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!
Disclaimer: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.
Back at it again with the third entry in the Kinfire Delve series, this time with Roland and Valora diving into Callos’ Lab.
Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab plays exactly like the previous two boxes, Vainglory’s Grotto and Scorn’s Stockade. It’s the same setup, the same core rules, but with two new heroes and a whole new well deck, it offers some fun and interesting twists on the system that I’ve come to know and love.
Firstly, Callous starts with 10 progress points on his card, and if these progress drop to 0 before you reach the bottom of the well, it’s an instant game over. Several of the challenge cards in the well will add and remove progress from Callous, as well as some of the exhaustion cards will siphon progress away.
I switched to using dice instead of the progress tokens
The two new characters, Roland and Valora are both wonderfully unique. Roland, can feed card draws into his partner by boosting her actions with specific symbols, as well as having a few key cards that scale up dramatically, depending on the contents of his discard. Valora on the other hand, excels at dropping extra progress on challenges you aren’t currently attempting, setting up for an easy success on her next turn.
Roland and Valora complimented each other beautifully. Their synergy made it fun to play as the two of them, feeling like both characters were helping each other, instead of the usual tank/DPS combo, where one player constantly has to set up the other, and the DPS player gets to have all the fun.
As before, the art direction by Katarzyna Redesiuk is still absolutely stellar. The back of every card has a full, gorgeous art piece on it, and the Callous’ Lab’s theme of scientific horror feels cohesive throughout the well deck, leading right into Callous himself, who is a tall, dark brute with gems and crystals growing out half of his head.
I love the flavour text on so many of the cards, and the life it breathes into the world. Snippets of context of Roland and Valora bantering, or warning each other. Callous egging his foes on, it’s masterfully done and makes me care about the theme.
As I said before, the gameplay of Kinfire Delve is just stellar. Every action is tactical, every decision needs to be weighed and the risks, calculated. You aren’t able to complete a challenge every single turn, so timing your blows to moments when you can suffer them are important, as is choosing when to let loose your cannon to smash through a particularly nasty scenario, even if it costs you your best cards.
Part of the joy in Kinfire Delve is the discovery, and each of the different boxes have plenty of content to discover. Because the goal of the game is to get to the bottom of the deck, and so many of the challenge rewards are just discard 1-5 cards, you only really see 25% of the deck in each play. Every time you go through, you’ll have a new combination of challenges that may or may not work together to ruin your run.
Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab succeeds in being an excellent standalone expansion for the rest of the series. The characters feel unique, the challenge of this well feels completely different from what you’ve had to face before, the exhaustion cards are distinct from previous sets, and I loved my experience with this box as well. Now the only thing left for me to do is to start mixing and matching characters to see which parings absolutely sing and which characters travel amongst sets the best.
Disclaimer: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.
Last time I talked about Kinfire Delve, I focused on the Scorn’s Stockade box, as I arbitrarily chose that box to be my introduction to the series. This time, I’m going back to the box that was released first, Vainglory’s Grotto, and taking this dive with the self-sacrificing Khor, and the Opportunist Asha.
Nothing about the core system has changed from box to box. This is still an endurance run down a deck of cards, tackling challenges one at a time until the well deck is exhausted, then completing the final gauntlet to overcome the boss, Vainglory. The gameplay still has players choosing cards from their hand matching the colour of the challenge, getting boosts from the other players, again, matching the colour of the challenge, and rolling dice in an effort to meet or exceed the difficulty of each challenge, and taking the rewards and punishments as you succeed and fail.
What is different is the theme of the game. Scorn’s Stockade was a body horror filled dungeon, with grotesque monstrosities in chains and bars. Obelisks, towers, and other prison themes permeated the art and flavour text of the cards, while Vainglory’s Grotto is more of a macabe symphony. The nightmare of someone who’s spent too much time at the opera. The art features unsettling beauty all around, like a slender lady in a red dress with a large blue rose obscuring most of her face, with only the top of a skull peeking out, and long daggers for fingers, or the marionette, which are a pair of ballerina legs disappearing into a cloud of ethereal roses. Beauty and horror mixed to create the feeling of high culture corrupted.
Vainglory’s Grotto two characters complimented each other quite well. Khor’s ability sucked up wounds, allowing him to take potshots at challenges and purposefully fail them, knowing he could absorb the punishment, then Asha’s ability added free progress to any challenge that already had progress on it. They worked well together, and the fact they synergized so well is likely part of the reason Vainglory’s Grotto feels much easier than Scorn’s Stockade. It helps that the Vainglory herself being nearly trivial if you manage to get to the bottom of the well with no cards attached to her. And even with cards attached, they’re more of a minor inconvenience, less of a show-stopping problem.
All that said, I can tell that Vainglory’s Grotto is the ‘first’ of the series. The card effects are a bit more muted and tame when compared directly to Scorn’s Stockade. Vainglory’s Grotto feels like a rock-solid, but safe first game, where Scorn’s Stockade saw designer Kevin Wilson having more fun with the system, seeing which ways the system could stretch and flex. It is less interesting, but only when directly comparing to its follow-up. That said, the entire time I was playing Vainglory’s Grotto, I couldn’t help but see the synergies that Asha and Khor would have with Naz and Feyn. I’m so excited to mix the character pairings to see how they play off each other and create a wholly different feeling game.
