Welcome to my personal and professional top 100 games as of March 2020. Each member of my game group compiles their own list each year around March, and we use each of our lists to determine what our favourite games are, and what our collective favourites are. It’s also really interesting to see how a game can rise and fall throughout a year, as we reflect on multiple plays of each game.
The best example is Terraforming Mars, which was on my list of top 50 games three years ago, but each time I play it, I like it less and less. My most recent play of it I found myself actively disliking the experience, so when it came time to make this list, I let it fall off completely.
Another interesting facet of having your own top 100 list is that you can scoff and feel superior when you see other top 100 lists, especially ones that are crowd sourced, like Reddit’s /r/boardgames top 100, or the Board Game Geek top 100, both of which have a pretty stark bias toward more complex games. I’ll talk more about my thoughts on these lists in a summary post at the end of this series.
This Complexity Bias in Ratings graph is from Dinesh Vatvani, who has an excellent series of posts about analyzing board games, that you can read on his website
Alright, enough chatter. Without further ado, here is the start of my top 100 games:
100 – Codenames
Codenames, by Vlaada Chvátil, is a game that needs no introduction, as it is constantly one of the best selling games each time I see a game store publish their yearly sales report. Codenames is an incredibly fun party game that takes only a minute to explain,encourages players to be both clever and witty, and often ends in uproarious laughter. Players are split into teams and take turns making one word clues, hoping to lead their team to their agents by guessing the correct word cards on the table. If they fail and their team members guess the wrong cards such as the bystanders or the other team’s agents, the turn is promptly ended. If you happen to inadvertently lead your team to the assassin, the whole game is over.
One of my favourite aspects of this game is trash talking the other team as they try to guess their spymaster’s clues. There’s nothing better than watching their perturbed faces as I try to throw them off-base. “Your spymaster said space, of course they want you to pick Turkey! Everyone knows about the Great Turkey Belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter!”
Stone Age by Bernd Brunnhofer (the box features his pen name, Michel Timmelhofer) is a worker placement game set in the titular time period. In Stone Age, you’re placing your workers onto various spots on the board, hoping to acquire goods, cards, buildings, or to improve your tribe. For every worker you assign to a spot you get a die to roll, which increases the amount of goods you can earn.
Stone Age is unique in that it’s one of the few games I can think of that lets you feed your people rocks, and features the “Bone Hut” action space where you put two workers in and three workers come back to your hand at the end of the round. It’s a simple game to teach and understand which makes it a good game to introduce to people who may be skeptical about these ‘newfangled board game things’.
I’ve only played Pax Pamir: Second Edition by Cole Wehrle once on Tabletop Simulator, but I am incredibly keen to try it again. Pax Pamir has players shifting their allegiance between the British, Russian, and Afgani factions. The game ends when one player achieves victory, requiring all players to keep each other in check.
Pax Pamir is the kind of game that you can’t give a fair review to after only a single play. The decisions you make and interactions that occur between the players will change based on everyone’s knowledge of the available cards in the game. The interplay of the mechanics and subsequent consequences for your (many) choices is deep and rewards those who explore it. The game offers many ways to subvert your opponents expectations, leading to exciting plays and situations.
I do need to prioritize getting Pax Pamir back to the table. One play is not enough for this complex game to show you all that it has to offer, despite the rules being fairly straight-forward.
97 – Qwirkle
Qwirkle by Susan McKinley Ross is a hand management, tile placement game about placing shapes and colours onto a shared structure. Each turn you place your pieces on the board, matching either their colour, or the depicted shape (a rainbow of squares for example, or a variety of red shapes). The hook is that every piece that goes down must match either the colour or the shape (but not both) of the connected pieces.
Placing more pieces connected grants you more points (think Scrabble style scoring), and placing the 6th piece of a set earns you a ‘Qwirkle!’ that comes with 6 bonus points if you shout out the word (yes, the shouting is mandatory).
The downsides of Qwirkle involve the colours. If the room has poor lighting, it can be nearly impossible to differentiate some of the colours, and don’t even bother with this game if you’re colour blind. The perks are that the tiles are thick wooden pieces that won’t blow away in the wind, and if you buy the ‘Travel Edition’, then it comes in a little pouch that is easy to bring camping or to the beach, which I can’t say about many games.
96 – Cacao
Cacao by Phil Walker-Harding is a clever tile laying game about gathering cacao fruit and selling it to villages, while amassing gold by travelling up a river (I guess there’s gold at the end of the river?).
In Cacao you take turns placing one of your square worker tiles adjacent to a jungle tile in the middle of the board. If due to your newly placed tile, there are now 2 worker tiles adjacent to 1 unoccupied jungle space, you have to fill this space with a tile from the jungle supply. Each one of your worker tiles depicts a number to actions along each of the sides. When you place your tile, you can do that many actions on the jungle tile that the side was placed against.
