Last time I was a grumpy, old, curmudgeon. It was a change of pace that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. Turns out, I don’t actually like complaining all that much. So this week I want to highlight some games that I really love, that I think are woefully underappreciated.
A high-speed puzzle ‘SHUMP’ wrapped in the aesthetics of a futuristic magical girl anime, Bullet♥︎ is one of the slickest, most replayable games I’ve ever played, as evident as its placement as #3 on my top 100 games of all time list
It’s a real-time puzzle game, where you drop bullets onto a grid based on colour and number, trying to match patterns before your board fills up. Every heroine plays differently, and the combinations of Heroines and Bosses provide near-endless variety. It plays fantastically solo or with friends, and the real time rounds keep the game moving at a decent clip.
There’s nothing quite like pulling out the perfect bullet you need to complete a pattern just in the nick of time, clearing space on your board and sending a cascade of bullets flying at your opponent. That moment when the round ends, and they look at the mountain of wood you’ve sent their way, it’s just a pure delight.
2. Le Havre: The Inland Port
BGG Rank: #1,729
Le Havre by Uwe Rosenburg gets plenty of plaudits. It’s revered by many a Uwe fan, even sitting in Tom Vassel’s #1 spot in his yearly Top 100 Games of all time lists in 2020 and 2021. Myself, I think it’s okay. It’s a bit big and unwieldy in my experience, but a great game none-the-less. What I am enthuasastic about, however, is the 2 player only spin off, Le Havre: The Inland Port.
The Inland Port features a resource grid, with 4 trackers on it. Players alternate taking turns building or using buildings, which sit on your own personal dial. As turns go by, the dials spin, powering up each of the buildings. When using a building, you can use your own for free, or throw a franc at your opponent to use their building. The buildings are mostly just different ways of getting more resources so you can build more buildings, but the resource grid has a fun spatial element to it. One building may move your wood marker up and to the left, but it’s useless to you if the marker is already bumped up to the left side.
Now Boarding by Tim Fowers turns the stress and mundanity of air travel into an utterly delightful real-time cooperative experience. As always, featuring charming artwork from Ryan Goldsberry, and featuring a fast-paced, real time, pick-up-and-deliver framework, players are tasked with juggling angry passengers, unpredictable weather, and the literal ticking clock as they shuttle travelers back and forth across the U.S. What starts as a breezy morning shift ramps up quickly, with passengers piling up and the best laid plans unravelling in real time as new passengers and their destinations are revealed mid-round. The game encourages tight communication and flexible thinking, and yes, sometimes ejecting a passenger mid-route because someone more convenient popped up.
No game makes a table look cooler by the end than Tokyo Highway. It’s part dexterity challenge, part spatial puzzle, and part architecture simulator.
You’re stacking and stretching tiny wooden roads on top of pillars, aiming to sneak under or over your opponent’s highways to place your cars. There’s a magical moment in every game where the roads twist into wild, impossible shapes and the table becomes a miniature cityscape of gravity-defying construction.
It’s easy to teach, hard to master, and packed with tension. Plus, it’s the rare abstract game that tells a story—not with words, but with the shape of the board by the end of the game.
This solo word-building roguelike is what happens when a word game, a deck-builder, and a dungeon crawler walk into a bar and actually hit it off.
You’re building words to defeat a series of enemies, collecting power-ups, levelling up your deck, and trying to survive until the final boss. Each playable character offers unique abilities, which means your strategy shifts dramatically from one run to the next.
The progression is satisfying, the mechanics are sharp, and the design is downright clever. It’s not just “a good solo game” — it’s a great game, full stop. And once it hooks you, it really hooks you.
Final Thoughts
Not every great game gets the love it deserves. Some are too niche, too chaotic, too quiet, or just fall between the cracks of hype cycles and hotness meters. But these five games prove that sometimes, everyone else is wrong.
So if you’re the type of person who stops looking at board games if they’re ranked lower than 500 on BGG, give these underrated gems a try. You might just find your next favourite game hiding behind a bad rank.
