Lurker > SeabassDebeste

SpikeDragon posted...

He was supposed to be the better one coming out of college, probably was the better one to start. But Marcus is definitely better at this point

yeah, kieff seemed better early on, but mook really came on strong since coming to boston while kieff kinda died in washington
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

what a way to head into the all star break
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

33. Villagers (2019)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Card-drafting, tableau-building, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-40 minutes
Experience: 5-8 plays over 4-6 sessions (2019-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is attempting to populate their village with villager cards, which come in several different suits. The game is split between a drafting phase, during which each player takes turns drafting one villager from the market, and a building phase, during which each player chooses up to their build limit of cards in hand to play. Villagers are free to build except the ones that pay other villagers (if present in anyone's village), and the cases where you have to discard a card to create a base villager. Some villagers require predecessors (like evolving Pokemon). There are two scoring phases; some villagers score both times and others only at the end.

Design - The great appeal of Villagers is that despite having a market of cards that you freely can draft, it plays very fast. The analysis paralysis is greatly reduced because cards themselves are simple: it's easy to recognize which suit they are (they're delineated by color), and most of them simply provide victory points, engine-building symbols, or a chain. There are some exceptions where you'll have to read more - you can benefit from having some when someone builds a specific other villager; the red ones are action cards that don't go in your tableau; and some Solitary cards can reward you with synergies - but overall, these actually either guide your strategy or fit neatly into it.

The biggest flaw I've noticed is the building choke. Without a good knowledge of what suits to mine (as you can draw facedown cards knowing only their suits), you can be shut out of getting extra builds for your villagers. These build symbols are vital, since no matter how many villagers you draft, you can only add to your board in accordance with the build symbols. This can result in perhaps the worst part of an engine-builder: when losing means you get to do less - your build phases will be shorter than everyone else's build phases if you can add fewer villagers.

Experience - Villagers isn't a super-remarkable design. It gets here largely on the back of becoming a go-to in the last half-year or so, after a friend got it on Kickstarter. Some setup aside that I've never had to participate in, it's a high-floor, low-ceiling type of experience that always has a few exciting turns - looking for that big chain to complete the Jeweler, or hitting a dramatic Solitary card, or even just finding a way to pay yourself multiple times. On the flip-side are the times hwen someone gets locked out of building more than two villagers for the first few rounds (in a game that can have only five or six rounds), but that's the nature of the beast.

Future - At the moment, Villagers appears to be one of the short euros du jour. I don't see it as being spectacular, but it's so seamlessly pleasant that I have no reason to object. While I don't particularly thirst to play it, it's become an easy answer for "what should we play" when we've got less than an hour and aren't ready to turn to the higher-energy, less-strategic games just yet.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

cyko posted...

It's funny that a couple of you guys consider Power Grid to be too heavy and too much bureaucracy to play very often. Among my friends, it's one of the games we play most often because it's simple, easy to teach and turns go quickly. Power Grid is definitely one of my all time favorites.

While I don't like wine, I do love Viticulture. It is competitive while somehow still feeling relaxing. James Stegmeier really is a great designer and a nice guy. I have played Viticulture and Euphoria with him and different Gen cons over the year and had a great time with each.

I have never played Glory to Rome, but have always wanted to. I do enjoy the designer's follow up game - Innovation. For anyone who has played both, any thoughts on which game is more enjoyable?

well, innovation ranked quite low on this list, and if you look at GTR, it also ranked very low the first few times i played it! i'm very interested in playing innovation more to see if it will rise, though i'm a little unsure about adding a big question mark with a skill curve to my collection. GTR doesn't have a "take that" mechanic like innovation does and it's better at 3+ than at 2.

NBIceman posted...

And there's my #1 down. Lame pick but it's popular for a reason!

what else ranks highly for you?

banananor posted...

scythe is a very demanding game

i think it has the least intuitive control scheme out of any board game i've played. when i have any new or fairly casual players, this one needs to stay in the box because they're going to be frustrated and walloped.

i imagine it's pretty good if you have a group that regularly improves at it. i've played it maybe 5 times and i still don't think i have a deeper sense of what i'm doing and why i win or lose compared to the other players' engines

fair - in the times i've played it, i've concentrated so much on my own efficiency that i haven't concerned myself too much with others'. deciding the order in which to upgrade/enlist has been my big question mark usually, or how fast to rush the factory. i wouldn't call it particularly demanding though, among middleweight euros

th3l3fty posted...

I played Scythe once and hated basically everything about it

what specifically? i had a negative first experience too, but admittedly some of that was being really bad at it.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

34. Scythe (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Resource management, dudes on a map, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 75-105 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 4-5 sessions (2016-2018) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 25/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player commands workers and mechs on a pastoral, steampunk 1920s hybrid, in charge of a nation with variable player powers. On each turn you take a top- and/or bottom-row action on your player mat. The top actions let you move on the map, generating resources, and bolstering your strength. The resources you get let you take the bottom-row actions, which boost your action efficiency, piggyback neighbors' actions, deploy mechs, and build structures. You get stars for going all the way up on any track, winning battles, and achieving objectives on cards, and you get victory points for stars, territories controlled, structures, coins, and leftover resources.

Design - There's no single thing at which Scythe excels, other than production value. The art is beautiful, the meeples and resources are solid and clear, and (best of all) the player mat is double-layered, with amazing indentations for the various pieces of wood which sit on it.

I enjoy moving around the map in Scythe all right - it's bit of an ancillary thing to do, but eventually you can pick fights and go to the factory and so on and so forth. But that player-board is really the lifeblood of Scythe, and it functions largely solitarily. You can't take the same action twice in a row in general, but you can chain together moves. Figuring out how to spread out (or consolidate!) your dudes so you can max out each production item, so you can maximize your efficiency to take the right top-row actions to get the most possible bottom-row benefits feels so good. Produce oil and food on turn 1, then spend oil on turn 1 to upgrade your enlist feature... then turn 2, move but enlist, and your movement and enlist features are both upgraded to move more pieces and enlist at cheaper cost, respectively. IT FEELS GOOD.

You can actually accomplish all six stars without ever fighting by building a fast-spreading engine with your personal board, and honestly, that's probably the part of Scythe that feels the best. The map, again, is very pretty. You probably do want to get some encounter cards. But other than dope art, the theme is comically thin, and the only real reason you're getting those encounter cards is so you can get resources and improve your engine. Same deal with the factory; you get area control points at the factory and you get to spread out, but in reality it's all about the dope action you can take, which feeds even more efficiency.

There's nothing really wrong with a solitaire efficiency game. And there's nothing wrong with incredibly nice components. These . That said, Scythe is hilariously overproduced for what the gameplay is - it looks like an epic wargame, and in fact it's a solitary euro where at the end, you might have a conflict or two to spread out and hope your guys stay spread out.

Experience - My first play of Scythe was long and miserable as everyone was trying to learn the game and I was boxed in, but since then, I've had several nice experiences, especially once the second-row actions were cleanly integrated into people's strategies. Again, it feels weirdly dissonant to be staring at your player board the whole game instead of the gorgeous map, but it works for what it is.

Future - I'm not exactly craving Scythe, but just remembering its smoothness and table presence makes me happy about hte prospect of it coming back to the table.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

not a lot of wine fans here
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

ninkendo posted...

my favorite stat of the night No pistons player had more than 2 made FG's

incredible

also the hornets only putting up 87 in a win lmao
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

35. Viticulture (2013)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Worker placement, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-90 minutes
Experience: 6-7 plays of Essential Edition over 6-7 sessions with 2, 4, 5 players (2019) incl 3 plays with Tuscany: EE
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs a winery. Via worker placement, grapes are planted, then harvested, aged, and made into wine. Structures need to be built to accommodate the wine or to grow grapes, and playable cards are drawn each round. Worker placement takes place across seasons; everyone must pass within a season before the first player of the year begins the next season. Turn order is determined via a form of bidding; you get to choose where in the turn order you want to play, and the lower in the turn order it is, the richer the bonus you get for choosing it. The game is played to a fixed number of VP.

Design - Among worker placement games, Viticulture is for the most part surprisingly forgiving. You don't need to feed your workers; you can build your own board to mamke it more resilient in the absence of other stuff to do; you've got visitor cards which can replicate a lot of the actions but more efficiently; and when all is lost, you've still got one bigger worker who lets you take an already blocked action.

That allows Viticulture to be pleasant, which is suitable for a game that's about making wine. It has excellent components, with a lovely agricultural big board for worker placement and a functional player mat for your own brewing process. The decision to use glass stones to indicate both grapes and wines is excellent, and they've got a bit of weight that makes them somewhat resilient to jolts. And mostly, it feels really good to make wine: Double-plant! Massive harvests! Fulfill big orders! Extra victory points on certain action spots! Watch that money come rolling in and watch those VP explode in the final rounds!

And it's a good thing the game feels good, because it compensates for Viticulture's lack of tightness in design - it doesn't have the leeway to be tight in actions or resources. There are myriad design decisions that feel like they could have been just tightened up a little bit.

Take money for example. Money is very useful at the beginning of the game, because it allows you to gain more workers and upgrade your structures to get your engine going. The flow of cash is tight-ish at first, though you can get an infusion by selling your fields. As you start selling wines, however, your income rises. Sell a few wines and suddenly you've got yourself a nice stream of money coming in each turn! The economy works! Except... if you sell a few wines, the game is ending that turn, or the next turn. the 20 VP threshold comes up relatively quickly, and fulfilling even a single wine order is the largest source of VP. As your cashflow increases later in the game, the utility of that money decreases: while Tuscany adds a better trade spot, there's nothing particularly useful to buy with money for the most part, once your engine is set.