Cacao offers a unique spin on player interaction. If you place your tile near one of your opponents, you choose what tile will be adjacent to his workers, perhaps forcing them to take sub-optimal actions. As the jungle tiles begin to sprawl along the table, it creates a pleasant pattern of jungle and worker tiles. Cacao is easy to teach and play, and is a wonderful game to bring along to a family game night.
Lanterns: The Harvest Festival by Christopher Chung is another family friendly tile placement game that looks gorgeous on the table, and has a friendly way to interact with your opponents.
Using the theme of floating lanterns on a lake, players pick up cards by playing a tile into the lake. When a tile is placed, all players receive a lantern card that matches the colour on the side of the tile that is facing them (no side-by-side gaming here!). You use those cards to satisfy recipes (that depreciate in value as they get claimed by other players) for points at the end of the game. The winner is the player who uses the cards other players give you efficiently and earns the most points.
When introducing hobby games to people who aren’t traditionally ‘board gamers’. I find it’s very helpful to use a visually appealing product. Lanterns: The Harvest Festival fits that bill perfectly. Another way this game appeals to non-gamers is that it keeps everyone involved regardless of whose turn it is, so people do not get bored between turns. Lanterns: The Harvest Festival has been a large success with my family, and has become a go-to gift for couples who are just starting on their board gaming journey.
94 – Potion Explosion
Potion Explosion by Stefano Castelli, Andrea Crespi, and Lorenzo Silva is a marble drafting game about collecting resources and crafting powerful potions (which you can then drink to take advantage of special abilities).
Potion Explosion features a tray that has 5 marble chutes. On your turn you may pick and 1 marble from the chute and remove it. If your action causes two marbles of the same colour to collide, then you take those as well, and so on until the chain reactions stop.
With a surplus of ingredients in your hand, you’re tasked with completing potions for points, and completing sets of the same potion for even more points. You can take a little help and pull a second marble on your turn (this one does not trigger explosions), but doing so will cost you 2 victory points at the end of the game.
Potion Explosion’s marble chute and mechanic of ‘causing’ explosions is brilliant. It takes the potentiallyboring concept of set collection and adds a fun toy factor on top. Plus, getting one of those turns where you can chain 4 or 5 explosions to end up with 9 marbles in your hand feels amazing.
I introduced this game to my Candy Crush /Bejewled loving mother, who ended up falling in love with it. I suspect if she lived closer, I would have bought this game and played it over a dozen times with her by now.
Potion Explosion also has an app on Android, iOS, and Steam.
93 – Coloretto
Coloretto by Michael Schacht is a push-your-luck card game about drawing cards, placing them in rows, then claiming rows. The goal is to get as many cards of one suit as you can, but not to have too many suits in the end.
There’s also an advanced scoring rule that rewards players that get some, but not all of the cards in a suit, as the amount of points you get for that suit at the end of the game crescendos, but quickly diminishes if you get too greedy.
A row of cards exists for each player. Once you claim cards you’re out for the round. The hook becomes deciding to stay in to possibly get a couple extra cards, but if you wait too long,the available rows fill up with suits that you desperately don’t want, and you may find yourself with a mitt full of junk.
Coloretto is one of the first ‘designer’ games that found its way into my hands. Back before I really got into the board gaming hobby, a friend of my girlfriend was moving to France for a couple of years. He mentioned having to sell all his games because transporting a board game collection to the other side of the world just doesn’t make sense. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) offered to store his collection for him, as she had just moved into a bigger house with 2 roommates.
I pulled Coloretto off the bookshelf and opened the rules. My wife and I instantly fell in love with this game, playing it about a dozen times and roping in her roommates to play it as well. Little did I know that push-your-luck mechanics are one of my wife’s favourite things (best exemplified in her favourite game, Can’t Stop, which I’ve touched on here and here). Remind me to never take her to Vegas…
I’ve often heard that more people prefer Zooloretto, which uses similar mechanics in a larger board game, but I haven’t had the chance to play it yet.
Camel Up By Steffen Bogen is a betting, dice rolling, racing game. The joy of Camel Up is the unpredictability of how the camels will race along the track, and not knowing who will come in first.
In Camel Up You don’t play as a specific camel, aiming to be the first to cross the finish line. Instead you play as a gambler, makings bets on which camel will be the first and last to finish. The hook of the game is that if a camel moves and lands on a space that already contains a camel, they stack up. When a camel moves, all the camels on top of them move along as well (this clearly simulates real-life camel racing).
