Welcome to part two in my Top 100 games series, going through the next 10 games in my list! I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes time to pick a game, the games listed here aren’t necessarily at the forefront of my mind (almost as if there were at least 80 other games ahead of them), but I can tell you that if any of these games get suggested, I am down to play and know that I’ll have a great time doing so.
90 – Colt Express
Colt Express designed by Christophe Raimbault is a hand management, action programming game about being the best thief amongst a colourful cast of scoundrels. In Colt Express everyone plays cards one at a time that represent the actions they will perform and the order they will be performed. Each round is dictated by a round-card that tells all players how many actions can be queued up, and whether those actions are public or secret. If the actions are public, the card is placed face-up, while secret actions are denoted by face-down cards.
Your goal is to accrue the most wealth by scooping it up from the floor, shooting your opponents, and swinging fists in hopes to make people drop their hastily gathered loot. Other actions include shooting at your opponents (or getting shot by stray bullets), leaping up and down the train cars, and controlling the Marshall, who also shoots at anyone who gets too close.
What makes Colt Express fun is the chaos that ensues from needing to pre-plan and program all of your moves for the round, then having something unexpected throw all of your hopes and desires out the damn window. The whole table hoots with laughter they watch characters bumble about the train. You will hold your head in your hands with disbelief as your character moves unexpectedly to an empty train car, then punches the air, tries to pick up loot that isn’t there, and finally shoots their gun at nothing.
Broom Service by Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister is a pick up and deliver game about witches delivering potions. In Broom Service, everyone has a handful of cards that dictate the actions that are available to them. Each card has a stronger “Brave” action and a weaker “Cowardly” action. The actions on a card are usually very similar, but the brave action is much stronger.
So why would anyone ever choose the cowardly action? Excellent question reader! At the beginning of a round, each player picks 4 of their 10 cards and that forms their ‘hand’. The first player will play one of their action cards and choose to play either the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Then, every other player in turn order will either pass, or play the same action card from their hand and also choose to play the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Anyone who chooses the cowardly action can simply perform that weaker action. Any players who chose to be brave need to wait until everyone has had a chance to play or pass. If any subsequent players choose to be brave, then all previous brave players don’t get to do anything for this action!
The tension of desiring to do the brave action, but fearing the following players snatching it away from you is genius. I love the theme of witches trying to deliver their potions around the world, and the art evokes memories of classic fairytale story books.
88 – Seasons
I’ve often tried to sell Seasons to my friends as a light version of Magic: The Gathering. In Seasons you play as sorcerers competing in the legendary tournament of 12 seasons with the winner being crowned archmage of the kingdom of Xidit. The game begins with a draft phase, where you swap hands with your opponent picking a card to keep and passing the rest until you have 9 cards in your hand. You then must separate those 9 cards into 3 stacks of 3. You’ll draw these cards into your hand at the start of each year.
On every turn, the die that correspond with the current season are rolled and each player gets to take one into their play area, gaining the benefits shown on the face. The remaining die progresses the time track forward, perhaps hurtling you into a new season.
I’ll be upfront; while I’ve played this game 16 times, every single play has been on Board Game Arena. The system takes care of all the bookkeeping like tracking your energy intake, your tableau limits, and your crystal counts. I could see how playing this game on the table would be a little onerous, but damn is this game worth playing, and worth playing repeatedly. The art is cute and charming, and players are constantly forced to make decisions on how best to play their cards. Each season has their own set of dice that dictate the types and amount of resources that will be available to players. for example, If the game is currently in the summer season, water energy may be in short supply, but fire will be plentiful. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the luck and restrictions, but they are not without their own penalties.
Seasons is best played with 2 players, and only gets better and better as you and your opponent reply it, learning how best to manipulate the system to amass the most crystals, and claim your crown as Archduke.
87 – Underwater Cities
Underwater Cities by Vladimir Suchy takes players into the depths of the ocean and tasks them with creating the best underwater metropolis possible. Kind of. The theme here has a tendency to melt away as your brain spins, trying to maximize your actions to maximize your productions and end game victory points.
UnderwaterCities utilizes a unique worker placement system that uses cards from the players hands. On your turn you can take any of the open colour-coded actions along the edge of the game board. At the same time you play a card from your hand. If the colour of the action and the card match, you can do both actions. If they don’t, you only get to do the action on the board.