When it’s late, brains are fried, but nobody really wants to stop just yet.
There’s a magic moment at the end of game night: the heavy hitters are back in their boxes, but you and your friends aren’t quite ready to call it quits. You want something light, fast, but still full of those exciting decisions and euphoric “aha!” moments that leave you buzzing. The real trick is finding the games that hit the sweet spot between being quick play and genuinely fun.
I’m here to help! Here are five of my absolute favourite games to close out game night on a high note:
1. For Sale
The slickest property deal you’ll ever make in 20 minutes.
For Sale is the filler game that earned its spot on the shelf. It’s fast, funny, and somehow, always exactly what the group needs. The game starts with players bidding on properties using your limited stash of coins, and then you’ll immedately turn around and use those properties to earn cold hard cash in a blind auction. It’s two clever little auctions in one deck of cards.
It’s quick, compact, super easy to teach, but it offers just the so many meaningful decisions. I’ve never gotten tired of it, and I’ve never had someone shrug their shoulders after a game.
For Sale is the perfect palate cleanser after a rules-heavy euro, no matter the crowd. For Sale always delivers.
2. 6 nimmt!
Lightweight, lightning-fast, and occasionally rage-inducing
This little box hides a world of tension. In 6 Nimmt!, players simultaneously choose a card from their hand and place it face down. Everyone reveals their cards, and they’re all added to the rows in ascending order… unless their card would be the sixth card in that row, in which case they must scoop up the whole line and take those nasty points. It sounds simple, and it is, but the simultaneous reveals create pure magic.
The excitement I feel when we reveal our cards and find that we’ve all jostled for the same row, leaving one person holding a whole bag of points always gets the table erupting with laughter. The simultaneous reveal is so exciting and hilarious.
There’s something wonderfully cruel about a game that punishes you for trying to be just a little too clever. 6 Nimmt! is fast, addictive, and endlessly replayable.
If you want to learn more, check out my full review by clicking here
3. SCOUT
No rearranging your hand. No theme, either.
SCOUT is a quirky little ladder-climbing game that starts off feeling restrictive. You cannot rearrange your hand of cards, but it quickly reveals its genius. Every turn is a puzzle: do you improve your hand by scouting, giving points to your opponents, or or try and strike with your best hand? With dual sided cards and a simple scoring system, SCOUT rewards creativity and precision in equal measure. For me, it always ends up being an exercise in hubris
Whether you’re shedding your way to victory or stockpiling cards, SCOUT always leaves me smiling.
If you want to learn more, check out my full review by clicking here
4. So Clover!
The word game that turns your group into mind readers. Or questioning each other’s sanity.
Imagine the wildly popular Codenames, but fully cooperative, and without the severe downtime. In So Clover!, everyone simultaneously jots down clue words to connect keyword pairs on a big green clover, then the whole group works together to decode what the heck everyone else was thinking. It’s hilarious and blessedly low-pressure.
So Clover is a warm, inviting game that’s perfect when the group wants to wind down and share a few last laughs before packing it in. As a bonus: you’ll definitely derive a few inside jokes out of someone’s completely off the wall connection.
5. The Crew
Just one mission. Okay, maybe three. Fine, the whole campaign.
Trick-taking goes cooperative in this brilliant little space puzzle. Each mission gives players individual objectives, like “Bigfoot must win a trick with the yellow 2, but Otter has to win the green 4, first”, then you try to make it all happen… without being able to talk. The beauty is in the slow build. Early missions are a breeze. By mission 30, you’re cursing out your captain, even if they had no hope of leading the team to victory.
At first, The Crew is just a quick filler game. Then it’s 2am. It’s dangerously addictive. It’s the perfect closer that somehow… keeps going. But hey, what’s one more mission? How desperate are you really to get to bed?
Conclusion
Closing out a game night doesn’t need to feel like a let-down after you’ve lost the big game of the evening. These five games deliver fast fun without sacrificing great moments, which is perfect for winding down while still feeling like you’re making interesting decisions. Whether you’re after laughs, puzzles, or a little competitive zing, any of these games I’ve listed are guaranteed crowd-pleasers.