Then there are the cards themselves, which feel... odd. Some clearly weren't desgined with scaling in mind, like the ones that have you collect either two coins or 1 VP from each opponent (obviously OP in a high-player-count-game, while being a weird sort of 1 VP move in a smaller game), and then of course the sequencing matters (a "plant vines" card is worthless in the late-game).

The game does provide non-wine strategies to winning as well. While this isn't a full-on criticism - the game definitely benefits a good wine-engine over anything else - VP seem available from odd sources. It's purely supplemental to wine-making, but you can get VP for actions like giving tours, selling your fields, going sixth in the turn order... which make it feel like a game about scurrying around the margins at times. These points can of course add up.

While the seasons give Viticulture a lot of its most distinct flavor, they actually prove a bit of an issue in the 2p game, in my opinion - and that's the seasons and turn order system. You lose the fun element of bonuses when you play with two, and there is only one spot for each action, making it more possible to be blocked - but Viticulture, as we examined above, isn't designed for this type of tightness in actions when it's so loose and unpolished in other areas. I love that there are different seasons, and I love the unique way to approaching the turn order track.

What I don't love is that turn order is so drastically important: because of the seasonal structure, the first player goes first in each season. There's only one space on the board to sell your wine in the final year. The final year, by the way, will very often have two or more players who have the ability to exceed the VP threshold. But with blocking, this could easiy mean that the final round is decided by turn order. I like jockeying for position, but this seems like not a great look for the game.

Experience - I tried out Viticulture at Origins 2019 and thought it was decent, one of the three-to-five best games I played that weekend. Gaming pal #1 was a fan, too, but it wasn't super-high on my radar until a meetup pal listed it together with its expansion (which I had yet to try) for $30. My bigger complaints only emerged later, the issues with turn-order and blocking, in the two-player game. While I'm not thrilled with it, though, it stays clean and enjoyable at counts above two, and even at two it's a little less punishing with automa rules added in, which opens up the space.

Future - Well, I own it, so I want it played more! I still have a special workers module I have yet to try out from the Tuscany expansion. It's not going to become a top-ten type of game, but as a pleasant middleweight euro with gentle WP, it's doing its job.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

yup! i think that's a testament to power grid's interactivity compared to other euros, and the satisfaction in having a full used map.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

37. Power Grid (2004)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Economic, route-building, bidding
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 3 plays (2015, 2016, 2019) with 5-6 players: Germany, China, India
Previous ranks: 35/100 (2016), 34/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs an energy company, delivering power to multiple cities, with a goal of maximizing the number of cities which you can supply with power. Each round of the game is split into three phases: auctions for power plant technology (which determines which resources are required to power the cities and how many cities you can power), expanding the power network (which is more expensive depending on the route it takes relative to your own network), buying resources (which become more expensive as they grow scarcer), and finally, consuming those resources to power your cities and gain money.

Design - There are two inaccessible elements to Power Grid. First is the arithmetic. Unfortunately, there's no way around it: you'll spend yourself down to your last few dollars in Power Grid fairly often, and with a bidding mechanism as free as Power Grid's is, that will often be a good business decision to math it out. Secondly, it is fiddly. It literally has a phase known as the "bureaucracy" phase where resource replenishment happens, and there are special rules about how to refill the power plants for offer, and special rules again for "Step 2" and "Step 3."

It's all in the service of a good game. The three main decision-making phases to Power Grid play extremely differently, but all three of them are centered around good ol' cash. (Power Grid's rubber-band effect essentially also is centered around being an economic discount; getting later pickings mainly just means paying a premium for what you wnat/need.)

The first two phases individually are also fun even in isolation: Auctions are pretty much fun by default. An individual auction in Power Grid is quite vanilla, but the way the cascading auctions matters is really interesting: you can buy a maximum of one power plant and each player gets a chance to get a power plant. Together, that means if you buy the first offer, then the remaining players will each get to contend with fewer opponents. Going first in the turn order is arguably the most punishing here, as you may get stuck having to pass if you dislike the initial offer, and you're guaranteed to get locked out of good plant bids later if you can't persuade someone else to buy your first offer.

Then there's building networks. I love the way the board grows in pretty much any route-building game. It has this great visual appeal. As space becomes more contentious, expansion becomes more difficult/costly. I like that unlike in Catan, you can't be completely boxed in (though you can be de facto boxed, when it's too expensive to go anywhere - but even this is temporary). While it's not as dramatic as blowing an army off the map, it can be fun to surprise someone by occuping a city close to them by going through their city. Building multiple routes in a single turn is very satisfying and feels like a worthy reward for generating or saving all that money.

People complain about and laud Power Grid's rubber-band mechanism, which is based on how many cities you have already entered. I think it's generally clever, even if it overcorrects by a bit - it tends to keep people holding a similar number of cities. You might be tempted to turtle and keep the best turn order for a while, and there are times when this is a valid strategy... but being an economic game, your revenues will grow more when you power more cities, and the whole point of keeping to a few cities would be to consolidate wealth... so you can expand. My skill level isn't high, but the incentives seem fair to me.

Experience - Perhaps key to my enjoyment and admiration of Power Grid (and also the reason I've played it so few times): I've never had to handle bureaucracy myself. Understanding it doesn't seem to be key to enjoying the game, which further has me wary of its fiddliness. Anyway, despite that multiple friends own it, and that I quite admire it, I've only played it three times, and a different version each time. I haven't performed particularly well, but Power Grid's blend of significant interaction (on the map and in auctions and competing for resources and map-space) and solitary puzzle (how should I value this plant, and when/where should I expand?) has made it satisfying each time.

Future - Power Grid is a tough one to get to the table, precisely because of its daunting bureaucracy and fiddlier rules. (Each special version of it also has special rules, like China's command economy.) Given that PG also can't handle two players, it's a tough sell to enter my collection. But I am optimistic and would like to get it to the table this year.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

The Mana Sword posted...

Yeah, mostly. I like my games with as little RNG as possible after setup.

does this extend to games like grand austria hotel, too? the dice roll there happens each round but is a form of setup. and then there are card games too, of course...
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Colegreen_c12 posted...

did you skip 37?

i most certainly did, thanks for the catch

37 next...!
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

36. Glory to Rome (2005)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tableau-building, multi-use cards, role selection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 45-75 minutes
Experience: 8+ plays (2015-2018) with 2-5 players
Previous ranks: 83/100 (2016), 27/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a hand of multi-use cards: they can be played for their action, as buildings in your tableau, or as materials to construct your buildings. The game works with a role selection mechanism. A leader plays a card for its action, and others may use cards to follow that same action. There are myriad different buildings, but they all fall under the six types of actions: engine-building for action selection, erecting buildings, gathering materials, and banking materials.

Experience - My first two plays of Glory to Rome were relatively early on, with five players, one of whom was very slow and kind of airheaded while playing. The games lasted well over an hour, which... they shouldn't.

I had little interest in playing GtR again until my friends decided to print their own copy of the out-of-print game. Given that everyone else was requesting a copy, a bit of FOMO got me in. I wound up bringing the game to meetups and other game nights and started developing a much greater appreciation for it. Once it's played with players who know what they're doing and are committed to playing relatively quickly, you can knock out two games in the time of another middleweight euro.

Design - Glory to Rome is a mess to explain, and its player mat is hilariously messy before you know the rules. But once you get it, it's clean to conceptualize the flow: cards only become buildings if you draw them; wasted "pool" cards go into material slots; materials become used for buildings or the vault. It's an elegant system that requires nearly nothing except the massive deck of cards, player mats that only serve to organize your cards, and the foundation cards.

Decision-making is always tough in a games where cards are both the tableau items and the resources used to build those items. Only one in every three or four or cards in your hand, or even less than that, will ever actually go under construction. The rest will be used to take actions or fill those orders. There's other stuff to decide - which role you want, or what cards you can afford to throw into the pool to get snatched up by others' Laborers - but for the most part, you only have to understand the six suits and not the 50+ different cards. This eventually speeds up play a lot.

One of the pleasures in Glory to Rome, like in so many tableau-builders, is watching your engine spiral out of control. The buildings you construct give you powers like increasing your hand size or using different building materials in the future, while adding clientele increases your capacity to take actions both as a leader and as a follower. As the game goes on, you'll be more and more likely to follow each action. The pool of materials will also grow and shrink with time, providing a nice flow of materials from wasted-in-hand to stashed-in-buildings-or-vaults.

Future - Lacking a real box for Glory to Rome is probably one of its biggest hindrances in getting my attention - well, that and requiring three-to-five players to make it good. Two-player didn't work out well. I think I'll have to make a concerted effort to get this to the table again, because it's worth it.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

ya go my marcus smart

hayward getting rejected at the rim to spark the thunder was nightmarish there
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Dr_Football posted...

and in our last 30 games only 13 of those are against teams currently above .500

there are 30 teams in the league and 13 over .500 man

enjoy it!
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

38. BANG! The Dice Game (2013)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, hidden identity, dice-rolling, player combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20-30 minutes
Experience: 5+ plays (2015-2019) with 6-8 players
Previous ranks: 39/100 (2016), 35/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is assigned both a character with powers and a role which determines their allegiance: a sheriff (who is revealed), outlaws (who want to kill the sheriff), deputies (who support the sheriff), and a renegade (who wants to be the last man standing). On your turn, you roll and reroll a bunch of dice up to three times. The results generally let you shoot at your immediate neighbors or people one removed from immediate neighbors, or recover health. Oddly, you can also roll arrows, which will hurt you eventually.