If you’re coming into Kinfire Delve as a new player, this is the box to start with. As an experienced player, It’s worth coming back to. The well cards themselves are less interesting than the successor, but the characters included here are unique and fun. I’m really looking forward to mixing them with the other heroes and seeing how they fare against the other challenges. Or use Vainglory as a testing ground while playing a new hero combination for the first time, so I have a safe space to see what makes them tick!
Disclosure: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.
I identify as a euro-gamer. Given the opportunity, my game nights generally include more food chain management (Food Chain Magnate), and wrestling with the economic intricacies of rats trying to build a rocket to get to the cheese moon (First Rat), and less of swords and dungeons and danger. Now and then a game breaks that tradition, such as One Deck Dungeon or Massive Darkness. Kinfire Delve becomes the latest game to press a blade into my hand and punt me down a well to deal with the overflowing threats that loom down below.
Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is a 1 – 2 player cooperative tactical card game where you take on the role of either Naz of the Windstrikes, the female orc tactician, or Feyn Longstride the Bard of Destiny. The goal of the game is to delve through a well of challenges to meet and contour the boss at the bottom, Scorn.
Naz, the Tactician
Each delve begins by randomly selecting one of three Scorn cards to place in the centre of the table, face down. Each Scorn card had a different challenge on the other side, so you won’t really know what you’re facing until you reach his lair. Surrounding the Scorn card are four cards from the well. These cards can either be an event or a challenge. On your turn, you select one of the cards to interact with. If you choose an event, do as the text reads. If you choose a challenge card (as most of the cards in the deck are challenges), you’ll play a card from your hand that matches the colour of the challenge as an action in an attempt to meet or surpass the difficulty. Each action can be boosted up to two times. If playing alone, you boost yourself, but if playing with others, then the boost needs to come from your comrades. Again, these boosts need to match the colour of the challenge. You’ll also need to roll the four dice, which may add extra progress to your action. If your final sum meets or exceeds the challenge rating of the challenge, you complete the challenge and gain the reward. If you fail, you place progress tokens on the card based on your action value, and suffer the penalty.
At the start of any turn, you may choose to exhaust yourself, which has you discard any cards in your hand, and redraw back up to the hand limit, as well as reveal an exhaustion card. The exhaustion cards have a few extra lose conditions, such as having 3 specific exhaustion cards up at the same time, or when a specific character plays a specific card.
The game continues to be played until either the players run out of health and lose, or exhaust the well deck and overcome Scorn in the final confrontation.
Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is a challenging game. I’ve only come close to beating Scorn a single time, with all my other plays see me fail about halfway down the well. I’ve tried solo with both characters, and a two player game, but I just haven’t been able to overcome this challenge.
I like how tactical the Kinfire Delvegameplay is. Each round, you’re presented with 4 challenges, and you need to pick one to tackle. Some of these challenges will have bold text that are in effect as long as that card is face up, such as “all other challenges are +2 difficulty”, or, “Everyone you roll a dark, lose one heart”. These become the obvious targets, but it’s also quite interesting when those effects start to overlap.
Another point of tactics are the cards in your hands. You must use a card of the matching colour to attempt a challenge, as well as a boost of the matching colour to boost. There have been times when I’ve been desperate to clear a blue challenge, but I have naught but red and green in my hand. Similarly, situations where I need to boost, as the penalty for failing a challenge feels drastic, but the only card I can boost with is a card that I really want to use for it’s effect on my next turn. Do I forfeit the effect until the next time I draw that card, or do I put my faith in the dice?
Heaven forbid I roll a blue
Capping every action in Kinfire Delve is a die roll. 4 dice that can add up to 4 extra progress to your challenge, should you roll well enough. But the randomness is also weighted in a way that rolling absolutely nothing helpful isn’t a terribly rare situation. It’s tempting to lean on the dice to conserve your cards so you take less exhaustion as you delve, but a terrible roll will spell disaster for you. I’ve failed more than one challenge because I needed a single progress point from the dice, only to be utterly denied.
The production on Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is fantastic. The cards are great quality and the art direction by Katarzyna Redesiuk is phenomenal. The art on the back of the player cards shines with gold that memorized me for longer than I want to admit. And while I’m not a fan of body horror imagery, the challenges depicted on the well cards did instill a level of grotesque fear that had me feeling like a terrible evil needed to be vanquished.
I received all 3 of the Kinfire Delve games at the same time, and I arbitrarily chose Scorn’s Stockade to be my first romp. On one hand, I’m interested and intrigued! I want to keep battling against this stockade until I make Scorn pay for his atrocities. I want to defeat all 3 variants of the boss before I move on. But at the same time, I’m excited to discover what the other characters feel like. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s in the next box and how well characters from other boxes would fare against this challenge. I do not know how I’m going to store all the content from all the boxes at the end, though, as I generally prefer to keep a game system contained to a single box.
All in all, Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is an excellent solo or cooperative game. At 30 to 45 minutes, it’s short enough that when I lost, I didn’t feel horribly demoralized, but it also gives a sense of accomplishment when I finally managed to confront the boss. I loved exploring the characters and am excited to explore the other boxes. I’ll be posting a review for each box individually, and then a final post looking at what a game feels like when all three sets get mixed and matched. Look forward to it!
