How many times have you almost been in a fight? How many times have you talked a big game only to realize, yeah, it’s probably smarter to sit back and let someone else take the hits? Scythe is all about that moment; the tension before the clash, the slow buildup where everyone is flexing just enough power to scare off rivals. Despite the war machines that are front and centre in players hands, Scythe isn’t just about throwing punches. It’s a game about power, efficiency, and a dance of anticipation where actual combat is rare, but impactful.
Scythe is a beautiful game. It was the first time I had ever seen a dual layered player board, something that just seems so obvious and prolific in today’s world. Each faction has four mechs plus a hero and animal companion, represented with unique sculpts. The world building and art by Jakub Rozalski draws on 1920 era industrial revolution motifs, with hulking behemoths in the background. It’s immediately arresting and sets up an atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re on the doorstep of a great conflict.
The gameplay hinges on a unique action-selection system. Each player gets a personal action board with four sections, each section links a pair of actions. On your turn, you choose a quadrant, pay any visible costs, and carry out the top action. Then, if you can, you also pay for the bottom action for an extra benefit. Turns are quick and efficient, hopping from one player to the next until someone manages to place their sixth achievement star, and immediately end the game.
Scythe‘s top row actions are deceptively straightforward. Move, produce, trade, and bolster. Moving lets you expand your influence across the map, dragging along your loyal workers to work the fields. Producing generates resources based on your where and how many workers you have on a location. Bolstering raises your strength or gives you power cards, and trading lets you spawn any two resources for a coin. But it’s the bottom row actions and being able to exploit the timing is where the strategic depth really lies. Each bottom action costs resources, and different player boards mix up which actions and benefits are linked together, making every faction’s strategy feel unique.
These bottom actions are what really get your engine running. Upgrading moves a cube from the top row to the bottom, making a main action better and making a bottom action cheaper. Enlisting gives you benefits when your neighbours take specific bottom row actions, deploying drops those hulking mechs onto the table, plus unlocking asymmetric abilities for all your plastic figures, and building creates structures that produce persistent benefits, not to mention may be worth points at the end of the game.
All of these actions build towards earning coins, which are the measure of victory in Scythe. Though you might not notice it at first, coins are critical. And everything you do in the game, from piles of resources you’ve amassed, to all the territory you control, converts into coins based on your popularity at the end fo the game. Placing six stars ends the game, but it’s not a strict “race.” players who are beloved by the populace will get far more coins from the same accomplishments, turning what may seem like a run away leader game into a narrowly close end result.
Scythe isn’t a typical war game. It’s more a cold war game, a palpable tension where strength is a resource, just as important as oil or food. Combat is rare in this game, and its real benefit is really limited by a star cap, so strong players aren’t encouraged to just beat down on weaker players indefinitely. When combat does finally occur, it’s a high-stakes gamble. Each player commits strength and power cards secretly, then both strengths are revealed simultaneously. The winner takes control of the contested hex, and gets to place a star, if they haven’t hit that cap. Both players lose all the strength and cards they committed to the fight, however. One time, I made the mistake of going all-in against Clare, only for him to one-up me with a power card, leaving his sum a single point above mine. With my strength utterly depleted, the other players descended on my mechs, pummelling me for easy stars, and leaving me destitute and licking my wounds at home base.
Scythe manages to build a sense of threat. As players expand and build themselves up on the power track, they’re hesitant to get into fights. Many games see a couple of players pushing toward the top of the strength track, throwing fights to conserve their power. But once they max it out, suddenly they have all this strength to burn.
