We’re past the halfway point on my top 100 games! I would quantify this as the turning point where I move from games that I enjoy to games that I’m enthuastic about. I worry that over the next couple posts I’ll get progressively more verbose
50 – The Isle of Cats
The Isle of Cats by Frank West is a poly-omino tile laying game where players are trying to lure cats off an island and arrange them on your ship to earn the most points.
Each round begins with cat tiles being placed onto the table from a bag. During the round you draft cards, then choose which you’ll be playing, taking care to not exceed your fish limit. Once cards have been drafted and played, players take turns collecting cats from the centre one by one until either no cats remain, or all players pass. The number of cats you can collect is limited by both your fish and the number of baskets out have.
Isle of Cats is a charming drafting game. It’s light enough to be accessible to a wide audience, assisted by the feline theme that everyone seems to enjoy. The art of the cats lounging in the sun is also charming and makes your ship board look great as it gets filled with content fuzzballs. Isle of Cats is a game I’ve only played once, but I enjoyed it so much. It’s been hard to get a hold of in my neck of the woods, but once I do get more plays in I’m sure this will be moving up the list.
49 – Quadropolis
Quadropolis by Francois Gandon is another tile laying game, this time themed around tasking players with building the best metropolis.
In Quadropolis all the available tiles for the round are placed on a central 5 x 5 board. Each player has four architects in their employ, numbered from 1 to 4. On your turn you place your architect along the outside of the edge pointing inwards. You count the number of tiles in from the edge matching the number on the architect, and take that tile from the central board. You now need to place this tile on your personal 4 x 4 board, but the tile must be placed in one of the districts that matches the played architect’s number.
It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but Quadropolis is a fairly intuitive game, and the player board does a very good job of reminding you of all of these restrictions. Your goal is to build a apartments, shopping centres, factories, docks, parks, and monuments in a way that maximizes the number of points you earn, crowning you as champion metropolis-ier
Publisher Days of Wonder has built a reputation on producing quality games and Quadropolis is no exception. The tiles are thick, the colours are bright and the included insert is useable, which is more than I can say for some other games!
48 – The Great Heartland Hauling Co.
The Great Heartland Hauling Co. by Jason Kotarski is a pick up and deliver game that I absolutely love. I’ve already talked about The Great Heartland Hauling Co. here so I won’t belabour the point again. I love how small the box is, but still manages to deliver a big experience. Also, any games featuring pigs is a big win in my books. Sheep are so grossly over-represented in board games that I’m taking a stand here and now. More pigs in board games!
47 – Container
I did not expect to enjoy Container by Franz-Benno Delonge and Thomas Ewert as much as I did. The box cover looks fairly bland and the theme of producing and delivering shipping containers to a non-descript island and the potential to bankrupt the in-game economy just didn’t inspire wonder within me.
Luckily I put aside my preconceived notions and give Container a whirl. It turned out to be a fascinating puzzle of producing the right amount of goods and choosing when to take money in and out of the economy. Choosing to deliver containers to the island when your opponents are flush with cash, and buying containers at a barging when they’re cash strapped. I really loved my plays of Container, and look forward to playing it some more.
46 – 10 Days in Europe
10 Days in Europe by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum is one of my most played games of all time. It’s a fairly small box so it travels when I visit friends and family. It’s easy to teach and play so it gets introduced to dozens of people, and my wife loves it, and will play it enthuastically, which inspires me to play it often.
I’ve reviewed 10 Days in Europe previously, and a new edition was recently released, making it a little more colourful and easier to acquire. This entry could stand in for any of the games in the 10 days series, but 10 Days in Europe is my favourite and I highly recommend breaking it out at every opportunity.
45 – Wok Star
Wok Star by Tim Fowers is a cooperative real time game about running a restaurant. Each player is put in charge of specific dishes and players need to work together to manage their ingredients, do the dishes, and earn enough money to keep the lights on for another day.
Personally, I love real time games. I enjoy the stress and challenge that comes with real time games, and I love the discussion and comradery that comes with co-operative games. Wok Star was a hit for me, but if you’re not a fan of either of these genres Wok Star isn’t going to change your mind. There’s also a significant luck factor, as each player is rolling dice at the start of the round and players need to work together to use them efficiently.
Also, any game with a food/restaurant theme will immediately grab my attention. The timer forces players to rush, and inflicts stress in their lives, which really makes me feel like I’m back working in kitchens again.
44 – Cartographers
I called Cartographers by Jordy Adan the “Best game I’ve never played” due to it being an excellent game, and having never played the physical game. I’ve played the Android app a lot, and my group played Cartographers half a dozen times on Tabletop Simulator and enjoyed every game. It’s fast, full of good decisions, and unlike a lot of flip and write games, offers some level of interaction between the players.
My only complained about Cartographers is that I just want more. I want more monsters, more cards, and more boards. Hopefully my prayers will be answered by Cartographers Heroes releasing later this year.
43 – Thurn and Taxis
I often forget how much I love Thurn and Taxis by Andreas and Karen Seyfarth, and part of that I attribute to it’s super bland beige board with German city names that I (as an ignorant Canadian) have never heard of. Don’t judge me! I grew up in northern Manitoba. If I made a game that featured “Opaskwayak, Cranberry Portage, Waboden, Lynn Lake, and Brochet” I doubt some German board gamers would notice or care.