Design - BTDG is a dice reimplementation of BANG!, a card game which has some interesting ideas: hidden identities, but the game isn't solely about deducing who is who, but rather about killing your enemies. The problem with BANG! is that it was slow as hell. Dodge cards and healing cards, along with lose-turn cards, basically ensure high variance with a high chance of being eliminated early and watching along.

While BTDG doesn't prevent you from being eliminated early, it has some nice controls on the playtime. Beer is available to heal you or anyone else (ahh, the wild west theming!), but you're twice as likely to roll bullets, and you can also roll arrows instead. As a result, the game is chaotic and violent with how it removes your health. (Amusingly, you can technically be forced to shoot a teammate). One of my personal favorite part about BTDG is how you can effectively be a dead man walking when you roll a bunch of arrows, but until someone rolls the final arrows to cause that HP to be drained, you're actually okay.

Playing BTDG falls just short of thrills. In particular, there is one notably superior hidden-identity-kill-the-opposing-team game. And a big part of that is that the "hidden identity" part of the game is relatively low. In all my games, the outlaws shoot the sheriff and then the deputies make themselves obvious by targeting outlaws themselves. The renegade should fight for Team Sheriff's behalf, but in my experience, the renegade has pretty much always died before getting down to the final few in a dramatic standoff.

Being a dice game, BTDG's outcomes are random. That's fine. It's the dramatic arc that you always want to see but are not guaranteed to get.

Experience - Back in 2015 when every group seemed big, BTDG hit the table a few times. It's not a perfect game, but it filled gaps very nicely. It's a game that has grown in my estimation since then for its compact playtime and nice way of assigning people to teams - always fun to give you an investment in the outcome even if you're eliminated. Along with Magic Maze, BTDG was on sale for under $10 at Barnes and Noble in December. I snagged it and have only gotten it to the table once and found the same high-floor experience I wanted.

Future - I don't play in mid-larger groups too often, but I feel pretty well-equipped for them now with BTDG! I have something of a vested interest in getting it to the table, even though I kind of see its value as being a low-usage type of game.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

39. Dixit (2008)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, clue-giving, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 30 minutes
Experience: 5+ plays (2015-2018) with 5-6 players
Previous ranks: 43/100 (2016), 43/80 (2018)

Summary - Every player has a handful of cards with nice, surreal art on them (like an angry dragon in a kitchen). The storyteller ("active player") chooses one and places it face-down and says something about the card ("my current mood"). Each other player then submits a card face-down to be mixed together, and then everyone except the storyteller guesses which card was the storyteller's. Points are awarded to the storyteller if some (but not all) players guess correctly, while points are awarded to each player who guessed correctly or misled others to pick their card.

Design - Dixit is simple and has become a modern classic. The game's replayability, like Mysterium's, is in some ways limited by its beautiful art on its gigantic cards. However, Dixit is game-ier than Mysterium and more replayable with its pictures, because you can't establish the same meta of "this card means this." Dixit's core conceit is ingenious: you want to give an accurate clue, but not too accurate. This can result in some bizarrely vague clues that lead to "oops" moments when your metaphorical sentence gets undercut by multiple people who play much better literal interpretations. A sure thing when you guess can turn out to be dead wrong. The same card will never get the same clue with the same people, because everyone should know it at that point.

The tradeoff on connecting well and laughing is that sometimes you're kind of shut out from the benefits. My biggest frustration from Dixit probably comes on turns when I guess wrong and no one guesses my card. This can happen fairly often if you lack "good" cards and you guess wrong, but that can happen multiple turns in a row before you become the guesser again. It's not really anyone's fault and can be a bit sour-feeling.

Experience - Even I'm a little puzzled why I have Dixit ranked this high. That said, like When I Dream, you can have bad hands but the overall play of a game of Dixit is usually pretty solid. Dixit is a bit more crowd-dependent than other games; you can learn a bit about how people's brains work, but if those brains aren't interesting to you, you'll probably prefer to explore your good friends' minds instead.

Future - I don't have a ton of desire to play Dixit, but won't really say no. It's best with a larger number of players, which we don't hit that often, and those players don't usually bring Dixit.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

honestly, based on what you've expressed as preferences, i think you'd LOVE orleans
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Naye745 posted...

i enjoyed when i dream but it felt like the novelty would wear off sooner than later. neat concept though

magic maze rules though. i think that one still holds up very well after a healthy number of plays

yeah, like i said, WID should not be overplayed in any given session (whereas many party games beg for more and more hands)

glad to hear about MM. i hope to find it increasing in the future, since i bought it!
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

40. Orleans (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Point salad, deck-building, point-to-point movement
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 75-105 minutes
Experience: 2 plays with 3, 4 players (2015, 2019)
Previous ranks: 48/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Set in medieval France, Orleans is a bag-building game played over eighteen rounds. Players pull a number of discs out of their bag. The discs represent various worker types that can be assigned to perform tasks on the player's board, but multiple workers are needed for each action. Actions can include moving a wagon around a board (to pick up goods for VP), getting more workers (which give bonuses), and a few other ways to gain VP.

Experience - Perhaps the most overrated game by experience on my list - I've only played Orleans twice, and those two plays were separated by over four years. The first play was one of my earlier heavy euros, and one of the ones I was learning and getting a good feel for. During my second play, four years later, I was no longer overwhelmed with all the options and was better able to see how to play the game.

Design - The most unique part about Orleans is the bag-building mechanic. It's pretty physically satisfying to shuffle your bag and pull out pieces and assign them onto the board. The actual mechanics of assignment are pretty cool too - every base action requires at least two workers to activate, and you have to decide whether to use your workers to activate "an action, any action" or to leave them out on your board until next round, when you've drawn the complementary pieces.

Part of what makes the game enjoyable is that, once you've grasped the decision space, there is a lot to do. I haven't played it enough to determine how "competitive" this gets, but mechanically it feels really good, because virtually everything you do benefits you in layered ways.

Take gaining workers. Getting a different set of workers is a strategic move because it allows you to specialize in different actions. However, there are further, immediate benefits as well: taking the white farmers, for example, moves you up on the farmer track, and sometimes it'll let you take goods, which are inherently worth victory points. Being high up on the farmer track gives you a trickle of VP each turn, while being low on it means you might lose VP. Meanwhile, taking the knights lets you get pieces required for moving, plus it upgrades your ability to draw from your bag, which translate to more actions overall.

Speaking of movement - when you push your little guy around a map (either by land or by sea), you reach new cities. You can an immediate VP bonus if you pick up a good on that track, and then on a subsequent action you can build a building if the city is unoccupied. The reward of building a building is - you guessed it - more VP. The game isn't really played on the map, and mainly it adds time to the setup, but... it feels good and satisfying as an option.

And of course there's sending your workers away to the temple. This is the game's only controlled culling mechanism. Shockingly, it also can result in gaining VP.

Orleans's interaction is extremely indirect and usually not particularly cutthroat. The map can empty quickly if people run through it and seize all the open spaces, and there's some finesse in timing when you go to the temple. I lost my last game because player 1 went to the temple, which perfectly set up player 2 to go and gain a special bonus. That left me (player 3) unable to get as great of a bonus. Then there's competition over being first to certain spots, or being at the top of the farmer's track, or being first to grab the tableau.

But overall, the game can be very much fixated on your own board - not that it's necessarily a bad thing. Unlike, say, Agricola, Orleans is relaxed and feels more point-salad-y. Even if you're not super-experienced, you'll usually feel good after taking a move, even if it wasn't optimal. Contrast Agricola, where even if you took an optimal move, you still might feel like it wasn't enough, and someone else definitely is mad at you for taking that move.

Future - I definitely want to play more of Orleans. Time will tell if it's a little "too" balanced, i.e. moves are so similarly valuable that basically anyone playing at least a baseline level of competence will score very close together. Nonetheless, close finishes are fun, and gaining VP is fun, and drawing from a bag is fun. Until Orleans gives me a bad experience (or fades more from memory, as it has before), that's good for me.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Naye745 posted...

ive had fun with celestia but there are some take-that-y parts of it i don't particularly like

yep, this is fair. some of the cards are really swingy and unpleasant
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

41. When I Dream (2016)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, hidden roles, clue-giving, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 2 minutes per turn, 30 minutes per game
Experience: 5-10 games with 5-9 players (2018-2019)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each round, one player (the dreamer) puts on a blindfold and turns a timer. A stack of picture cards is in the center, with a hybrid image on it and a word. Each player is then secretly assigned either to help (fairy) or mislead (boogeyman) the dreamer in guessing the word. In turn order, each player says one word, and at any time the dreamer can guess the word, which gets sorted into the correct or incorrect pile. When the time runs out, points are awarded, and the blindfold is passed, and new roles assigned.

Design - When I Dream fits an unusual type of niche: one guesser, but lots of hidden traitors, and plenty of opportunity to try to discern who's on your team. I love the frantic pace of it; an entire circle of clues can happen in less than ten seconds (especially at lower player counts). Sometimes the guesser will guess after just one or two clues, while other times the guesser will wait until the entire circle has gone around.

