gamer somewhere who returned home from a college semester only to find that their parent ‘cleaned’ up and donated Shogun amongst other valuables to charity.
The game of Shogun is encased in a large box that contains a lot of small pieces. The centrepiece of the game is the fascinating combat resolution mechanism. In Shogun each player is a Daimyo trying to take control of feudal Japan during the Sengoku period. If two players find themselves embroiled in conflict, they each drop cubes representing their troops into a cube tower, and whichever player happens to have more troops fall out the bottom decides the winner. There are situations later in the game where a player is attacked and only gets to drop a single cube of their colour into the tower, but several cubes that had been stuck in the tower in the previous battles suddenly come to their aid to create a unexpected victory. It’s a different kind of randomness from other combat resolution mechanics (such as dice), but I really enjoyed the mechanism.
61 – Keyflower
Keyflower by Sebastian Bleasdale & Richard Breese is an auction game where players are bidding their workers to get tiles into their village. These tiles assist in procuring resources, which you can then use to upgrade the tiles to earn more points. Honestly, the theme of building a village abstracts away very quickly, leaving only the excellent auction and worker placement mechanics behind.
A game of Keyflower takes place over 4 seasons. In each season tiles will be placed in the centre of the table for all players to use and bid on. Each player will have a mix of red, yellow, and blue meeples. You can either place these meeples on a tile to take the action, or place them along the outside of the tile to bid for ownership of the tile. The round ends when all players pass in succession. At the end of the round, tiles are distributed to the players that won them, and any meeples on the tiles become the property of the winners. Each player also gets to claim a boat with more meeples and play continues. After 4 seasons, the player with the most points is the winner.
Keyflower is a perfect hybrid of worker placement and auction mechanics. Tied into those mechanics is some resource generation and management that you’ll need to master to win the game. Keyflower has a fairly random setup making every game feel different. The art on the tiles is simple and perfect, and the auction injects a wonderful amount on tension. Keyflower is a unique game, and an excellent design that I feel everyone should experience at least once in their gaming career.
Takenoko was among the first designer board games I ever played. My wife pitched the idea of going to the local board game cafe as a fun date (slightly against my will actually). That date opened my eyes to the world that is cardboard within cardboard. Little did she know that she was introducing me to a hobby that I would fall deep into, hard and fast.
Shortly thereafter, while thirsting for more board games I discovered Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop show on YouTube and chose to watch the episode with Harley Morenstein from Epic Meal Time (of which I used to be a big fan). Tabletop introduced me to Takenoko, a beautiful game about trying to build an aesthetically pleasing garden and grow bamboo to specific heights, all the while a damned panda keeps eating it all.
If the panda is the symbol of harmony and diplomacy, I’m sure the gardener is the incarnation of rage and spite.
How to Play (First Edition)
Takenoko begins with a single blue tile in the centre of the table. On that lonely blue tile sits a single gardner and his eternal rival, the panda. Each turn begins by rolling the weather die (Skip this step on each player’s first turn). The result of the weather die gives you a little boost for your turn, like granting you a third action – the ability to do the same action twice in one turn, a free panda teleportation action, growing a single bamboo stalk anywhere on the map, an improvement tile, or your preferred choice of all the benefits I just listed!
The playerboard keeps track of everything you have, and the actions you’ve taken on your turn
After you apply the weather effect, you take 2 actions (3 if you happened to roll the sun weather benefit). You may not perform the same action twice in one turn (unless you have the wind weather benefit). The actions available to you are to draw 3 plots of land and choose one to add to the central play area; to take an irrigation channel; to move the panda in a straight line and eat the top section of bamboo from wherever he stops; to move the gardener in a straight line and grow bamboo on every irrigated tile of the same colour adjacent to the spot where the gardener stopped moving; or to draw 1 goal card.
The goal cards you hold are what influence all of your decisions. At the beginning of the game you’ll receive 1 card for each type of goal; plots, gardener, and panda. The plot goals encourage you to arrange certain colour tiles in specific shapes. Once the shapes have been satisfied with the required colours, and every landscape tile in the shape has been irrigated, you may claim that goal. The gardener goals task you with growing bamboo stalks to specific heights on certain tiles. Conversely, the panda goals are all about feasting on the appropriate type and quantity of bamboo, making the stalks shrink by one for every piece the little white and black bear stuffs his face with.