Thurn and Taxis is a hand management route building game that won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award in 2006, and for good reason. Thurn and Taxis is a fun game to play! You take and play cards each turn building routes around the board, and choosing to end the route to place your houses on some of the cities that were a part of your route. The wrinkle comes in choosing if you want to draw a second card, play a second card, or complete a route a route and take one benefit more than you’re entitled to. You’ll feel pulled in multiple directions and the tension watching other players complete their routes is very satisfying.
Thurn and Taxis is available to play on Board Game Arena and I highly recommend that you do.
42 – Root
Root by Cole Wehrle is the cutest war game I have ever played. In Root each player takes control of a wildly different faction. The Marquise de Cat start the game with a soldier in almost every field, firmly controlling the woodland. The Eyrie are amassing a force to take back their forest. The Woodland Alliance is amassing underground support and the Vagabond is making back room deals with each faction, sowing discord and working toward their own secret objective.
Every faction is almost playing their own game, and have vastly different strengths and weaknesses. As the Game Teacher of my group I’ll be the first to admin that teaching Root is HARD. You’re essentially tasked with teaching for small games to each player, and hopefully the people at the table have good attention spans as you need to know each factions limitations in order to effectively hamper their advancement.
I talked about Cole Wehrle’s previous game Vast earlier in this series and a lot of the same praises and criticisms can be applied to Root. It offers great discovery at the expense of a high level of rules overhead. In order to really know each faction, you’ll need to play multiple games as each one, as some of their nuances don’t reveal themselves until you play against other, similarly experienced players.
41 – Hive
Hive is the worst. And by the worst, I mean the best. But it’s also the worst. I’m conflicted.
Hive is a masterpiece of game design. It’s an abstract strategy game that is endlessly replayable; one that will have you biting your knuckles when your opponent makes a clever play that you didn’t see coming. Much like Tak, this is an elegant design, highly addictive and brimming with strategies. Hive begins with the first player putting a piece down on the table. There is no board and the thick bakalite pieces means that Hive can be played anywhere. The goal is to surround your opponents queen with tiles, while ensuring your own queen has room to breathe. Each insect has their own rules for movement, and making the restrictions work for you will separate the winners from the losers. Players will take turns either placing more of their tiles into the play area, or moving the ones they control.
Much like Chess, Hive can be enjoyed by people of all ages. Once you grasp how each piece moves you’re off to the races. Hive also comes in a black and white Carbon Edition, and in a much smaller Pocket Edition. All Hives are good Hives and make for excellent gifts to those who love games, bugs, or both!
A pre-release review codewas provided by Direwolf Digital. I played the Steam version of The Fox and the Forest.
Trick taking games are a tale as old as time and have been ubiquitous throughout my growing up. My mom had a group of three other ladies who would gather and play Hearts until the wee hours of the morning. Later on in life, Euchre, Whist, and Spades were added to the rotation, with slight tweaks to the rules depending on who was joining the table that night and where they came from. As I got older, my family started playing Wizard during our reunions, and now we have reached the point where everyone in my family owns their own copy.
One thing most trick taking games have in common is that they often require three or more players. It is rare that a trick taking game works when only two players are at the table. Enter The Fox in the Forest by Joshua Buergel. The Fox in the Forest is a trick taking game for 2 players. No more, no less. Players are tasked with utilizing the cards in their hand to manipulate the game in order to win most of the tricks.
The Fox in the Forest offers a couple spins on the traditional trick-taking game model. First, there are only 3 suits available. Second, all of the odd cards have some kind of special ability that can spin the game in different ways, and third, you can earn a lot of points by losing nearly every trick.
How to Play
For anyone who hasn’t played a trick taking game before, some of these terms may be a bit foreign to you. Real quick talk about the core of almost all trick taking games – a trick is all the cards played in a round and ‘trump’ is the suit of cards that overpowers the other suits. In general, when the first player in a round ‘leads’ by playing a card, all subsequent players have to ‘follow’ by playing a card of the same suit if they have one. If someone doesn’t have a card of the lead suit, they’re free to play any card from their hand. Once all players have played a card, whoever played the highest card of the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump card was played, in which case the player who played the highest trump card wins the trick.
With that out of the way, you now have the basic rules to dozens of games. What makes The Fox and the Forest special is how it takes that basic concept and offers clever wrinkles and ways to manipulate the game state. Let’s talk about what The Fox and the Forest does differently.
First, Each player is dealt 13 of the 33 card deck, with the remaining 7 cards being set aside as the draw deck. The top card of the draw deck is flipped faceup. The faceup card is called the Decree, and dictates which suit has ‘trump’.
The non-dealer player leads on the first trick of a round. After that, unless specified otherwise, the winner of the last trick leads the following trick. The leader can play any card from their hand without restrictions. The follower must play a card of the same suit as the leader if they have one.
In The Fox and the Forest every odd card has a special ability. Those abilities are resolved as soon as the card is played, before any other cards are played or tricks are resolved. Some will have you drawing and discarding cards, others will have allow you to change the decree cards, and others will let you lead the next trick if you lose this one.
Play continues until all the cards in your hand have been played. At the end of the round each player totals how many tricks they won, and earn points based off the chart below. In general, you want to win more tricks than your opponent, but don’t get greedy or you’ll be punished with a big fat 0 points.
Shuffle all the cards back together and deal out another round. Play continues until someone meets or exceeds 21 points.