Cleverly, the second image on the card gives the boogeymen a chance to present a untied front. For example, if you heard: "Raptor, Bed, Falcon, Fish, Atlanta, Metal," it would be pretty clear that the word was "hawk," because bed, fish, and metal don't make any sense. However, if the words were instead "Raptor, Rodent, Falcon, Cheese, Atlanta, Grey," then you'd have a more difficult decision as you tried to figure out whether it was "hawk" or "mouse." This actually forces hte cluegiver to figure out who to trust instead of just trying to form a single image and discarding the noise.

One of my favorite little details of When I Dream: the bed structure that holds the stack of cards. The blindfold itself is also pretty interesting - it looks innocuous (and brightly colored), but if you don't usually wear one to sleep, it's weirdly disorienting.

Experience - I discovered When I Dream at a meetup at a time when I hadn't discovered new and especially good party games in quite some time. It came as a very welcome surprise since I love clue-giving. Convinced a friend to get it, and it's appeared several times at our monthly game nights since. I've had dull rounds (when I couldn't figure anything out, or my guesser seemed to be disregarding me entirely), but never a dull game where nothing clicked at all. Reliable.

Future - Like I said, When I Dream is reliable. The one "problem" with it is that you can't really play it many times in one sitting; the deck of cards goes by very quickly. But given the time to breathe, it's highly engaging and fun as a party game.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

42. Celestia (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Push-your-luck
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 25-40 minutes
Experience: 8-12 games over 8-12 sessions with 5-6 players (2016-2019), incl A Little Help expansion
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 20/80 (2018)

Summary - An airship is voyaging into the land of Celestia, and the further it goes, the more valuable the loot. Everyone on board gets to take turns piloting it. One problem though: there are hazards to overcome at each stage (which the pilot encounters by rolling dice.) The dice represent challenges the pilot needs overcome (i.e. discard cards from hand) in order to progress - else, the ship crashes. Everyone gets to decide at each stage whether to stay on (except the pilot, who must stay on). Once the ship crashes, it just starts right back up again.

Design - Celestia is a simple game by decisions. Your decision is influenced by your tolerance for risk, how likely you are to become pilot again, and whether you think the current pilot has good cards. But it always boils down to "am I in or out?" For any game with such simple decisions, it needs to be super-fun.

And for the most part, Celestia succeeds at that. The chrome helps - each player is represented by a little pawn that physically goes inside an airship. The airship physically progresses down a straight line, which looks super-cute and kinda intrepid/badass. When you roll the dice, everyone must announce "I'm in!" - possibly in rapid succession. The dice themselves feel great. Plus, the game plays at an incredibly rapid pace given the simplicity of the decisions, which keeps you moving along, and everyone is invested - either positively (if you're still on the boat) or negatively (if you're off it) - in whether the pilot succeeds each mission. And you can villainously toss down a few Take That cards as well just to be a jerk.

Experience - I've had a lot of fun playign Celestia. Just moving down the track feels good, as well as animatedly declaring whether you're in or out. That said, I want to discuss two issues I've had with the game.

First, when I started out, I made the mistake of playing one rule wrong: you're supposed to roll the dice before letting people decide to stay in or get out. I actually liked it better when you didn't have that info, even further simplifying the decision (to "am I feeling lucky?" as opposed to "oh no way you got that man"). Second, playing with the expansion worsens the game in my opinion. Asking for "help" slows the game down and adds nothing in terms of fun, and those cards randomly can clog the deck.

Future - While I don't own Celestia, at least two of my gaming friends do. I've seen the entirety of the decision space of Celestia, but there's still space to have positive experiences with it.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Great_Paul posted...

My problem with this game is that my group has never won because the guy who brought it out decided to put in every module whenever we played it (and also didn't tell us this was the case until way later). I like the game fine, but I might've liked it better if I wasn't thrown in with everything from the get go.

oh god. progressing through the modules one by one is SO much more satisfying.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

43. Magic Maze (2018)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Restricted communication, point-to-point movement, dungeon-crawling, tile-laying, real-time
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 5-15 minutes
Experience: 20+ games over 6-10 sessions with 3-6 players (2018-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Four pawns explore a shopping mall, tile by tile. One player doesn't control one pawn; rather, each player controls all pawns, but can only move them in certain directions and take certain actions, like laying tiles and going up/down escalators. Other players move them in the other directions and take the other actions. The goal is to lay out enough tiles that each pawn can go to its "base" location, then escape the mall by going to its specific exit. The game is played in real time with a sand timer with no talking, except when you turn the timer by going on timer spots. As you advance in the game, you add more tiles to increase the number of tiles you need to explore, as well as rules that can help or hinder you.

Design - Real-time games are naturally frenetic. Magic Maze adds to the madness by preventing any single player from doing anything without coordination. It also prevents players from talking and instead hands them a red wooden piece that you place very passive-aggressively in front of other players to indicate "Do something!!!" Which pawn should you do something about, if someone puts it in front of you? You'll have to figure that out. Granted, this results in various levels of cheating as can often happen in co-op games that are designed to be unintuitive and restrictive toward communication, but that (as often is the case) adds to the hilarity. To be fair, the game anticipates this chaos and encourages you to laugh along with it - the rulebook is fairly forgiving about the inevitable cheating, and for god's sake, the theme is that an elf, a wizard, a dwarf, and a mage get together to... rob a shopping mall.

On the flip side of the chaos is the sublime. This happens for all counts, but especially at two, you can really get locked in. If you can properly time the timer-flips and discuss your plans, then coordinating feels really good. Two players can move a pawn twenty consecutive steps without pausing, and a locked-in third and fourth player can just chime in occasionally as one pawn goes a very far distance. There's a special sort of pleasure that can come from feeling like you're in "the zone," but it's amplified when it's shared with another player without talking.

Experience - Magic Maze might rank even higher with a re-rank, because before I started making this list, I hadn't played it in months. I played it at a meetup with both small and large groups and cleared and failed at levels repeatedly each sitting, four or more games a pop. It was a mix of smooth and hilarious but with occasional bad-feels when people (including me) couldn't figure out why we were being paged with the red stick.

Then, Barnes and Noble held a sale at the end of the year which dropped MM to $16. I've played the game around ten times since then with two through four, with players I trust more, and it feels like its potential was unlocked. The main couple I play with had tried it at a con before and hadn't liked it then - I suspect one or two bad players can tank it, which is a bit unfortunate, because those players will also not have a good time.

Even the worst part of the game design itself now seems like a feature instead of a bug. Magic Maze is visually noisy. Pretty, but noisy - it can be hard to distinguish where each player's weapon is, or where their exits are. Without players being allowed to talk, I'm now thinking that the five-to-ten-second lag it will take to discern where those sites are actually part of the difficulty that makes the game fun. (It is of course far more painful if the group sucks...)

Future - I've finally played with every rule laid out! Now it's just a matter of the special scenarios to fill out. Want to get gaming pal #1 more involved than she has been on this one; its franticness feels similar to Overcooked, which makes me think it has that potential. I get the feeling that introducing this to newer players should be pretty fun, as long as people aren't impatient and don't try to make the worst players feel bad.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

drummond to cleveland is hilarious

am i stupid for being excited about wiggins to GSW
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Tom Bombadil posted...

that sounds right up my alley

didn't know you liked more microgames! it's really good

Maniac64 posted...

Can that be played with 2 players?
Seems Like it could and would be really fun

no reason it couldn't! better chance at scoring points for being first to the temples, too!
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

44. Karuba (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tile-laying, point-to-point movement, racing
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15 minutes
Experience: 10+ games over 4-6 sessions with 3-4 players (2016-2019)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 49/80 (2018)

Summary - You have an unfilled 4x5 grid of an island and four explorers. The four explorers start on the western and northern edges, while the respective temples they must reach are on the eastern and southern borders. From there, each player has a stack of identical tiles. One "leader" draws a tile randomly from their stack, and then everyone finds their corresponding identical tile and either lays it or discards it to move an explorer down a track. The game ends when all the tiles are drawn or when one player has moved all their explorers to their corresponding temples. You can also pick up jewels on the way. You get points for the jewels or for getting to each temple fastest.

Design - Karuba is perhaps the least interactive game left on this list, with one or two exceptions. It is literally multiplayer solitaire and could easily be compared to a roll-and-write type; if you refuse to look at your opponents' boards, it literally is purely solitary. That's probably the first thing to accept about Karuba: the lack of competitiveness.

That said, as its own unique puzzle-generator, good god it's addictive. The positions of the explorers and temples are randomized each time, and the moment you draw your first tile, you're able to start making meaningful decisions. You'd always want the dream of having a beautiful, efficient path with minimal branches so your explorers can share their exploration, but in reality, you'll draw those tiles out of sequence, you'll want the gems, and you'll need to burn some tiles just to get your guys moving. Sometimes your guys will move smoothly along, and sometimes they'll crash into each other, and sometimes you'll in effect block off temples from ever being reachable. Are you waiting for the perfect piece so you can set your explorers on their path? It may never come! Sometimes you just lay pieces and have no perfect plan. But before you know it, the game is ending and you've made a mess but achieved some stuff and... ah, let's just play it again!

Experience - Played this game like four, five, six times in one glorious weekend during GenCon 2016, when I was introduced to it. Tons of heavier options, but this game was so quick and addictive that it captured many of our attention and wound up arguably stealing the show. It has mostly sat on various shelves since then, but it came out again last year and was good for two or three more straight adventures.