Camel Up also features a fun pyramid that holds a die for each of the camels. Each round consists of those die getting pulled out of the pyramid one by one until each die has been rolled once. Each camel may only have one die in the pyramid, but they will often move multiple times in a round by stacking on top of the competition.
Camel Up is a pleasant low-stakes gambling game. Because the race is so unpredictable and short, throwing caution to the wind is the perfect way to enjoy this hilarious game. The randomness of which camel moves first and how ‘Laggy Larry” can be in last place, hop on the back of the right camel and ride them all the way to victory creates dynamic and exciting moments, especially if you managed to bet on the dark horse that stole the victory.
The goal of the game isn’t to be the fastest, or the best, but to be the richest. You’ll rely on the information your opponents give you when they choose to move a camel, and make bluffs, claiming to have the knowledge on which camel will ultimately come in first to take the cup.
91 – Pandemic: The Cure
Pandemic: The Cure is a dice based version of the extremely popular Pandemic game. In Pandemic: The Cure, coloured dice represent the four viruses that threaten to envelop each continent. It’s your mission to spread out, treat the diseases, and discover the cure quickly before time runs out. On top of that, you get to roll a mittful of dice over and over, which really is one of my favourite things to do.
I find that Pandemic: The Cure plays more quickly than its full board brother, but the increased randomness makes it more difficult to effectively plan and win the game. You can roll your action die as many times as you want to try and earn the actions you desperately need to perform, but one of your die faces will contribute to the pandemic and one bad die roll of 5 biohazard symbols could easily cost you the game.
Comparing the randomness to the base Pandemic game, you almost always know where the diseases are going to spawn, so you can plan to have the right resources around to mitigate the disasters. Because Pandemic: The Cure abstracts away the individual cities and instead focuses on entire continents, it’s harder to know where the hot spots are going to be.
That said, I still really like Pandemic: The Cure. Designer Matt Leacock has developed a fantastic cooperative system that is satisfying to play, and Pandemic: The Cure feels significantly different enough differentiate it from others in the Pandemic line of games. The asymmetry of the player roles is higher in this version, as each player get their own set of action die that will push them toward a specialization. For example, the medic’s die are full of heals, but severely lack die that allow the player to move around efficiently. The strong asymmetric nature of the player roles and higher degree of randomness does inspire replayability, as a dream team might fail, while an unlikely duo could pull out a surprise victory that releases us all from a two week year long quarantine.
Artist: Gavan Brown, Scott Carmichael, Lina Cossette, David Forest
It Always Goes Back to Games With Me
I have a confession to make. I love games. I know, shocker. I’ll wait as you all pick up your collective jaws off the floor. One of the things I love most is discovery. I’m always searching for a new game to play, a new experience to …experience. It doesn’t matter that I have half-finished games on my Nintendo Switch, or 300+ games that I’ve barely touched in my Steam library (30 minutes or less played time); I’m always looking forward to starting a new game.
In addition to the thirst for discovery, I’m also super cheap. This combination of insatiability and thriftiness leads me to some interesting places. I’ve played many Flash (RIP) games you can play for ‘free’ in your web browser. A long time ago I played a game called Motherload. The goal of the game was to dig and dig and dig until you found the centre of the planet.
Imagine my surprise when I gathered with my family in Saskatoon and my cousin pulled out a small square board game box titled “Super Motherload”. The connection to the Flash game didn’t connect at first, but once we set up the game and began playing, the memories came back.
The Mechanics of Digging through Mars
Super Motherload is a light deck builder about digging into Mars and collecting valuable minerals to purchase better pilots, all in a race to accrue the most prestigious mining company? I’ll admit the goal of the game doesn’t quite match the theme, gathering a surplus of minerals that will languish in your vaults. The winner isn’t necessarily the player who earned the most money (but it helps), but the player who accrues the most victory points at the end of the game.
Each player deck has unique art, and has slightly asymmetric powers
Super Motherload does it’s very best to emulate the experience of a side scrolling (or in this case a vertical scrolling) video game. The first two double sided Mars boards are placed on the board and each player gets a unique starter deck, each one slightly varying from the other. Each player starts with a 7-card base deck, plus 16 more cards laid in groups of 4 in front of them, forming a personal shop. As the game progresses, players may purchase cards from their shop to add to their deck. The last person who dug a hole gets to take the first turn, and the game is underway. A turn consists of 2 actions. You may draw 2 cards, play cards of the same colour for their drills, or cause an explosion by playing a bomb token and a red card. You may perform the same action twice in a row.
As you chew through the dirt you’ll inevitably uncover minerals that you can use to purchase more cards from your shop. If you meet or exceed the value of the card, you remove all minerals you’ve allocated to that card and place it into your discard (and get a one time bonus for buying the card). Be warned that the economy on Mars isn’t like Earth – if you overpay, too bad so sad.