Review
My experience with the physical game has been a story of hardship and trials. I played The Fox in the Forest half a dozen times against the same opponent over the course of the last two years, and in every game I get pushed around. I start off the hand doing well, snagging up the first four tricks with no resistance, only to be denied every trick thereafter through my opponent’s clever card play. Or somehow even worse, to be deliberately giving away tricks, trying to achieve the Humble status, only to have tricks forced into my hand, causing me naught but pain.
The Fox in the Forest is a lovely game for a pair of players. Only being a 33 card deck instantly makes this a contender for travel or playing while out of the homestead. The art on the cards is lovely, and the theme is calm and serene. If you really want to get into the story, Foxtrot has published the fairy tale that inspired this design over on their website. Even more portable than a 33 card deck is your phone with the newly published app.
Direwolf Digital is no stranger to making digital adaptions to board games. Root and Sagrada both have excellent apps that live up to the excellent quality of game as it’s cardboard counterparts, but also exudes charm with subtle animations and good UX choices.
I enjoyed playing The Fox in the Forest on my computer. The sepia toned forest background made me feel at ease, in the same way that a lovely autumn walk does. The flourishes of colour and light when ‘cards’ are placed imbues a semi-magical feeling. My only qualm with the interface is that you had to drag the card to play it, not simply click it. I can only imagine that during playtesting someone was the victim of errant mis-clicks and the decision was made to set dragging your card as the best way to play.
The in-game tutorial does a very good job of walking you through the first half of a game, explaining what’s necessary to get you started before leaving you to discover the nuance of the special abilities on your own. Beyond the tutorial you have options to play locally against the AI (no pass and play options at time of this writing). I tried two games against each of the 3 levels of AI and honestly didn’t notice much of a difference in difficulty. I managed to thoroughly trounce each one of them, earning myself 7 or 8 points per round. I’d say maybe I just got lucky, but my experience with the card game and getting utterly trounced over and over tells me there’s more needed to win than luck.
The Fox in the Forest also includes challenges. The challenges offer different scenarios that introduce new aspects to the core gameplay of The Fox in the Forest. The challenge “Might Makes Right” throws out the Humble victory condition and tasks you with getting as many tricks as possible. The “Meek Shall Inherit” challenge flips the script with the player earning between 4 and 6 of the tricks earning the bulk of the points. One scenario randomizes your cards after every trick, and another adds an entire other suit! Each of these challenges come in two difficulty levels and offers a fun twist to test your mettle and mastery of the trick taking system.
Over all, I enjoyed the digital implementation of The Fox in the Forest. It’s fast to play, pretty to look at, and doesn’t waste your time with overly egregious animations. The Fox in the Forest is kind of game best played in a cool morning with a hot cup of tea while you slowly rouse yourself from your slumber. Direwolf Digital has created a faithful implementation of the original game, and has even offered interesting challenges to shake up the experience so the app isn’t just a plain recreation of the physical version. I’m hopeful there will be some updates, possibly with more challenges or with the implementation of a local pass and play feature. I’m excited to explore the online mode when The Fox in the Forest launches on Steam, iOS and Android on October 18th.
It’s been a while since I posted a set of my favourite games. At the speed I’m going it’ll be 2023 by the time this list is finished!
60 – Millennium Blades
Millennium Blades designed by Brad Talton is almost a fever dream of a game. Millennium Blades is a game about collecting cards and competing in tournaments of a fictional CCG called Millennium Blades. Each round of the game has two parts; a real-time deck building phase, and a tournament phase. In the deck building phase you have three 7 minute rounds where you’ll drop literal stacks of cash to buy new ‘packs’ from the store and buy and sell singles in the aftermarket. As cards and cash flow in and out of your player area, you’re trying to achieve two things: create a competitive deck and build a collection (a set of cards that share an attribute with increasing rarity). Cards in your collection cannot be used in the tournament
Once the real time phase is over, you flip over your playerboard and play a fairly simple game with your competitive decks. Each player takes a turn playing a card to the table in front of them, resolving the effects, and earning points, cards, and money for how well your deck performed.
Millennium Blades is a special game for a certain niche of people. The art by Fabio Fontes has a strong 90’s anime aesthetic, and makes dozens of references to the video games and anime from my childhood. Millennium Blades also comes with dozens of sets of cards that you can mix and match to create a unique store deck every time you play.
Because Millennium Blades is a throwback to competitive CCGs and 90’s era anime and video games, it feels like it was MADE for me. My gaming group however has never dabbled in these specific quagmires so all of the theming is lost on them. I’m sure Millennium Blades could be so much higher on this list if I had equally enthusiastic players to join me at my table. For now, it will languish at #60.
59 – Alhambra
Alhambra by Dirk Henn is a classic. In Alhambra you take turns taking money cards from the offer row and using that cash to buy tiles to place into your personal Alhambra. At two points during play a ‘scoring’ card will be drawn, instantly triggering a scoring phase. The player who has the majority for each of the colours earns the points, splitting the points if tied. The first scoring round only offers a prize to the person who has the most, but the next two scoring rounds have points for the person who has the most and for the person who has the second most tiles in each of the colours. In addition to earning points via the majorities in the tiles, you also get points for the wall going around the Alhambra. Most tiles will have a number of black boarders, representing a wall. Walls prevent you from building further in that direction from that tile. Often you will find yourself at odds with buying a tile from the shop because you just need one more green tile, but struggling to place the tile in your tableau in a way that doesn’t completely prevent you from building out even more.
Alhambra is a great game to begin or end a night. It’s fairly quick to play, not terribly complex, and offers a satisfying puzzle for you to solve.