As much as I’ve talked about warfare, winning Scythe isn’t about being the strongest. Victory comes from resource management and having efficient productions, being able to optimize every turn. Every action has a milestone to earn at its end, whether it’s enlisting, upgrading, or building structures and mechs. Like many action efficiency games, the more you play, the more you see the nuances. It was only on my third or fourth game that I really started to understand how to link actions into something that resembled efficiency. After every game, I’d find myself mulling over every decision and thinking about how I could have shaved off a few turns here, or accelerated my engine just a bit faster. It’s the kind of system that digs into your brain and stays there, whispering, “next time…”
Scythe is a special package. It offers a unique blend of cold war tension and engine building bliss. It’s not for everyone, as evidenced by half my game group ‘being done with it’ after 15 plays. But my other friend and I are 20 plays deep, and are looking to embark on some of the fan made campaigns soon. There is so much game to plumb here, from the faction’s starting positions to which action board pair best with each faction, to even just learning how to use each faction abilities themselves! Learning when to push forward and when to back off, there is a tonne of nuance here. Scythe is a masterpiece in my opinion, and a game that I would happily play, any time, anywhere.
Expeditions by Jamey Stegmaier, released in 2023 debuted as the sequel to 2016’s Scythe, which is fairly high on my favourite games of all time list at number 16. While visually very similar to Scythe, the gameplay in Expeditions is quite different, and I think it’s worth being explicit in saying right from the get-go in saying that Expeditions is a fully separate game. Jakub Rozalski returned to provide the distinct art and world building, which helps players familiar with Scythe to feel right at home from the moment they get their hands on the box, but nothing in the Expeditions box can be ported to Scythe, nor the other way around.
The box for Expeditions feels oversized for what’s inside. It is just a bit smaller than the original Scythe box, but it feels like it contains so much less. 5 large mechs, 20 location tiles, a huge stack of cards, 50 worker meeples, a bag of thick acrylic markers, 5 square player mats, and a home bast tile is what that box contains. The included plastic insert holds everything quite well, and should facilitate fast set-ups, when you’re not playing a public copy at the board game café and whoever played it last was not so careful in putting everything back in the right spots.
I’ve never been able to complain about Stonemaier Games component quality. Everything here feels about as deluxe as you want it, and they showcase thoughtfulness in small ways, like including little riser stickers for the player boards to make it much easier to tuck cards under your player board. The home board that holds the glory track has the end game scoring listed right next to it, making it really easy to remember what is worth points come the end of the game.
The play area itself is expansive, which I think is quite good for a game named Expeditions. After all, what kind of adventure would it be if you only travelled 6 metres from where you started? The main play area is
Playing Expeditions is pretty straightforward. There are 3 actions available to you. Move, Play, and Gather. Moving is simple, move your mech from hex to hex, up to your movement value. If you enter an unexplored tile in the centre or north side of the map, your movement ends, but you get to reveal the tile. Play just has you play a card from your hand. Each card gives you guile or strength, and if you place a worker on the card at the time of playing it, you get to activate its special ability. Gathering just lets you take the action of the tile your mech is currently sitting on.
The tiles are laid out in such a way that there’s space for 5 cards between the hexagons. Those cards can be quests, items, or meteorites, all of which can be claimed to be used for a unique ability, and then upgraded, melded, or solved to offer some more permanent effects. The stack of cards in the game is impressively large, offering a wide variety of effects that could show up.
Each turn on the game has you move a cube on your map, covering one of the three actions, enabling you to preform the other two. This was a great mechanic, and figuring out your own tempo on how you want to move and play or play and gather was a good puzzle to try and squeeze some efficiencies out of. The cards you play and the workers you spend on them sit on the table in front of you until you take a rest action. This takes the cube off your board, pulls all your workers back to your mat, and lets you play all your cards again. And, on your next turn, you get to take all 3 actions, which can be very powerful and is a nice consolation prize, making that lost rest turn a little less painful.
The general flow and card play of Expeditions can be quite satisfying. If you happen to pick up cards that compliment each other well, you can find yourself specializing in specific ways that lead you to claiming an achievement long before anyone else can. In one game we played, I just happened to pick up 4 items, and uncover the upgrade action. I very quickly was able to boast to claim the 8 cards achievement, then immediately turned around and started upgrading those item cards to claim my second achievement before anyone else claimed a single one. The downside is that once you hit the achievement threshold for something, continuing to pursue that objective is meaningless. You’ll need to pivot and figure out a different way to get the rest of your stars onto the board.