Various obstacles will prevent you from beelining to the core of the planet. For instance, rocks and metal plates require you to use different tools to progress. Metal plates can only be dug though using drills of the matching colour, and rocks must be bombed. You do still get the minerals if you bomb through them, though, because on Mars there are special bombs that only destroy worthless rocks, leaving the valuable stones untouched for your capitalist needs (the theme is falling apart again).
One of the best features of Super Motherload is that you can always dig starting from any of the tunnel pieces that have already been placed on the board. As you go further down into Mars, the quality and quantity of goods begins to increase. This causes every player to take as much as they can on their turn, while trying not to give the next player immediate access to whatever treasures lie beyond your current reach. I love the trade off – biding your time and building up your hand while waiting for someone to make a move that allows you to strike out at a particularly rich ore vein. Your tunnel may then be used by someone else to reach even further and gather more resources. This cycle is incredibly satisfying and is what keeps me bringing this game back to the table for more.
As the game progresses, diggers will come across artifact tokens (pictured above). Each token has a hidden bonus on the back that players can choose to use at their discretion. If all the artifact spaces are uncovered on a board, the top board is removed from play and a new board is placed at the bottom, introducing a whole new realm full of valuable goodies and mounds of dirt just waiting for your drills to penetrate it (ahem) recover the goods.
The majority of victory points will come from buying the increasingly expensive pilot cards in your personal shop, which consists of four different decks. Each deck has pilots who are trained for different specialities. For instance, the red deck pilots specialize in bombing. As you purchase pilot cards, the following card in the deck is more expensive, but it is worth an increasing number of victory points. The challenge is to balance buying pilots of different specialties while accruing the most victory points.
To make matters more interesting, Super Motherload also has Major and Minor achievements that may influence how you play each turn. The Major achievements are earned by fulfilling the ‘recipe’ of having purchased the required number and type of cards from your personal shop. Only the first player who satisfies the requirement of each achievement can claim it, and once the major achievements have been claimed, they’re gone from the game.
The minor achievements are a little more fun, asking you to accomplish seemingly random tasks, such as drilling 4 spaces in a single action, or simply having three bomb tokens in your supply. Chasing these goals may have you putting your long term plans on hold, but I’ve seen players earn enough points to swing the whole game by just earning enough minor achievements. Once a player collects a minor achievement, a new minor achievement card is drawn. Once again, you have a choice – do you use your turn to further your progress on a major achievement, or do you take a detour to collect a minor achievement? You may only collect one achievement per turn.
The game ends after the final artifact is obtained on the 4th board. As the communal tunnel inches ever closer to the final artifact, each player scrambles to scratch out their final few points without giving anyone else the opportunity to end the game. When that last artifact is claimed, the game ends immediately, irrespective of who was the first player. All the points on the player cards and any major and minor achievements are added together, along with any points that may be on some of the artifacts. The player with the highest score has created the best intergalactic mining company. I think? I told you, the theme gets thinner and thinner the more I think about it. My solution? Don’t think, just play!
Final Thoughts
Super Motherload offers a a unique spin on the deck building genre. By not requiring players to discard unused cards and draw a whole new hand each turn evokes a feeling of momentum. You can build up steam, gathering a handful of cards then blast off, reaching that high value gem that everyone thought was out of reach. If you have a big turn, spending all your cards digging massive new tunnels, you’ll find your next turn lighter as you recuperate from the aggressive activity. That’s not a bad thing however, I feel it evokes the feeling of someone who rushed out too far, too fast, and broke their little digging machine. The players who take their time, making slower moves never hit a big payday, but are never left out in the cold.
While most deck building games reward players who focus their decks to a specific synergy (Hardback, Star Realms), building a slim, uber functional deck is not the core of the game here. The crux of Super Motherload revolves around the spacial element of burrowing for resources on the board, seeing the best time to lay down 4 drills to just barely get that extra valuable gem, and racing for the low hanging fruit of the easy to achieve achievements. The double sided boards offer a nice variety of obstacles, and if you’re desperate for more, fans have posted some of their own creations.
What does add to the replayability is the asymetric nature of each player deck. Each deck’s purchasable pilots are unique and exciting to play repeatedly, mastering the different combos each one offers. It’s refreshing to swap to a different deck to try a different strategy. Each deck is unique enough to add it’s own flavour to the game, but not so wildly different that you’re railroaded into a specific strategy that may or may not pair well with the minor achievements.
Now this is a well sized box
I do wish Super Motherload had a expansion. More map tiles, more asymmetric player decks, different minerals and so on. Nothing that changes the game drastically (I’m looking at you, Isle of Skye), as the core gameplay of Super Motherload is absolutely fantastic. I just want more of it.
