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 know a lot of people use the PubMeeple ranking engine to generate their top X lists, but I’ve gotten to the point in my gaming career where that tool is almost unusable for me. Comparing 500+ games takes thousands of matchups and takes literal hours to complete.
What I do to make these lists is go through BGG and sort by all the games I’ve played, then give them a ranking from 1 – 10. I then export the list, sort the games by their ranking, and then take each respective number and figure out the order within that segment of games. What really shocked me was learning that I have some games that I’ve rated an 8 that didn’t make it onto the top 100 list. There are so many games out there that even great games don’t crack my top 100!
But my feelings are always changing, so maybe if they see another play, they’ll work their way into the list the next time I do this.
I love that the components for the game is just a generic deck of cards, and yet the way you interact with the game is engaging and exciting. Making the royalty cards bosses to be overcome, and every suit a special ability is some special, out of the box thinking that I really appreciate.
The resource market brings me so much joy. The ebb and flow of fuel that dictates which plants can produce energy is easily my favourite thing about Power Grid. I’ve only played this twice, and haven’t played it in over 5 years, but it obviously left quite the impression on me to remain on my top 100 list even through years of not playing it.
How dynamic the gameplay is with different players. When I played a 2 player game with Otter, we were absolutely rolling in resources. When I played a 5 player game, most rounds each player only gets 1 action, so you really have to make them count. I really enjoy that Le Havre not only works at low and high player counts, but that the experience is so different.
87 – Inis
My favourite thing about Inis:
The quality of decisions grow as the group gets more familiar with the cards. In the first game, the draft is somewhat important, but after everyone has a game under their belt, every card you take feels monumental. Handing your opponent a hand of cards that you know could cripple you is delicious.
86 – Underwater Cities
My favourite thing about Underwater Cities:
The interplay between the cards in your hand and the actions on the board. It’s tight, but not too tight. Gently nudging you from doing EXACTLY what you want to do, and doing what might be the most efficient thing, feels great. I love having to decide between the action on the board I want to do, but not having a card, or, having a card that I really want to play, but don’t have an action on the board that benefits me.
The whole game revolves around the central mechanic. There’s a grid of building tiles that require you to a worker with a number along the edge of the board to claim the tile that many spaces in from the edge, and place it into a matching space on your player board, with points being awarded for certain things being adjacent to other buildings. There are two modes of play, one gives everyone a set of numbers for them to use, the other pools all the numbers together into a common supply. I literally cannot tell which mode I prefer, both are so amazing to play, and this central mechanic is genius.
The double-sided cards mixed with the mechanic of not being able to re-arrange your cards does allow the space for some clever play. I keep expecting to get bored of playing Scout, but it’s been a joy every time I play.
I like arguing with my friends over which words could possibly connect with the clues they’ve given us and agonizing over what clues to give. How do you connect the words Quilt and Sausage? Homemade! I love word games like Just One and Codenames, as you’ll see further on down this list, and I feel like So Clover sits right up with them, which is an impressive feat. There’s a lot of word-based puzzle games out there, and breaking into the top spots is an accomplishment.
The amount of details in the map is astounding. Over the course of all the missions you’ll be pouring over the map for hours, and while it starts to feel familiar, you’re constantly discovering new people and new situations that you must have missed the last four times you were investigating a certain area. Discovery is something I’m always craving, and MicroMacro: Crime City delivers on that front.
The way the barbarians march gives an amazing sense of impending dread. Unlike base Pandemic, where new hot-spots can pop out anywhere, Fall of Rome has a great progression to it. Tribes you ignore slowly follow their path towards Rome, giving the game a great thematic feel.
It’s no secret that I love discovery. I crave new experiences, and will choose to explore a new game over a game that I’ve played before and know I like 9 times out of 10. For some, this character trait is annoying, but I am who I am. in 2022 I played 105 different games 235 different times, and of those 105 different games, 41 were new to me. I’ve compiled the games that were new to me in 2022 that I enjoyed the most
Now, these games may not have been released in 2022, but I played them for the first time this year. While it’s tempting to be seduced by the new hotness every week, it’s a reminder that sometimes you should look back a bit and see what gems you missed.