For a game to be called Expeditions, I expect a fairly heavy focus to be on the discoverability inside the game. I found it surprisingly disappointing that all the tiles are in use in every game. The discovery isn’t about finding new tiles and which abilities are available to you during this game, it’s just a matter of figuring out where the tile you want is hiding. In addition to this, if you happen to find the tile you needed, great luck! Another player is probably crawling across the north part of the map, frustrated that they’ve just collected their 8th map token that have no value beyond collecting 5 for an achievement. Exploring isn’t rewarded, which is awful in an action efficiency game.
The art on the tiles and cards all tell a story. Much like the encounter cards in Scythe, the art is a wonderful vignette featuring a grim 1920’s aesthetic, with the shadows of hulking mechanical behemoths in the background. A tale can easily be told by these cards, but at the same time, the theme can very quickly melt away. Guile and power turn into brain and strength, which are just values you accrue, vanquishing is merely a transaction, solving is just being on the right spot at the right time. Nothing you do in the game feels thematic, it’s purely mechanical.
The interaction between players is merely being in each other’s way. Someone can camp on a tile that you need for a few turns, and someone might sweep the card you were pining for, but that’s really the extent of it. You can’t take anything from your opponent, you can’t bump them off their tile, they exist to just be in your way. A score to compare yours against at the end of the game.
The gripes I have with Expeditions mostly stems from mis-matched expectations. I went in with all the thoughts and feelings of Scythe, but found a game that feels more like Century Spice Road wearing Scythe’s clothing. I really wonder if calling it the sequel to Scythe was the right thing to do, considering just how different the games really are. The Scythe world was so unique and gripping that it does make sense to set more games in that universe, but I really feel that Expeditions suffers from sitting in the overbearing shadow of its predecessor.
Almost to the end of the list now! These games are ones that I would play anytime, anywhere. These would always get a resounding “YES” from me, if ever asked to play
It’s one of the most satisfying dexterity games I’ve ever played. There’s a high skill ceiling, but also great potential for laugh out loud funny moments. From bouncing off two of your opponents disks to land in the centre, to fully missing the most basic of shots.
The translucent colourful dice are simply beautiful, and when beautiful components are paired with a simple yet satisfying puzzle, you get a perfect introductory game. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve convinced to start playing board games regularly when I see them doing a Sudoku, and I give them a nudge into the hobby with Sagrada.
The positive player interaction. One player builds a coal or iron mine, another player consumes it to build something else, both players benefit. That on top of some really interesting dynamics make Brass: Birmingham a top tier game.
Oh man, it’s a shorter list to say what I don’t love about Scythe. To pick one thing that really draws me into this game, I love that it’s a ‘cold-war’ game. The threat of combat is so much more present than the actual combat. I’ve had games where I was the loser of the only combat encounter of the whole game, but I ended up as the overall winner. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it’s endlessly satisfying.
My favourite Stefan Feld game by far. I love how simple each turn is, just use your two dice, but how efficently you use your actions determines how well you do in the game. There’s a push to fill your small provinces early to get the bonus points for doing so, but those large provinces offer huge rewards, if you can complete them. One day, I want to complete the whole board. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s what I want to do.
Oh gosh, Calico is a puzzle game with teeth, and I love it for it. Every hex you place feels impactful, and deciding to put a purple dots tile in one spot means you’re choosing to not pursue three other objectives with that spot. I have my head in my hands the entire time I’m playing Calico, which doesn’t sound like a good thing, but I love the burn this game gives my brain
Leaving a trail of workers behind and then doubling back to pick them up again is a genius mechanic. You want to be efficient with your actions, and spending time going back to a space you don’t need is painful, but running out of workers means you can’t do anything. I also love how fast Istanbul is to play, with most games taking around ~25 actions, you can fly through games, assuming no one is stalling at the market for too long.