I think that’s probably the highest praise I could give a game. I simply crave more of it. Honestly, owning Super Motherload turns you into missionary; it’s the kind of game that you want to introduce to everyone, especially those who love deck builders, as it has the deck building elements that you love from other games, but a very satisfying board element to go along with it
Race for the Galaxy is a tableau building game for 2-4 people designed by Thomas Lehmann. In Race for the Galaxy each player secretly chooses one of the actions they want to perform (2 actions if playing a 2 player game). The chosen actions are revealed simultaneously, and each player gets to perform each of the actions chosen by all players, with the person who chose the action getting a small benefit.
There is a interesting history of this game and how it relates to Puerto Rico, but I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to tell you that Race for the Galaxy is a masterclass in engine building game design, and a 2 player game of Race for the Galaxy only takes 9 minutes on Boardgamearena.com. It’s amazing the quality of game design that has been achieved by Thoman Lehmann in such a small playtime. Factors such as tense decisions and satisfying resolutions contribute greatly to the game’s success. Most engine building or civilization building games take a lot of time to play (usually a couple of hours per game), so the fact that Race for the Galaxy can award its players with feelings of growth and achievement while boasting a shorter playtime is attractive to someone who doesn’t always have as much time to play games as he would like.
The BGA implementation of Race for the Galaxy also includes several expansions; The Gathering Storm, Alien Artifacts, and Xeno Invasion are some of the ones that I’ve tried, and the community is very healthy. I’ve never had to wait longer than a couple minutes for a game. I will say it is intimidating when playing against someone with over 3,000 plays, but when a game ends in 9 minutes, you can get crushed and just start again from scratch without any hard feelings.
Can’t Stop – 59 games
Can’t Stop is a push your luck game about rolling dice and moving up tracks. On your turn you roll 4 die, pair them up in any way you’d like, and progress on those tracks that match the numbers you have chosen. During your turn, you move black pieces that represent temporary progress. Once you’ve moved the black pieces up the track, you can choose to stop and save your progress, or you may roll again and continue moving up the tracks. Roller beware! If you happen to roll something that does not match your chosen numbers for that turn, all of your progress for that turn is lost and play passes to the next player. When you successfully reach the top of a column, you win that column (so long as you stop and save your progress), and no other players may continue climbing that number. The first player to win 3 columns is the winner!
Can’t Stop tends to be the game we play while we’re waiting for someone to join the group. It’s fast to play, and I enjoy chanting the name of the game as someone makes 12 rolls in a row, climbing higher and higher, only to bust and waste all of their progress. It creates some excellent moments.
Jaipur – 30 games
Jaipur, designed by Sébastien Pauchon, is a card drafting hand management game for 2 players. You each take turns collecting resources from the card row, either trading your existing cards or taking 1 card on its own. Eventually you sell your cards in sets, gaining tokens that represent victory points. The game ends when 3 of the 6 resources have been depleted.
I’ve always loved well-designed 2 player games, and Jaipur absolutely fits that bill. Jaipur is the kind of game where you and a friend can play dozens of games with each other and still find ways to upset the developing meta. There is plenty of luck in the game, so if a game doesn’t go your way you don’t feel too bad about the loss. Having said that, there is enough strategy that I have a 60% win rate (that sounded a lot more impressive in my head).
Through the Ages – 25 games (plus 8 games of through the ages: A new Story of Civilization)
Through the Ages is another one of those games that makes me question the distinction between board games and card games (although I also question whether the distinction is necessary). Through the Ages is a card drafting civilization game that takes you and up to 3 opponents from the age of antiquity all the way through to the modern ages. Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization is a remake of the game that rebalances a lot of the cards, adjusts a few of the mechanics, and adds some nice new art.
I’ve only played a physical game of this once, and it took hours to play. There are 30 tiny wooden cylinders to represent your citizens and resources, and tracks that need to be managed for each player to represent culture (points), military strength, and knowledge. Also, some of the turns can be quite involved, with lots of things chaining off one another. It’s awful when you get to the end of a 7-action turn only to realize you’re one stone short and need to start over from the beginning. The BGA implementation has completely replaced the tabletop version of this game for me, as I find that not needing to deal with the fiddly little bits and counting up all the various places that you get resources from makes the game much more enjoyable. On BGA, Through the Ages takes about 45 minutes to play, although it does play asynchronously very well and I would highly recommend it.
7 Wonders – 29 games
7 Wonders is a card drafting civilization building game where each player is trying to make their civilization the best in the world. The game consists of three decks of cards, each representing its own age. Each deck is divided into the number of players present. During play, each player will choose a card from their hand, then pass the rest of the cards to the next player. Choose wisely! You may see the cards you pass away again, but only after everyone else has had the opportunity to pick through and take what they want.