This game is an exercise in loss aversion. I’ve found myself delaying taking a critical action simply because I didn’t have a properly coloured card to play along side it and refused to do something that felt inefficient. Underwater Cities also has an excellent arc to its gameplay, with the first few rounds making players feel starved for resources, then growing their engines until suddenly you find yourself placing several costly building on a single turn.
I recall when this game was released a few people compared it to extremely highly rated (by other people) Terraforming Mars. Personally, I don’t see the comparison, Underwater Cities is much more complex (and the better game in my opinion), but the games play significantly differently and don’t evoke the same feelings in players.
Underwater Cities is available to play on Yucata.de
86 – Calico
Calico by Kevin Russ is a tile placement game about matching patterns and colours to satisfy the whims and desires of cats. Each player takes turns placing a tile from their hand, then pulling one from an offer. Each player has their own board with 3 objectives that can be satisfied by patterns, colours, or both. You also get additional points if you can connect three tiles of the same colour you also get a button that’s worth points. Everyone knows kittens love quilts with buttons
Don’t be fooled by Calico’s adorable aesthetic. The actual game contains an intense cerebral workout. You only have two tiles in your hand and 3 in the supply that you can take from to refill your hand after you place one tile. Within these limitations, you’re tasked with trying to place tiles that contain 6 different patterns and 6 different colours in ways that connect like patterns and colours, while also satisfying the objectives on the board which require multiple different sets of colours and patterns. It does not take long before everyone at the table has their head in their hands and the only thing keeping the table from being flipped is the adorable kitten artwork dotting this game.
85 – Automobiles
Automobiles by David Short is one of my favourite racing games (being so far down the list is pretty telling on how I feel about racing games in general (But if you break it down, aren’t all games a race in the end? (No, shut up))).
I’ve written in depth about Automobiles before, so I won’t rehash words I’ve already written. For those who don’t know, Automobiles begins with two trays of cubes. One tray hold white, black, and various shades of grey cubes, representing the various gears of your car, which correspond to spots on the game board. The coloured cubes have special abilities that are set at the beginning of the game when you draw a card for each colour (the game has 4 cards of each colour, offering a wide variety of powers to choose from). From those trays of cubes each player seeds their own bag with a standard set of white and grey cubes, and a chosen selection of coloured cubes. Then they’re off to the races!
There aren’t a lot of bag building games, and theoretically, this could also work as a deck builder; the bag and cubes don’t do anything that cards couldn’t do also. Having the bag of cubes click and clatter as your swish your knuckles around, searching for a cube is satisfying. When you and your opponents are pulling around the final turn and you desperately need a specific cube THAT YOU KNOW YOU HAVE IN THE BAG SOMEWHERE really gets your heart pounding in your chest.
Also, it’s fun to make the vroom noises with your mouth as you move your little car around the track. Automobiles is available to play on Board Game Arena and Yucata.
84 – When I Dream
I love when a party game makes me question if my friends are insane or not. When I Dream by Chris Darsaklis has one player close their eyes and everyone else offer one word clues to try and lead them toward a word as dictated by a card. The guesser gets one guess, then the word card gets moved to either the correct or incorrect pile, then the game presses on with a new word card drawn.
After a couple of minutes the guesser is then asked to recount their dream, trying to name all the elements they can remember. If they’re able to name all the words that were in the ‘correct’ pile, they get a bonus two points.
What makes this game excellent is each of the players also have a role. Some are encouraged to try to get as many words correct as possible, while others are trying to lead the guesser astray. Others yet are trying to achieve a balance between the correct and incorrect cards. The inclusion of asking the guesser to recount their dream is a fun exercise that looks easy until you find yourself in the hot seat and the only word you can remember for the life of you is “spaghetti”.
83 – Evolution
Evolution, designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, is a hand management game about survival of the fittest. In Evolution you are tasked with growing creatures’ populations and body sizes, and assigning traits that will help them not only survive, but thrive.
The gameplay loop begins with a bunch of small herbivores, happily eating from a well stocked feeding hole. As a turn or two passes, the herbivores grow larger and get more efficient at eating. Eventually one creature gets a taste for blood and turns into a carnivore, feasting upon its neighbours. Very quickly defenses are raised; some animals learn to climb, other have defensive herding, and other develop a hard shell.