The auction/bidding mechanic that makes money flow around the table, and the game constantly pouring more and more money into the economy letting the bids grow bigger and more ludicrous makes for exciting rounds. I love pricing one tile just a bit too high and watching my opponents agonize over spending that much cash on a single tile. I don’t even care if I win, I just want my friends to be uncomfortable for a bit!
Saturday is our first full day of gaming. The schedule for Saturday was:
8am Breakfast
9am – 1pm Block 1 (Bigfoot)
Lunch
2pm – 6pm Block 2 (Otter)
6pm – 8pm Dinner/Campfire break
8pm+ Open Gaming
Gaia Project
Bigfoot had the first block of time where had full control over what game we would play, free from veto, but not free from my derisive sneers. He could pick any game in the world, and he chose one of his absolute favourite games, Gaia Project, which I’ve written about in my Bigfoot’s Trash Taste post.
Gaia Project, designed by Jens Drögemüller and Helge Ostertag is the spiritual successor to Terra Mystica (another of Bigfoot’s favourite games). In Gaia Project, players control an asymmetric faction and must terraform neighbouring planets into their home environment before developing colonies and improving their infrastructure. This is a big game with a lot going on. Players are tasked with balancing several resources as they expand into the far reaches of space.
I can see why Gaia Project (and it’s fantasy partner Terra Mystica) are so beloved. The decisions offered here are wide and varied. With 14 different factions all playing differently, there is depth to be plumbed. This is a tough game that rewards appropriate planning and capitalizing on being a turn ahead of your opponents. There’s no randomness to throw you off your game, everything is deterministic, which I generally enjoy. I still think it’s still a bit too much for me, after we finished our 5 hours game I had a splitting headache, but there’s no way I can say that this game is objectively bad. For my money, I’d say Gaia Project is better than Terra Mystica, even if only because it jettisons the need for priests. One less resource to juggle means one less bottleneck to force yourself through.
Maybe Bigfoot’s taste isn’t as trash as I remember… but don’t tell him that.
7 Wonders: Armada
Our game of Gaia Project went longer than Bigfoot’s allotted time, but wanting something light to buffer between big games, Otter chose to play 7 Wonders with the Armada expansion
7 Wonders is a classic game that serves as the introduction to modern board games for many players, and amongst our group of board game enthusiasts, 7 Wonders remains a tried and true favourite. So of course we’re going to change it by adding expansions!
If you haven’t played 7 Wonders before, it’s a civilization building card drafting game, where players simultaneously choose cards from a hand, reveal their choices, then pass the hand of cards to the next player. At the end of the game, the player who has accrued the most points, or culture, has won the game.
7 Wonders: Armada adds a whole extra board to the right of your normal player board. When you build a non-resource card, you can spend additional resources to progress a ship of the same colour up its track. These tracks will offer some naval combat power, inflict taxes upon everyone at the table, a flurry of victory points, or, the opportunity to settle an island, which can offer some unique enhancements to your civilization.
This expansion also adds a few cards into each of the ages, meaning you’ll play 7 cards per age instead of the usual 6. These extra cards offer more ways to interact with the players who are not your neighbour, like, granting you the ability to buy a resource from someone 2 seats away, or, choosing someone to combat with, meaning at the end of the round you’ll evaluate 3 combats instead of the usual 2.
At the end of each age, in addition to the usual combat with your neighbors, there is now a naval combat that all players participate in. Whoever has the strongest naval military of all the players earns points, while the weakest loses points.
These may seem like small changes, but they actually address a lot of the problems I have with 7 Wonders. I like being able to interact with more players at the table, I like using leftover resources, and I like the little boosts the island cards offer (even if I ignored them to my own demise). I’ve seen this expansion on sale for as low as $8. At that price, I cannot recommend this one enough.