BGA has an excellent implementation of 7 Wonders that I’ve been using to bring my family together over the last year. The interface is easy to navigate and all the necessary information is readily available. The real strength of BGA is that it manages all of the rules for you. There’s no worry of someone accidently cheating by building the same card twice or ‘forgetting’ to pass the necessary coins to their neighbour. And when an easy-to-play game supports up to 7 players, I can get my entire family involved!
7 Wonders Duel – 21 plays
I’ve already gushed about 7 Wonders Dueland how much I enjoy it. It’s a fantastic 2-player card drafting game where you’re building your civilization head-to-head against your opponent. This is another instance where playing on BGA is fast and easy. A very active game, you’ll have no problem finding players to face off against, and a entire game should only last 10 – 15 minutes, assuming neither player goes AFK for some reason.
This is one of the few games where I dabbled BGA’s Arena mode. Arena mode is a competitive mode where you can earn points on each game you play and achieve higher ranks, proudly displaying your achievement to the world. Having a higher rank does nothing tangible, other than letting you show off how big your dick hat is.
BGA has the Agora expansion available to play right now, and the Pantheon expansion (which is a must play for experienced players) is currently in Alpha.
Targi – 16 games
Oh look, another 2-player only game on my list. Can you tell that I have a type?
Targi, designed by Andreas Steiger, is a cut-throat worker placement/set collection game. On your turn you place your 3 workers on spaces along the outside of the board. When all 6 workers have been placed, you draw a line from each of your workers and place a wooden cylinder where those lines would intersect. You then take all 5 of those actions in the order of your choosing. As an added twist, the game has a robber piece that moves around the board, and players may not place a worker on the same card that the robber occupies.
In Targi you’re trying to collect resources and spend them on tribe cards to place them into 3 rows in front of you. At the end of the game you get bonus points if all the cards in a row are the same suit, or if they’re all different suits (some of the cards will give you bonus points based on the cards and their positions in your row).
The cut-throat aspect of the game comes from maneuvering your workers to block the spaces your opponent so desperately needs, as you can’t place a worker directly across from another worker (after all, how would those lines intersect?). You’re constantly weighing the costs and benefits of spending your precious few workers. Should you claim a card that you desperately want? Or should your first action be to deny your opponent their needs? Targi is finely crafted and a joy to play, especially if your friend is willing to engage in some light trash talk, and won’t take it personally when you ice them out from a specific card for three turns in a row.
Alan Moon is a prolific game designer. With a game like Ticket to Ride under his belt and selling millions I’m sure he could retire to a comfortable life and never need to design another game again. But when Board Game Design is your passion, I’m sure you can’t help but create games.
Here we are with another one of his games about traveling. In 10 Days in Europe, you collect tiles and place them into a timeline as you attempt to contiguous a trip across the continent spanning 10 days. The hook that turns this activity into a game is that once the tiles are in your holder you can’t swap them around. You can only replace a tile with one picked up from one of the three discard piles (or drawn blindly from the top of the deck).
In 10 Days in Europe you can always travel by walking to two neighbouring countries that are next to each other and share a border. You can fly between two countries as long as they’re the same colour as the plane you’re using, and you can travel to any country by sea, as long as they have a shore on the indicated Ocean or Sea
Other games in the 10 days series have other types of transportations. Asia has trains,USA and Africa have cars, but the core game remains the same between them all. Manipulate your hand of tiles until you have a cohesive 10 day trip across the continent.
The game starts with the board (which is literally just a map) and all the tiles splayed around the table. Each player picks up tiles one at a time and places them into their card holder. Depending on the order that you draw your tiles, this can set a player up for a easy game, or it can telegraph to a player that they’ll need to replace all 10 of their tiles before their game is over. In theory you could win right off the bat, but I’ve never seen it happen.
Once the game is underway, one of two things seems to happen to each player. Either they put themselves into a situation where they need a specific country (most countries only have one tile in the deck), or they hold their head in their hands waiting for someone to end the game so they can pitch the tiles they’re currently holding into the ocean.
10 Days in Europe is the kind of game that gets played back to back often. Games are almost always over within 15 minutes, and to reset the game all you need to do is throw the tiles back into the centre, give it a stir and begin again.
I don’t know how I feel about the board basically just being a map of Europe. I say that I’m bringing a board game, but really, 10 days is a card game with a cardboard map.The map does tell you what colours the countries are and which shores belong to which oceans, which is key information in the game. But it still feels more like a card game than a board game. This can also be a great learning experience if you aren’t familiar with a continent as learning the where in the world the U.A.E and Boliva are can make you look worldly and traveled when asked to point them out on a map.
