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.
Fun fact, the first 50 games on this list, I’ve rated every one as an 8/10. There’s actually another 20 games outside the top 100 that I also consider an 8/10, but for the purposes of creating the list, I had to cut games that numerically are identical, but I know in my heart I enjoy more. I generally don’t like faffing about with half ratings or decimal places, but, I might have to just to help me delineate my feelings on these games a little bit more. The bottom 50 of this list is in a constant state of flux, and depending on my feelings during the day that I make this list, a game could easily shift up and down. Beyond this point, though, my feelings on each of the games becomes a lot more concrete.
My Favourite thing about Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition
It’s a game that probably shouldn’t work. A trick taking game where you can just declare the suits? Nope. Should be broken. And yet it isn’t! For a while I was thinking the game was a bit too random, a bit too dependent on the draw of the cards, then I played with a friend who just proceeded to smack me around for several games in a row. So, there’s mastery to be found here. I don’t have it, but I know it’s there!
My favourite thing about The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine:
Much like Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition, my initial impressions were that this is a game that shouldn’t work. Cooperative trick taking isn’t going to be any fun, rather, it’s an exercise in sorting cards. Turns out, I’m dumb, and The Crew is awesome. It’s become a great way to end a long gaming session, and as you progress in the missions, the requirements get more and more intense. There’s tension where you play a card, then stare at the next player, willing them to play the right card, then an eruption of either elation, or fury depending on the result.
The full stack economy on display here is amazing. All players are simultaneously building the means of production, producing goods, acquiring goods, selling goods, shipping goods and buying goods. The semi-closed economy is fantastic, and greed leads to recessions.
The sheer number of people who have played the crap out of Dutch Blitz means I almost always have a challenging opponent to square off against. I love real time games, and speed-sorting cards is some wholesome fun that I can pull out at any opportunity.
The “Crush Otter” strategy. Let me explain, When playing Las Vegas, trying to control anything and having a strategy is a great way to having a frustrating game. So my plan for every game of Las Vegas I play, is to just beat Otter. I actually end up doing pretty well most of the time!
The worker placement mechanism of claiming three of the outside cards that also give you two of the inside cards is just brilliant. There’s so much delicious decision-making in picking which of the inside cards you want versus which of the outside cards you need, all while bumping up against your opponent and making sure they don’t snag that free gold coin card too easily. As far as 2 player games go, this one is simply brilliant
54 – The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
My favourite thing about The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
I’m not going to lie here, it’s the theme. I love the Lord of the Rings and any game that lets me take on the role of Aaragon and hew orcs is going to be a hit in my books. LotR: JiME is a fantastic adventure game in its own right, and the app managing the deployment of enemies and health trackers is a very welcome addition.
The combination auction/worker placement is so fun. Using a single worker to pin down a tile and ensuring the auction for that tile is the colour that you want it to be is really smart. I’m absolutely awful at Keyflower, otherwise I’m sure this would be much higher on my list.
The ease of play. Once everyone is set up the same, one player draws tiles randomly, and everyone else follows suit. I love the mechanism where everyone gets the exact same thing. The same situation, the same resources/ decision, but the things we choose to prioritize are what sets each of us apart and determines the winners and losers.
Just One is a brilliant little game where everyone had to give one clue, trying to lead the current guesser to a single word. If two people give the same clue, they’re cancelled out. I love this, as it encourages players to not use the most obvious clue, but sometimes the clues end up being a little too obscure, which is hilarious when the guesser opens there eyes, reads the clues and exclaims “WHAT?”. My dirty secret is that I’ve never owned a copy of Just One. I’ve always just used sheets of paper and the deck of Codename cards to play. I’ve introduced Just One at almost every family gathering and it’s always been a hit.
As of this month, my blog will be 2 years old, so I think it’s time I start looking back and revisiting some of the games I talked about in the beginning. As time goes on, our gaming tastes change and I feel value in looking back at what I was keen on, and how much staying power a game actually has. It’s one thing to say ‘this game is eminently repayable’, but how does it actually fare when the rubber hits the road? When put to the test against all the other games, and it no longer has that ‘new game shine’, does it come back? Did my interest wane? Here’s where we find out.