Evolution Is a brilliant game that has each player double guessing what their neighbours will do. With every creature you control having access to different traits, and some traits working off neighbouring creatures, you can have fun building an impenetrable wall, or you can have fun trying to tear down the other players’ walls. Only the fittest will survive.
82 – Everdell
Everdell is so hot right now. Released in 2018 and with 3 successful Kickstarters funding a myriad of expansions, Everdell has climbed the Boardgamegeek ranking and at the time of writing this, sits as the 31st best board game of all time.
Everdell is a light worker placement tableau building game set in a fantasy forest. As you play your workers and bring cards into your tableau, you’ll slowly start to see an engine form. It’s easy to play, has absolutely gorgeous artwork, and a family friendly andromorphic animal theme. It’s easy enough to play with your family, while maintaining enough complexity to keep adults involved. I don’t really want to use the term “gateway game”, but this gorgeous game is a perfect ambassador to show people how beautiful and interesting board games can be.
I’ve enjoyed my plays of this game a lot, and if the opportunity to play it more arose, I have no doubts that Everdell could climb higher in my rankings. As of this moment, it has settled at #82.
81 – Century: Spice Road
It seems for every game that has new and interesting mechanics, another one is just about trading cubes for other cubes to trade into points. Century: Spice Road is in the latter, but does so in a fast and satisfying way. In Century: Spice Road you take action cards into your hand, then play the cards to manipulate your cubes. Some cards will simply gain you more cubes, others will let you trade in specific recipes, while other others will allow you to upgrade some cubes higher along the value chain. The other action you can take is to sell a specific combination of spice cubes to acquire a point card, which are necessary to win the game.
Century: Spice Road does restrict players to only being able to hold 10 cubes at a time, so you feel an ebb and flow of resources as you build your wealth, then drain your coffers to nab a particularly high scoring card. The game often begins with people taking card after card from the row, but soon enough each player should have a small engine they can exploit to increase the number and value of their spice cubes until, finally, one person is labeled “The Spiciest Trader”
The Century series of games have the added benefit of being able to be combined with the other games in the series to enhance each other. I’ve played each of the games in the Century series, and while each one stands on it’s own as a good game, I firmly believe that Century: Spice Road stands taller than the rest.
When asked about my hobbies, one of the first activities that I choose as the activity to define myself is that I’m an avid reader. This is why in my home my bookshelves have 9 compartments dedicated to books and only 3 to board games. I’ve always been a voracious reader, going back to my elementary school days. I would get irrationally excited when the Scholastic Book Club pamphlets would come out and I would excitedly circle all the books that I wanted (Come to think of it, it would have been less work to cross off the books I didn’t want). Unfortunately I grew up in a very small town in northern Manitoba, which meant that the newest books in the libraries were on average a decade old. I was also the child of a single mother who was raising three kids and did not have a lot of room in the household budget for brand new books.
Regardless, I spent the vast majority of my free time in the school library, reading through most of the fiction section. It’s there that I got to experience some fantastic stories that I would have otherwise passed on. I will never forget pulling a unassuming brown covered book off the shelf, and reading Lamb by Christopher Moore for the first time, not knowing what a wild ride I was in for.
I was incredibly lucky to have some great teachers who invested in my love of reading. My IT teacher introduced me to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels with Guards Guards!, and I now have an entire shelf dedicated to Pratchett. Another teacher introduced me to his personal Dragonlance Chronicles collection, thereby ensuring I would never get a date throughout my high school career.
When it comes to my board game preferences, I absolutely have a proclivity toward deck building games. There’s something about the mechanic of building a deck of cards over the course of a game that just makes me smile. I love starting with a small pool of cards and adding cards one at a time, while culling cards that don’t fit my vision, until the result is a deck that’s finely tuned, completely unrecognizable from the deck I started out with, and ready to destroy my opponents.
Paperback marries my two loves, and also tickles the fancy of the woman I married. A deck builder with a book theme, every card in your deck is a letter and to get points and currency, you need to use your letters to make words which allows you to buy more powerful letters to make bigger words! The catch is that in order to gain victory points, you need to buy wild cards that award you no currency. You must balance buying cards that make your deck more powerful and cards that will win you the game.
I recall Paperback being pitched to me as a “Scrabble, but deck building,” which sparked my curiosity and intrigue just right. You see, when my wife and I first started dating, we were long distance. We would spend hours on Skype playing Scrabble online, and listening to a playlist that we created together. Scrabble became a pretty integral part of our relationship early on, so hearing about a game promising to mix that with the deck builder genre using a theme about writing books made me wonder… Was Paperback designed directly for me?