Future - Probably the multiplayer solitaire game I'd most like to replay! I don't own a copy, but playing this game is like playing Tetris. Thankfully (?) it has some controls in place, as setup is a little cumbersome.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Naye745 posted...

cash n guns is fine

i had fun with it, i see the appeal, but there are just better games out there in basically every category that it does - better negotiation games, better bluffing games, better games with powers, better press-your-luck games

wait, are there powers in cng?! maybe in an expansion?

trdl23 posted...

I have never had a good experience with Pandemic, and this is coming from a guy whose favorite board game is Arkham Horror (not the new one, new one is atrocious). It feels so swingy based on luck that it pushes people to quarterback, since the players have so little thats actually under their control.

i'd think the reverse - if luck is gonna drive a lot anyway, then it's ok for players to gamble a little and go with their gut, since different actions are better depending what cards are drawn
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

45. Five Tribes (2014)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Abstract, point-to-point movement, set collection, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 60-90 minutes
Experience: 3-4 games over 3-4 sessions (2017-18) with 4-5 players (with expansion)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 26/80 (2018)

Summary - A rectangular board of tiles is laid out, each randomly populated with meeples of five different colors (the titular tribes). Each round, players bid victory points for turn order, then take their turn. On your turn, you pick up all the meeples of a tile and drop them, one at a time, on orthogonally adjacent tiles, thus moving around the board. The final meeple you drop must match one that is already on that tile - you collect the tile meeple you drop and all meeples of the same color on that tile, then perform an action specific to that color. These actions include "killing" other meeples, gaining VPs for the meeples themselves, collecting VP cards, building a tableau of special-power-cards, and gaining money. You can also build structures/claim tiles on the map. The game ends when there are no legal moves remaining.

Design - Five Tribes is nearly a pure abstract. Aside from card draws which affect the offers for markets you may visit with green or white meeples, there is zero randomness. Because of its spatial element, there are literally thousands of ways you can play each turn, especially at the beginning (albeit, some sub-choices, such as where to drop the meeples along the route, are seemingly redundant, while others are seemingly poor choices). In addition, a single meeple dropped onto the square you want can entirely change the parameters of the problem, as going from an odd number to an even number means you can no longer end on the same square you intended to. As a result, Five Tribes gets a reputation for being analysis-paralysis-inducing. Indeed, one of the major issues with Five Tribes is something of an inability to predict what the board state will look like on your turn, and the overwhelming number of possibilities available to you on a given turn.

That said, when it plays, it sings. One of the joys of a board game is its physical presence. Five Tribes has you physically doing something every turn. If you're ever played Mancala, the process of picking up meeples and dropping them off in consecutive squares, looking to claim meeples, should feel familiar - and really satisfying.

Aside from the physical element, taking the actions themselves feels rewarding. There are several very cool payoffs at the end of your turn that give you a nice sensation of payoff, since all of them contribute very directly to VPs. When you empty a square completely, you get endgame points, so the red assassins can give you a double-boost if you claim a territory when you drop the red, then claim another by killing the last meeple in a different territory. The blue builders give you coins, which are one-to-one with VP for endgame scoring. The yellow and green meeples become more valuable if you can get a lot of yellows (especially if they're not being taken by others) and/or the market offer for the set collection becomes useful. And the white tokens are of course really satisfying, because improving your powers is always nice... and they also give VPs. Sometimes, you wind up taking a suboptimal turn, and it hurts, but you bide your time hoping for more.

Turn order in Five Tribes is kind of interesting. There are slots on the turn order track you can bid for, but they cost you VP, and they are not an open auction - rather, each player chooses where they want to bid at according to a fixed track, and you're locked into paying that amount, even if several others leap you. It's a very interesting system, where sometimes you'll just throw down the 18 points to get the monster first move (the only choice with stability), and sometimes you'll meander paying 0 to 1 and just hope you can make a slightly profitable move.

This phase, alas, certainly does not help with the importance of analyzing the board state, resulting in more potential for AP. What's a little more disappointing is that the endgame of Five Tribes is less interesting and fun than the opening, for pretty much all players. At first, with all the meeples on board, you can be assured of taking a cool move no matter what, even if it's not strictly optimal. At the end of the game, when the legal moves are few, "hate-drafting," defensive placement, and countably optimal moves take over, and even the optimal move probably grants fewer points than the early-/mid-game moves that get the oohs and ahhs. As a result, the game's arc is a rise and then something of a sputter/drag as it finishes out.

Experience - Played this at a meetup and, in a rare moment, a friend decided to buy it based off that. Since have played it a few more times, and indeed have found that AP can be a bit agonizing. And yet, the game has always managed to fit that "arc of fun," where you get a few monster moves per game that make you feel great.

Future - There are so many middleweight euros out there that it's kind of hard to think of when this will be the #1 choice. I have heard it's best with two though...
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

46. Raiders of the North Sea (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Worker placement, tableau-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 45-75 minutes
Experience: 4-6 games over 4-6 sessions (2018-2019) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player attempts to gain the most VP by mostly raiding villages with high strength. On your turn, you play the one worker you have in hand onto an available action space and take the action on that space, then pull another worker off of its action space and take that space's action. Generally these actions give you a tableau of cards and a set of resources you must pay, preparing you for the raids... which you embark on by placing your worker, then taking the loot, then rolling a die for VP. There are also three tiers of workers that you pass through during the game.

Design - Raiders of the North Sea might be one of the most straightforward eurogames in the top section of my list. It's not incredibly elegant, nor is it super-fiddly. It's not super-complex, nor is it extremely lightweight. It's not an immense intellectual puzzle, nor is it mindlessly pleasant. What it is, is a solid experience that has some cool mechanics, some typical pieces, and some satisfaction when you count up the score.

The best part of Raiders is, without question, its central mechanism. Unlike so many other worker placement games, Raiders of the North Sea does not really offer you chances to hate-draft your opponent's actions. Placing a worker on a spot leaves that spot available as an action; the next player will just be pulling from instead of placing on that spot. I also really like the natural arc of the game as more and more people upgrade from black to grey to white, as you keep raiding - at first there will be a single higher-tier that gets fought over, but soon everyone will have that color.

The game also plays with action economy: certain actions are stronger (or only available) with later-game workers; other actions (specifically the one to get money) are actually stronger with the early-game workers. The way the payoffs change is really interesting.

While the interactivity via action-blocking is almost nil, there is a racing element to Raiders, which is essentially "achievement-drafting." While it can be tempting to sit back and just relentlessly build your engine by getting money and buffing your strength, the best loot comes from actually completing raids, even if you aren't strong enough to get the VP from your raid. It's nearly impossible to get certain resources without raiding, and there are limited raiding spots in the game - so you're heavily incentivized to go forward, pushing the game toward its conclusion.

Other than its worker placement system, there's nothing specifically notable about Raiders. It's just a snappy, fast-playing euro where the interactivity primarily comes from this racing element, which constantly lets you feel pretty good by snatching up the cool workers others place, and which gives you the occasional adrenaline burst when you roll your combat strength dice to see if you're scoring big on VP. And in that, it works great.

Experience - Due to its rather standard design, Raiders primarily makes it up here on the back of having some great plays with a fast speed. There was a copy in my group for a while because a visiting friend left it here, and it saw several plays over those months as a euro that's clearly long enough to be beyond filler and is a "complete" experience, while being much shorter and brian-burn-y than an Agricola type.

Future - Alas, that copy is back to the out-of-town friend. I don't know that Raiders is quite notable enough to buy (unlike, say, Agricola, which I think about a lot). But - especially if it works well at two, which admittedly I've never tried - it could fill a niche at a weight I'm very interested in...
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

that's insane

they have two MVPs in or near their prime

i guess this shouldn't be shocking though. letting ariza walk after taking GSW to 7 was absurdly cheap

hilariously, cheapness is what broke up OKC too
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

why are the rockets shopping clint capela for roco?! and why whould i want him if houston doesn't?

also roco isn't actually good. iggy at 36 is probably more useful.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

47. Hanabi (2010)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Cluegiving, restricted communication, sequence-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 25+ games over 15+ sessions (2015-2019)
Previous ranks: 51/100 (2016), 19/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player holds four cards so that everyone else can see them, but not the cardholder. On your turn, you either use a token give a hint - color or number - about a specific player's cards, discard a card to draw another and gain a token, or play a card. Playing a card means choosing a card and seeing if it is next in line in any of the sequences: 1 through 5 in every color. Once the deck is drawn or four incorrect cards are played, you sum the top numbers of all your sequences, and that's your score.

Design - This is the highest-ranked Antoine Bauza game on my list, and aside from a Japanese theme, it's really interesting to see how different all his designs are. Anyway, Hanabi is simple and clever: You can give clues, but even those clues are painfully limited. Everyone has to be at least somewhat aware, and the game is absolutely rife with opportunities for misinterpretation.

Experience - I did not like Hanabi the first time I played it. A lot of people can get pretty damn upset if you misinterpret their clues, and it feels like there can be a lot of passive-aggressiveness. And honestly, the game kind of engenders that. Unlike Pandemic where you can really talk through things and come to agreements (and feel bad when someone is dominating the game), here you can feel bad because you misremembered or misinterpreted a clue and played out of turn or threw away a key number. It's kind of a daunting prospect.

And yet, I saw the game for $5 over a year later and picked it up at Target and therefore decided to get some use out of it. And it turns out that taking the game less seriously, like so many other games, makes Hanabi better. Accepting that you'll make suboptimal plays is a key part of what makes Hanabi good. I've seen players agonize over a card, but in the end, the game is just more fun if you trust your teammates and shrug your shoulders - you're not going to deduce anything by waiting the extra thirty seconds to make a move. And quick play also allows multiple roudns of Hanabi in a single sitting, where a rhythm really develops.