Got your own go-to nightcap games? Drop them in the comments, because let’s be honest, there’s always room for one more game.
I’ve said this a lot in the past, but I don’t really play a ton of games in the year they come out. Between my impressive backlog and my unwillingness to go to any board game conventions, I’m usually a year or two behind when it comes to playing the hot new games. In fact, I usually do this list around July, but this year, I’ve been much more active on Board Game Arena, and more and more games are launching on BGA close to their physical release date. It also helps being on the Alpha test list, so I can play lots of games as they’re being added to the site, with the caveat that there may be bugs. ANYWAYS, I’m not here to talk about BGA, I’m here to run down my 10 favourite games that released in 2024 (so far)
Also, side note for myself. Next year I really need to complete this list before my kid goes on Christmas break, because, I was completely unable to get ANY writing done during the last 2 weeks!
Harmonies was incredibly popular when it hit the scene in March. Pitched as a cross between Azul and Cascadia, it felt like everyone was talking about this little game. Now, I’ve only had the opportunity to play Harmonies on BGA, but I can see why this game had everyone so excited.
Designed by Johan Benvenuto, Harmonies tasks players with building specific shapes in their personal ecosystems to satisfy the demands of the fauna cards. Each animal wants something different, perhaps a lion wants a mountian 3 discs high, with 2 plains discs adjacent, while the boar wants a tree thats only 2 discs high next to a 2 disc high building. The name of the game (literally) is finding the animals that can exist harmoniously, as each of their requirements compliment each other.
While luck plays a major factor in which discs are available to you each turn, and you’ll quite often be forced to take discs you don’t want or can’t use just to claim the few that you really need, Harmonies remains a calm, enjoyable experience. I really look forward to fleshing out my thoughts in a full review, once I can get a few more plays under my belt.
9 – Castle Combo
Another game introduced to me via Board Game Arena, Castle Combo, designed by Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel, is a fast, simple tableau builder about trying to squeeze the most points out of a courtyard of servants.
The cards you’re drafting come in two rows. The servants, and the nobles. All cards cost money to bring into your tableau, and once you take possession of the card and slot it into your 3×3 grid, they’ll offer some immediate benefits, as well as offer some end game scoring. After 9 rounds, you evaluate all the cards in your grid, and whoever has the most cards wins!
The artwork by Stephane Escapa is colourful and full of funny caractures, and the gameplay is so fast and butter smooth that it fits the role of ‘filler game’ perfectly. There are still satisfying decisions to make, as a lot of the end game conditions will depend on where each card is, and how many of the other tags are in the rows and columns next to each card.
It’ll remain to be seen if Castle Combo will stand the test of time, but it’s worth at least a dozen plays or so!
An area control and stock market game about the ever increasing value and presence of flowers was a bit of a surprise hit for me. Another BGA game, Stalk Exchange by Christopher Ryan Chan, gives players some hidden information that will inform their final score, then tasks players with swapping the flowers they have behind their screen with the ones that are able to go onto the board.
When flowers are on the board, they start off as bulbs, after a single turn if they have an open side, they grow into flowers. If a cohort of flowers are ever fully contained by the borders created by other flower varieties, they’re removed from the board, and the value of that flower goes up 1 spot for every flower token removed from the board. At the end of the game, you score your portfolio. But before you do that, the bubble bursts on the most valuable flower, its value gets cleaved in half.
Stalk Exchange is clever, quick, and simple to teach, making it a pretty appealing game. I’ve enjoyed the few plays I’ve gotten of this one, and if I can source a physical copy, I’ll be sure to push it onto my local game group.
7 – Wyrmspan
Building off the core gameplay mechanics of the massively successful Wingspan, Connie Vogelmann crafted a new game in which players hew homes for dragons out of caves, then entice those dragons into your sanctuary, all in the effort of building an engine by chaining together powerful abilities, and turning those abilities into victory points.