Now, not all of these games came out in 2021, but they were new to me in 2021. So, here we go!
#10 – Regicide
Designers: Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale
What made it special: An engaging cooperative game that uses a standard deck of 52 cards.
Thoughts over 2022:Regicide came to Board Game Arena, and I played it about a half dozen times during my lunch breaks. It’s amazing how a game using a generic deck of cards can evoke strong feelings of tension and peril. I love the ebb and flow of cards as you crush through the royal family, sending each one to their grave.
Regidice is also on Board Game Arena, which is an interesting take on the Regicide system. I found Regidice to be a bit less interesting, but still fun none-the-less. Both games require that you maintain a sense of momentum. If you stumble and falter, you’ll be overwhelmed quickly.
#9 – Project L
Designers: Michal Mikeš, Jan Soukal, and Adam Spanel
What made it special: Polyomino puzzles plus Splendor-like engine building puzzle, with candy-like pieces
Thoughts over 2022: I played this once with my mom in May, and we both really enjoyed it. It’s a great little game with great production quality. The little pieces are super colourful, and satisfying to slot into the double layered tiles.
One thing to note, I had hoped to pick up the expansion(s) for Project L, but following the crowdfunding campaign of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, publisher Boardcubator announced they were shutting down. I don’t know what that means for the future of Project L, or the availability for expansions, but I suppose we’ll see!
What made it special: Cooperative trick taking with limited communication
Thoughts over 2022: During 2021’s Black Friday sale, I picked up the follow-up The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, and I found I enjoyed that version quite a bit when playing with a group that doesn’t gather together regularly. The Crew: The Search for Planet Nine is a game that I look forward to playing with my regular group as we plod our way through the quest book, but not one that I would necessarily pull out for a casual game night.
#7 – Cascadia
Designers: Randy Flynn
What made it special: A lovely tile placement, pattern building, hex grid, drafting game.
Thoughts over 2022: I haven’t revisited Cascadia since September 2021. I have played Calico a few times (which my mom said was her favourite game that she played when she came to visit) and I think I still prefer Calico, although it seems I’m in the minority.
Cascadia has received a lot of acclaim over 2022, including winning the prestigious Spiel des Jahres! Congratulations to Randy Smith and Flatout Games!
#6 – Beyond the Sun
Designers: Dennis K. Chan
What made it special: It’s a big, interesting tech tree! That changes every game!! That you get to control!!!
Thoughts over 2022: Beyond the Sun is another game that I keep playing on Board Game Arena, which is really exciting. I’m impressed with the variability of each game, and playing it again in person during Cabin-con was one of my highlights of the weekend!
I’m eagerly awaiting an expansion to Beyond the Sun to ratchet up the asymmetry and give us more excuses to return to this wonderful game!
#5 – MicroMacro: Crime City
Designers:Johannes Sich
What made it special: It’s Where’s Waldo, but you can follow people’s actions backwards and forwards through time! Everything is happening all at once!
Thoughts over 2022: My partner and I have played through MicroMacro: Crime City – Full House, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s no way around it, it’s exactly the same, just, more of what you’ve already seen. I just got game #3 in the series, MicroMacro: Crime City – All In. I do enjoy this system, and I continue to be invested, if only to see what the whole city will look like with all 4 maps stitched together.
What made it special: A tile placement, pattern building, hex grid, drafting game. BUT WITH CATS!
Thoughts over 2022: Calico remains one of my favourite pattern building tile laying games. It’s simple to play, but has sharp teeth that can make you regret the very first tile you place in your double layered player board. I like how bright and colourful Calico is, and the variety in the patterns you need to build and the objectives that are slotted right into your board.
I played Azul: Queen’s Garden in 2022, and halfway through reading the rulebook I looked up at my friends and said “This is kinda like Calico!”. That framing helped learn Azul, but as soon as we were done, I think we all agreed that we would much rather play Calico.