10 Days is the perfect game to bring to the in-laws for Thanksgiving as it’s dead simple to play and is over quickly, allowing players who feel like they’ve lost to reset and start again from the beginning. There is a lot of luck in the game but I will counter that by saying there is a element of strategy involved, otherwise my wife wouldn’t have a 70% win rate over her 20 plays.
I do also appreciate the box size. The insert keeps everything in its place, even when it’s stored vertically, and if you took the insert out, you’d only have enough empty space for a banana.
Mechanics: Push your luck, Dice Rolling, Area Movement
Release Year: 2017
Designer: Scott Almes
Artist: Miguel Coimbra, Adam P. McIver
Intro – In where I try to not talk about The Legend of Zelda
If you walk around my living space, one thing will become apparent very quickly. I love video games. I have knick-knacks and memorabilia adorning my shelves, giving brief glimpses into my nerdiness. The franchise represented most prominently is The Legend of Zelda, as the Zelda games are amongst my most favourite video games ever. Most games I wait to pick up on a sale or second hand as the price of buying new is a pill that I have a hard time swallowing. The exception to that rule is a new Legend of Zelda game. If you doubt me, ask me about the time my wife woke at 6am with me frantically hitting the refresh page on Best Buys website the day the Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild were launching their pre-orders (spoilers – she wasn’t pleased).
I can hardly be blamed for my obsession however. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of my most played video games. Back in 1995 when I could barely hold a controller, my mother and I explored Hyrule together. I vividly recall running through the green fields, sword thrust forth to parry any foes, getting the guards called on me in Kakariko village, and my tiny mind being blown wide open when the Dark World was introduced.
When Gamelyn Games launched their Tiny Epic Quest kickstarter in November of 2016, I was immediately enthralled with the aesthetic of the game. While the art assets were vaguely generic fantasy, the items looked like they were ripped straight out of The Legend of Zelda. I backed that project immediately without a further thought. Come Summer of 2017 when the game was delivered, I delighted in the ITEMeeples and the tiny items arranged on the item rack. Aesthetically, I was already in love.
Nostalgia always knows how to get me to open my wallet
Components and Play Space – Hope your table is epic, not tiny
Like all of the Tiny Epic games, they boast a large game experience, crammed down into a tiny box. Foolishly, at the time I also thought that meant the play space would be small, perhaps I could play this game on my coffee table. Not the case here, as the components sprawl out, demanding nearly as much space as you’re willing to give to it.
Setup for a solo game
The art on the cards is bright and colourful, full of the promise of adventures to come. The ITEMeeples are cute too, made of plastic and slightly larger than your standard meeple. I never thought of myself as a meeple connoisseur, but I found myself wishing they were made of wood instead of the cheaper feeling plastic (not that your wooden meeples is a ‘deluxe’ component).
The items that go into the ITEMeeple’s ‘hands’ are absolutely tiny, making some of the more delicate ones difficult to manipulate (I’m looking at you, Bow and Arrow). Luckily you won’t need to manipulate them too often, as once they’re acquired, you stick em in someone’s hand and then there’s rarely a reason to move it.
My wife tells me size doesn’t matter.
Gameplay – A Gamblers Journey
A game of Tiny Epic Quest is played over 5 rounds. In each round players are trying to accomplish tasks to accrue the most victory points. It’s all the normal, heroic acts you accomplish during the dead of night that get you victory points (sounds sketchy). How many spells you can master, how many quests you can accomplish, and how many goblins you can smack into the ground will all affect your heroic rating and win you the game (also bonus points for pillaging the Legendary Items).
During the day phase, one player you will choose a method of travel, then move one of your meeples according to the card. A raft lets you sail up the perfectly vertical and parallel rivers, a Horse can take you as far east or west as you’d like (you all know of horses natural aversion to north and south movement), the griffon can take you diagonal, and the travel by boot option can take you one step in any direction. Once you’ve made your move then everyone else gets to make a movement of their own, following the same card. No matter how many players are at the table, this phase of the game has 4 turns, meaning one of the movement types will go unused.
And no, you can’t put your horse on the raft. We tried that once, it didn’t go well.
Once the Day phase ends, night descends. During the night each player decides if they want to adventure, or rest. Every player who chooses adventure is IN. The lead player rolls the 5 custom die, and then the die results are resolved.
First, the goblin heads represent the total damage inflicted. Each player takes 1 damage each clockwise around the table until all the hits have been distributed. If there are more goblin heads than players, it overlaps, hitting the lead player again and continuing on.
Then power is gained based on any power symbols, and where the mushroom marker is. Then the mushroom marker moves down its track based on the number of mushrooms that have been rolled. If the mushroom is at the end of its track, it just deals damage in the same way as the goblins.
Once those are out of the way, all players can use the torches, scrolls, or punches to complete their objectives. Torches and scrolls advance your adventurers along their track, inching them closer to acquiring their treasure, while the punch symbol lets you pummel into the sleeping goblin who had the misfortune of being on your space
The one time you didn’t need any goblin punches…
After all the die have been used, the active player passes the die to the next player who now has to choose to adventure, or to rest. Should they choose adventure, all players are dragged along, like lackeys in a gang.
The dice rolling is the crux of the push your luck mechanic that is the core of Tiny Epic Quests gameplay. Sometimes you’ll find your meeple on a dungeon that requires torches and all you roll are scrolls. You’ll sit in anguish as your friends march up their tracks, pilfering the treasures, equipping their new items that bestow special abilities to the meeple that holds it, while you grumble that yet another torch has been rolled. There is a bit of mitigation in the form of Power. You can always spend 2 power to gain an extra Scroll or Torch for a meeple, or to block a hit from a goblin.
Two of my adventurers finished their quest. The third one had to sleep in a cave.
As the players turns go on, health will begin to dwindle and the risk of death will loom ever closer. The Mushroom track I mentioned earlier will pass thresholds that will make the game riskier, like increasing the amount of damage goblins do, or removing the ability to recover power via die rolls, eventually causing extra damage if there is no space left on the mushroom track. The benefits of the mushroom track going up is the higher it is, the more potent the magic is in the night and allows you to learn even greater dark magics (with only 5 turns and 10 levels of magic to learn, you’re expected to skip a couple lessons).
Should you fail in your quest of murder, thievery, or sorcery and become exhausted, all of your meeples are returned home, health and power restored, but empty handed. You only get to keep the spoils of your exploits if you choose to stop during the night phase, returning to camp before your metaphorical parents catch you out on a school night.
Crafting the legendary weapons requires finished two specific dungeons in order. Hopefully you’ll have some overlap with the other quests
Tiny Epic Quest bills itself as a push your luck game, and it absolutely is. Some bad dice rolls can throw the entire experience for you. In my plays, I’ve found the luck factor is much lower in lower player counts. You may be taking more damage, there are more opportunities to rest. In a 4 player game you may find yourself with only 2 health left, your goblin punching meeple has won their combat, the spell learning meeple has finished studying, but your dungeon crawling meeple is only two torches away from grabbing that precious loot. If you choose to roll, you may be committing to 4 rounds of die rolls, and should you accomplish what you needed during your rounds, you’ll sit in terror as the other three chuck those misery cubes and flinch as somehow the player before you rolled a full round of goblins, pummeling you right back to the start.
I understand that is the draw of push your luck games, trying to get as far as you can and if you go bust then you’re kicked back to the beginning. I love Can’t Stop, but the salient difference is Can’t Stop takes 10 minutes to play, while this goes on for an hour or more! And the cascading failure of missing out on a whole round of adventure, when your friends may now have gear that makes their subsequent heists easier is a rough feeling.
Final Thoughts – Are we the Baddies?
Is it wrong to complain about luck in a push your luck game? Maybe. While I did enjoy my play of Tiny Epic Quest, most of that enjoyment came from the aesthetics. Seeing my ITEMeeple run around the map with a bomb and a rupee filled my heart with joy. I recently gave the solo mode a try, and barely managed to achieve the lowest score acceptable, 40 points to be a peasant. Because you only have 3 meeples and 5 rounds, you’re expected to complete a quest with 2 of your meeples, if not all 3. The scores ramp up the more you achieve of each objective (beating 3 goblins is 3 pts, while beating 10 is 30). Achieving 15 tasks is about the best you can hope for, and it’s not THAT hard to accomplish, but if you fail early quests it can leave you feeling like it’s impossible to catch up. Looking at amigoodat.games, the average winning score is in the low 30’s. With no catch up mechanic to speak of, The winner will more often be the player who got the best loot the earliest.
All that said, I am keeping this game, and would pull it out of I knew someone was a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda. The aesthetic is strong enough to keep the box on my shelf (and it helps that the box is tiny, getting rid of it wouldn’t free up much space on my overflowing shelves). Also, I don’t have very many push your luck games, so it’s a small niche that’s being filled.
I begun this review with the fresh innocence of a Kokri boy waking up to the cries of a fairy, ready to go on a quest to save the Kingdom. I’ve come to realize that while this is indeed a epic quest, we just might be the bad guys. After all, we’re tearing across the kingdom by day, and wreaking havoc over the night, punching sleeping goblins, casting demonic spells, and stealing treasures. At the end of the game, we’re not coming home to a waiting princess, we’re going to face trial for the crimes we’ve committed! If the authorities found me with standing in a magic circle with a sword in one hand and a bomb in the other, I don’t think they’ll give me the benefit of the doubt.