How Paperback Plays
Paperback plays like most other deckbuilding games. You begin the game with a deck of 10 cards and draw 5 cards per turn. Over time you’ll buy cards to put into your discard, and if you ever need to draw cards but your deck is empty, just shuffle the discard to form your new deck.
Each card has a letter, a special ability, and a value, letting you know how many ‘cents’ you’ll earn if you include that letter in your word. Each turn you can play the cards from your hand to form a word. You don’t have to use all the cards in your hand, but any that go unused will end up in the discard pile. Once your word is formed (assuming no one calls you out for trying to pass off Realy as a proper word), you add up the cents earned from each letter, then purchase cards from the card row to add to your discard. All the cards from your word and your hand go into your discard pile, and you draw a new hand for the following turn.
The letters you can buy from the card row increase in cost as well as in value. You’ll soon find yourself buying an M that gives you 3 cents when you play it, or an R that lets you draw extra cards next turn, or an S that gives you extra cents when it’s the last card in the word. Very quickly you’ll find yourself within reach of the the 7, 8, and 9 cent cards that were impossible to obtain when the game first began.
The other type of card that you can purchase is wild cards. These cards do not give you any cents when they’re a part of your word, but being wild, they’re very useful to have in your hand, offering necessary flexibility. While these cards don’t offer much value during the game, every wild card is worth victory points at the end of the game. Each game has a turning point; usually around 75% of the way through a game your deck has enough really good cards that you don’t feel the need to add any more letter cards, and you can start focusing on those wild cards. In our experience, once one person starts buying wilds, everyone should follow along quickly, or they’ll find themselves with a deck full of letters, but no victory points to contest for the title of best novel writer.
The stacks of wild cards also function as the endgame trigger; once two of the four piles of wild cards are claimed, the game ends. At that point you break your deck apart, count all the victory points you have earned on each of your wild cards, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Compared to Scrabble
I’ve played a lot of Scrabble, and talked about Scrabble to a lot of people who are into hobby board games. The most common complaints I hear are that turns take too long as people hold their head in their hands trying to find a really good word and a valid spot to place their word once they’ve finally identified it. The other major complaint I hear frequently (out of my own mouth because my wife is the worst for this) is that as you get better and better at Scrabble, the game becomes less and less about playing great words, and more about playing small words that score well while controlling your opponent’s access to the double and triple word score spots. Scrabble devolves from a word game into a game almost entirely about area control and getting a mix of letters that can go in many high scoring places.
Paperback does a excellent job of sidestepping the complaints that plague Scrabble. By removing the need to chain off other words on a board, each player needs only to focus on the letters in their hand. It’s often much easier to see a word that uses all, or at least most of your cards and that’s the best word you can possibly make. The flipside to this is you are now at the mercy of your deck. If you draw a bad hand of cards (such as Q, K, J, X, C and no wilds), you’ll just have to discard your hand and wait for your next turn. You can’t even play a tiny word for one or two cents because any unspent currency is lost at the end of your turn.
Conclusion
Paperback doesn’t try to improve upon the deck building genre, nor does it need to. If you’ve played Dominion then Paperback‘seconomy and mechanic of points cards clogging up your deck will immediately feel familiar. By taking the tried and true formula of deck building and applying a word-building theme, designer Tim Fowers has created an approachable gateway for fans of word games everywhere.
Paperback is a game that my wife and I have played a lot. We have played the physical game at least 19 times together, and when the Android app was released we instantly bought it and spent many a night playing against each other while lying in bed before going to sleep. We’d have games going during our work days, each of us stealing a few minutes here and there to play a turn. It is a super fun game, and it takes a long time before repeatedly playing it gets old.
I have a type. It’s Tim Fowers
Honestly, once the app came out, the tabletop version really stopped hitting the table. The setup for the game is a bit much, even with the well divided box. Eight separate piles that form the store, plus 4 more piles for the victory point cards, everyone gets a starter deck and common cards need to be arranged; it’s not difficult to set up, but it is absolutely easier to just press a button on the phone and start playing. It is also handy that the app will dictate which words can and cannot be used. The app does lack the attack cards that inject a bit of player interaction into the game, but my wife and I often choose not to play those cards. For us, the joy comes from building each other up and trying to see who can stand tallest, not who is better at knocking the other to their knees.