58 – Targi
Targi by Andreas Steiger is a two player only game about placing workers on action spaces in such a way so that you get exactly what you want, while your opponent curses your name under their breath. Targi‘s theme is that you’re the leader of a Tuareg tribe trading goods and trying to expand your wealth, but the theme is pretty paper thin. Where Targi fails in theme it makes up for in gameplay. Targi has a 5 x 5 grid of cards. Along the outside edges are the action spaces, while the centre 9 cards are either resource cards, or a tribe card. During a round you and your opponent take turns placing your workers on available action spaces. You may not occupy an action spot that your opponent occupies, or a spot directly across the board from an opponents worker. Once all six workers have been placed, you place two more tokens on the centre cards that are in same row and columns as your workers. Then you perform all the actions available to you; getting various resources and spending them to gain tribe cards that give you various benefits when placed in your tableau.
Targi is a delightful game to play with a rival. Every action you take denies your opponent opportunities, but spend too much time trying to thwart their plans and you’ll find yourself falling far behind. Targi puts players in a dangerous dance as they try to achieve their objectives while getting in each other’s way. I’ve played Targi only a handful of times in person (every time I do a slew of profanities slowly slip from my mouth as the turns go on), but I’ve played dozens of games on Board Game Arena. I find that because there is very little hidden information, Targi played very well asynchronously. I highly recommend Targi if you and your gaming partner delight in stepping on each others toes.
57 – Azul
Azul by Michael Kiesling is one of the best games of 2017. It’s simple to play, difficult to master, and the Bakelite tiles are satisfying to play with. In Azul you and your friends are working to embellish the mosaic walls of a Portuguese palace. Each player has their own board, and there are a number of factory spaces in the middle. On your turn you take all matching tiles from any of the factory spaces. Once you take tiles from a factory, the left over tiles from that factory are deposited into the centre of the table. On and on the game goes, with people taking tiles from the factory or the centre of the table and queueing them up on their player board in hopes of filling a row. At the end of the round when all the tiles have been claimed, any full rows will move one of the pieces over to the scoring area, and the rest will be returned to the box.
Azul is a very abstract game and you will quickly lose the idea of creating a beautiful mosaic as you fall into the rhythm of the game. Azul is a great game to play with anyone, whether they have a deep and abiding love of games or show only a cursory interest. The game of Azul is satisfying and is one that often gets requested, even if that request is “can we play that game with the Starburst pieces again?”
56 – Tak
Tak has an intresting genesis. It began in a book, The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. The main character Kvothe described it as “The best sort of game: simple in its rules, complex in its strategy.” Never did Patrick Rothfuss try to describe how the game was played, as he envisioned Tak to be like the Chess of his world; classic, perfect, and timeless. And how could anyone invent chess today?
I saw an interview with Patrick Rothfuss where he said he was flabbergasted when James Earnest approached him and said:
“I want to make Tak.”
“You can’t just make Tak any more than you can invent the next chess!”
James Earnest said he’d come up with something and if Patrick Rothfuss veto’d it, that would be the end of it. The fact that this game is sitting on my favourite games list may spoil the ending of this story. James Earnest pitched a version of Tak to Patrick Rothfuss and won him over, successfully creating a game that was simple to play, but had deep complex strategies.
I’ll admit my bias; I’ve loved Rothfuss’ books long before I got into board games. But when I saw that Rothfuss had endorsed this version of Tak, I knew I had to get my hands on it. An abstract strategy game that’s elegant and fun to play, and no luck with the potential for misdirection and big moves, I was an instant fan.
55 – Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is the second meanest game about trees that I’ve played, but I’m ready to argue that this game by Hjalmar Hach has a much more impressive table presence. In Photosynthesis you struggle against the other players to grow your trees from little seedlings. Each round you’ll spend your energy growing trees taller so they catch the sun while simultaneously casting a shadow upon the trees behind them, denying those players valuable sunlight tokens. As your trees get taller you earn more points and the player with the most points win.
Each player has three different sizes of trees to place on the board, and after just a few turns this board game has a wonderful 3D effect. Trees are standing tall amongst smaller saplings and the sun is rotating around the table, changing who is receiving the benefit of the sunlight and the punishment of being in the shade.
Photosynthesis is a game I’ve only played a handful of times but it’s one that I remember fondly. I aspire to play it again soon!
54 – Le Havre
Le Havre is a huge game by Uwe Rosenburg. In Le Havre you need to manage 16 different resources to build the best buildings and ships to earn the most points to win the day. Each round has a total of 7 actions, meaning some rounds players will get more or less actions than the other players. This is particularly difficult in the 4 player game where you’ll get 2 actions at most every round and in some rounds get a single action. Coupled with trying to amass enough food to feed your workers and earn enough goods to build ships and buildings, it can feel like Le Havre is asking a lot of you.
I really enjoy the resource management, and the mechanism for using other players’ buildings. By the time you get to the end of the game you feel successful and powerful, as if you just overcame a large foe. Le Havre is one of Uwe Rosenburg’s best games, which is high praise considering just how many excellent games he has designed.
53 – Inis
Inis by Christian Martinez is a area majority game in which players are tasked with deciding who they’re going to crown as their king. Inis is probably one of the most satisfying area majority, troops-on-a-map games I’ve ever played. The artistic direction is unique and eye catching and I love the mechanic where players need to declare that they can satisfy one of the three victory conditions at the start of the round and hold onto it until the end of the round.