#1 – Bullet⭐ (2022)
This one is a bit of a cheat in that it’s kind of an expansion to my favourite game from 2021, Bullet❤️ . And by expansion, I mean that it’s the full game again, just with 8 different heroines and bosses that can be mixed and matched from the original game.
If you’ve somehow missed my myriad of posts about Bullet❤️ and ⭐, here’s a quick rundown. Bullet⭐ is a push your luck pattern matching game for 1 – 4 players. Players pull bullets out of their bags, and assess the colour and number. The bullet slots into the column of the matching colour, and moves down the number of open spots. If the bullet hits the bottom row, BANG, you lose a life. Lose all your life, and game over!
I’ve exclusively played Bullet⭐ solo, which has become my favourite way to play. I love the symmetry of the bosses and characters, and I love mixing and matching, discovering which bosses are a cakewalk against which characters, and I love the push your luck gameplay. The multiplayer mode is also quite fun, if you’re a fan of real time games. It’s fast and exciting, but also, isolating. When the game is on, you are 100% focused on your own board, and all the interaction you get is flinging bullets back and forth between your opponents. It’s a fine experience, but the solo boss battle mode is where this game really gets to shine.
#2 – 6 Nimmt (1994)
6 Nimmt by Wolfgang Kramer is brilliance in a box. A mere 104 cards manages to contain a world of tension and excitement. 6 Nimmt pits players against 4 growing rows of cards. Everyone plays a card simultaneously, then they’re slotted into a row in ascending order, placed next to the card they’re closest to. If someone’s card would be the 6th card in that row, they instead take all those cards into their play area as their score. The catch of the game is, score is bad. The first player to hit 66 points triggers the end game, and once the game is over, the player with the least points is the winner.
6 Nimmt achieves what many much larger and more expensive games aspire to, generate tension and excitement and audible groans as the gameplay unfolds. I love the double-think as you desperately try to figure out what your opponents will be doing. If you’re successful, and you sneak in the 5th card in a row just ahead of someone else, it’s immensely satisfying. If you’re wrong and end up taking a terrible handful of cards, the jeers from your opponents do nothing to ease the sting of failure.
Luckily, 6 Nimmt only lasts for ~15 minutes. Once it’s done, you sweep the table and go again, no harm, no foul. If you like card games, especially simple to learn and easy to break out at the local pub, than 6 Nimmt is an excellent choice.
#3 – Viticulture World (2022)
One of the best things about having friends who are just as enthusiastic about board games as you are, is that when you buy them a game as a gift, they’ll generally play that game with you. It may be a little selfish, but it makes it really easy to buy gifts for your friends when that gift will facilitate a couple nights of hanging out.
Viticulture World designed by Mihir Shah and Francesco Testini is the cooperative expansion to Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone’s 2013 game, Viticulture. In Viticulture World, each player is still managing their own farm, and each player must reach 20 victory points by the end of the game, or the players lose the scenario. In addition to those personal goals, there’s another track that all players can contribute to that also needs to be pushed to its limit to claim victory.
I’ve complained about Viticulture‘s luck before, and how getting the right cards at the start of the game can launch you into a powerful position, and while that still holds true in this expansion, a player doing well benefits everyone. The goal isn’t to try to catch up to the leader despite the luck, but to take the situation the game throws at you and form a winning strategy out of it.
If I’m being honest, I don’t really want to go back to base Viticulture after playing Viticulture World. Now, I don’t always LOVE cooperative games, but this one is pretty special. There are great moments of collaboration, but players still get ownership over what they can contribute to the team.
If you want to read more, I did write a full review of Viticulture World, which you can read here
#4 – So Clover (2021)
As a seasoned gamer, I can often dismiss party games as not for me, as the vast majority of the games that I play are in serious settings. Four grown men silently sitting around a table with furrowed brows, pushing cubes for 2 hours until a final exclamation of emotions at the very end, is my idea of a good time. So when these word association party games show up, I’m perpetually tempting to crush them under the very weight of a superior game, such as Scythe.
I’m only kidding. I’m actually super impressed with how great a game can be with so little. So Clover has a few decks of cards with 4 words, one on each side of the card, and a handful of plastic clovers, so you can align the cards easily. Your goal is to connect the two words on the outside of each wall. What I like about So Clover over other great games like Codenames or Just One is that everyone is involved for a lot of the time. In Codenames, players sit and wait while the codemaster hems and haws over the clue they’re going to give. In Just One, the active player sits with their eyes closed as all the players write their words and compare notes. In So Clover, all players prepare a clover at the same time, then, players go through the clovers one by one, keeping everyone involved and engaged.
