Board Game Hot Takes recently did a poll discussing if the unthinkable happened, and you lost your entire board game collection, how many of your games would you re-acquire. I think every game in my top 30 would be strong candidates for re-acquisition!
It’s an easy, relaxing polyomino tile placement game. What sets Bärenpark above Patchwork in my mind is the fact that someone actually get to complete their park. Beyond that, BEARS!
Dexterity games hold a special place in my heart, as I really love the tension they deliver. I love seeing the highways rise up amongst the grey spires, and they duck and weave over and under each other. Then in an instant, it all comes crashing down.
The shared tunnel system creates a fascinating leapfrog effect. You’ll strike out in one direction, nabbing some juicy gems, but that gives your opponents a springboard to leap even further, collecting even better resources, which in turn sets you up on your turn.
Panda camel. Just kidding. I love the push and pull as you and your opponent pick at the shared market, swapping cards from your hand and trying to decide if you want to sell early to get the most valuable token, or if you should hoard cards to net that amazing 5 card bonus tile.
I like building up my deck in Paperback with a wide variety of powers, and the natural growth of the amount of money you’re able to generate. At the start of the game, earning 5 cents feels like an achievement. Then by the end of the game, dropping a casual 21 cent hand feels super satisfying.
A classic from 2006 about picking up cards and building mail routes. There’s enough short term benefits to distract you from your long term goals to create some very interesting decisions. Honestly, it’s hard to poinpoint what exactly I love about Thurn and Taxis, as it’s just a very fun and satisfying game to play. It’s light, it’s easy, I feel engaged. It’s lovely, and it’s moving up in my rankings!
The engine building of trying to get the right vikings to earn money and points is quite satisfying. You want all the vikings possible, but obviously you can’t take them all, plus, they might be paired with an island tile that you really can’t use! Also, the way the market dynamically adjusts based on the vikings that are getting purchased is unique and awesome. It’s a great game over-all.
The push-your-luck aspect of putting down the handshakes and just HOPING that you’ll pick up more cards of that colour is amazing. I love getting 3 handshakes down, knowing that every card I pull could be the one that launches me into the stratosphere of points. More often, my hubris leaves me in a hole that I can’t dig out of, but I have fun none-the-less.
I like that throughout the race you’re shedding cards from your deck, so in the final stretch you might be running right out of cards. It feels thematic in that sometimes at the end of the race you just don’t have the juice to make it over the finish line.
The cutthroat nature of the scoring, being able to deny others the ability to score their best lines just by holding one card in your hand is amazing. That said, every card you hold on to, to deny your opponent is one card that isn’t helping further your own goals. Every time I have to discard in Arboretum, I’m in anguish, and all the cards are ones I want to keep. And I really love that feeling!
Last year, my game group and I booked off an extra long weekend and congregated at a beautiful ocean side cabin. We then proceeded to shut ourselves inside for the entire weekend and gorged ourselves on board games.
The impetus of Cabin-Con 2021 was we felt like we had a backlog of big games that we couldn’t reasonably play during our weekly Wednesday gaming sessions. Add into that the Legacy games we want to play, but don’t prioritize over new experiences or old favourites, we figured setting aside a whole weekend would give us ample opportunity to tackle this backlog
Last year the big events were playing through 4 games of Clank! Legacy in a row, unboxing, learning and playing an Anachrony Infinity Pledge (which took us from 8pm to 2am), and playing through Oath for the first time (a brutal 5 hour experience).
While the inspiration of Cabin-Con was to play these bigger games, we all agreed that the most fun part of the con for us were the periods where we just played several small games in a row. No big commitments, games we already knew how to play and enjoyed. One evening saw us play The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Vikings, QE, Azul, and Project L, and we had an absolute blast.
Armed this this knowledge, this year we’ve decided to parcel out 4x 4 hour chunks on Saturday and Sunday and assign each chunk to a person. That person gets to pick all the games we’ll play during that period of time, then, in the after dinner portion of the evening, we’d just have easy, breezy open gaming, driven by group consensus.
Day 1 of Cabin-con had the group congregate at my house in the early afternoon, as we didn’t even get access to the cabin until 4pm. Now, you might ask yourself, why rent a cabin for the weekend if we all live close to each other? The answer is really that doing so gets all of us away from our daily responsibilities and allows us to really commit our time to the weekend. In theory we could all just gather at one of our houses but none of us have enough spare beds, and the separation from our daily lives is important for rest and relaxation.