Inis can leave a sour taste in your mouth when two of your opponents can win and you only have the ability to stop one of them. Each round begins with a card draft in which you more or less have to decide what actions will be available to you this round. As you play more games of Inis you’ll learn what cards are available and how to utilize them properly. Eventually you’ll figure out how to predict what someone is going to do based on the cards that you didn’t see, giving you the important information needed to counter their moves.
I found in my plays of Inis that someone ended up being a ‘kingmaker’. By choosing to attack player A instead of Player B, Player B was able to amass their armies and lead their clan to victory. Personally I don’t like being in the situation where my one choice to stop someone from willing will directly hand the victory to another player, but if that feature doesn’t bother you I highly recommend giving Inis a try!
52 – Karuba
Karuba is not the first Rudiger Dorn design on my list and it certainly isn’t the last. Karuba gives all players the exact same challenge, with the winner being the player who completes the challenge in the most efficient way possible. All the adventurers and temples start on the same space for each player. Every turn all players get the same road piece and have to place it somewhere on their board, or discard it to move their adventurers across the jungle, stopping to pick up gems across the way.
Karuba ends once one player has managed to get all four of their adventurers to all four temples, or when the deck of road tiles runs out. Karuba has a particularly excellent Tabletop Simulator mod available that allows it to be played start to finish in under 10 minutes. During the COVID season where my group was playing games exclusively online, Karuba was a standout hit. Unlike a lot of other games, Karuba is easier to play online than it is in person. Because it was so easy for us to play and played so quickly, it ended up being the game of choice to end the evening or for a quick game while waiting for the rest of the group to show up.
51 – The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth by Nathan Hajek and Grace Holdinghaus is almost the opposite of Karuba. It is a large sprawling adventure across Middle Earth managed via an app. I have small qualms with The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth due to the character choices and their accuracy in reference to the Lord of the Rings novels (Aragorn and Bilbo do not adventure together!), but overall I really enjoyed the game system. All of the equipment, combat, skills, and damage are managed by cards, and the enemies are plastic miniatures that are entirely controlled by the app. I enjoyed the app integration for The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth as it removed most of the tedium of managing the opponents and the environment, and got us back to playing our turns quickly.
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth is on of the few campaign games that I’ve played all the way through to the end. I’m incredibly tempted to play through the main campaign again just to see where the story branches. I also really want to play the DLC stories, and get the Shadowed Paths expansion that adds in 6 more heroes (Gandalf and Balin) and a ton of new monsters and minis and another scenario to play. I saw recently that ANOTHER expansion was announced Spreading War that adds even more map tiles, roles, terrain types, heroes, and a 15 scenario story. If you have a proclivity to play the same game over and over, The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth has a ton of content to explore and more keeps coming out every year! Long may it continue!!
A copy of Hamsters vs. Hippos was provided by the publisher
Number of Plays: 4
Game Length: 15 – 40 minutes
Mechanics: Press your luck, Player Elimination
Release Year: 2021
Designer: James Freeman, James Staley, Adam Staley
Artist: César Ayala Delgado
Publisher: Tin Robot Games
Intro
There are many famous rivalries in the animal kingdom. mongooses vs. cobras, lions vs. hyenas, and hares vs. tortoises are the first examples that spring to mind. Never in my life have I heard of the epic and lifelong battle that exists between hamsters and hippos.
Hamsters Vs. Hippos is a press-your-luck game by designers James Freeman, James Staley, and Adam Staley, with art by César Ayala Delgadoand published by Tin Robot Games. The goal of the game is to be the hamster that collects the most lotus flowers while avoiding the hippos lurking deep in the water.
How to Play
To begin, remove two of the hippo tiles from the rest of the tiles and shuffle the remaining tiles up. Lay the tiles out randomly on the table in a grid of 5 x 5 (for 1-4 players) or 7 x 7 (5-6 players). On the centre 9 tiles, place a single pink lotus flower. Each player chooses a hamster, takes the associated player board and you’re ready to play.
Setup for a 2 – 4 player game
On your turn you must move your hamster onto an unflipped tile. When you move onto an unflipped tile you collect any flowers sitting on the tile, then flip the tile and perform the action depicted on the tile.
Anytime after your first turn you may choose to bow out of the round. Remove your tile from the board and place all the lotus tokens you’ve collected onto your player board. These points are now permanently yours and cannot be lost.
If you don’t want to bow out of the round for your second action, you must take another move action, exactly the same way as the first action.
If you move and flip over a tile and reveal a hippo, your turn is immediately over and any points you’ve collected this round are lost. Play continues for the rest of the players until either all players have bowed out or a second hippo is revealed. Once that second hippo has been revealed all players who are still in the round are hippo food.
Once the round is over, you’ll shuffle a third hippo tile into the supply, and set up for another round. And for the third and fourth rounds, you’ll add a fourth hippo tile into the supply. After four rounds the player with the most lotus tokens in their permanent supply is the winner!
Review
I’ll talk about the production first. I received a pre-production review copy of Hamsters Vs. Hippos, so any aspect of this game could change over the course of the Kickstarter campaign.
The first thing that I noticed was the charming art on the cover. A cute hamster blissfully unaware of the looming danger of the hippo. I like how bright, cute, and colourful the art direction is, which encourages me to play with a younger audience. Once inside the box, you’re greeted with some very nice screen printed hamster meeples, and a tall stack of wonderfully thick tiles. While this massive stack is hard to shuffle, the thick cardboard tiles feel good in your hands.