I had a blast playing So Cloverat Cabin-Con this year. The next time I go to visit my family, I’m going to pick up a copy of this excellent game, as I know it’ll be a hit anywhere I pull it out.
#5 – Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun
I’ve had a bit of a complicated relationship with the T-series of games (Tzolk’in, Teotihuacan, Trismegistus, Tiletum, etc). Initially, I didn’t like Tzolk’in at all. Then, I disliked Teotihuacan even more. Upon revisiting Tzolk’in, I found myself enjoying it much more than I remember. Then, I got my hands on Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun and found myself really enjoying the game.
If you haven’t played it before, Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun is a big and complex game, but the crux of the mechanics is an obelisk sits in the board and casts a shadow over some of the action spaces. Die are rolled and placed into each of the 6 action spaces, and the colour of the die dictates if that die is pure, tainted, or forbidden. When taking an action, the pip value and colour may affect the action, and the purity dictates where that die goes onto your scales of karmic balance. There’s a lot to consider in every action of the game, and the player who can balance all these aspects the best, will emerge the winner.
Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun has an incredible table presence. A plastic spire rises off the table, and chunky dice lie around it, displaying all the options available to you. There is much more to do than you could ever hope to achieve in a single game. I only got a single play of Tekhenu in this year, but it’s one I’m keen to return to.
#6 – War Chest (2018)
Once upon a time in cold, bitter Winnipeg, I had a roommate. This fellow and I were both avid gamers, but our time together was prior to my discovery of board games. We’d play Gears of War 3 and Borderlands 2 and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game into the wee hours of the morning. We also played a fair amount of Chess, Magic: The Gathering: and Yu-Gi-Oh together. Xel was the perfect opponent, we were both equally enthusiastic, evenly matched, and both grew in our strategies, developing a meta unique to us and figuring out how to counter that meta.
It’s my great regret that I left Xel behind in Manitoba before getting into the world of board games. He installed a deep love for two player direct conflict games in my heart that I still hold to this day, despite not having a gaming partner with the same proclivities over nearly a decade now.
War Chest by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson is the kind of game that Xel and I would have dove deep into. It’s an abstract game with a hex map. Each player has a different set of units available to them, each with their own unique abilities. Your units are represented by chips, and you take actions by pulling chips from a bag, and spending them. Some actions can be spent by using any chip, while others require chips matching the unit you want to use the action with. The goal of the game isn’t necessarily to wipe out your enemy forces, but to control certain points. While attacking and removing your enemies can be very helpful, I’ve won games without attacking a single time and while sustaining heavy losses.
As soon as I get a gaming partner who enjoys these two player direct conflict games, and we start playing games more regularily, I’ll be picking up my own copy of War Chest and any expansions that are available. I really enjoyed my plays of War Chest and can’t wait to explore it further.
#7 – Canvas (2021)
Canvas, by Jeff Chin and Andrew Nerger was a bit of a surprise to me. My wife and I went down to our local board game cafe and plucked this game off the shelf simply because it looked pretty. I vaugely knew that it featured plastic transparent cards. What we discovered was a pretty puzzle game about creating works of art and trying to satisfy the conditions of score cards to earn points.
Now, the actual artwork on the cards is unnecessary to the gameplay, the only thing that really matters is the icons along the bottom. Players take turns drafting plastic cards into their hands that feature different icons. They can then stack 3 plastic cards and slot them into a plastic sleve to create a masterpiece and submit it for scoring. Once all players have submitted 3 artworks, the player with the most points is the winner!
I know I just said that the artwork was unnecessary, and from a gameplay perspective, it is. But it gives the game lots of charm and a lovely theme, even if the composition of some of the artworks feels like it leaves a bit to be desired.