Future - The new gaming partner doesn't specifically like Hanabi (though I wouldn't play it at two much) but approves of it as a quick game that anyone can get going. The fact that it is literally pocket-sized is another point in its favor. It has a very clear niche it can fill for travel or outdoors, and that makes it valuable.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

48. Pandemic (2008)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Point-to-point movement, set collection, action-point allocation
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 45-60 minutes
Experience: 15+ games over 10+ sessions (2015-2019) with 2-4 players
Previous ranks: 11/100 (2016), 8/80 (2018)

Summary - There are four diseases (represented by differently colored cubes) infecting the globe, each originating in a general region of the world. Each player is an employee of the CDC who gets four actions on their turn: traveling between cities, building research centers, treating diseases within cities, and researching cures for diseases. You discover a cure by collecting five city cards, which you draw at the end of your turn. After your turn, an infection deck spawns an increasing number of disease cubes in cities. The catch: sometimes the virus intensifies - i.e., the cities that were infected become the ones that will become infected again in the future.

Design - Like Catan for Eurogames, Pandemic is probably the archetypal cooperative board game. It's got a crackin' theme and an addictive puzzle and a blend of luck and strategy. It has the board fighting back violently with epidemics cards and escalating numbers of cubes added per turn. It has variable player powers. And it often has that climactic moment where you can win or lose.

Of course, this means that Pandemic also is the poster-child for some of the issues with cooperative games. The most common thing people accuse Pandemic of is being quarterback-heavy - i.e., it handles differences in player-skill very poorly; with no hidden information, the most skilled (or loudest) player can simply tell everyone else what to do. And this would actually benefit the team, while obviously not being fun for the players who are just being told what to do. Pandemic also can result in unsatisfying game arcs, if randomness hits in ways that make the game a walkover or just wrecks you in an unpreventable way. The game also vary weirdly in terms of how well it scales with respect to difficulty, depending on how the cards are drawn. All of these are pretty valid concerns to me, though I'd argue that the right cast of players can render the quarterbacking moot, and that luck on average enhances the experience.

For my money, the most brilliant thing about Pandemic is its "intensification" method, by which each game gains a distinctive flavor. Each game will start as some random smattering of cities across the globe, but depending on how you spread out to contain those cities, you'll be locked into paying attention there for essentially the whole game. I also really like the flight mechanic - you can discard a city card to fly to that city. But, in order to fly out of a city or, more importantly, build a research center, you need to discard the city you are in. So how do you balance moving around the slow way versus discarding the potentially precious city cards?

The one thing I find a little anticlimactic about Pandemic is that its "set-collection" method to cure diseases doesn't feel particularly cutting-edge. It's highly subject to luck of draw with almost zero mitigation, since sharing knowledge is an act that can happen maybe twice per game in an aggressive game. As a result, the scientist/researcher are overpowered in my opinion, and along with the medic are easily the best roles. Also, the game makes you desire to eradicate diseases, but that should happen rarely in most games. "Winning" with an overrun map somehow feels wrong. Nonetheless, these are rather small complaints that arguably simplify and make more accessible an excellent cooperative puzzle.

Experience - I first got Pandemic in 2012 or 2013 and was overwhelmed by the bookkeeping. (Indeed, the setup can be cumbersome, and I made the mistake of thinking you needed to stack the cubes). After I'd been in the hobby proper, I finally revisited the game and found it easy enough to pick up. I played it a few times at every player count and then started bringing it as a gateway game to meetups when I couldn't get myself into longer games. Letting or helping people solve stuff feels really good as an icebreaker type of game, and the theme is excellent and engrossing. While most games in my hobby group played were a bit newer than Pandemic, we also got a great night out of playing Pandemic like four times (and dying each time. Oops!) I've played it with my family and other non-gamer friends and had fun as well.

In 2019, Pandemic hit the table with my new gaming pal, for two rounds. The first time, we got blasted out by a shit epidemic draw. Fine. The second time, we simply couldn't draw into five of the same for some of the diseases. We lost due to running out the deck. It was insanely dispiriting, and that, perhaps more than anything, has dropped Pandemic's ranking hard.

Future - Given that Pandemic might have become game non grata to gaming pal #1, it feels a bit unlikely it'll hit the table anytime soon. Pandemic sits in a spot where we'll see a lot of games, where my future desire to play it is dampened in comparison to how much fun I've had in the past. I simultaneously feel that this ranking is justified and far too low. That's just how it works sometimes.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

49. Ca$h 'n Guns (2014)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, take that, simultaneous action selection, push-your-luck, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 10+ games over 10+ sessions (2016-2019)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 57/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is a conspirator in a series of successful robberies, armed with an actual foam toy gun. Over the course of eight rounds, players simultaneously load their guns, point them, and then (after assessing which guns are pointed at them) choose whether or not to "stay in," i.e. participate in the splitting of loot. Players who both stay in and do not get shot by a real bullet get to draft the loot.

Design - There's not a lot of strategy to CnG. It's fast and mean and occasionally groan-worthy, where your agency can often be restricted by the take-that mechanisms. But given the entire game is about take-that, it doesn't always feel quite as personal as in many other games. (A safe thing to do is point your gun at someone who shot you, or at the godfather, or at anyone before you in the turn order.) At only eight snappy rounds, it flows really well.

The best part of CnG is probably the small details. It's just really, really satisfying to point the foam guns at people. If you reveal your bullet, you show either a "BANG" or a "Click" for a blank. Then there's the cardboard cutout stands for your characters, which you knock over when you bail out. And speaking of the courage round, the game encourages you to yell "BANZAI!" if you do stay in. And there's the godfather piece, which both indicates the person with godfather privilege (and who starts the draft), but which also is the sole place that lists the phases of the game. For a game with an actual structure, it's super-useful to have a (rotating!) designated player who essentially narrates the round.

It can be unfun too. If people are determined to gang up on you, you can be locked out of the game, and it's possible to get entirely killed in a round or two. That realistically shouldn't happen, though, with sane people. For me it's a light filler that works really well.

Experience - CnG might have been my first (used) blind-buy. Not every play has been spectacular, but like many simpler games, it's high-floor/low-ceiling. I really like its effortless scaling.

Future - Since I've gotten plenty of mileage out of my copy of CnG, it's no longer something I pack every time I go to a meetup. That said, it's still fun pretty much every time it hits the table, as long as people are okay with a bit of take-that. I think it's a good option to have on hand without the explicit intent to get to the table.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

damian lilard is on an absurd tear

also celtics reck sixers oh yes
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

50. Ghost Blitz (2010)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Pattern recognition, reflexes, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 5-10 minutes to go through the deck
Experience: 20+ games over 20+ sessions (2016-2019) with 2-8 players, incl "5 to 12"
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 36/80 (2018)

Summary - Five wooden items sit at the table: a white ghost, blue book, red chair, grey mouse, and green bottle. You compete for cards: one card at a time is flipped, and then you have to race to grab the correct item. The correct item is determined by looking at the picture, which contains two of the items, but possibly of different colors. If one item is of its correct color, you grab that item. If neither item is of the correct color, you examine to see which item is not represented in either color or object.

Design - Another brain-freezing game. Ghost Blitz, like Jungle Speed, knows how to mix things up just the right amount. Most of the cards are of the "grab what's not there" ilk, like a blue ghost and a green mouse (red chair), so you program your brain one way... and then, suddenly, you'll be hit with a card like a blue ghost and a grey mouse. If you try to grab red chair (grey mouse), you'll be wrong and have egg on your face as someone else grabs the correct item.

The 5 to 12 version ups the number of items to nine, among five colors, and has three items represented in its pictures. The same rules apply, but you can also add "advanced" rules that cause the game to behave differently. It's a little less clean and elegant and brainless, but the mix between grabbing and talking, plus the increased brainpower to process, is a really nice change of speed.

Experience - I discovered Ghost Blitz at a marathon meetup where I hadn't really met anyone before. I played maybe seven new games that day, and in the end, this zero-strategy game wound up being my takeaway, which I bought. It's been a brilliant filler many times as a game that anyone can play, as long as they can recognize colors and can compete speed-wise in terms of grabbing. My most fun plays in large groups where it gets contentious (we've done variants where you compete to say the item first, since eight people can't realistically grab sensibly), or in the relatively uncommon cases where I'm evenly matched (my friend got the game to play with her kids, and she is probably the only person who's as good as I am).

Future - I kind of destroy most people I play with - Ghost Blitz is a no luck game - so it's hard to bring out Ghost Blitz in general. The faster player can win over 80% of the cards quite easily. That said, if I'm not going 100% or if I just need to fill space with something cute, I'm still totally up for it. Not like it wastes any time! I might also consider getting the 5 to 12 variant, but not being a centerpiece game, the appetite in my groups for complexity here has to be there - and that's no guarantee.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

51. Decrypto (2018)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Clue-giving, hidden communication, word game
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 15-45 minutes
Experience: 8+ games over 6+ sessions (2018-19) with 4-8 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each team has four words that only the team knows. Each round, one player on each team sees a different sequence of numbers, representing those words, and that player on each team has to give three public clues so that the other players on their team can guess the correct numbers. The catch is, while the opposing team does not know your words, they do know your clues and finds out what clues correspond to what numbers for your cards. In future rounds, they are granted the opportunity to "intercept" sequence-guesses of the opponent. Two interceptions by the opponent or two failed guesses on your own team, and you lose. Make it through eight rounds, and your tiebreaker is guessing your opponents' words straight-up.