Are they Hamster Meeples, or are they Mamples?
Each player gets a little player board with a hamster on it, holding a bag of their colour. This player board has a linen finish, giving it texture and a nice feel, but is made of very thin cardstock, almost the antithesis of the thick tiles. This isn’t much of an issue, as you’re not interacting with the player board much, just using it as a space to designate the tokens that you’ve cached from round to round. The lotus tiles are also quite small and thin; I found my sausage fingers had some amount of trouble picking them up deftly. Luckily for me, Hamsters vs. Hippos is not a dexterity game.
Hamsters vs. Hippos is a press-your-luck game about trying to collect the most points before choosing to bow out of the game to cache your goods. It may seem obvious that a press-your-luck game is incredibly luck dependent. Every time you choose to play more, you risk all of the progress you’ve made in the round up to this point.
In the case of Hamsters vs. Hippos, the word that comes to mind is ‘arbitrary’. Your first action in every round is to pick a tile to move onto; any tile along the outside will do. You have no information on which to base that decision, so you just end up picking the tile closest to your seat. Your second choice is much like the first – you now have 5 unflipped tiles surrounding your hamster, and you arbitrarily pick one to move onto and flip.
There is some vague feeling of strategy in choosing where you want to move to. Because you cannot move onto an already flipped tile, you try to maneuver your hamster in a way that leaves you with more than one unflipped tile available, while simultaneously trying to pin and corner your opponents. Beyond that consideration, you just choose your destination arbitrarily. Unless one of your tiles provides an option to peek under an adjacent tile, you have no information to base your decisions on. You just end up picking one, and hope there are no hippos in the water.
The Hamsters vs. Hippos tempo settles quickly. Move and flip, move and flip. We found that we stopped moving our hamster meeples in-between our actions. We’d just flip one tile, collect any rewards and/or settle any actions, flip the second tile, then place the hamster on the tile. Once we stopped moving the Hamster meeple, it became clear that the game of Hamsters vs. Hippos is just tile-flipping.
As tiles get flipped over and players start to accrue lotus flowers, you may be tempted to bow out of the round to ‘save’ all the goods you’ve collected thus far. The trouble that comes with that decision is that it feels bad to choose to stop playing. Further to that, if you’re not already in first place it feels like a losing move. Yes, you could stop early and save the flowers you collected, but if the the leader is still in the round it feels like they’re getting further and further ahead of you. It feels bad when you stop the round with 3 flowers and the person who was already in first place collects 8 before stopping. Not only are you no longer playing the game, but you’ve put yourself into an even worse position.
The mirror opposite to that situation is when you arbitrarily chose a tile to start on, and that tile turns out to be a hippo. You are immediately out of the round before you even began. Again, in press-your-luck games you’re supposed to weigh the odds of getting points versus the odds of losing it all, and sometimes you can just have bad luck and lose right off the bat.
The game is not altogether without tension. In one of my plays I was the player who got the first hippo tile relatively early. I sat and watched as my friends scurried across the pond, snatching up lotus tiles left and right. I willed the tiles to reveal a second hippo, and when the player in the lead loudly postulated “Should I just leave the pond? Ah, I’ll flip over one more tile!” and that tile was the second hippo, I let out an audible gasp. That tension quickly deflated as we realized that because no one else had bowed out, the whole round was basically a wash. Poor decision making on our part I suppose.
I can’t help but compare Hamsters vs. Hippos to press-your-luck games that I really enjoy. Can’t Stop (which I’ve already reviewed) and Incan Gold are two great examples that come to mind. In Can’t Stop you roll four die, pair them off, and move trackers up a board. Before you choose to roll you have information available to you, which numbers are still available, how far you’ve gone on each of the tracks, and the probability of rolling one of the three numbers you’ve chosen for the round. If your three numbers are a 2, 11, and 12, you’re probably going to choose to stop playing for the round, just because you know the probability of getting one of those three numbers is low.
Incan Gold asks players to voluntarily choose to stop playing in order to save all the gems they’ve gained thus far in a round, but players have more information available to them when they make that choice. First, as players adventure into the temple and loot gets left on the floor, you can see the reward for choosing to bow out of the game; you’re not JUST choosing to stop playing, but choosing to scoop up all the points that were left behind. Tension builds as you contemplate what others are doing, you weigh the benefits and risks as you try to out-think and out-maneuver your opponents. Incan Gold has some very exciting moments as players choose to leave on the same turn, forcing them to split the crumbs, or as one player is alone in the temple, presses their luck and scores big! When a threat card is drawn, it doesn’t end the game for just one of the players at the table, it signals that the end of the round could be imminent for all players.
Getting back to Hamsters vs. Hippos, I feel there is a element of player agency missing from this game. Because you have no information to base your decisions off of, you’re just flipping tiles and hoping that you don’t get the first hippo. In a 4 player game with a 5×5 grid, half the tiles aren’t in the game. The odds of 2 hippos being in the grid at all feels quite low. In a 5 or 6 player game and a 7×7 grid, nearly all the tiles are included, which does increase the tension a little bit, knowing that the hippos are definitely on the table. The downside of playing with 6 players is that 10 tiles get flipped in between each of your turns, making the odds of two hippos coming up within those 10 tiles not unreasonable.