Pandemic: The Cure
I’ve gone on and on about the Pandemic games. I reviewed vanilla Pandemicback in May when I actually caught COVID, and I reviewed Pandemic: Fall of Rome just a few weeks ago when I fell under the weather. Pandemic: the Cure is the dice game version of the Pandemic formula. This one is more abstracted than other entries in the series. Each of the (livable) continents is represented by a disc with a transparent dice pip. Die of various colours are rolled and placed onto each of the discs. These d6 don’t have the regular distribution of pips on them, the Red dice have two 6 sides, two 1 sides, and 1 4 side. The yellow, blue, and black die all have various die faces that make it more likely for them to appear on different continents.
The flow of the game is to have players travel to various continents, treat the diseases, which moves them from the continent disc into the centre ring, and then either take samples (which tie up your dice until you discover a cure), or, treat them from that centre ring back into the general supply.
Each character in Pandemic: The Cure have their own dice pools to roll as well. My character, the Contingency Planner allowed me to move dice from a continent onto the CDC board, which is how you pay for the event cards in the game. To win, you need to collect samples of the diseases, then after your turn, roll the disease samples you’ve collected and meet or exceed 13. Once a disease is cured, it’s much easier to treat, and players win the game once all 4 diseases are cured.
I haven’t played Pandemic: The Cure for years. My partner and I used to play Pandemic all the time, and this was a great way to vary the gameplay before the Survivor series had been announced. This version of the game is lighter, easier, and more prone to luck. Like every good game of Pandemic, you’ll be cruising along treating diseases, thinking all is fine in the world then WHAM all of a sudden cascading outbreaks are ravaging Asia, and Blue illness that has been slowly building on Sourth America is spilling over into the North America, and the situation is dire.
The big wrinkle in the game is that you can re-roll your action dice as many times as you want, until you use them. However, one of the die faces has a bio-hazard symbol which will advance the infection rate, and when you cross specific thresholds on the infection rate track, you’ll re-roll all the diseases that happen to be in the treatment area, and add in more cubes. things can spiral out of control incredibly quickly.
Speaking of quickly, this game is also extremely quick. With some luck you can have your first cure within a few turns. In the same breath, pulling 4 blue cubes and rolling all 6’s can cause cascading failures that will haunt your dreams.
I should return to Pandemic: The Cure soon for a deeper look. I enjoyed the experience quite a bit.
Barenpark
After the world succumbed to various virus outbreaks, we decided that instead of being health care professionals, we’d do better building our own Bear Parks. Barenpark is a polyomino tile placement game by Phil Walker-Harding. In Barenpark, you place tiles on your board, cover icons that give you more tiles, and proceed until someone has filled in their entire board. There are various scoring objectives, like having 3 or more pandas in your park, that decrease in value as people achieve it.
I love Barenpark, but something has changed. I’m suddenly very bad at this game. I don’t know what I’ve done, but as the end of the game approaches, I seem to have 8 1 or 2 square holes all over my park that I then need to laboriously take tiles and cover up. I think the short term goals overtake my long-term strategy just a bit too easily.
Arboretum
After Barenpark we packed up and migrated from my house to our Cabin. We unloaded, claimed beds, then promptly started playing games again, starting with Arboretum by Dan Cassar. I reviewed over a year ago, so you can check out that post if you want my full thoughts on the game. In this specific game I was allowed to collect every Maple tree, so I just, put them in a line! That single species scored me 17 points, which alone beat everyone else at the table.
It’s fun playing Arboretum and seeing the player to your left discard a card that you want desperately. They say “Don’t let him get this one!” But every other player prioritizes achieving their own goals over preventing other players from getting what they need. It’s a delicate balance, ensuring you’re doing whats right for your board, but not allowing other players to just run away with the game.
Sagrada
Sagrada was one of the first reviews I ever published on this site, and it still holds up to this day. In Sagrada players take turns rolling and placing die into their window grids, taking care to adhere to the die placement restrictions printed on their player mat, and following the sudoku-esque rules of not having of the same number or colour adjacent to one another.
In this game, I managed to complete my board, and I had a decent score from my secret objective, but I failed at getting the same colours in each of the rows. I ended up last with a score of 50 points.