In classic Stonemaier Games fashion, Wyrmspan is a beautiful product. The art is lush and fanciful, the eggs are speckled, the components have a premium finish, it’s a wonderful production to hold in your hands. Gameplay wise, Wyrmspan is much more complex than Wingspan, there’s a lot more interactions between the dragons and caves and the resources you hold that players need to be aware of. The potential to craft a runaway combo feels greater in this rendition.
Personally, I’d be much more willing to play Wyrmspan over its predecessor, but I’d also be much more reluctant to introduce newer players to Wyrmspan, at the very least without the Wingspan background. It’s a great ‘next step’ game, where it has some familiar mechanisms to ease the learning burden, but offers a more satisfying gameplay experience.
6 – Draft & Write Records
A prototype was provided by Inside Up Games
I was fortunate enough to receive a prototype copy of Draft & Write Recordsto review from Inside Up Games back in the fall of 2023, but it was officially released this year, so I’m including it on this list!
Draft & Write Records by Bruno Maciel, is as the title indicates, a draft and write game. Each player gets a large sheet of paper and every round, they’ll draft a card from their hand, cross off the appropriate resource from their sheet, and pass all of their unchosen hands to the next player. After each hand of cards has been picked down to nothing, there’s a short weekend, where players evaluate goals, and play continues in this fashion until someone triggers the end of the game.
In 2024, Draft & Write Records came to Board Game Arena, and I decided to hop into a couple friendly tournaments for it, which ended up putting another 10 games of it under my belt. Draft & Write Records is the perfect async game, as on your turn you just need to quickly assess your board state and the few cards passed to you, before making your choice. And the combo-tastic nature of the game is really satisfying when you manage to stretch a single action into 5 or 6 resources getting crossed off.
5 – Nucleum
While I haven’t reviewed Brass or Barrage on this site (yet), I’ve touched on how much I enjoy Brass: Birmingham as it sits at number 18 in my top 100 games of all time list. Nucleum by designers Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi has players erect power plants, build links between urban buildings, and completing milestones. Each player has asymmetric technologies, and throughout the game the action tiles you’re using to take actions are spent to establish links, giving the game a really great feeling of tension.
If I’m being really honest, I suspect that when I look back at all the games on this list, Nucleum will have the most staying power. That said, I didn’t like it more than Brass, so I’d be more inclined to return to that game if my group is in the mood to play a heavy economic euro game. Not to diminish how great Nucleum is as a game, it’s really amazing! It just has some close parallels that evoke similar feelings to other games that I already love.
4 – Fromage
Coming in right at the end of the year on BGA, Fromage was a really enjoyable euro game that played fast and offered intresting decisions. With simultainous worker placement, and 4 different scoring areas to play in, I had a really good time exploring this french cheese game.
I enjoyed it so much, I felt compelled to give this one a full review, which you can read here!
All 3 Kinfire Delve games were provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes
Are these technically expansions? They can be mixed with the previous Kinfire Delve games, but each box is stand-alone. While the core gameplay is the same between all sets, each character and boss are wildly different. Mixing characters to address specific challenges for each boss is a real treat.
In 2024 I transitioned to being a stay at home parent, and solo gaming suddenly became much more of a reality for me as my child napped during the day. My time with Kinfire Delve was a delight, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring the rest of the Kinfire universe, whenever that opportunity arises.
Another game that got the full review treatment, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth is a reworking of the 7 Wonders Duel system. Folding in both the Pantheon and Agora expansions, then streamlining the whole package down into something that is just a joy to play, LotR:DfME is an achievement of game design.
That said, when all is said and done, I find more fun in the 7 Wonders Duel experience, especially with the Pantheon expansion. I don’t mind the dozens of little calculations you need to do every time you want to buy a resource that you don’t have, and the engine building powers of the yellow cards is something I dearly missed in this new edition.
1 – Bullet: Paw & Palette
How dare an expansion take up the number 1 slot? Well, the answer is easy. Bullet remains one of my favourite games, especially the solo mode, and getting 8 new characters and bosses was a highlight of my board gaming year. Bullet: Paw focuses on animals, while Bullet: Palette puts the emphasis on heroines with an art pursuasion. I have indepth looks at both of those expansions, linked above, so if you want to read about those games specifically, please check out those reviews.