All in all, Hamsters vs. Hippos is a cute and well produced game. My ‘core’ game group bounced off it, citing the lack of information available to influence their decisions, but I can see it being a fun game to play with younger kids. I’ll be seeing my 6 year old niece in a couple months, so once we play it I’ll update my opinion on it. I imagine she will have a lot of fun with it.
Let’s flash back to 2008. I was 17 and had just moved into my first apartment in Winnipeg, leaving behind the tiny village in northern Manitoba that I had called home for my entire life. I desperately needed a job to pay the rent for my super sketchy apartment, and the only place that would hire me was the local Pita Pit, paying minimum wage.
With the experience I got From Pita Pit, I moved onto other restaurant jobs, including Joey’s Only Seafood, Chesters Chicken, and Wendy’s. It wasn’t long before I was promoted to shift supervisor at Wendys. I took their training seriously and for two years it was a good enough job to keep my bills paid and food on my table. Unfortunately the training stopped and rather than waiting to move into higher management, I chose to pursue a diploma in Culinary Arts.
I left Wendys part way into my first year of college. When I left, I described working in fast food as ‘absolutely soul grinding’ and I couldn’t get out of that restaurant fast enough. Looking back on that period of my life, I have an odd sense of bittersweet melancholy. For some reason, I miss my Wendys. I’m sure I’m just lumping my time at that job together with a time in my life where I was excited about my schooling and all the new friendships I was developing.
It’s with those rose-coloured glasses that I picked up Food Chain Magnate. This was early in my gaming career and easily my most expensive game. With almost no information other than a fast food theme that I felt drawn to, I payed the $120 and brought it home. After all, I love food and restaurants, any game with this theme is sure to be a hit for me! How bad could it be?
How to Play
Food Chain Magnate is an economic game where the player with the most money wins. That’s the goal, make the most money, there are no alternate objectives, no prizes for having the best food or the most restaurants or the most brand recognition. The only thing that matters is money. Every round of Food Chain Magnate moves through its 7 phases, and if there is still money to be earned from the central bank, a new round is started. On and on it goes until the bank has been depleted and one player stands richer than the rest.
I’ll be honest, I wrote out a ‘how to play’ summary that ended up being nearly 2,000 words long. I’m going to wager that if you found yourself on this page, it’s because you already have an opinion on Food Chain Magnate and aren’t here to learn how to play. If you’re intrested in learning how to play, I’d recommend just reading the rulebook. It’s only like, 7 pages long and does an incredibly good job in laying out how to play in an easy to digest manner.
The gang’s all here!
I will say that playing Food Chain Magnate isn’t difficult for the average player. If you have someone who knows how to manage the phases and can shepherd the game along, most of your questions can be answered by just reading the cards. The trick comes in playing well.
Review
The first time I cracked Food Chain Magnate‘s box open and laid everything out on my table, it was almost too much to bear. I found a solo variant on Board Game Geek and slowly played it, spending the better part of an afternoon and a literal litre of coffee to learn how to play Food Chain Magnate.
The very first time I laid everything out on my table
Where I’m at now in my gaming career, and with 16 plays of Food Chain Magnate under my belt, I’m ready to argue that it’s actually not technically difficult. The flow of each round is smooth and the natural progression of the game eases players into the tempo. The tempo ramps up considerably, but it’s rare for something to happen that you didn’t expect or at the very least couldn’t see coming. Unless of course you’ve been playing on your phone during someone else’s turn, at which point I have no sympathy for you.
To begin my review proper, I need to say that while I just said that Food Chain Magnate isn’t a difficult game to play, it is HARD. Being a no-luck, perfect information game, Food Chain Magnate is merciless in its punishment. Splotter’s design philosophy is “if you can’t lose on the first turn, what’s even the point of turn one?”. Food Chain Magnate doesn’t care that a poor initial restaurant placement can sink your entire game, or that the person in the lead gets rewards for doing well and there is no welfare system in place to assist those who are struggling. It is absolutely, 100% the case that someone new to Food Chain Magnate playing at a table with a group of experienced players will get stomped into the ground and walk away from this experience with a poor taste in their mouth.
Decide if you’re planning for a short or long game before you even take your first turn
Listen, I love Food Chain Magnate. I love Splotter’s design philosophy and mostly agree with their train of thought of ‘no mercy’. I can tell you that I I don’t want all my games to require such careful considerations and harsh punishments. Food Chain Magnate isn’t a game I recommend to everyone, or even want to play every single day, but under the sharp shell lies a delicious puzzle where every thread you pull can have wild and drastic effects on gameplay.
Food Chain Magnate is one of the few games where I’ve actually sat and pondered what optimal openings exist and how to counter particular strategies right from the start. You see, aside from the 30+ possible employees, there are 16 milestones that everyone is racing towards. These milestones can be incredibly powerful, and missing out some of the key ones absolutely could cost you the game.
The Milestones
A milestone is claimed when someone fulfills it’s requirement. Everyone who managed acheive the milestone on the same turn gets to claim the milestone. That milestone then becomes ‘locked’ for the rest of the game, permanently unavailable for everyone else. This makes the first few turns of Food Chain Magnate critical. On one hand players can copy what everyone is doing to ensure you get access to the same milestones. On on the other hand if you do something completely different you may find yourself as the sole owner of a very powerful persistent benefit.