Design - Decrypto is a true battle of the wits. You have to try really hard to outwit your opponents while not outwitting your own teammates when you give clues, and as a bonus, everyone takes turns giving clues in Decrypto. Unlike in other cluegiving games, you can't make your clues as accurate as you want them to be; they need to distinguish your cards but not necessarily identify them. For example, giving "yellow" and then "fruit" as clues for "banana" is extremely dangerous, because two rounds later, your opponent will know for sure that your word is "banana," and then any clues you give for it, when it shows up on your sequence, will be almost immediately identified. On the other hand, if you get too cute - "funny" for "banana" - your team might miss it. The danger of giving the single word that gives it away also terrifying. "Boat" is fine for banana. You can even get away with "curved." But toss in "split" in round three, and suddenly you're running up against very dangerous territory.

For some reason, Decrypto is nearly impossible to explain with words. It's one of those games that you just have to play a practice round of to get the hang of, unless you've independently read up on it. Separating the intercept phase and the open discussion phases is a little clunky, and keeping track of all the info you want to requires just a little more space than the paper gives you.

Experience - I got a lot of really good plays out of Decrypto, really fast. It has a very unique brain-burn-y, puzzle-y feeling that, in cluegiving games, can let you feel so indescribably clever. Figuring out your opponent's word is also incredibly satisfying; it's perfectly acceptable to say what you're thinking about the opponents' words because you have nothing to hide from them, and nailing their sequence also feels incredible.

That said, for a while, we had a core four thing going, and then early in 2019, the couple came back after having played a ton with their families, which made them much harder to beat. And then my erstwhile partner said, "I don't really like Decrypto." And that's the thing. As much as Decrypto can burn your brain and make you feel clever, it is one of those games where being noticeably worse than your opponent can feel really, really bad. It happened, and since then I haven't really played.

Future - With the right group I can bring it out again, but it feels like opportunities for that right group are a bit limited. The potential for negative feelings in teammate miscommunication is pretty rough; something about it is a little less laugh-filled than guessing wrong in other cluegiving games, perhaps due to the amount of thought that has to go into each clue. Additionally, the difficulty in teaching Decrypto creates another barrier to getting it to the table. I'll bide my time, though - it remains on my shelf, waiting for the stars to align again.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

52. Mysterium (2016)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Clue-giving, limited communication
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 40 minutes
Experience: 5-8 games (2015-2018)
Previous ranks: 32/100 (2016), 40/80 (2018)

Summary - One player is a recently murdered ghost while everyone else is a medium. Each medium is assigned a murderer, location, and weapon. The ghost, the only one who knows them, tries to clue the mediums in. They communicate by drawing cards from a deck with bizarre dream images on them, then assigning them to specific players. The players discuss and each place a guess at the same time, and if you are correct, you advance to the next tier.

Design - Mysterium is rather thin as an actual game. It's about interpreting pictures the way you hope the ghost intended, or vice versa choosing pictures as the ghost and hoping that the mediums discern your intent in what's essentially multiple choice game. It's not a "tight" game, with free redraws, the ability to dump your hand (as the ghost) just to redraw, and the ability to listen so closely to the mediums talking that you can communicate with them on almost an unfair basis.

As a result, it leans very heavily on its theme and components and the hope that players enjoy one another's company. For the most part, Mysterium succeeds big-time here. The game is absolutely gorgeous, starting from the box and large, eerie-bluish ghost screen. Cardboard ravens perch on the edge of the screen. Drawing obvious inspiration from Clue, it's got a motley crew of suspects, beautifully illustrated locales in an ominous manor, and some classic murder weapons to choose from. And the art on the dream/clue cards - if you like surreal, weird, fantasy-themed art, as you'll find in a game later on this list, you will love the images here. All the better that the game all about contemplating those images.

From there, it's up to you to adjust the difficulty level and try to have fun.

Experience - I was really excited for Mysterium. In fact, it was one of the early games that I discovered by my own research and was thrilled to have brought to the table. I was the first ghost and thoroughly enjoyed the toughness of interpretation.

Since then I've had both good and bad games. The replay in one sitting is very questionable; even in spread-out games with one group, the meta of "this card means that suspect" grows very quickly. It's a game that is perhaps most fun when players are failing and struggling; I think in an experienced group, playing with nine suspects (three dummies vs six true suspects) is way more enjoyable than with six or seven.

This game therefore seems incredibly dependent on enjoying the company. There's no objective puzzle to solve, so the game is much more fun with tabletalk among the mediums. The single best memory I had was in a game with four players, whom I like, but two of whom I barely get to play with at all due to living across the country. We spent most of the time doubting each other's options, trashing the cluegiver, and often making contradictory bets (i.e. picking the same location). Is that to the game's credit? Its detriment? All games are more fun with a fun crowd.

Future - Wanting to play Mysterium means desiring a raucous good time, whoch isn't always guaranteed. The risk is seemingly low, being short and relatively pleasant. Problem is, its setup and teardown are unfortunately rather comically cumbersome. I will typically opt for something else (in a way I won't for many games ranked this high), but I'm still willing to take the gamble on a good group, because it can be really fun when it's right.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

53. Dr. Eureka (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Pattern recognition, dexterity/real-time, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 1 minute per hand
Experience: 30+ hands over 2 sessions with 2, 3 players (2017, 2019)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player has six small, colored balls (of three colors) that sit in three graduated cylinders. A card is revealed with some configuration of balls in cylinders on them, and all players then rush manipulate their balls into that configuration. First player to make the shape wins the card.

Design - Dr. Eureka is beautifully simplistic. If you've ever played with logic puzzles before like "You have a container that can hold five liters and a container that can hold three liters; how do you get four liters," you'll understand the patterns at work in Dr. Eureka.

The components are simple and clear and attractive (red, green, and purple) and wonderfully tactile. (In particular, the little plastic "atoms" clink when they hit each other). Being spherical and mostly frictionless, they also make it very difficult for a panicking player to pour the correct number of balls out of their cylinder, leading to that fun frustration that happens in real-time games.

Experience - I've only played Dr. Eureka at two separate occasions, and it's been incredibly fun both times. We wound up playing dozens of cards each time. The shine could come off it in future plays, of course, but it really helps that the most recent play was with the likely primary gaming partner, and you can play it with two players and enjoy it.

Future - Because it plays well with two and my primary gaming partner liked it, Dr. Eureka could find itself on my shelf. A few more plays could persuade me more in this direction, but they also might reveal a relative lack of staying power.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

54. For Sale (1997)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Bidding, simultaneous action selection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 10+ games over 7+ sessions with 4-6 players (2015-19)
Previous ranks: 14/100 (2016), 22/80 (2018)

Summary - During the first half of For Sale, players bid on property cards that are ranked in value from 1 to 30. Each round, the same number of properties as players is revealed as the offer. An auction then starts for the highest valued property. Passing means you get the lowest remaining property and that you only pay half your current bid, while the person who wins (and gets the highest-valued property) pays full price. Then, with the collected property forming their hands, all players simultaneously blind-bid on money cards, with the player who chooses the highest property taking down the largest money card. Your score is the sum of your money cards and any leftover money from the first half of the game.

Design - For Sale is about evaluation. Evaluate the worth of a property correctly and you're likely to win. However, it's also deeply interactive; you need to consider what opponents are likely to bid, what you think you'll need to win, and how high you think you can go without being forced to win before placing your bid. The decisions are juicy due to the benefit you gain by passing, meaning that the other properties on offer are very important. Say the bid is at four already on 28-27-22-4 - you really want not to take that 4, but if you bid five, odds are that everyone will pass on you and you'll be out the full five for a rather marginal benefit compared to the people who spent only two (rounding down from that four). The choice is fairly simple, but the points of consideration are many.

The second half of the game features blind bidding, which features yet more evaluation. Here, there's another nice mix of luck - in the clustering of the numbers that come out - and basic strategy. Because there is no turn-by-turn evaluation, there's something of a press-your-luck element, where you might really want to win at least second place in a 15-14-2-0 spread, but your best number is 28 - will both 29 and 30 place those numbers? Will you blow your 28? Most decisions aren't that extreme, but it's cool to see how your decisions in the first half of the game impact the rest of it.

Experience - For Sale is yet another game that I first got into during the "fear the euro" phase. It was one of the great palette-cleansers of its time and had the bonus of playing five players extremely comfortably and stretching to six if need be. Lightning-quick decisions and a simple skillset (evaluation/some gambling/some interactivity) made it a favorite of mine whenever it reared its head at game night. Since then, I've become happier playing those heavier euros and need less of a "filler-ish" palette-cleanser, often preferring something either a little more "tableau"-y in its class or a little more party-ish (but for a small player count).