Beyond the Sun
After dinner and a campfire, we launched into our first big game of the con. Beyond the Sun by Dennis K. Chan is a worker placement space civilization game in which the players are collectively discovering technologies and progressing the lengths of human knowledge during the spacefaring future. That may sound like a co-op game, but you’d be deceived! Beyond the Sun uses a a tech-tree to unlock worker placement actions, forcing players to research the prerequisite technologies before gaining access to the later abilities.
In addition to researching techs, there’s a sideboard where players are launching ships in an effort to control and colonize various planets. The challenge becomes holding onto control of the planet for a whole turn you can then take the colonization action! Our game saw a LOT of action on this board, each of the colonies were hotly contested. I tried my best to assert my dominance, but failed to research any of the final level technologies. The game ended with me narrowly missing the victory, 64 points to Bigfoot’s 66.
I really enjoyed Beyond the Sun. The variability is quite good with a wide variety of techs available, and the tech tree will build out different each time. This was only my second physical play, but it’s growing on me fast. I suspect it’ll debut in my top 100 the next time I redo that list.
Cartographers
I once called this “The best game I never played”, on the account that I played it a bunch on digital platforms. I’ve finally put my hands on a physical copy of the game, and continued to have a blast. I’m a little sad that my artistic skills leave quite a bit to be desired, but the gameplay is still fast, fun, and satisfying.
I actually like having the monsters in the deck, that little bit of engagement with my neighbours is just enough to make this exciting, and throwing a wrench in my plans makes for a more interesting game in my opinion. I do want to seek out the expansions to this game, as I find myself wanting more monsters, more goals, and more shapes to play with. I don’t want to change the formula, I just want more of it!
Karuba
To end the day, we played Karuba by Rudiger Dorn. Karuba starts by giving everyone the exact same puzzle and the same tools to solve the puzzle. The winner will be the player who can best utilize their tools to solve the puzzle.
One player pulls a tile randomly and announces it to the table. The other players find the same tile, and all players place the tiles on the board, trying to create paths to lead their adventureres to their designated temples, or discard the tile to move their adventurers along the paths they’ve created. The first player to get an adventurer to their temple earns 5 points, and everyone else who manages to do so after that gets diminishing returns. The game ends when someone has gotten all 4 of their adventurers into their temples, or, the stack of tiles runs out.
This is another game that we played a bunch during our COVID isolations. We played on Tabletop Simulator for a little over a year, and the scripted mod was so fast and easy to play that it became our go-to selection.
We played Karuba twice, I won the first game, and Bigfoot claimed victory over the second one. I tried to ignore a temple and instead placed a bunch of the gem paths along a single line, but I wasn’t able to collect enough points to win the second game. Sometimes I like trying out strategies that seem counter-intuitive to the spirit of the game, just to see if they’ll work!
Artist: Philippe Guérin, Chris Quilliams, Beth Sobel, Waldo Ramirez
Intro
In this wonderful hobby, lots of games exist with lots of different themes. Do you want to build a bear park? We’ve got a game for that. Feel like managing the fickle demands of fast food customers? Boy do I have an experience for you! We got several games about quilts, and a somewhat unhealthy obsession about sheep. You’d think that after experiencing great games in a wide variety of themes I wouldn’t be so quick to write off a game just because it’s artistic direction does little to incite wonder in my heart.
In Arboretum you are trying to build the prettiest tree garden. But don’t let the beautiful artwork get your guard down. In this Arboretum only those with the strongest botanical skills will survive!
How to Play
Before the game begins the deck is constructed according to the number of players. With 2 players the deck is 48 cards in 6 different suits, 3 players is 64 cards of 8 suits, and 4 players has all 10 species of trees totaling 80 cards. The mathematically inclined among you may have noticed that each suit has 8 cards, valued from 1 to 8.
The game begins by dealing each player 7 cards. You begin your turn by picking up two cards either from the face down deck, or from one of the discard piles (each player has their own discard pile). You then must play a card, and discard a card. When you play a card into your arboretum, it must be placed adjacent to an existing card, in any orthogonal direction. When you discard, it must be to your own discard pile. The next player can then proceed with their turn.
The game ends when the last card is drawn from the face down deck. That player finishes their turn like normal, then all players compete for the right to score. One by one you go through all the suits in the game and reveal how many of that suit you have remaining in your hand. Whoever has the highest sum of cards has earned the right to score the trees in their arboretum.