Scythe
Otter had pre-planned on having our friend Clare arrive in the afternoon. Clare is a sometimes guest to our gaming group, but one of our great experiences was playing through the entirety of Scythe: Rise of Fenris together. I actually really enjoyed that campaign, as the ending felt climatic. Depending on your performance throughout the campaign, you got some significant benefits, but the final battle was for all the marbles. I enjoyed the feeling of “anyone can still win this”, and the final game was TENSE. It probably helps that I won that final game, but who can really say? 😉
For those who haven’t played before, Scythe by Jamey Stegmier is an action selection game where the threat of combat is often more powerful than actual combat. Set in an alternate history version of 1920 Europa. Workers farm the land with scythes, while heavily armoured mechs loom on the horizon. Each player takes control of an asymmetric faction that offers various abilites and powers when the mechs have been built, and, each player’s action selection board is different from each other. On your turn, you’ll place your pawn on one of the four actions on your action selection board. You’ll take the top action, which can be Move, Bolster, Trade, or produce, and if you have the necessary resources, can take the bottom action as well, which can be: deploy, upgrade, build, or enlist. Players keep taking turns building up their forces until one player manages to play their 6th achievement star. The end game scores are tallied, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Scythe is high on my top games of all time list, and probably my favourite game that includes direct attacking. I generally enjoy the arc of the gameplay. Everything starts slow, your factions move at a glacial pace, and everyone is locked into their own island, cut off from the world by a river. Only by building the mech that grants Riverwalk can you adventure forth and spread your influence.
In this play of Scythe, we included The Wind Gambit expansion. This module adds in impressive airships with 2 abilities that can be swapped in and out each round, as well as an alternate ending condition. Following the advice of the rulebook, all the airships had the same power, units moving out of the airships space get +1 movement, and players don’t lose popularity when forcing workers to retreat. I think this combination of cards would have been more interesting had we gotten to the end game where stealing resources was possible. The new game end card said, “When the first player places a star in a category that has no stars, they earn $5. The game ends when someone either places their 6th star, or has $40”. Otter just so happened to get a great combo going where he could do the top and bottom sides of two actions back to back (Bolster, build mechs, produce, upgrade, then repeat). This got him 4 stars very quickly, but left his popularity in the toilet. The 4 stars, and the coins he earned from the bottom row actions, left him within striking distance of ending the game. A few turns later he earned his 40th dollar and ended the game just after the first combat and each other player had only 1 star on the board.
I think if the game had continued on, his engine would have spluttered out. Sure, he had a commanding lead, but I do think it would have made for an interesting end-game. Going forward, I wouldn’t play with the alternate ending conditions. I also didn’t feel like the airships added too much, other than general aesthetic.
Bigfoot already wasn’t a fan of Scythe, and this play didn’t change his mind. It was anticlimactic and didn’t have a chance to get interesting or exciting. This play may have also turned Bear off the game as well. Otter and I are still enthusiastic though, we’ll probably try to play through the fan-made campaign soon with a different group of people, but at the time of this writing, I have no idea when we’ll squeeze that in!
So Clover
So Clover was the game of choice while waiting for pizza to be delivered. If you haven’t played it before, So Clover, designed by François Romain is a cooperative word association game. Each player is given a plastic clover and 4 cards. Each of these cards slots into one of the four quadrants of your clover. Each card will have a word along each edge, but you only need to consider the words that are facing the outside edge of your clover. Your goal, is to write a single world on each edge of the clover that will allow the others at the table to re-assemble your clover once the cards are shuffled. Sometimes you’ll have words that just work well together, like Skin and Suitcase (clothes was the clue given in this case). Other times, a stroke of genius will have you connect two seemingly impossible words, like Quilt and Sausage (Homemade won the day here). And sometimes, you’ll get absolutely stuck on a word, unable to shake the meaning of a word, like Charge and Cow. I couldn’t think of ANYTHING other than electric milk, so I eventually just went with Amp and hoped the other three sides of the clover would lead them to the correct answer.