Since the app came to our phones, Paperback has physically hit the table 3 times. I have felt slightly burned out on it because we have played it so frequently, but I still get a sense of glee when I open the box and hand each player a deck of fairly well-worn cards. I hadn’t actually noticed how worn my cards had become until I received the Paperback Unabridged expansion along with my Kickstarter copy of Hardback. Once the expansion content was slotted into the original Paperback box, I was taken aback by how pristine the new cards looked and how tattered by comparison my old cards were. Personally, I believe well-loved cards are a sign of a great game.
Can you tell which cards were added later?
For me, Paperback is my favourite word game, narrowly edging out it’s pre-quill, Hardback. I love the deck building and the trade-off of buying wild cards that clog up the deck but provide the points you need to win the game. I’ve introduced Paperback to a lot of people, and it’s never failed to impress. So many people have played Scrabble that a word game is almost second nature, and the twist of deck building always excites, especially if it’s a mechanic that they haven’t seen before. Because it has such an appeal for people who aren’t into designer board games, it’s the perfect game to use to introduce your bibliophile friends to this wonderful hobby.
I suffer from deep personal dilemmas when it comes to Kickstarter. I am constantly aware of all the projects flowing in and out of the platform, trying to tease the hard-earned money from my wallet. At the same time, I’m constantly paralyzed with fear, either of missing out on the next best game that is difficult to get after the product ships, or spending much more on a game that I could get for less after it hits retail shelves. Let me tell you about two games that recently caught my eye when they launched on Kickstarter. For both projects I chose not to pledge my support.
Burgle Bros. 2 by Tim Fowers is the follow up game to one of my favourite cooperative games of all time, Burgle Bros. When I saw the Kickstarter for Burgle Bros. 2 I decided to pass on it because I already owned the first one. The initial reviews talked about how the game ‘fixed’ some annoyances of the first one (particularly about the guard movement) that I never found to be onerous. The Kickstarter campaign failed to offer me a compelling reason to add this this shiny new version to my collection when I already owned the tried and true original.
Cut to today – the Kickstarter is being fulfilled and some of my favourite reviewers are lauding the game. According to the reviews, the production is novel and exciting, the game flows smoothly, and the campaign setting is exciting. Deep within my heart, I found myself lusting after this product. I loved the first game and desperately wanted to experience Burgle Bros 2 at the same time as the others in the board game community.I did not account for the social aspect of experiencing a new game at the same time as everyone else when I chose to pass on the Burgle Bros 2 Kickstarter. If I wanted to buy the game now, it would cost $60, plus $6 shipping. Had I backed the Kickstarter I would have only paid $50 +shipping, and I would have the game in my hands now! I pledged to myself to not miss out on another Kickstarter.
Bullet♥︎ was another Kickstarter project that I was terribly tempted to get in on. While I’m not the biggest fan of shoot-em up games (SHUMPS), I am a degenerate anime fan, and I really enjoy Level 99’s whimsy. Ultimately I passed on Bullet♥︎, knowing that the majority of my gaming partners do not find the anime aesthetic appealing.
Reviews on Bullet♥︎ started trickling into my media feed, and I found myself playing the (highly scripted) Tabletop Simulator version after having my interest renewed. I loved the puzzle the game provided. Additionally, the variability of all the different heroines and the promise of multiple game modes caused me to salivate. Again, the desire to have this game in my hands right now rose dramatically, and I found myself wandering over to their Kickstarter page to find all the things I missed out on.
Imagine my surprise when I found that the base game of Bullet♥︎ was $50 on Kickstarter, while the pre-orders have it listed for $35. The Kickstarter had no stretch goals, and no exclusives to speak of, which then begs the question, where is the value in Kickstarting this project? Is it just to have the game first? To be riding the first wave of discussion when the community at large gets their hands on it? I made a pledge to myself to remain strong and not back Kickstarters. After all, the majority of games come to retail eventually, and I can make the distributors pay for the shipping.
These two experiences with Kickstarter perfectly illustrate my ambivalence. If I choose to back, then I regret spending my money (not to mention having to explain to my wife where that board game came from and of course it’s always been there). If I pass, I have the bitter taste of regret in my mouth for months.
Turns out Kickstarter is a push your luck game, and I am what the experts call a coward risk-averse investor
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