These milestones include things like a freezer that lets you store food (everyone else has to discard unsold food at the end of each round), adding $5 for every burger, pizza, or drink sold, granting you the ability to use multiple trainers on the same person, rocketing them up the corporate ladder, or permanently offering a $15 discount on salaries, allowing you to have talented staff early in the game. Some of these milestones are legendary, and exploiting properly them is the key to winning Food Chain Magnate.
The quiet before the storm
The very first turn of Food Chain Magnate sets the foundation for the rest of your game. Like a massive ship, it can be incredibly difficult to turn quickly or react to sudden changes. A food chain CEO needs to be like a ship captain. When a sailor sees trouble ahead, calls for the sails to be adjusted, the rudder gets cranked all the way to the side, and the massive ship turns very slowly. In Food Chain Magnate you need to anticipate and be ready for the demands of your guests. You need to be catering to their demands before they even knew they had demands. Just reacting to other players actions is a sure fire way to miss. If you’re planning your next turn’s productions based on the demands of the current round, then you’re already two turns behind.
The first turn of Food Chain Magnate can feel like a whimper. Each player gets to recruit one entry level employee. That’s not very exciting at all! Company growth is almost exponential, every employee that you add gives you another action, allowing you to control the situation on the board and hopefully earn the hard earned cash that will win you the game.
The employees
It’s difficult to see how the gears of Food Chain Magnate‘s mechanics are interlocked and how each action changes how each future action will be taken. Every player is trying to suss out your strategy and either build their own exploitive engine whose growth will eclipse yours, or try to undercut you and steal your business.
Turn order feels critical in every round. at the beginning Food Chain Magnate it’s incredibly advantageous to go last, as you have the ability to react to anything anyone else did on their turn, You can also use the fact that no one is after you to choose to do something completely different, knowing that no one has a chance to react. midway though the game however, it becomes critical to be first, as turn order is the tie breaker for almost everything, and Food Chain Magnate often comes down to ties.
Pricing wars in Food Chain Magnate are not uncommon, if you and an opponent are the same distance from a house that keeps demanding food, it’s tempting to lower your price as getting $4 per sale is better than making no sales at all.
So this begs the question, do you go the McDonalds route and try to sell one hundred million $4 burgers, or do you posture yourself as the cream of the crop, and only sell a dozen $40 burgers? All this will depend on your opponents, as everything they do will push and pull you, forcing you into a dastardly dance of capitalism.
One of the things I love about Food Chain Magnate is that every employee can be the one that wins you the game if you find yourself properly prepared and in the right situation. if two people are racing to the bottom in a pricing war, you can eclipse their profits by flooding the market with demand, and use the Luxuries Manager to boost your price by $10. Couple that with a garden and CFO and all you need is a handful of sales to make a lot of money.
I can keep going on and on about the various situations and how Food Chain Magnate creates fascinating scenarios, but I’ve rambled on for long enough. The long story made short is that Food Chain Magnate is a wonderful, brutal design. The tempo of the games grows organically and exponentially, and I never feel like the game obfuscated what the consequences of my actions are. Every mistake I make is my own fault. A two player game is a cutthroat knife fight as you battle for control of the 9 square hamlet. A 5 player game feels like an all out war, with all the treachery and backstabbing you’d expect from corporations fiercely competing to carve out a section of market share.
Food Chain magnate has no mechanisms to help those falling behind. If you make a mistake and it puts you a turn behind everyone else, you very well may be unable to ever catch up. It’s entirely up to you to make the best of the situation you created. This also has the effect of making someone feel like they’re ‘out of the game’ 30 minutes in, and it’s no fun to sit in a game watching everyone else vye for the crown for 2 hours. And personally, even if I’m doing well in a game, I feel bad when someone is disengaged and obviously not having a good time.
Another common criticism of Food Chain Magnate is with the art. A lot of people are turned off by the way this game looks, calling it boring or bland. Personally, I love the 1950’s aesthetic, tying in the golden age of advertising really drives home the theme. I also recognize that at the start of the game the board is very plain looking. I maintain that Food Chain Magnate has a lot of important information to convey to players and it’s simple design aesthetic was chosen to minimize the information overload for an easier play over-all.
That’s a lot of demands
Another point I really want to bring up is the playtime. Everytime I think about playing Food Chain Magnate, I wince at the time commitment. Food Chain Magnate feels like a four or five hour game. Lately I’ve been recording just how long games actually take to play, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the average game of Food Chain Magnate is only two and a half hours (with 4 players). Food Chain Magnate does an amazing job of giving you a board game experience full of decisions and interactions and depth in a relatively shorter playtime. I’ve played other games that take a lot longer to play and have significantly less interesting decisions to make.
All in all, Food Chain Magnate is a beast. It demands players think ahead and prepare for future rounds. It insists that you ebb and flow with your opponents, responding and reacting to what they’ll do, rather than just to try and build your own little corner of the map where no one can bother you. It creates amazing and interesting decisions throughout its entire playtime. Playing is a joy and every single time I open the box and start playing this game, I celebrate. I love Food Chain Magnate so much, my heart accelerates during play. If that isn’t the sign of truly enjoying a board game, I don’t know what is.
Food Chain Magnate is my #1 favourite game of all time, and it has been for years. I have a hard time fathoming enjoying another game more, between the theme and mechanics, Food Chain Magnate just sings to me. I love the strategic decisions and the tense interactions between competitors. I get tingles just thinking about this game. I firmly state that Food Chain Magnate is the best game I have ever played. While I recognize that it really isn’t for everyone, it would be a disservice to call Food Chain Magnate anything other than a masterpiece in game design.