The player who earned the right to score counts up the number of cards that exist in ascending order, beginning and ending with the suit that is being scored. Numbers can be skipped, but the trees must always be placed in ascending order. If the start or end card is a 1 or and an 8 respectively, you earn additional points. If you have four or more cards in the row and they’re all of the same suit you’re scoring, then each card in that row is worth two points each.
Once all types of trees have been scored, the player with the highest score wins. If two players tie, whoever has the most tree types present in their arboretum is the winner. If the players are still tied, both players must plant a tree. Whichever tree is tallest after five years is the victor.
Review
Arboretum is a deception. The calm nature theme and gorgeous art does a lot to impart a sense of ease and calm before the game starts. There’s a couple of nuances that are often left uninternalized when explaining how the game works for the first time. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen eyes glaze over when I begin to describe how the scoring works. I’ve always emphasize that you have to earn the right to score, but more than once we’ve played a whole game only to get to the end and a new player didn’t realize you needed to hold cards back in their hand in order to score it, meaning their perfect row of 7 Blue Firs went unscored.
The mechanics of Arboretum pulls your heart in multiple directions. Cards in your hand are worth nothing if you don’t have any cards of the same suit on the table. Cards on the table earn you nothing if you don’t have enough left in your hand at the end of the day. You have a limited hand-size, but you also need to hoard cards of your chosen suit so you can not only build an arboretum worth scoring, but also have cards left in your hand that will win you the right to score. You’ll often be tempted to dump cards that you don’t need, but you know that every card you throw away has the potential to be incredibly valuable to the other players.
The need to keep cards in your hand is directly at odds with earning points from your cards on the table. While it might seem obvious that you could just keep an 8 in your hand and be confident that that you’ll win the right to score, Dan Cassar saw you coming from a mile away; if someone has the 1 value of that species in their hand, it turns the value of your 8 card to 0. This twist encourages you to keep your eyes on the cards that have been played. If the one is already on the table, suddenly the 8 is more powerful. On the other hand, if the 8 has been played, holding the 1 in your hand means almost nothing. And when hand space is a valuable resource, you don’t want useless cards clogging up your hand.
My copy of Arbortetum is the 2018 deluxe edition published by Renegade. This edition boasts stunning art by Beth Sobel and impressive holo-foil cards. The way the light reflects off the foil faces feels at odds with therest of the aesthetic; the gaudy reflections feel audacious and unnecessary. Speaking of unnecessary, this edition comes in a wooden box at least three times too large. I pulled the deck, rulebook, scorepad, and velvet bag out of the strangely nice smelling box and tossed all the components into a plastic photo box. With a smaller footprint, comes portability. Arboretum is now a top pick when I’m packing games for travel.
One of the best features of this game is the unique scoring mechanism. It creates a tense push-your-luck element that makes the decision to place and discard every card significantly more stressful. In my experience one of the suits ends up being the universal junk tree that everyone is happed to jettison from their hand, and in doing so, the remaining suits are much more sought after and hotly contested. The final reveal of cards left in your hand at the end of the game is a tense chapter. While you usually have one suit for which you have counted cards in such a way that leaves little doubt you will be able to score, the other suits are more of a mystery. It is always exciting when someone has just the right cards to deny the other player a big scoring line (unless, of course, it was you that was the one denied). This chapter of the game elicits cheers and groans from everyone at the table as each person is invested in the outcome of each scoring.
Arboretum’s end game always approaches much faster than I expect. On average, the number of cards in my tableau normally sits around 11, not leaving much room for error, especially if I diversified and now need to have 3 or 4 different suits in my hand. On the other hand specializing in just one or two types of trees is only a solid strategy if you want to be in second place. Fortune favours the bold, after all.
Because Arboretum is just deck of cards, I pick this game to travel with me almost every time I embark on some kind of adventure. The complexity of the scoring mechanics causes me to hesitate when it comes to teaching new players. I have absolutely no issue teaching this to someone who professes themselves to be a gamer, but Arboretum is not a game that I would push on people whos gaming experience lies entirely in Rummy and Spider Solitaire.
Arboretum is the kind of game that gets lodged into your mind and keeps you thinking about it for hours after the deck has been packed away. You are left wrestling with the idea that if you had just done this one thing, or discarded that other card, then everything would have been different. I love when a game sticks with me after I’ve left the table, and in my experience most people are itching for a second go after they have had time to stew about their first experience.