It did not.
It has got to be difficult coming out with a new word association game when there are such giants already published. Games like Codenames, Just one, and Decrypto are so fun and clever, I can’t imagine trying to compete against them. So Clover has done it, we had an absolute blast playing this, and I’ll be picking up my own copy for the next time I visit my family back in the Canadian prairies.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Ted Alspach tasks players with building an extravagant castle with no plan or forethought. Players take turns taking the role of the ‘Master Builder’, where they arrange the available rooms into different prices, then the other players take turns buying the rooms, giving their cash to the master builder, and finally, the master builder paying the bank for whichever tile they take.
Players need to place their tiles into their castle, matching entrances, scoring points based on adjacency, and scoring bonuses if they finish the room.
It’s mildly annoying that you’ll never finish your castle. The game ends after a certain number of tiles have been bought (dictated by the number of cards in the deck), and when the game ends, a final scoring happens. The player with the most points is the winner and players are left reflecting on their architectural failings. Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time getting the bowling alley to fit next to the flower bed, you wouldn’t have come in last place.
I really enjoy Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Years ago, I played this along side another Ted Alspach design, Suburbia. At that time, I proudly proclaimed that Suburbia was the better game and I cast Castles of Mad King Ludwig aside. Today though, I feel my tastes shifting. I like that the room market is controlled by the players, even if sometimes the Master Builder makes arbitrary decisions that shunts the room you desperately needed into the $15,000 slot.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
One of the highlights of Cabin-Con 2021 was The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, designed by Thomas Sing and published by KOSMOS. It was a light and easy cooperative trick taking game that was exactly what our brains needed after a brutal day of playing Oath. We blazed through a couple dozen games that weekend, and this year, we returned to our interplanetary adventure, hungry for more.
The downside, we embarked on this game at 11pm, after a VERY full day of big games. Brains were tired and SOME players (me) were incapable of counting cards. Foolish misplays were abundant, and we ended up failing against the same chapter 8 times in a row.
If you haven’t played The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, the game begins by dealing out the entire deck to all players. cards vary from 1 to 9 in four different suits, and 4 more cards, numbered 1 to 4 in black serve as trump cards. The story blurb is read out, and goals are distributed, based on the requirements of the specified mission. In general, you’re trying to make certain players win certain cards. The rub is, communication is extremely limited. You may not talk to your comrades, and you can only show one of your cards, which you place a token on to indicate that the card is the highest, lowest, or only card of that suit in your hand. If the card doesn’t match one of those three descriptors, then you may not show it.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is a great little game to play with friends. There’s very little at stake, losing just means reshuffling and trying again. Sometimes, multiple tries in a row.
And that’s all we played on day 2 of Cabin-Con 2022. Come back soon for Day 3!
We’ve arrived at my favourite 10 games of all time (as of March 2020). I did not anticipate how long this series would go when I started it over a year ago.
It’s been nice reflecting on my favorite games, verbalizing why I like each one so much. A few of the games descriptions were enough to peak my wife’s interest, which always makes me happy.
I’ve played a lot if games over the last two years, and while this list will have changed quite a bit, I know that these top 10 are firm in their spots. It would take something pretty special to come a dislodge any one of these from the pantheon of my top 10 games of all time.
10 – Glen More II: Chronicles
Glen More by Matthias Cramer was one of the few games that I lamented ‘missing’ out on when I first got into the board game hobby. Our local board game cafe had a copy and I loved it. I really enjoy how the scoring is all based on how well you’re doing in certain aspects compared to the other players, and I love the push and pull of selecting tiles to add to your tableau. Leaping ahead to grab the best tiles is tempting, but then players who take their time have a much better chance of growing a strong whiskey engine. Alas, by the time I became a Board Gamer™ Glen More was out of print
Glen More II: Chronicles takes everything that I enjoyed about the original game, adds some gorgeous art, and throws in a boat load of discovery. While the new clan board is not my favourite addition, I love that there are 8 expansion modules in the box that can be mix and matched for a unique game every time we play.