What made it special: One of the few legacy games we’ve actually completed.
Thoughts over 2022: The first few chapters of My City filled me with excitement and wonder. Just what would we be discovering in each of the envelopes. As the chapters wore on, mechanics came and went, the forest got cut back to make room for more tiles, and we delved too greedily and too deep.
In the end, My City was a great game, but the campaign ended on a whimper. No great climax, no revolutions to the gameplay, just small twist after small twist until the engine sputtered and finished.
I enjoyed my time with My City, but I just wish then ending was a bit more exciting. A bit more impactful. Nevertheless, I’ll be playing both My Island and My City Roll and Write as soon as they become available to me.
#2 – Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated
Designers: Andy Clautice and Paul Dennen
What made it special: Lots of discovery and humour sprinkled throughout the gameplay
Thoughts over 2022: Near the end of 2021, we played Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporatedfour times in a single day. Early on, it becaome clear that my goal wasn’t to win any specific games, but to hit as many story encounters as possible. I mourned when I failed to complete a goal before it’s time limit was reached and we had to read the ‘failure’ text.
Over 2022, Bigfoot chose to bow out of the campaign. Fair enough, he wasn’t enjoying himself, and our hobby time is too precious to waste on playing games we don’t like, even for the sake of the group. So Clank! Legacy has become the game we play when Bigfoot is unavailable to us.
We still haven’t finished it, but we’re close, I think only 2 plays remain. I’m hoping the campaign ends on a very exciting note, but playing a game once every three months makes it hard to remember the narrative continuity.
#1 – Bullet❤️
Designers:Joshua Van Laningham
What made it special: A very clever push your luck, puzzle-y, pattern matching game with an excellent solo boss battle mode.
Thoughts over 2022: Suzanne Sheldon said it best when she said “some games spark“. A spark game is one that captures both your mind and your heart. They feel fresh and excite you!
Now, I might be struggling with burnout, but sometimes, it can feel like board games sort of, blend together. Nothing stands out, nothing really elicits that joy that I felt when I was really getting into this hobby. Bullet❤️ is a game that sparked for me.
In 2022, I picked up Bullet⭐️ and mixed both sets together. This has become one of my go-to solo games. The evenings where I don’t really want to sit in front of a screen, or if I only have 30 minutes to kill before moving on to something else. Every character is unique, and each character doubles as a boss mode to crash against. I love exploring this puzzle and this system.
I did play the multiplayer game a couple of times, but found it a little lacking. It’s real-time and tense (which I love), but it’s extreamly heads-down. During the real time phase of the game, I have no idea what my opponents are doing. Not until I pop my head up and see the mound of bullets they sent my way.
If someone was equally enthusiastic about Bullet❤️, I wouldn’t hesitate to play it with them over and over and over again. Until that person makes themselves known in my life, I’ll be content with the solo mode.
It’s Sunday Funday people! Our second full day of gaming means both Bear and I get to dictate what games we played! Yesterday we suffered through Gaia Project and enjoyed a very weird game of Scythe. But today I’m taking my friends where they never go willingly. To the world of fast food management.
Breakfast
Block 1 (Me!)
Lunch
Block 2 (Bear)
Dinner/Campfire break
Open Gaming
Bullet⭐
Being the parent of a toddler, it seems impossible for me to sleep beyond 7am. So as per usual I was first to rise. I took the morning to walk along the beach. When I came back, I prepped breakfast and made coffee. I was still the only one awake so I broke out Bullet⭐ and played a solo game as Rose Blanchett vs Starry Night Sky
If you’re curious about how the Bullet game plays, check out my review of it here. Bullet❤️ and Bullet⭐ are identical, except that the 8 heroes in each box are all wildly different from one another.
Starry Night Sky is a bit of a weird boss, their pattern requires that you don’t have a single bullet of a specific number on the turn that you break a shield. If you do, then you’ll lose a life. At the same time, you can’t just go wild in breaking shields, as if you break more than one shield in a round, you’ll lose a life.
I promptly lost this solo game, but I always enjoy exploring the different bosses and characters.
Eclipse: A New Dawn for the Galaxy
The first big multiplayer game of day 3 was Eclipse. Now, I’ve already written about my experiences withEclipse, but the more we play it, the more enthusiastic Bear seems to be to return to it. This time, I took control of the Hydran Progress, a science/tech focused race. I don’t know how other groups play, but for the first 6 of 9 rounds of the game, there wasn’t a single combat. There was a lot of building and upgrading, but no combat. Our forces swelled as we all kitted out our best fighters to tackle the problems that were on our doorstep.
I built out my galaxy tiles in such a way that there was only 1 way into my quadrant of the map. I then plopped 4 star bases on that doorstep and attached 2 missile modules to each and a high-powered computer. If anyone wanted to take my territory, they’d need to survive first. I also managed to take the only wormhole generator that appeared in the game, which allowed me to zip out the back door and take over several planets nearly uncontested in the end.
That being said, my star base strategy left me wanting for brown resources; my fleet was severally out numbered. But I doubled own on my smart missile strategies, shaving off the hull of my ships to fit more ordinance. The best offence is a great defense, as they say.
It worked well in the end, I took several planets from Bigfoot, but he managed to survive my volley during my siege of the centre tile. It was my first time even using the missile tech, it’s not a strategy our group has really explored. While Bigfoot managed to hold the centre, I took the win of the game due to the tiebreaker.
Glen More II: Chronicles
Up to this point we had played a LOT of space games, but now it was my turn to pick the game. My first choice was Glen More II: Chronicles, with accompanying soundtrack provided by The Real McKenzies
Glen More II: Chronicles is a tile placement and resource management game. Players take turns moving their workers around a tile selection roundel, moving from the back of the line onto any tile they want, then placing it into their kingdom and activating all adjacent tiles. Then the tile row is refilled and the player who is now in the rear may take their turn. If players leap over several tiles to claim a particularly important one, then it may be several turns before it’s their turn again.
The goal of the game, is to have more of certain resources than your opponents, as scoring is almost entirely dependent on “How many more of X do you have than the player with the least amount.” For example, if I have 5 whiskey barrels, while Otter only has 1, then I have 4 more than he does, which would net me 5 points at the end of each round.
Now you might think to yourself, “If someone leaps ahead, then I’ll just scoop up every tile left behind!” Unfortunately, at the end of the game, players lose 3 points for every tile they have in their kingdom, more than the player with the leanest kingdom. Urban sprawl is punished here.
Glen More II: Chronicles is always a delight, and I love the production. The custom meeples are charming, the art is bright and green, and any excuse to put on punk bagpipe soundtracks is a win for me.
Food Chain Magnate
Because Glen More II is a slightly faster game than the ones we’ve played this weekend (Eclipse and Gaia Project, looking at you), we also managed to squeeze in a game of Food Chain Magnate with a couple expansion modules, namely Coffee, Parks (Lobbyists), and Fries!
The first four rounds of the game are generally quite quick. I know some people complain about rote openings, but I don’t mind them, personally. In my game group, two players generally take the recruiting girl while two others take the trainer, and from there, the strategies diverge. I quickly put up a burger billboard in the top left corner on a house with a garden, with the expectation that players would fight over delivering that good, then I’d cash in on the coffee sales. Unfortunately, Bear beat me to placing the coffee shop right on their driveway, but thankfully, Bigfoot won the bidding war and sold the burger, which ran right by my restaurant, allowing me to sell my coffee.
Bigfoot and I hit $100 on the same turn and both generated the CFO. He placed a park in the lower corner, touching two more houses, and a mailbox campaign started generating interest. I put a second coffee shop right next to Bigfoot’s restaurant, and one next to the park. Now I’d sell 2 coffees to each of those houses every time they ate at Bigfoot’s Blues Bar. I picked up the luxuries’ manager, and now my strategy was set!
What I didn’t anticipate was our CEOs dropping to two open management slots when the bank broke for the first time. I had plans to play trainers and generate coffee at the same time, as my coffee production was still quite low. Should I skip producing coffee for a round and let my trainer work, so I can produce even more coffee in future rounds? Should I eschew the luxuries manager and take less money and train? It’s quite hard to know which way to go sometimes. In the end, I succeeded at selling 3 coffees at a base price of $20 to houses with gardens, making it $40 per coffee, and my CFO worked his financial wizardry to turn that into $180 in a single turn. Bigfoot was selling several goods, but at a base price of $7, plus a $5 benefit to some of his goods.
The bank broke just in the nick of time, as one more turn would have spelled disaster for my luxury coffee strategy. One more round and Bigfoot would have doubled my income easily. As it stands, the game ended with me in the lead with $395 to Bigfoot’s $362.
This play left players a bit salty on the coffee modules, claiming it’s too hard to counter. Unlike selling food to houses, you need to ensure that you have the demand, and you’re selling it less than or closer to your opponents, but there’s no way to steal someone else’s coffee sale. The combo of the luxuries’ manager with the coffee seems really strong. My rebuttal is that my coffee production just couldn’t scale. I’m lucky the game ended when it did, as one more turn would have dropped me into second place. In any case, I really enjoyed myself, as I always do when I play Food Chain Magnate.
Twice as Clever
After dinner and a fire, we returned for an evening of casual, open gaming. The first game that got pulled out was Twice as Clever, the second in the That’s Pretty Clever line of games. I’ve only played That’s Pretty Clever a paltry handful of times, as roll and write games generally don’t light my world on fire.
If you know how to play the first one, you’re 80% there on Twice as Clever. The active player rolls all three die, chooses one to place on their scorepad, take the action corresponding with the colour and value of the die, move any die with a value lower than the die they took onto the platter, then roll the remaining die. They continue this until they have 3 dice on their sheet. Then, all the inactive players may choose one of the rejected die and make a mark on their own sheets. A round consists of each player having a turn being the active player, and the game concludes after 4 rounds.
One of the trademark features of a roll and write game is triggering cascading combos. Marking one thing off your sheet that lets you make another mark over here, which gives you this bonus, and that lett’s you do this thing… you get the idea. Twice as Clever does that very well, and it’s an absolutely fine game, but it’s not one that I would ever see myself reaching for again. Inactive players sit and stare at the dice they want while the active player ponders their own pad, then that blue 5 you desperately needed gets re-rolled. If you enjoy roll and write games, I think this will be a hit, it does all the things you expect from this genre of games, but like I said before, these games just don’t excite me.
Race for the Galaxy (x2)
Before anyone says anything, I only own the base game of Race for the Galaxy, and I love it. I’ve heard the expansions are pretty rad, and I’ve dabbled a bit on Board Game Arena, but I’m pretty content with the base game.
Bear on the otherhand, had vauge memories of distaste for this game, so this was finally the opportunity to re-teach the game to him, in a safe, welcoming environment.
Race for the Galaxy is an action selection tableau bilding game designed by Tom Lehmann. It’s often critisized on being brutally difficult to teach. Luckily, 3 of the 4 of us already knew how to play, so I could focus all my attention on teaching Bear.
I spent the bulk of the teaching time showing him how to read the iconography, as every card is laden with icons. The downside of this approach is it repells new players. The plus side of the iconography is once you know how to read the language, you can parse a lot of information very quickly.
We played twice in a row at Bear’s request, which is fairly unusual for our group. We’re very much a ‘play it once and move on’ kind of table. After the second game Bear had warmed up to the system and was able to find the joy in the game (probably because it was the first game he won all weekend). I suspected it would, as he’s a big fan of other tableau building games such as Terraforming Mars and Ark Nova.
Hopefully with this revelation, Race for the Galaxy will hit our table with much more frequency.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
To cap off the night, another space game. Much like last night, our brains were pretty fried from the long weekend of heavy games. We played 10 rounds or so and lost 8 in a row. One day we’ll be less tired and more successful, but it won’t be this day!
And thus ends Day 3! Day 4 will only contain two short games, but will also have my concluding thoughts on throwing a cabin-con!
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!