As for the new year, Bullet Cubed is coming to Gamefound with two more expansions, which means Level 99 Games is going to continue to get more of my money. Dang, I hate it when companies give me what I want!
And those are my top 2024 games. Soon I’ll have a couple more lists out, my top 10 best new to me games that aren’t from 2024, and my top 10 BGA games from last year. Let me know if you’ve played any of the games on this list, and what your favourite games of the last year are! See you again soon!
I’ve become the guy whose known as “The Boardgamer” amongst my friend groups. I kind of delight when people who are unaware that board games can even be a hobby come to visit, and they open the doors to reveal my board game collection and see them be just a little flabbergasted. “I didn’t even know there were this many board games!” “How do you remember all the rules?” “Which one is best?” are all common statements, once they get over their shock. I thought I would list out my favourite games to play with board game newbies.
I’ll have another list soon with the best card games to play with newbies too! For this list, I wanted to focus on games that feature cardboard prevalently.
Starting off the list is Sagrada by Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews, published by Floodgate Games. One of the key aspects to a game to introduce to a newbie is that it has to be beautiful. You eat with your eyes first after all, and Sagrada is eye-catching with it’s multitudes of colourful dice. It’s also easy to learn, understand, and offers a little bit of brain pain near the end as players who initially thought the game was so easy is confronted with the sum of their decisions. The ability to enjoy that brain pain is what separates gamers from non-gamers in my opinion. If someone can hold their head in their hand, then say “that was awesome, let’s do it again!”, then I know a new gamer has been born.
Wingspan, by Elizabeth Hargrave and published by Stonemaier Games is beloved by many for it’s easy of gameplay, beautiful artwork, and satisfying gameplay. It’s ostensibly an engine building game, but with only 4 actions to choose from, it’s easy to teach. It starts off a bit slowly for some, but there is a great progression that leaves players satisfied with what they’ve built, and it’s real easy on the eyes.
It’s no secret that I prefer Calico to Cascadia, but I know that I’m in the minority. And Calico can be a bit rough as a first experience. Cascadia on the other hand, is really satisfying to play. Designed by Randy Flynn and published by Flatout Games, Cascadia is a tile laying game where the tile you draft and the animal token you get to place are tied together. Each of the 5 animals have different scoring criteria, and the 5 biomes on the tiles score more if they’re grouped together. All these conflicting scoring opportunities create a satisfying experience!
Bruno Cathala makes great games, and Kingdomino is one of the best for introducing to new players. The math of terrain types multiplied by the number of crowns is simple, yet satisfying, and the tile draft of having the less valuable tiles also dictate who picks first in the next draft is a brilliant mechanism. Kingdomino is one of the games that brought my mom into the board game hobby, and for that, I’m thankful!
Stepping up from Kingdomino, I’d consider Barenpark,Takenoko, or Arboretum
7 Wonders
7 Wonders by Antoine Bauza and published by Repos was the first time I was scared away by a rulebook. the mere concept of drafting cards was too much for my poor little brain to handle at the time. But having someone teach me how to play is what really unlocked the love for board games that I have today. In 7 Wonders you’re drafting cards around the table, picking one to keep, and passing the rest on. At the end of 3 ages, you’ll stand in awe over the civilization you’ve built. 7 Wonders is a great game that scales up to 7 players, and yet retains a 30 minute play time. It’s become a classic for a reason, and if you’re looking to introduce your family to board games, you can’t go wrong with 7 Wonders.
Stepping up from 7 Wonders, I’d suggest Splendor, Century Spice Road, or Alhambra
And that’s the end of my list for now. Look forward to the card game list coming soon! And if you’re wondering where the games like Catan, and Ticket to Ride were, I’d have to tell you that I’m trying to bring people into the hobby, not scare them away. 😉
We all have these games, right? The games we love to play, but for some reason or another, just CANNOT seem to earn a victory? Today I’m presenting the 5 games that I have with the most plays, and 0 wins. Here we go!