#8 – Pandemic: Rising Tide (2017)
I would never call myself a Pandemic expert, but i’m also no slouch. Playing on the normal difficulty on the app, I have about a 70% win rate, and I haven’t lost a game of Pandemic: Fall of Rome yet. So maybe I had a little bit of hubris when I pulled out Pandemic: Rising Tide by Jeroen Doumen and Matt Leacock. I strode in, expecting another easy Pandemic experience but with a different coat of thematic paint. What happened was I got lulled into a false sense of security thanks to plentiful dykes, then when they broke and water flooded all across the map and I started to panic then promptly ran out of water cubes and was left a broken shell of a person.
I’m being dramatic, but, this version of Pandemic thumped me good, and I’ve been thirsting to go back to it. If you haven’t played it before, Pandemic: Rising Tide is set in the industrial age in the Netherlands, tasking players with building modern hydraulic structures that will prevent the country from being swallowed by the ocean. The feature that sets this version apart from other Pandemics, is that there is only one colour of cube to battle against, and water flows across the map. If a section of map has 3 cubes on it, all adjacent sections will get 2 cubes, then regions adjacent to those regions will get 1 cube each. Luckily, dykes are in place to prevent the water from freely flowing across regions. Unfortunately, dykes break and the torrents of water are relentless.
It’s great, it’s hard, and it’s really hard to pronounce any of the dutch regions. I hope to play more soon so I can figure out where it sits in my personal rating of Pandemic games!
#9 – SCOUT (2019)
I think… I like card games. It’s not something that I logically find myself particularly drawn to. When I’m pursuing the shelves at my FLGS, my eyes are naturally pulled to the big impressive boxes. More and more I find myself charmed by little games that can do so much with just cards!
Enter Scout by Kei Kanjino and published by Oink Games. In Scout, players are dealt a hand of double sided cards, and are explicitly told, under no circumstances are they allowed to rearrange the cards in their hand (I absolutely love this mechanic). On their turn, they can either ‘Show’ or ‘Scout’, and once per round you can ‘Show and Scout’. If you show, you need to take cards from your hand and place them on the table, either a set of cards (cards of the same value), or a run of cards (cards with sequential ascending or descending value). If there is already a show on the table, your showing must be stronger than that’s already there (meaning more cards, or, if tied, a higher value). If you can’t, or don’t want to show, you can ‘Scout’. This allows you to take one of the cards from the current show and add it to your hand. Finally, once per round you can ‘Scout and Show’, where you do both actions on a single turn
The round ends when someone runs out of cards, or, when someone plays a show, and all subsequent players scout. Points are tallied and the player at the end of the game with the most points is the winner
Scout is a little delight. It’s so frustrating looking at your hand and seeing how close some of the cards are, and it’s immensely satisfying when you’re able to scout a card and place it in the perfect spot in your hand. The box for Scout is literally the size of the cards, making it easy to travel with, and the gameplay is fast and easy to teach. I think Scout is the kind of game that could live in my travel bag forever, and would be a hit at every pub I pull it out at.
#10 – Ultimate Railroads (2021)
Much like Bullet⭐, Ultimate Railroads is a bit of a cheat. This version by Helmut Ohley and Leonhard Orgler is the ‘big box’ edition with all the expansions for 2013’s Russian Railroads. If you haven’t played Russian Railraods before, it’s a worker placement game in which players are trying to build a rail line to earn the most points. Unlike most other train games, in Russian Railroads there is no central map or pick up and deliver aspect. Instead you have tracks of varying grade, and as you build the weakest track you unlock the ability to build better tracks over the ones you’ve already build. As the grade of track goes up, so does the amount of victory points you earn.
One of my favourite aspects of Russian Railroads is how the amount of points you earn each turn pretty much doubles throughout the game. On the first turn, earning 5 points is reasonable. Then in turn two, you’ll earn another 10 points, then 20, and by the end of the game you’ll be earning 135 points and riding that locomotive to victory!
The only module of Ultimate Railroads we played with this year was German Railroads, which introduces coal (a module I wouldn’t bother with again), and a modular player board, letting you choose how the rail lines develop and what kinds of benefits you’ll earn from those tracks. I quite enjoyed that playerboard, even if I came in dead last by a wide margin.
And those have been the top 10 new to me games I played in 2022! What were some of your breakout hits? Any games you’re looking forward to playing next year?
Honourable mentions: The Red Cathedral, Acquire, Unsettled
Dishonourable mentions: Maglev Metro, In the Hall of the Mountain King, The Pillars of the Earth, Azul: Queen’s Garden
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!