Glen More II is the game we play on Robbie Burns night after feasting on Haggis and drinking scotch. It plays well at 2 and 4, and is a very satisfying experience every time it hits my table. Because Glen More II is the game we play during a special event, it ends up holding a very special place in my heart.
9 – Scythe
If you’ve been paying attention to my list, you’ll notice that there aren’t very many games that offer direct player combat. Scythe by Jamey Stegmaier is one of the few board games where conflict is the main focus that I really enjoy.
I’ve often said that Scythe is a ‘cold war game’, meaning that the threat of combat is often more important than the combat itself. Military posturing and threats go a long way in this game about farmers and mechs.
While my friends enthuasim for Scythe is infectious, what really cemented Scythe for me was playing through the Rise of Fenris campaign. Playing Scythe over and over again each week and finding new statagies and discovering the emergent storytelling from the gameplay brought me so much joy. I look forward to every game I play of Scythe, and I’ll never forget one game where I managed to win the whole game, while losing every single combat levied against me!
8 – Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
It feels very odd to have a game that I adore so much and have so high on top games of all time list that I’ve never played in person.
That’s right, I’ve never actually played a physical copy of Vlaada Chvátil’s civilization building card game Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization. What I have done is played dozens of games on Board Game Arena, and even more on the excellently designed Android app.
While my win rate is absolutely abysmal (3 victories in 25 games), I enjoy every play. Each game has a feeling of progression and momentum that other games can only hope to emulate. Oddly enough there isn’t a whole lot of discovery in Through the Ages as you’ll see every single card in each game, but there is so much depth to mine. Given enough thought and smarts you absolutely can master this system and prove your superiority over all who dare oppose you.
7 – Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy by Thomas Lehmann is another Board Game Arena obsession that I’ve almost never played on the table (2 physical plays!). The BGA implementation is slick, fast, and with a very healthy player base it takes no time to find an opponent and games almost never last longer than 10 minutes.
Race for the Galaxy is a tableau building card game, laden with iconography not for the faint of heart. Of course, once you crack the code and understand the logic of the icons, you can ascertain what each card does at a glace, but this can Race for the Galaxy can be intimating for new players.
I find RtfG best at 2 players as it’s quick, exciting, and strategic. If you have a gaming partner who is near the same skill level and enthusaiam as you are, I’d highly recommend picking up Race for the Galaxy and playing a half dozen times in quick succession.
6 – Concordia
Concordia by Mac Gerdts is probably best known for it’s somewhat controversial (read, bad) cover art. While later editions updated the art (although some people still detest it), the game inside has always been a wonder to behold. Concordia was one of the first games to introduce positive player interactions to me. Whenever a player activates a province to produce resources, they activate every building within that province, which could land your opponents with a sudden windfall of goods.
I also really enjoy the action selection mechanic, where you have hand of cards, each one offering you a different action, and as you play the cards to take their action they just sit beside your player board, waiting for their chance to strike again. One of the cards in your hand will be to retreive all your cards, which is almost skipping a turn just to get access to all of your actions again!
We most often play Concordia with the Salsa expansion which includes player powers, one time benefit tiles, and the special wild ‘salt’ resource. There are many maps available as well for those who crave a little variety in their Mediterranean resource trading games.
5 – Istanbul
Istanbul by Rüdiger Dorn is my favourite game that I don’t own. And it’s a bit of a tragedy too because it’s a fast, light, excellent game where players are racing to collect 5 gems from various merchants around the turkish bazaar. Each player begins with their merchant disc and a stack of assistants. As you move around the board you deposit assistants and take actions. Should you return to that location again you can collect your assistant and take the action again. The catch is if you don’t have an assistant to drop off or pick up at a location, you don’t get to take the action!