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar – 4 plays
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini is an incredibly interesting game. For those who said “gesundheit” after I said Tzolk’in, here’s the introduction. Tzolk’in is a worker placement game that features a series of gears on the main board. On your turn, you can either place one or more workers on the lowest spots on each of the outer gears, or pick up some or all of your workers. At the start of each round, the centre gear turns one space, which in turn rotates all the other gears. As your workers ride their gears, the actions they are able to preform get more and more lucrative. Sounds easy, right?
So why have I never won Tzolk’in? Really, at only 4 plays, it’s not the most outrageous claim. I will say that for a long time I harboured resentment to Tzolk’in and refused to play it. Only recently did I give it another chance and found some enjoyment in the system.
Tzolk’in is a slow strategy game. You really need to be planning 4 or 5 turns ahead, and orchestrate your grand move. Pulling all of your workers off their spots at the same time, and ensuring you have enough resources to do all that you want to do. Turns out, I’m not a very good coordinator.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Tzolk’in. The problem is me. And that I’m dumb. That’s about it.
Yokohama – 6 plays
Yokohama by Hisashi Hayashi, is a gorgeous game about running your president and merchants around the pyramid shaped town, while trying to earn goods and trade them for points. You drop merchants off all over the board, then move your president to one of the spots, and collect stuff based on how many merchants you had there. You can erect trading stalls for extra points and merchant power in future actions. There’s a ton of great mechanics going on in Yokohama that makes it a cool and interesting game. My challenge, lies in the fact that Bigfoot has won 5 of the 6 games I’ve played. Sometimes games just speak to certain people and they run away with it every time.
Evolution – 6 plays
Evolution by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin has a similar problem to Yokohama. Bear has won every single game I’ve played. In Evolution, players are growing and developing species to become the fattest of them all. By playing trait cards from their hand, they can either expand their species population, size, or spawn a whole new species all together. Of course, they can also play trait cards to each species to make them unique, to adapt to the world around them.
I quite enjoy Evolution, there are so many unique situations that come up just based on all the traits and how they get placed onto each of the cards. I don’t know how Bear does it, but he seems to stymie me no matter what strategy I try. If I play defensively, he manages to build an amazing food generating engine. If I become a carnivore, his creatures suddenly develop pack herding, and/or climbing, and/or hard shells, and I starve. If I’m the one who’s gorging at the watering hole, with a ton of amazing defences, out comes the intelligent carnivore who pokes the perfect holes in my defences.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that every strategy has a counter, and Bear is superbly proficient at finding the holes in my hard shell armour.
Hardback – 11 plays
This one is a bit of a sore spot for me. My wife and I both love Paperback by designer Tim Fowers, so when Hardback hit crowdfunding, I didn’t even hesitate. Both Paperback and Hardback are word based deck building games, but Hardback seems more in line with other deck building games like Star Realms, where the cards have suits and can synergize with one another. A few other very important differences between the two, Hardback has a push your luck element where you can draw extra cards from your deck, but you HAVE to include those cards in your word, and instead of having wild cards that clog up your deck, you can turn any of your hand cards backward and use it as a wild. Subtle, brilliant changes that make for an excellent follow-up.
Hot damn, has my wife figured this game out. I don’t really know what I’m doing wrong, but she kicks my butt 6 ways to Sunday. I’ve asked her what her strategy is, and she just says “get lots of points, quickly!”. Thanks for the tip…
Through the Ages (both versions) – 37 Plays
This is the one that surprised me the most. Through the Ages and its follow up Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization by designer Vlaada Chvatilis a brilliant civilization building game. Run entirely by cards, players draft technologies, wonders, and leaders to try to make their civilization the most cultured. There’s a fine balance to strike between generating enough food and ore to build your civilization, and earn science to develop it further. There’s a lot of spinning plates to manage in Through the Ages, and if you neglect even a single one, you’ll wind up paying for it.