When an goal has been completed, you simply place the card down on the table. The first person to reach the required number of completed goals triggers the end of the game and earns the Emperor’s favour (which is worth a couple of extra points). Every other player gets one more turn to accomplish any remaining goals they’re holding before the game is over. The player with the highest sum of points on their completed goal cards has won the game and receives the congratulations of the Emperor.
Just because you’re the one to end the game and get the bonus 2 points, doesn’t always mean you’ll win the game
Final Thoughts
Takenoko is a light and charming game with bright and colourful components. I find the mechanics and goals easy to internalize, and I enjoy evoking ire of the other players by making the panda chomp down on their carefully pruned bamboo stalks that they’ve been trying to grow all game so they can accomplish their goal of having 4 green stalks, all at the height of 3.
Actually the mechanic of hidden objectives is something my wife absolutely detests. It’s one thing if some makes a decision to deny you what you need, but it’s another thing entirely when someone ruins all your plans without even knowing they’re doing so. Apparently she just doesn’t enjoy having her plans ruined.
I absolutely love the artistic direction and the components in this game. The plot tiles are thick and bright, and the panda and gardener miniatures come pre-painted. The real star of the show are the bamboo stalks that stand high off the table. The chunky wooden spires attract the eye and capture the attention of new players. Plus, it is fun to see how high you can stack them while you’re waiting for other players to take their turns.
The game itself is easy to play Each turn is straight forward with few opportunities for making any single turn overly complex or acheive big game changing combos. This is nice and keeps each turn moving quickly, but it can be frustrating when the player across the table from you had 4 more goals cards down, it can feel impossible to catch up.
Personally, I find the weather die to be a bit of a frustration. I find the sun benefit (an extra action) to be head and shoulders above the other benefits, each of which are only situationally advantageous. The other issue I have is many of the cards require specific advancements that either come preprinted on the plot tiles, or are only obtained by the cloud weather benefit. When you have one of the advancement tiles, you can only place it on a tile if there is no bamboo on that tile, meaning the tile must be either unirrigated or the panda must raze the vegetation before any advancements can be placed.
The Panda destroys what the Gardener grows
It’s not uncommon for players to creep close to the endgame without passing the line. In the 2 player game, the first person to reach 9 completed objectives triggers the end game. Often I’ll see the game suddenly stall at 7 objectives realized as each player tries to queue up extra points in their hand. Considering that each other player gets one last turn to complete as many of their objectives as possible, it just makes sense. I find that players draw several plot objectives at the beginning of the game, then slowly move to drawing mostly gardener objectives at the end as the garden sprawls further and further away and the spires of bamboo reach the sky. The randomness can be aggravating as you somehow draw the one goal card that nothing on the board is nearly close to, while your opponent draws cards that are one bamboo segment away from being finished.
Ultimately Takenoko is a lovely game that you can use to allure people who would otherwise turn their nose up at the waves of beige that dominate other board games. With a commanding table presence and easy to play mechanics, Takenoko is often a winner when I’m not playing with my normal ‘advanced’ board game group. I wouldn’t introduce this to a complete non-gamer, as the amount of decisions are a little much (5x weather effects, 5x different actions). If someone has expressed interest and is willing to be engaged in the experience however, this game is a hit!
Lesson of the day, never store Takenoko on its side
I also really like to imagine a world where a gardener is trying to carefully cultivate an aesthetically pleasing garden, but one patch of trees happens to grow much more aggressively than the rest, so his solution is to source a panda and hold it over the tall tree to cut it down to the proper size. I don’t know if that world exists, but that’s the world that I want to live in.
This week in my top 100 games series we’ll see plenty of sheep, birds and even a panda. We’ll be at odds with the weather as it controls us in Takenoko, and we’ll try to control the floods in Lowlands. Let’s stop beating around the bush and get to it!
80 – Takenoko
Takenoko is a colourful game about building a garden, growing bamboo, feeding a insatiable panda, and cursing the whims of the weather. Designed by Antoine Bauza, Takenoko has players competing to accomplish 3 different kinds of tasks with the winner being the player the one who accrues the most favour with the emperor.
I absolutely love the “toy-factor” of this game. The bamboo pieces are large, brightly coloured, and stand tall off the table creating an excellent table presence. Stacking bamboo pieces is simply fun! The game behind the bamboo spires is straightforward and easy to play. Takenoko is a great game for families to play, as the decisions you make turn to turn are simple, but there is enough strategic depth to keep older gamers engaged.
79 – Wingspan
Wingspan, designed by Elizabeth Hargave, is a wonderful game that has transcended the board game hobby. So rarely does a board game get the attention of the wider world, but damn, Wingspan has broken the glass ceiling to reach a wide demographic. Every illustrations on the (many) cards of the various birds are wonderful, and the gameplay itself is very smooth. The production of Wingspan is also a work of art. The quality of each component has been lifted to a whole new degree that board games a decade ago could only dream of.
I have heard and had some criticisms of Wingspan (such as players spending the entire last round of the game just pumping the egg engine), but the reality is that any game that can reach such a vast audience and showcase just a glimpse of how good modern board games can be, deserves to have it’s praises sung.
Get it? sung? like, birdsong?
As an added bonus, Wingspan is one of my wife’s favourite games, and it is a nice change of pace when she is the one asking me to play a game.
78 – Forbidden Desert
Forbidden Desert is the 2013 follow up to 2010’s Forbidden Island. Another of designer Matt Leacock’s co-op board game, Forbidden Desert tasks players with searching the desert for lost pieces of an airship they can use to escape the hellish landscape before they’re buried under mountains of sand or die of thirst.
If you’ve played Matt Leacock’s previous co-op games, you’ll feel right at home with the rules. Take 4 actions, the world tries to kill you, the next player takes their turn, the world tries to kill you, and so on. In Forbidden Desert the environment the players are struggling against is a sandstorm represented by a hole in the layout of the tiles. Each turn the storm will move, shifting the location of the tiles relative to each other and dumping sand on top of all your hopes and dreams.
I vastly prefer Forbidden Desert to Forbidden Island, if only because Forbidden Island felt entirely too easy. I know you can increase the difficulty, but the board was too static. Forbidden Desert addresses my complaint by shifting the location tiles all around the board, then dumping a bucket of sand on my head. I suppose I technically asked for that.
77 – Las Vegas
Las Vegas is not going to be the last Rüdiger Dorn game on this list. One of the things I appreciate most is that his designs aren’t iterative; he doesn’t retread places he’s already been. Las Vegas is a push your luck, territory control game where you roll dice, curse, claim a spot on a casino, then curse further as your friends elbow you out of all the good spots.
When approaching Las Vegas (much like a real casino) you have to be ready to lose. Armed with the understanding that your fate is at the whims of the die and your loss is practically already assured, you can cackle with glee as you make ‘sub-optimal’ decisions and spitefully deny other players the things they want.
Ironically enough, when I sit down to play Las Vegas I have a singular goal in mind. I pick a specific person and make sure that person does not win (you know who you are). According to my stats, out of the 8 games we’ve played together, he’s won 0. That’s a win in my books.
76 – Troyes
Troyes is a dice worker placement game designed by Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, and Alain Orban that no one can agree on how to pronounce. Perhaps it’s just us ignorant anglophones that won’t agree when we’re told it should be pronounced “twah”.
I don’t have a lot to say about Troyes other than it’s quite the unique game. You’re contesting for spaces that give you more dice that allow you to do more of the things you want on your turn. There’s a semi-cooperative aspect where each player MUST contribute. Players who fail to prepare for this stage can find themselves robbed of all their opportunities. You can also use money to use the other players’ dice, which can really save you from a bind, or screw you when the player to your left takes the last red 6 that was on the table!
I also really love the art direction, if only because it’s so different. Visually, it stands out from the crowd of board game boxes.
75 – Power Grid
Power Grid by Friedemann Friese is another box that stands out on a shelf due it being oversized and garishly green. Hidden inside this long and thin cardboard box is a wonderful economic game about generating power and supplying as many cities as possible. Power Grid allows you to choose to either be an oil burning magnate with cheap power plants but a requirement to continually purchase resources to generate energy, or buy the very expensive renewable powerplants that generate power without any further resources needed. Power Grid is a modern classic that is great if you want to stretch your mental math skills; the board and gameplay is littered with numbers. Players are constantly trying to balance costs and benefits while maximizing the energy they can produce and their expansion into the cities on the board.
One criticism that I would like to see addressed is the ramifications of energy production explored. I’d like to see a mechanic picketing a nuclear plant, or a ‘government’ impose carbon taxes on coal plants while giving benefits or subsidies to the green energy. Then again, not every game needs to imitate life, and Power Grid as it stands now is an excellent economic game. Adding more mechanics might just muddy the nuclear pools.
74 – Tigris & Euphrates
Tigris & Euphrates is designer Reiner Kenizia’s magnum opus. It is a cutthroat area majority and hand management game where you try your very best to manage the expanding web of tiles, deftly positioning your leaders into advantageous positions and ensuring that when the impending conflicts finally come, you’ll be the one left standing after the dust settles.
Your goal in Tigris & Euphrates is to earn the most points of all four different kind of victory points, as your final score is equal to whichever one you have the least of. It doesn’t matter if you have dominated the red military or black government points because if you have failed to get any blue trading points, you won’t be winning this game.
Conflict in Tigris & Euphrates is tense and exciting. The tiles that you and your opponents lay down on the board don’t ‘belong’ to anybody until one player has placed their leader next to those tiles. If ever a group of tiles is joined to another group and two leaders of the same colour meet, war promptly breaks out. The majority of your combat power is determined by what’s already on the board (the number of same colour tiles touching your leader before the combat began), but players can commit tiles from their hand to swing the tide of battle and cause devastating upsets to the political topography of the board.
If you are a fan of area control games (which I usually am not) and have not played Tigris & Euphrates, you owe it to yourself to play it (hopefully multiple times with the same person). Each subsequent play enriches the overall experience.
73 – La Granja
La Granja is a lovely euro game designed by Andreas Odendahl and Michael Keller. In La Granja you’re tasked with expanding your farm, growing and processing goods, and delivering your goods to the market to score victory points.
What sets La Granja apart from the (many) other farming euro games is the multi-use cards. When you play a card you have to decide if you want to use the top, left, right, or bottom edge of the card, slotting it into the appropriate spot on your player board, hiding all the options you chose to forgo. This forces you to to decide what’s most important to you on each particular card. A card in your hand may be the only card that will let you grow olives, but you already have all the products to fulfill the order at the top of the card for victory points! But if you don’t choose the olives, how will you grow the olives you need for next round?
La Granja is a wonderful game with many options for players to explore. It’s also available to play on Board Game Arena and Yucata!
72 – Caverna: The Cave Farmers
Another farming theme board game hits my list at #72, Caverna is the big brother sequel to Uwe Rosenburg’s classic, Agricola. In my experience Caverna offers players more varied paths, allowing each player to do their own thing and avoid stepping on each others toes.
In Caverna, you play as a family of dwarves, carving out a life on the side of a mountain. Each player has their own ‘farm’ board with 2 halves. The left side is dedicated fields and pastures, where you can pen in animals and grow crops. The right side is the cave where you can hew out dwellings and build rooms that will offer your dwarven family special bonuses that assist as you amass a fortune.
Each of your dwarves has a ‘level’. You may chose to forgo the regular actions on the board and instead send that dwarf out on an adventure, with the higher levels allowing them to go on longer and more lucrative quests. This feature of the game can help you get resources that you desperately need if there is somehow a dearth of that resource available.
If Agricola’s cruel and unforgiving mechanics rubbed you the wrong way, I’d suggest giving Caverna a try, as it may have addressed some of your grievances. Personally, I liked how tight and punishing Agricola can be, and found Caverna to deliver a cornucopia of resources that robbed the game of it’s difficultly. I have been informed by trusted friends and advisors that my feelings in the matter are ‘wrong’.
71 – Lowlands
Ahem. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Lowlands is yet another farming themed euro game. Luckily Lowlands by Claudia and Ralf Partenheimer has shifted the focus from growing vegetables, to managing the exponential growth of breeding sheep and stemming the floods that threaten to wash away everything you’ve built.
In Lowlands each player has a farm and can produce sheep. At the end of a round if you have two sheep, you’ll earn a third, because… that’s how sheep grow. As the game goes on and on you may find yourself trying to cram 8 new sheep into your overcrowded paddocks like some kind of crazed sheep horder.
At the same time, a flood is coming. All players may contribute to a shared dyke that will hold back the floods. Should the dyke hold against the tide, and no precious sheepies will perish. If the dyke is poorly built, the waters will rush over your board and many sheep are swept away never to be heard from again. Because this is a cruel village, everyone knows who has and hasn’t maintained the wall. Along with some nasty gossip, you’ll also be faced with harsh penalties being doled out each player who prioritized their own farms’ needs and let the flood cause untold mayhem.
There is a balance to be struck; if you’re the only player who is contributing to the wall, everyone else will be spending their time growing their terrifying sheep engine. At some point it will be beneficial to let that flood come, especially if you have no sheep to care for. At the same time, there are benefits to be earned by contributing to the dyke, but not enough to offset a massive sheep monopoly. Lowlands offers a rare semi-cooperative mechanic that I just can’t get enough of!
There are few games in my collection that get the chance to leave my doors once its been slotted into a spot on the bookshelves. Qwirkle By Susan McKinley Ross is not one of those games. I own the travel edition of Qwirkle, which has small tiles and a zipper bag to hold everything together in a conveniently tiny package. The ease of transportability coupled with the fact that this game only needs a relatively flat surface to be played means we have played this game in locations from sea to shining sea. As an added bonus, it is a relatively wind-resistant game, so playing it outdoors is less of a challenge.
Qwirkle, aside from being awkward to spell when you’re sleep-deprived, is a tile placement game for two to four players. You begin the game with 6 tiles in your hand. Each tile has two attributes; a shape and a colour. On your turn you place any number of tiles in a single line as long as every tile in that line shares one attribute (either all the same colour, or all the same shape). You earn one point for every tile you place from your hand onto the table.
A game of Qwirkle starts out simply enough
Very quickly the common play area becomes a sprawling mass of tiles. The rule of lines of tiles only a being a single attribute quickly becomes a thorn in your side as you search for a spot to place your 3 green tiles that doesn’t abut against tiles that are not green, or worse, the exact copy of what you have in your hands.
As you add onto and spin off of lines of tiles, the length and score will creep higher and higher. Placing a 4th tile in that green line earns you 4 more points. The next piece placed will earn that player 5 points, and if someone can complete the line with the 6th shape or colour, they get 6 points, plus a bonus 6 points for a “Qwirkle”. They are also contractually obligated to shout out the word “Qwirkle” as they tap that piece onto the table.
The play area quickly sprawls out
The challenge with Quirkle is that the player’s best move also tends to set up other players for even better moves. The more lines on the board, the more likely someone is going to earn 5 points or more per turn. Knowing what’s left in the bag isn’t to hard to parse. There are 3 copies of each tile in the bag at the beginning of the game. Subtracting the 6 tiles that each player has in their hand gives you a pretty good idea of what you can and cannot hope for. If there are 3 orange circles on the board, you had better not be hoping for another orange circle to come out of the bag or you’re going to find yourself quite disappointed.
This placement is a no-no
One issue that does come up is the fact that it can be hard to tell some of the colours apart from each other. Trying to differentiate the purple and blue colours, or the orange and the red colours, on the black tiles feels nearly impossible if the lighting is anything less than perfect. Also, if you’re colourblind, give this game a pass; there is no way to differentiate the the tiles from one another other than colour.
Qwirkle has traveled across the country with me and has been played on a dozen different surfaces. It’s an easy game to teach the in-laws while being just competitive enough that keep players engaged. The smaller travel edition makes a great stocking stuffer (I know because I stuffed it into my wife’s stocking one Christmas) and comes in a lovely zip-up pouch. The full size game comes in a larger cardboard box. I understand the concept of ‘shelf appeal’, and I’m not the one bringing these products to market. I’m just the guy who needs to find new and creative way of storing board game boxes lest my wife pitches my newest acquisitions onto the lawn because I stored games in the towel closet again (Note from the wife: It isn’t that I mind his board game collection; it’s just his choice to displace the towels in favour of his games!). Maybe my ‘travel’ games will just live in a backpack from now on, perpetually ready to go. I’ll tell my wife it’s motivation to travel! What could go wrong?