It always feels odd when the goal of the game is to stop playing as soon as possible, but in the case of Istanbul, the potential for an incredibly short game exists. Filling your cart with 5 rubies first can be done in as little as 18 actions (depending on the tile layout and how much your opponents are getting in your way). I find Istanbul charming and incredibly replayable. I love shuffling the location cards, dealing them out at random, then try to find the most efficient route to claiming those precious rubies.
Two expansions exist for Istanbul, but I don’t find them necessary. Expanding the number of action spaces can make this game tedious to play. The only reason I haven’t priortised getting a copy of Istanbul into my collection is because two of my close friends already own it, and the last thing I want is for our collections to start overlapping. If I ever moved away from this game group however, this is would be one of my first purchases!
4 – Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King
The eagle eyed observer may have noticed some glaring omissions. I don’t know why, but I seem to love when Alexander Pfister and Andreas Pelikan work together. I really enjoyed Broom Service and I love Isle of Skye. There’s not many bidding games on my list, because I keep coming back to this one! I adore the variety in scoring objectives (especially after I got the expansions that included even more), I love how simple the base gameplay is, and I even enjoy cursing my friends when they pitch the perfect tile back into the bag.
7 Wonders Duel by Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala is the game that my wife and I played together the most. we bought it early in our board game career, when we were coming off the high of discovering that board games could actually be fun and exciting! We had played the 2 player version of 7 Wonders and found it fell flat as we really didn’t enjoy managing a dummy player.
7 Wonders Duel was one of the first games I chose to review, mostly because I love it so much. It’s small enough that it can fit on a coffee table and deep enough that it can withstand dozens of repeated plays. There’s an android app available, and a wealth of players on BoardGameArena if you’re seeking a variety of opponents.
2 – Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker by Vlaada Chvatil is the game that divides my group. Myself and Bigfoot absolutely adore the chaos and insanity that Galaxy Trucker revels in. Otter is somewhat luke-warm on it and Bear detests this game. He’s proclaimed that he’d rather take up knitting than play Galaxy Trucker.
In Galaxy Trucker players are racing to build the best ship they can, full of guns, storage containers, engines, batteries, and crew cabins. Once constructed, ships are run through a gauntlet of asteroids, space pirates, epidemics, and wide open space. The players to manage to survive and deliver their goods earn credits and at the end of the game anyone with at least one credit is a winner! Of course, some players will win more than others!
The chaos and randomness will either draw players in, or chase them away. Personally, I find myself laughing uproariously when a single stray asteroid cleaves your ship in half, but for some, that pain is too much to bear. There is also a run-away leader problem where often the players who are struggling get punished for struggling. Even with those criticism in mind, Galaxy Trucker lands in the number 2 slot of my top 100 games of all time.
1 – Food Chain Magnate
Food Chain Magnate is the game that excites me the most. Almost the anthesis of Galaxy Trucker in that there is nearly no randomness. I’ve talked in depth about Food Chain Magnate recently, but it’s one that generates the most excitement when sitting down to play.
Every game of Food Chain Magnate feels unique. I can pursue the same strategy over and over and have wildly different results every time. Because Food Chain Magnate is highly interactive and so much of doing well in this game relies on anticipating what your opponents are planning and capitalizing on their actions, simply following the same pattern in every game will quickly lead your opponents to knowing exactly where your weaknesses lie.
I could literally talk about Food Chain Magnate for hours, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just thank you for reading to the end of my top 100 games of all time as of March 2020! It’s been quite a journey actually sitting down and writing my impressions of each of these games. Some I haven’t actually played for a couple years but writing about them renewed my desire to get them back to the table! I hope you had as much fun as I did!
Soon I’ll make a post about some of the more radical changes that have happened in my top 100 list, like how Bullet<3 debuted at number 7!