The vast majorities of these plays have been via Board Game Arena, and I’ve played with at least half a dozen players, but no matter who I’m competing with, I’m routinely at the bottom of the pile. I’ve played the Android app dozens of times against the computers, and I do fairly well there! I just can’t seem to crush *ahem* I mean best any human opponents. Probably something to do with empathy or some other aspect of my personality that makes me unfit to be a warmonger.
And those are the 5 games that I have the most plays in, with absolutely 0 wins. What are the games that you just can’t seem to grasp a victory in?
We’ve arrived at the cream of the crop. My top 10 games of all time. Serendipitously, this is also my 200th post on this blog! Nothing more to say, other than thanks for reading!
10 – Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
My favourite thing about Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization:
How deep and satisfying the puzzle is. I really cannot overstate how much I enjoy wrestling with the systems in Through the Ages. Now, it’s a game I’ve only played offline once, and it was tedious and took hours, but, I’ve played dozens of games online and on the app, and in those venues, the brilliance of this game shines through.
My favourite thing about Glen More II: Chronicles:
The tile roundel and being able to leap as far forward as you want allows for so much freedom in how you want to grow your village. Leaping ahead to get the best tile ensures you’ll get what you want but it allows your opponents to take everything that was left behind. Sometimes it’s worth it to claim that castle, but other times, slow and steady produces fistfuls of goods.
Yeah, that’s right. I have the OG Agricola where animals are cubs and resources are disks. My favourite thing about Agricola is easily the occupation and minor improvement cards that you get, and how drastically they impact every game. These cards are by far the reason why I prefer Agricola over Caverna.
The way they took the word building of Paperback and meshed it into a roguelike Slay the Spire-esque tabletop game is really fascinating. The mechanic of splaying your word left or right to get different icons, and choosing which card you want on top to trigger its ability, feels so satisfying. So many decisions to make on each turn, I am utterly in love with Paperback Adventures
The positive player interaction that I mentioned in Brass: Birmingham is here in full force. Weasling your way into the same province as the other players to benefit from their Prefect action. I love this peaceful economic game, and there are so many maps to explore, I never get tired to playing it.
It might be kinda silly, but I really love the fact that there are 3 ways to win. While achieving a science victory or military victory when playing against equally skilled players is incredibly rare, I love that they exist. And when one player makes a move towards one of the victory conditions, the other player is forced to respond. Commit too far and not achieve it, and you’ll have wasted a ton of precious actions, but still, the threat is palpable and exciting.
It’s fast, it’s variable, and it’s satisfying to build a functioning engine and goose it for fistfuls of points. So many other tableau building games wish they could achieve the level of satisfaction that Race for the Galaxy nails in just 30 minutes. Race for the Galaxy is my most played game on Board Game Arena, but that doesn’t mean I won’t play the physical version any chance I get!
The boss battle mode is just the perfect solo puzzle for me. It’s fast to set up, it’s wildly variable as each boss and each heroine have drastically different skill sets, and it takes less than 15 minutes to play. The puzzle is endlessly satisfying, and the push your luck element always has me on the edge of my seat. The expansions, Bullet⭐, Bullet🍊, Bullet 🐾, and Bullet🎨 all add more characters, and characters from any expansion can be mixed together, giving this excellent game almost endless variability.
No game has made me belly laugh more than Galaxy Trucker. From the moment I finish building my first ship until the final card in the game has been resolved, I have a stupid grin on my face, and when any ship gets cleved in two, my own included, I just feel giddy inside. A childlike sense of joy that comes from senseless and slapstick destruction makes me love Galaxy Trucker more than almost every other game I’ve ever played.
Everything. Okay, I know it’s a cop-out to say ‘everything’ to my favourite game of all time, but honestly, yeah, I love everything about Food Chain Magnate. The no luck strategy, the interaction that comes from all the players competing over the same customers, the way the economy seems dead for 5 rounds then BAM money starts flying all over the place. I love Food Chain Magnate with all my heart. My heart rate literally accelerates when I get to play it, and just thinking about playing it makes me salivate. I have a physical reaction to this game, and while my game group doesn’t share my level of enthusiasm, it does not deter my love for this masterpiece.