Future - I requested For Sale at a game night last year to introduce new gaming pal to it, and she thought it was... okay. It seems therefore not the likeliest that I'll actually request For Sale much in the future. And that's fine - playing it once a year could probably slake my entire thirst for it. It's had a good run in my top rankings, but as time goes on, it may continue to slip.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

well no point in playing coy at this point - i believe agricola is my highest-ranked uwe on this list.

i'm quite interested in fields of arle and have one confusing/long play of ora et labora.

feast for odin got its second play after i made the ranking. in 2021 or 2022 it'll make a showing.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

never played caverna. have heard the setup is a nightmare and that every option is always open, which sounds pretty brutal for my analysis paralysis!
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

55. Agricola (2007)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Worker placement, tableau-building, tile-laying
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 6-8 games over 6-8 sessions with 2-5 players (including online/app), 2015-2019
Previous ranks: 38/100 (2016), 37/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs their own farm, a 3x4 grid, and feeds a growing family of workers. Over fourteen rounds, players collect resources, gain special abilities (from cards dealt at the beginning of their game), grow crops, raise animals, upgrade the house's size and material, grow their family, and most importantly, make sure not to let their families starve. At the end of the game, you get points for basically everything above, with a twist that ignoring any given category nets negative points.

Experience - Agricola was one of my worst first-experiences ever. It was my first worker placement game. Without an actual proper meal myself, my stomach was experiencing some pains as people I kinda knew were crowded around the table - five in all - taking agonizingly long on their turns and alwyas doing something called baking bread. I was unable to get wood (needed to do basically anything), never first player, stuck with the fewest workers, and perpetually taking the sad "here's a few food items" option to stay afloat. The game lasted three and a half hours, and I trudged away with a sad defeat, no positive interactions, and (hey) at least I maxed out my house and humans.

And yet... unlike many longer strategy games I played back then, I returned to Agricola later (and never with five again). At different meetups, with at least some sense of round progression, I still was mostly bad and made for plenty of last place finishes. But the games moved faster, and I felt at least more empowered, being able to view the game as a decision space instead of a directive of "fuck you, you must do this." While I never played with that original group again, I did play once on IOS with friends casually and even once online with a friend (getting my ass kicked badly). In 2019, a friend brought it to a meetup, and I won my first ever game. It took some luck, but also obviously experience helped.

In short, and I suspect this is the case for many complex games with broad and deep decision spaces, experience matters. Not just for winning, though - also for enjoyment. And that's one of the tough things to grapple with ranking Agricola.

Design - One of the first words that comes to mind when I think of Agricola: punishing. Unlike so many other eurogames, Agricola defaults you at -14 points. It's very unafraid of negative points, and it shrinks your possibilities of expansion with a brutal subsistence farming message: you have to do everything. You need fences, stables, fields, corn, vegetables, and uneaten animals of every type. The game is relatively long in playtime, but not that long in actions. The scoring rubric essentially demands that everyone play the same game, which makes the worker placement cruel and brutal.

And many of these point-scoring mechanisms rely heavily on past actions, forcing you to go in some order. You realistically need fences before getting sheep; a home increase to grow your family; a plowed field and an acquired vegetable before you can grow them, which is its own action... and of course, you need to make sure to feed your family repeatedly throughout the game, so make sure not to eat all your vegetables/grain/sheep before the game ends. Your plans can be easily disrupted by other players (unintentionally) due to the worker placement blocking, but long-term planning is obviously needed. It's fiddly as hell; aside from replenishing all the resources, different action spaces are unlocked each round, and you basically need to internalize what you're "saving up for" before they're unveiled.

With the dizzying array of available action spots, almost none of which is useless - over twenty by the time the game ends - Agricola can be overwhelming if you don't have the right plans. (And remember, plans are necessary due to how each desirable outcome requires predecessor materials.) What's most important in actually succeeding at Agricola is developing an engine, for resources and/or food, and preferably both. That of course is where the cards (which are even more brutal to newcomers) come in: you're dealt fourteen cards at the beginning of the game, each of which grants a special power, generally increasing your incentive to take certain actions.

Every player should be trying to play one or two of their best powers early, which will drastically ease the pain of the game later and can define a strategy. Even in the first sad game I played, I was able to grasp for points late because of the occupation card which let me have cheaper upgrades to my house. Hello stone house. There is of course also the oven which is available to all players, which can ease the pain of feeding your family by allowing you to cook your grains or animals.

Why does it feel worth it? Why did I grow to like Agricola? Was it just Stockholm Syndrome and the feeling of "finally, I can win at this game, fuck you"? I don't think that's all. Part of what makes Agricola's punishing nature feel so bad is that it looks harmless and really enjoyable. Despite how the scoring goes, you'll always have your own farm at the end of the day. And it'll always be a little different. Did you get a fenced stable this time? How did you arrange your fences? Why do you have so many fields? Nice animals! Later editions of the game introduced animeeples and clearer wooden resources, further improving the game's visual appeal.

The game is also wonderfully thematic. Yeah, it's a mess and it's painful. But all of the ingredients make sense... it's subsistence farming. Even worker placement, which is often a fairly abstract mechanism, makes sense in most cases: only one person can use the plow per day, or harvest wood from the forest, or whatever. (Feel free to insert joke about only one hospital bed now.)

Uwe Rosenberg is one of the most respected game designers on the planet. While many people will have different favorite Uwes, Agricola is generally considered to be his masterpiece.

Future - Given that I've now got the experience, you'd think Agricola is likely to rise with future plays. The question now is how likely it'll be to hit the table, with no more copies in my regular game group and me being likely the most experienced at it now. Trying to bring others up to speed... rough thought.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they i

56. Cottage Garden (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Drafting, tile-laying
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Experience: 2-3 games over 2-3 sessions with 3-4 players (2017-2019)

Summary - Each player is filling in their own rectangular-grid fields with Tetris pieces. Fill in a field and it clears, and you score both red points and blue points, depending on how many are still showing (though you may also cover them for expediency/sanity). On your turn you draft a tile from a grid, based on an arrow that moves around the perimeter of the board.

Design - Cottage Garden is simple. In fact, it's the spiritual (and mechanical!) sequence to Patchwork, designer Uwe Rosenberg's two-player first foray into tetramino-drafting and -laying. It's an inherently solitary puzzle, and the hate-drafting in Cottage Garden is of course smaller than Patchwork, accommodating more than two players. Anyway, Cottage Garden is more adorable than Patchwork (you can use a cat to fill a gap for some reason. It's cute.) You push a little wheelbarrow around at the beginning of your turn.

The offer mechanic might be a little out of place and there's not a lot going on in a game that's probably just beyond a filler for new players. But man, it's cute, it's relaxing, and it's fun.

Experience - We gifted Cottage Garden to a friend for her birthday and have played it two or three times. We consider it a requirement to make a squeaky sound as you push the wheelbarrow, which is about as roleplay-y or goofy as we ever get in a game. Later play went faster than the first - perhaps because it was three players instead of four, but perhaps because of familiarity with rules leading to snappier decisions - and it was really nice.

Future - I actually am pretty inclined to play Cottage Garden again. Want my primary gaming mate to get to experience it! There are eurogames of similar complexity higher up on this list, but it's possible that with more reps, Cottage Garden could make a play to fill that niche as well.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Naye745 posted...

tzolkin was definitely a neat game but it kind of bugged me how there were like only 2 pathways to getting points, and if you didnt figure out how to sequence them early on you were going to lose

that said it was way earlier in my experience with eurogames so i'd probably enjoy it more now
(but i've preferred a couple of the designers' other titles - teotihuacan and voyages of marco polo - a lot more)

i think i liked tzolk'in more than teotihuacan, which i've only played once. the two have a lot in common, other than the central mechanism. i think tzolk'in definitely deserves a second look! (and teotihuacan for me.) haven't played voyages of marco polo.

SBAllen posted...

Pit is my 7-year-old son's favorite game that we own. He always calls it "the yelling game". It's also under $10 on Amazon to get a copy so it won't put you out to buy a new copy!

that's adorable and made me laugh out loud.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

57. Jungle Speed (1997)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, pattern-recognition, reflexes
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 10+ games over 7+ sessions with 6-8 players (2015-16)
Previous ranks: 17/100 (2016), 23/80 (2018)

Summary - Each person has a stack of cards with an intricate geometric pattern on it. Each turn you flip a card onto the top of your faceup pile. Flip the same pattern as someone else, and you duel, i.e. have to race to grab a totem pole set in the center of the table. The loser of a duel takes the winner's cards. A few other cards can cause everyone to participate. The first person to lose all their cards wins.

Design - Jungle Speed is the obvious predecessor to Anomia. It's simple and clean, with some deviously similar-looking-but-not-identical cards that can severely punish you for grabbing the totem pole out of hand. Its most obvious issue is people's proximity to the totem pole - a game designed to play eight, which relies on people being able to grasp a single object, naturally favors people closer to that object. (It also favors people more able to see the card being flipped.) Like Anomia, Jungle Speed has the fun, unique ability to turn an intelligent person's brain into mush in a split second.

What makes Jungle Speed so devastatingly effective is its change-of-pace cards - several cards can cause players other than the non-active player to become involved in duels. So not only are you always checking to see if you match the shape of the player who flipped the card, sometimes you need to check to see if you match anyone's color, or you need to flip your own card along with everyone else, or you need to just race and grab the center totem before everyone else. Because you're constantly off balance, you can never develop quite the right rhythm.

Experience - Jungle Speed, like several other games, was a game that's moved away but that saw a lot of play back in the day. It was a reason to look forward to bigger gatherings.

Future - Those bigger gatherings are rarer now, and trends go heavier. I feel nostalgia thinking about Jungle Speed, and those times. If that bigger group can be reunited for a game night, then yes. Otherwise, maybe I'll wait until it's a newer group of gamers.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

Nelson_Mandela posted...

Also I support a similar list for other decades

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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness

for the topics where i liked the feedback, i liked just saving the whole page as html
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness