Lurker > SeabassDebeste

KommunistKoala posted...

I just love all the different ways you can win in the game. There is some randomness to which cards you get, though there is a draft variant, where the 4 cards you draw get drafted and passed around the table like in 7 Wonders/Sushi Go which can eliminate some randomness and add more player interaction. The award system is great (even if it doesn't match the theme lol) with gambling on your ability to win an award early or waiting towards the end to pay more for an award you're more sure to win.

I do think it at least needs the Prelude expansion which makes the game have an asymmetrical start and helps avoid the boring 1st/maybe 2nd generation if you're only playing base game.

I've never played with less than 4 players and 1 person in particular always takes too long on his turns but otherwise it's great. Still need to try the new expansion

drafting each round seems to favor experienced players who know the deck deeply. so while this could be an improvement, to someone like me, i imagine it's more a penalty - not to mention all the extra AP that would be induced by looking through so many extra cards...!

cyko posted...

I am shocked to see Pret a Porter up here! That's one of my favorite games of the last year. I only have the second edition - not the new third edition - and the rulebook is a huge mess, but printing up the re-translated book off of BGG cleared things up immensely. Ignacy creates some fun games, but his rulebooks are notoriously awful.

I do love the unique theme of Pret a Porter, though. It's entertaining to hear cutthroat arguments about fashion shows. That game is surprisingly intense. Oh, And endless Zoolander jokes - "that Boho - it's so hot right now..."

haha, i had never heard of this game but my friend went on an acquisition tear late last year and i wound up logging two plays thanks to it. thankfully i never had to go through the rulebook.

to me, the iconography on the board is messy, but the cards are understandable. and yeah, the art for the outfits themselves is dope.

this is more a point on game design than on the theme, but i like the contests because they focus your goals. in general those stars are the way to win the game, so they encourage everyone to compete on similar goals.

Maniac64 posted...

Played takenoko.

We definitely enjoyed it but I can already see some of the issues mentioned. Not sure how much we would replay and feeding the panda is so much easier and better for most the game. The shape objectives are way more difficult and worth the same amount or less. They all need at least one more point for each of them.

But our game ended 41 to 40 and we had fun slow it was definitely a good experience. I could see checking it out again to play with family once.

yup, replayability is probably my big question mark on takenoko! glad you enjoyed it.

Tom Bombadil posted...

I think that's the first writeup that's made me think "ooh I wanna try that"

in that case this was a success
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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

58. Pit (1903)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Set collection, trading, real-time, limited communication, multiple hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 5 minutes per hand
Experience: 20+ hands over 7+ sessions with 4-8+ players (2015-16)
Previous ranks: 66/100 (2016), 45/80 (2018)

Summary - Everyone plays as a commodity trader holding a hand of disparate commodities cards (cocoa, cows, etc). In real time, everyone makes trades of identical sets, but you can't say what you're offering! "Two! Two!" You might say, offering two cocoa, hoping to receive back two of anything else. A hand ends with the first person to assemble a full hand of nine identical items.

Design - Pit is really, really straightforward. In terms of what it's supposed to be, I think it mostly succeeds - it's hectic, loud, adrenaline-inducing, confusing, and fun. It's blatantly unfair depending on who decides to trade with whom; you can be very lucky or luncky easily; a person can technically break the game by getting singles of everything.

Experience - But the fun part of Pit sticks out to me. Like Two Rooms and a Boom, it's a game that I played mostly in those halcyon days, when large gatherings were plentiful and everyone hadn't moved away. Pit sticks out as one of those games that everyone played, including the significant others that didn't usually play, and which pretty much everyone enjoyed as well. I don't know that I've ever technically finished a game (you're supposed to keep track of your score across hands or something).

Favorite memory here is probably playing it at a vacation house at 2 AM or so with four people. Every player finished their set at the same second. There were a lot of laughs and a quick realization, "man, it's time to go to bed."

Future - Since no one in any of my current groups owns Pit, it seems unlikely I will play it again anytime soon. I wonder how it will hold up.
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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

59. Tzolk'in (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Worker placement, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 90-120 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 4-5 sessions (including online) with 2-4 players (2015-16)
Previous ranks: 34/100 (2016), 33/80 (2018)

Summary - Tzolk'in is a Mayan-civilization themed worker placement game, played over twenty-four rounds. On a turn you can either 1. place available workers on the lowest open spots of gears or 2. pull placed workers off of gears to gain benefits. The gears physically(!) rotate each round, moving each placed worker on it one spot higher. The higher a worker is on a gear when it is pulled off, the better the reward is gained. Goals include feeding workers, going up temple tracks, gaining resources, building monuments, and improving technology tracks.

Design - It's impossible to talk about Tzolk'in without talking about its gear system. They are its defining characteristic and by far its most distinctive visual feature. Each gear is themed: this gear is for resource conversion; this gear is for corn to feed workers; this gear is to upgrade tech tracks. And physically speaking, they're gear-shaped for a reason: they are all connected to one larger gear in the center of the board, which is turned each round (automatically moving your workers up gear tracks). The center gear represents the flow of the entire year as well; when it makes a full revolution (a full year), the game ends. Tzolk'in is almost painfully clever in that mechanism.

And how well does it integrate intp the gameplay? Pretty damn great -. There are two general flavors of worker placement: You place a worker (or workers) and immediately take the action (see Lords of Waterdeep), or you place your worker(s) during one phase and resolve them during another (see Caylus, Pret a Porter). Tzolk'in is undoubtedly a worker placement game, but uniquely, some turns you'll be seeding actions and others you'll be reaping them. The passage of time can give you a feeling of really "investing" in your workforce. It's really satisfying to pull off multiple workers in one go and make big turns.

All of the mechanisms of Tzolk'in are great, and on top of those, it's fun to play. You get a bunch of stuff to do, depending on the gear you've strategized in. You can build an engine and reap repeated rewards by going to the tech track; you can get a ton of resources and gain VPs from monuments; you can gain unique rewards off crystal skulls; and you can race people to get immediate and future resources and VPs by going up the god tracks. Feeding your workers isn't that punishing, and you can get large amounts of corn quickly on the corn track, and you don't need that much if you don't blow your corn by placing higher up than the bottom. The decision tree is very broad, which is great. Lots of good feelings.

I have to wonder, though, if Tzolk'in is particularly deep, or if it has a coherent strategy in mind. While I'm no expert (I've never won a game or been particularly close), it does have a typical "rush to max your workers" element to it. In a game where feeding workers is an element, I've noticed that occasional starvation can seem extremely profitable. The game feels a little too eager to throw you into the sandbox without fixed goals, but some synergies appear overwhelmingly strong compared to others. Maybe this is intentional. Hard to say! Nonetheless, deciding when to place and when to pull off your workers always feels like a satisfying puzzle.

Experience - Tzolk'in has been a staple on my list in the mid-high tier since the first one. Obviously, it's been a long time since I've played the game - it was one of my first heavier games that I enjoyed, which can be attributed both to its relatively forgiving game design and spectacular table presence. I've also played it online, which speeds up the game of course (especially the upkeep) and lets you see a little more clearly just how others are gaining those points, though not being able to turn the wheel naturally doesn't feel great.

Future - I think Tzolk'in is overdue to be played again! Once again, I find it somewhat unlikely it will hit the table for me soon given the people who own it - but I think it's very deserving of a "second" look.
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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

60. The Mind (2018)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Sequence-building, restricted communication
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 10-20 minutes
Experience: 8-10 plays over 3-5 sessions with 2-5 players (2019-20)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Everyone has a hand of unique cards numbered 1 to 100. The goal of the game is, without talking or indicating the cards in your hand, to have everyone play their cards in order. With each round, you're dealt an increasing number of cards, and sometimes you can earn one-off abilities to give you leeway for errors.

Design - The Mind is... weird. Many have argued that it's not really a game, and while you can make a case for that - with practically no structure - there also arises a clearly cooperative rhythm in the right group. The stripped-down ruleset of The Mind enables players to play intuitively, with some sense of push-your-luck while attempting to meld minds together.

Experience - That's what The Mind is - an experience. You can have good examples - where you lock in and put your hands on the table and groan when you just miss - and then it can totally miss in a group where the buy-in doesn't feel right. I've had both.

Future - I feel I've seen of what The Mind has to offer at this point. It always takes a few rounds to fall into rhythm together, and that getting-into-rhythm is what the game is about. That said, experiencing it with different people can make it 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

i can't remember if i cried when i read about his widowed bride
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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

61. Pret a Porter (2010)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tableau-building, economic, set collection, worker placement
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 2 plays or 2 sessions with 3 players (2019)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player is an aspiring fashion mogul competing over one year in four quarterly fashion shows over number of outfits, demonstrated quality, PR points, and trend points. Each quarter consists of three months: two worker placement rounds and the fashion show, with a payday (monetary cost) after each months. During the worker placement phase, players can build a tableau of buildings/contracts/workers that can increase efficiency but raise monthly costs; get outfit ideas (i.e. draw cards); or purchase materials used to create those outfits.

Design - Hey, it's one of the first worker placement games to hit the rankings. Worker placement is a nice mechanic for indirect interaction - during any given round, you want to take a certain set of actions, but you need to prioritize them because other players may occupy some of your spots first. In a game like Pret where you're building your company's engine and collecting design ideas hat all fit a certain suit, prioritizing the actions you want any given year is very important.

The best parts about Pret: a unique theme, economic tightness changing with your engine, and the focus on the shows. I really like the fashion theme - Rococo is the only other tailoring game I've played, and I didn't like it much. Then there's the economic aspect - generally, most rounds of Pret, you're spending your way down or increasing your salary, making planning tough but payouts really satisfying when you're finally able to refill your bank account. And most interestingly, I like the fashion shows - you're judged based on how many of each category you're accrued relative to other players. This forces everyone to compete indirectly each time, so while it affects basically nothing else about the game, there's incentive to go after that PR specialist or to buy expensive threads even if the spot to buy cheap threads is open.

One area where Pret may suffer a bit is with saturation of rules and especially of the board state. While it is perfectly sensible to compete over the number of outfits of a line you can produce, the other three areas of competition - Quality, PR, and Trendiness - leave something to be desired. While it's thematic that you'd compete over them, they are simply tokens. Quality at least you get from buying more expensive (but otherwise identical) cloth, which makes sense. PR and Trendiness on the other hand seem to come mainly from cards. And there are twelve cards to read per season, which is an absolute ton of information to try to evaluate. That becomes visually noisy and hard to parse.

Add that to feeding after every worker placement round and a design decision to have action resolution in a separate phase from placement, and you have a recipe for slowing the game down. I think being one quarter shorter, given it's an economic snowball, wouldn't have been the worst thing for Pret.

Experience - I really liked Pret both times I played it. That said, winning can introduce a big bias, and I might have broken the game the second time - no one denied me a few buildings that turned into a massive snowball. Not having to worry about economic tightness really frees up the engine in Pret in a way that might not be great for the game, unless everyone can do it.

Future - Might be kinda hard to get to the table. I had originally considered buying it myself, but weight is a bit of an issue, and I'm not sure if the primary gaming partner loved getting pasted. Oops. I think on a per-play enjoyment average, it might beat two of the worker placement games above it, so further plays could help it rise or settle it into its rank 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

KommunistKoala posted...

One of my favorites RIP

my primary gaming mates right now are a couple who own TM, and it's possibly their single favorite game that they've played 2p. i haven't played TM with them in months, so maybe i should request it soon!

what are your favorite aspects of 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

62. Terraforming Mars (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tableau-building, card-drafting, tile-laying
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 3-4 plays over 3-4 sessions with 4-5 players (2018-19); one play with expansions
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player is a corporation tasked with making Mars more hospitable to human life: increasing oxygen level with trees, increasing the temperature, and filling the oceans. Each age consists of players receiving cards and gaining income, then taking turns performing up to two actions until they all pass out of the age. The game ends in the age when all three terraforming tracks are maxed out.

Design - Terraforming Mars is messy. Its player board is notoriously bad (forcing you to track your income potential, your money, and all your resource counts with personal tracks that are very easily disturbed). The card art isn't particularly consistent.

It's fiddly. There are a bunch of resources to keep track of and mechanics that don't always tie great together and seem to be there mainly for the theme. It's easy to get sucked up in the cards and forget about the actions that are printed on the board as well; you can always pay twenty-five dollars to build a city or something, but you can quickly forget. You have to convert your energy into heat, and it doesn't seem to add anything to the experience except rules overhead and more things that can be disrupted with a bump of the table.

It's long. While in my games people have generally terraformed Mars at a fast rate, it's an engine-builder where games are known to go ages because people are more invested in running their engines than in pushing the endgame by planting trees or raising temperature.

It's random and sometimes mean. Resources are useless without the right type of cards; many cards have different synergies that you need luck to roll into. Occasionally you'll have cards that have a take-that feature in a eurogame that really doesn't need any.

And yet... I kinda like it. It's satisfying when you do string some actions together, and it's fun to hit those bump-lines when you terraform to just the right temperature. And of course there's the theme, which is the real excuse for all the fluff. The chrome in Terraforming Mars is what justifies all the mess - each card, with all its exceptions and garbage attached to it, generally makes sense as to why it behaves the way it does. Like of course you can only have livestock once the temperature reaches a certain degree. Of course predators eat others' animals. Of course a meteor is destructive. Of course you have placement rules for oceans and cities. The theme ties everything together (except possibly the funded awards and buying the cards) and that is great.

Experience - I've played TM a few times and found it good. There's a lot of hype behind the game which eludes me, but while I've never done particularly well, there is something inherently satisfying about competently runninga complex machines. Like hey, I found a way to use this titanium! Or whatever.

Future - It might be worth a few more goes to see if I can actually get any better at evaluating the cards (which seems to be the most important decision point of the game) and just to fill in Mars again. TM is probably a bit high on my list for what I've played of it; however, it could easily justify this ranking or go higher if I were to get a good engine going or to find more of what others love about 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

63. No Thanks! (2004)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Bidding, push-your-luck, sequence-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 10-15 minutes
Experience: 10-20 plays over 5-10 sessions with 4-5 players (2015-2019)
Previous ranks: 36/100 (2016), 38/80 (2018)

Summary - Your goal is to minimize points taken via cards. There's one card in the center with a number on it (3 to 35), and on your turn you either add a token if you have one (-1 point) to it to pass on it or take it and all the tokens other players dropped. However, any sequence of cards that you assemble scores only the lowest number on it (so 5-6 will score only 5, not 11).

Design - Simple and brilliant, No Thanks! distills decision-making into a binary: do I want the card or not? But a lot weighs into this: How many points are you taking right now? How likely is it to get a connecting piece with future negative points attached to it? If I have the 33 and the 32 is up for bid, should I take the 32 now, or pass and let it collect negative points from other players first? How long can I afford to do that before someone says fuck it and takes it from me? Even if it's bad for me, can I afford to give up a token right now (and risk getting stuck with an even worse number later)? With nearly a third of the deck (nine cards) removed each game, what are the odds that I'll be able to see the cards I need to build the sequence? (This is particularly painful if you're trying to decide whether to get that 19 when you've got 17 showing.)

Due to its filler weight, No Thanks! is going to have a small hole or two. It is luck-dependent. And because of its peculiar brand of player interactivity, different players may see different opportunities: if the player to your right loves snapping up cards, then you'll always be first to be offered cards, and the decisions might not be as interesting. No Thanks! plays like a 6 nimmt! type of game that needs to be iterated to have any meaningful value due to the swinginess of a single hand. And of course there's some spite; since No Thanks! is clearly non-zero-sum, it's always a question if you want to be the one to "take one for the team."

Experience - I haven't played No Thanks! a ton. I haven't played it every year I've been in the hobby, and I don't feel the urge to play it. But it's really reliable as a palette cleanser. Have positive memories of waiting for others to finish a different game with it, or ending a long game night with it, or having it be a breath of fresh air early on when I was overwhelmed with heavy games.

Future - I don't know that I need No Thanks! in my collection but with any group from 3-5, hard to see me turning down a round. There are a lot of games in a somewhat fluid tier here. While NT has rather limited potential to rise, it also wouldn't really fall other than just becoming a bit tired of it, or other games surpassing 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

didn't know this was on switch, i think i'll get 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...

Isle of Skye is neat. I've only played it a few times but the most recent play was with the Journeyman expansion which lets you use a pawn to explore your kingdom which I thought was a nice addition.

isle of skye is short enough that i'd be worried about adding a mechanic like that!

Naye745 posted...

i really dig the variable scoring system in isle of skye

the tile laying and even bidding stuff work well but don't seem particularly groundbreaking
but the scoring options? good stuff

like an anti-seasons, i feel like all the parts of IOS come together well!

cyko posted...

I haven't played Isle of Skye yet, but I do enjoy Castles of Mad King Ludwig - which Isle of Skye seems somewhat similar to. Has anyone played both enough to offer a comparison?

only played MKL once. the castle-building there is definitely more fun than IOS's, but IOS's market mechanic is probably a bit better? would take replays to discern

Maniac64 posted...

My wife isnt super into tabletops. It's very hard to find games for us as she isnt very competitive and doesnt like deception games. And neither of us like co-op games that are super challenging to win.

takenoko can be very relaxing, hope it goes well!

Naye745 posted...

seasons is okay. i've enjoyed playing it online but i think your quote "less than the sum of its parts" is a really good summation of seasons and why i find it fairly underwhelming.

to be fair, those parts are WAY better physically! the upkeep is slower (increasing downtime as you do arithmetic) but it's much more satisfying IMO
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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

64. Seasons (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Card-drafting, tableau-building, dice-drafting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-75 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 3-4 sessions with 4 players (2017)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 32/80 (2018)

Summary - At the beginning of Seasons, everyone drafts an equal-sized hand of cards and divides them to be drawn at the beginning of each of three game years. Each year is four seasons, which advance by the last remaining die in a dice draft, which grants various resources, extra cards, and the like. These resources are generally spent to play your cards, which have instant abilities, ongoing abilities, and victory points.

Design There are several minigames within Seasons. It starts with a card draft, which essentially determines the powers and points you are capable of earning throughout the game, as well as which resources to prioritize. Then there's collecting those resources via the dice and trying to control the season track. And finally, there's playing the actual cards, deciding which order to play them in. Each of these is a fun game in and of itself.

Is Seasons somewhat less than the sum of its parts, though? Card-drafting like Sushi Go and dice-drafting like Grand Austria Hotel don't often go together, and that card-drafting phase, which takes perhaps fifteen AP-laced minutes at the beginning seems to take on an outsized importance in the outcome of the game, relative to more mechanically satisfying parts of the game: rolling the dice and actually playing the cards. Is there just a little too much downtime?

Experience - Seasons is like a fever dream in my mind: we played it twice in person and loved the feeling of the differently colored dice, the season-changing mechanism, tapping our cards for their abilities, tracking victory points. We agreed this was one of those games we could play repeatedly and get a feel for, get to know the cards, grow in together. Then we played online two or three times. And then... I think it might never have hit the table ever again. And now that was over two years ago.

Future - For some reason, maybe tied to reading online, Seasons with four seems rather daunting now. The card draft at the beginning feels cumbersome in my mind, and for some reason, I anticipate downtime. That said, I still want to give it another shot and reassess, if only because of that past great experience.
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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

i imagine it goes

lebron A
giannis B
ad A
embiid B
kawhi A
harden B
siakam A
doncic B
walker A
young B

something like this?
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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

i remember hearing about spy party. it sounds utterly fascinating. i also think there's absolutely no way i'd be able to succeed at either role.
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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

65. Isle of Skye (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Bidding, tile-laying, city-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-60 minutes
Experience: 4-6 plays over 4-6 sessions with 4-5 players (2016-2018)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 28/80 (2018)

Summary - Everyone is building a personal isle using square tiles. Each round, everyone draws three tiles and places them for offer. Knowing what everyone else is offering, you simultaneously (and secretly) assign values and an ax to each of the tiles you've been dealt. The values assigned are simultaneously revealed, and then in turn order, players get to use their leftover money to buy other players' tiles. At the end of the round, you buy your own unbought tiles and pay money to the bank for them. Scoring happens based on different island criteria each round.

Design - Isle of Skye has a few things going for it: the offer mechanic, the short play-time, and the tile-laying. The short play-time and tile-laying add to the accessibility - you can teach the game reasonably quickly and make a very cute city, making it a great game to bring to the table if you're playing with people who aren't as deep into the hobby/have shorter attention spans.

But of course, the simultaneous marketing mechanic is what defines the game. It's a lovely form of indirect player interaction, providing some big decisions. How much money do you hold back to buy others' tiles? Having to buy your own tiles if you overvalue them and no one buys them is a downright Knizian twist. How much are you willing to risk both your tiles getting bought? You almost always want to lay two tiles per turn, but set your prices too low and you'll lose both. Turn order plays an interesting role as well; going first gives you first pick of the tiles (you can get the many-ships tile perhaps, if ships score this round), but no one will be buying your tiles first, so you may have to lower the money you allocate to your own tiles (risking both getting bought) in order to afford other tiles.

The geometric puzzle in Isle of Skye is definitely fun, and it's an example of what can mitigate the pain of getting your ass kicked in Ra or Modern Art. Valuing tiles isn't that easy in Isle of Skye, since you don't know how your current tiles may affect the layout of future tiles, and then there are asymmetric values that allow you to enclose areas, or score points independent of the round-specific scoring conditions, or generate income for you to spend later. In short, good feels are available even to the losers of the auction, which is great.

Experience - I don't think I've ever won a game of Isle of Skye, but also, despite multiple feels-bad moments - getting both tiles bought; being poor as hell; getting your ass handed to you - I've never had a feels-bad game overall. It's reliably enjoyable and of course it plays quickly and it has tough decisions.

Future - If the friend who owned this would show regularly again, I think it would be a regular sight, and probably could leapfrog other games above this. It was ranked at #28 on the previous list, but as time passes since the last play, it falls more into memory and has to compete with other games that are up there because of memory instead of recency.
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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

also holy shit i turned it off with zion at 8 min 2 points and he ended with 18 min 22 points
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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

kings are cursed bc they overachieved last year, denying the celtics a good pick
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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...

tokaido looks nice, but ive never played it

doubt it'd be up your alley!

Great_Paul posted...

Tokaido is cool and one that I would use for less-experienced gamers. Though otherwise I really preferred to use the first expansion because it gave an alternate option at each location so there was more strategy.

yeah, it strikes me as a nice, rules-lighter game you can easily get to the table, more than a gamer's game. i guess the expansion making it more gamer-y is another similarity to takenoko!
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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...

Ra is one I'm definitely interested in trying since I do like Egyptian themed games.

haha, fair warning - ra is a good game but it is very theme-light, outside of the way the tiles look
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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 think ra definitely rewards skillful play, but you generally get to win some auctions and collect stuff regardless of skill - i don't think it's quite as painful as some of the more punishing euro games (both modern and old-school)
unless of course you get one of those wacky rounds where a bunch of ra tiles come out and everyone gets squeezed. those are both the best and worst, lol

oh, yeah. i guess my thing is, as you pointed out, the actual set collection is a little threadbare. you're not gonna look down at your board after a game of ra and go "aw yeah, i built a fucking civilization"

Naye745 posted...

blokus is okay. its undoubtedly the most fun with four, but it cant help but feel a little random on whether people decide to crowd out your own territory or not.

TomNook posted...

I love Blockus. It has a lot of strategy elements that you pick up the more you play it. Rushing to the middle and sectioning off stuff isn't always optimal. There is also a 2 player version with a slightly smaller board where you start in a different spot, which feels a bit more strategic and less chaotic, which can be good depending on what you are looking for.

i think chaos in a game isn't the same as randomness. it can feel unfair since you don't have the control, but it's not really random - it's player-driven. IMO.

not surprised that there are better strategies than the straight rush - maybe if you let someone extend diagonally into you as you spread laterally, you can cross them? haven't played enough to experiment!

as for 2-player - pass! that's a chess-lite (or chess-extra) and those don't interest me as much.
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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

66. Tokaido (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Set collection, point-to-point movement, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Experience: 3 plays over 2-3 sessions with 3-5 players (2017-2018, including online)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 51/80 (2018)

Summary - Everyone is vacationing in Japan, traveling down the same path. On your turn, you can advance to any open spot ahead of you and take the action there - usually getting some form of card that will be worth points - as many times as you want, as long as you're at the back of the line. Once you pass someone, then the new person in the back of the line acts. A few times, everyone assembles to eat food.

Design - In 2018, I ranked Tokaido 51 and Takenoko 50. They probably do belong next to each other. Both Bauza designs, set in Japan, published only a year between one and another, and with a soothing, gorgeous design. And yeah, Tokaido's art is fantastic, with the aesthetically particularly nice on the panorama cards if you can assemble a full painting.

The downside, of course, is that Tokaido is also not the tightest design. It's perhaps a little overly punny to say that the design is straightforward, as you literally just move in a line. The decisions at most points are relatively limited, with the goal of victory points almost vague. It's definitely more one of those games that's about the journey than the destination, and that journey is a relatively calming experience. It's honestly pretty thematic in that sense - not a lot of tension in a nice trip through Japan.

Experience - Tokaido is probably a bit high because of my first encounter with it - I just wanted to try out the game when it was brought to our game night, and I learned it via the rulebook while the owners of the game were involved in a different game. Suffice it to say that given how much of the experience comes with the physical experience, my one time playing it online was... bad.

Future - I'm not sure Tokaido has too much of a future - it's not a two-player game, which means it's less likely for me to buy at this weight, and it's ultimately not interesting enough for me to clamor to bring to the table, either.
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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

tatum limping off in a 26-point game

god damn 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

Naye745 posted...

ah man, i actually think ra is WAY more streamlined than modern art, specifically because it takes out the biggest problem i have with most auction games that offer too much freedom in what to bid - "what the heck constitutes a good bid?"

in most bidding games you have newbies who don't know what number to bid (or even experienced players who bid a bit arbitrarily). by limiting the numbers you have, and putting everything on the table (literally), it makes it WAY easier for everyone to understand exactly where they stand. i know who can outbid me with a given number, how many "good" and "bad" options i'm leaving behind, and how that all factors for everyone else.

and despite this, the decision making from these small options is tense and outstanding. you will often find yourself in a position agonizing over whether you should bid or pass, and end up ruing that choice by the next turn. it's awesome.

the set collection stuff is secondary here, but it works well and provides a satisfying feeling akin to the multiple avenues of scoring of 7 wonders - you can do a little of everything, or go big in a couple categories

ra is knizia's masterpiece. and that's saying something, from a designer who has several games that could fit that mold (and i'm sure plenty of people would argue with me for tigris & euphrates or several others of his)

it's in my personal top five! i'm interested to see where this list takes us, because i have a feeling we're gonna get heavier and heavier as we go along (in general), but for my money, i still rate mostly ~1 hour games that are just full of tasty decisions and replayability at the top of the heap

so, you're not wrong about all those points about ra. it certainly forces a lot of decisions on you quickly (you almost never draw two tiles on the same offer, for starters!) - and you can definitely feel bad very quickly

and as for your comment about the trend of this list as we go higher... i'd like to deny it, but you might be right in many respects! i think one thing that knizia enthusiasts love about his designs is that "gamer's game" sensation - a strong feeling of zero-sum/playing the players.

a lot of "more modern" eurogames and engine-builders (which, spoilers, are coming up) are a lot more forgiving and are interested in providing you with a positive experience even when other players are better than you are.

now this doesn't mean that you can't play poorly and start to hate yourself, but i think the skill threshold to enjoy yourself is generally lower among pretty much all the games higher on this list.
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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

67. Ra (1999)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Bidding, set collection, push-your-luck
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 40-60 minutes
Experience: 2-3 plays over 2-3 sessions with 4-5 players (2017-2018)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 46/80 (2018)

Summary - Over the course of three age, players try to collect various different tiles. Points are awarded after the round and some of them are cashed in, while some others persist 'til the end of the game. On each player's turn, they pull a tile from the bag and add it to the collective offer pile. A player can also declare Ra for an auction on the offer pile. Bidding is done once around the table using numbered sun tiles. An age ends when all players have taken the offer or a certain number of Ra tiles have been drawn.

Design - It's interesting how different set collection games can be. Some tableau-builders go the whole game and let you become absurdly powerful or amass large swaths of victory points. Ra's rounds are fifteen minutes long and wipe out nearly your entire board afterward, and it they punish you each time if you have the fewest of a certain type of (otherwise useless) tile. Ah, Dr. Knizia, you sly bastard.

While I don't find it quite as streamlined and beautifully designed as Modern Art (with a mess of different tile types), there are several points of interest in Ra. Ra's auctions are more homogeneous than Modern Art's. All of them follow the same format, and they use sun tiles, which are far less fungible than the money found in Modern Art. You can win three offers in each round of Ra, period. You'll just get more or less contested offers with better tiles. While this is intrinsically a feature of open auctions, Ra codifies the use of the "bait" bid, where you can essentially force someone to overspend on something they value, if you have a tile that slots between two desired values.

I'm not actually good at Ra, and it can be frustrating because of some of the strategic subtleties. The most notable one to me is valuing the sun tile in the middle (which replenishes your hand for the future round). It's really damn easy to get stuck with a whole round of shit bids, and if that happens in round 3, well that just sucks.

The anti-push-your-luck feature of Ra is great, too: the Ra tiles. It can be tempting to sit out a round and let everyone use up their high tiles and then have the pick of the litter among remaining tiles. Yes, you can do this, but if you've waited that long, you'll likely be in danger of the final Ra tiles being pulled. Only one person effectively winds up playing this game of chicken, but it can be significant, and you can lose if you're greedy.

Honestly, my favorite part of Ra is just taking the little statue and declaring "Ra" on my turn. I rarely wind up getting the better of an offer (both paying a good price and getting back a good number), but it can be really fun to frustrate others about not having a fuller offer, even though they want some of what's up already. It's a sort of visceral satisfaction that I think will age well in future plays.

Experience - I've only played Ra a few times, but its relatively simple. As I described, I'm not particularly good at it, but it feels satisfying and interesting.

Ra is the final Knizia game on this list. Incidentally, since I made the list, I've gotten two more plays in of another Knizia title which might rank decently (perhaps above Ra!) in the future.

Future - Only one friend owns Ra and it's not widely available (though it might be a tough sell for me anyway, not playing two players). For my money, I admire the design of Modern Art more and would be more eager to replay Modern Art. But I also want more reps of this slightly-over-filler bidding game that has you trying to collect so many items with so few items, where you never have to declare an auction but so often want to, and where you have so little theme-related mechanics but so many Egyptian-themed tiles.
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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

68. Blokus (2000)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Abstract, tile-laying, area control
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 4-6 plays over 4-6 sessions with 4 players (2017-2019)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player sits at the corner of a grid, with around twenty-five Tetris-like pieces of their own color. On your first turn, you place a piece on the board that touches your corner. On your subsequent turns, you place a piece onto the board such that it borders at least one of your pieces, corner-to-corner. You cannot have your pieces border one another's edges. The winner is the player who has the fewest pieces not on the board at the end of the game.

Design - Blokus isn't really a designer game. It's published by Mattel Games, which publishes Uno (not ranked). It's utterly abstract and doesn't do anything particularly new or innovative. I think I might have left it off my 2018 list even though it would have qualified, simply because I wasn't sure if it belonged.

And yet... it's really fun. It's a perfect-information abstract, but due to being a four-player, interactive game, it doesn't have 100% optimal plays like chess or checkers or tic-tac-toe (or Tak/Hive, for that matter). The endpoint of this game is technically player elimination (you'll eventually no longer be able to put any pieces on the board, and that point will be earlier for some than others), but the game has a very finite turn limit in the number of pieces everyone has to start the game.

Every game of Blokus I've played has had something of a similar arc: people rush from their corner toward the center with large, awkward pieces and attempt to establish control there. With the board divided into four like an X, everyone tends to find a natural enemy or enemies, as you decide which side to pursue, which territory you can "leave for later," which players you can block.

Because you can lay your pieces adjacent to others' (whereas you cannot for your own), blocking someone from entering your territory is difficult, and it gets contentious pretty quickly. It's a very interesting take on something like area control and one that relies a lot on spatial reasoning and tactics.

Experience - I don't always do even particularly well at Blokus, but almost every time I've made a move I felt was cool or been able to congratulate someone else for finding a really nice way to slip into others' territory. Blokus can make you a big loser, but games are also fast enough that you don't need to stew over it.

Future - Blokus doesn't feel like a "hobby game" for reasons I mentioned before, and as a result, I'd never do a game night centered around it. Combined with its strict player count, I have a hard time seeing it being added to my collection currently. But if there are exactly four and the call asks for a shortish game and players play fast and it's there, I'd always be up for 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

yup, that was an error and it's too late to edit :(
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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

69. Modern Art (1992)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Set collection, push-your-luck, bidding
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 35-50 minutes
Experience: 2-3 plays over 2-3 sessions (2018-19) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - During each of four rounds, players choose to offer and then bid on pieces of art (cards from hand) from five artists (suits/colors). At the end of a round, depending on how many total paintings were sold of each artist, the paintings are valued and sold to the bank. There are four different types of auctions, which are specific to the cards sold, including blind bids, English-style open auctions, single-circle bids, and fixed price bids.

Design - Modern Art is another Reiner Knizia game, one of his earliest breakout games. Knizia is renowned for the simplicity of his rules, the difficulty of the decisions, and the interactivity of the gameplay. The experience is often described as emergent, and that comes through in Modern Art: you have to decide to what suit to offer but also how you want it to be valued; how to value pieces on offer; which suit(s) to gamble on; whom to buy from (should you get the choice).

Thematically, Modern Art suggests there's no inherent value to the artwork you're bandying around. The most valuable art is the art that is marketed the most. But that value then is carried over to subsequent rounds: value gained from popularity in round three is added to value from popularity gained in rounds one and two: Last season's fashions continue to inform today's prices.

But in one of the most Knizian twists of the game, only the three most popular artists' paintings get bought each round. So if it's round 2 and you're investing in round 1's most popular paintings and hoping for a boost to its already strong value, you could actually wind up getting nothing at all for your investment. The market has a light card draw effect but is otherwise almost entirely set by what players chose to offer. And therefore, it's incredibly interactive. Beyond even that, there's a minigame of who you want to buy from; if you buy my offer then I get that money, while if I'm stuck buying my own offer, I pay to the bank. Whose pain is better? Who are you letting profit?

In a similar move to Acquire's pain point where you can only buy stock after you've already boosted its value, Modern Art allows you to end a round by offering a fifth piece of art from any one suit, guaranteeing that it will become the most popular artist of the round... but, no one actually gets a chance to bid on that piece of art, so you ensure you don't get that piece - or the proceeds from selling it.

Experience - I think if I were just slightly better at it, Modern Art could be a lot higher up. As is, I haven't got quite enough reps in on it. The nature of Knizia games can be rather punishing if you don't grasp them quickly, and since the game is short, it's not like I've gotten a ton of time to bask in its design.

Future - Alas, the person who owns it in my group doesn't play much anymore, and it cannot be played with two players, which makes it a very iffy buy for me at best. But I'd love to play it more, due to its elegance and quickness and how much I admire its design. I could see Modern Art rising a lot - but it's constrained by experience.
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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

Paratroopa1 posted...

I did notice this, but the only thing I'd define as punishing is Darkest Dungeon. CrossCode is fairly challenging but I don't think to a ridiculous degree (and it has some pretty friendly accessibility options if truly needed), Mega Man 10 also has an easy mode in addition to a hard mode (I just really like the fact that it has a hard mode), and FTL is kinda hard even on its easiest difficulty but I think anyone could get it with enough plays. DD's a motherfucker though yeah.

i guess to me, spending 30 minutes stuck on a single puzzle (with no guarantee of ever getting through) sounds like a colossal waste of time now. "with enough plays" for FTL also sounds like something that doesn't interest me!

also DD has to look better than the screenshot, right? literally zero visual clarity for me there. guess a larger screen helps?
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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

forgot to say, i loved ghost trick, but i'd peobably only wanna replay it now, at least 5-10 years after playing it the first time

most of the stuff in your top ten seems to be defined by being punishing, which i have no interest in! thought MM2 was ok when i played it for the first time like 2-3 years ago, much preferred DKC2
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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

71. Takenoko (2011)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tile-laying, set collection, point-to-point movement
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 25-40 minutes
Experience: 2-3 plays over 2-3 sessions (2015) with 2 players
Previous ranks: 31/100 (2016), 48/80 (2018)

Summary - Players lay hexagonal tiles in an imperial courtyard of Japan, attempting to provide bamboo for the emperor's pleasure and to feed a particularly hungry and adorable panda. Dice can give you some extra actions, but for the most part, you'll be expanding the garden, planting bamboo by moving the gardener, and moving the panda, who will eat food. Combinations of hexes, eaten bamboo, and grown bamboo complete hidden objective cards, which provide the game's scoring.

Design - Antoine Bauza is super-interesting. You wouldn't expect the dude who came up with Ghost Stories to put out a game so... not Ghost Stories. "Punishing" is the last way you'd describe Takenoko.

Takenoko is simplistic and not particularly strategic - the dice aren't necessarily fair; objective cards vary greatly in ease and value; and decisions aren't too hard. Its decision space is limited and it is calming to play. And it is gorgeous to look at - the tiles you lay, the way the bamboo stacks on top of itself as it grows taller, the thin bars representing streaks of irrigating water that flow along the hexes' borders, the best panda I have yet to encounter in a hobby game.

I could try to say more about it, but that's really it. That's the appeal of Takenoko. It's really fun to play something beautiful (which is clearly game-y; you make meaningful if simple decisions to achieve your objectives) and soothing and cute. If you like pandas, this is for you. If not, I mean, it's a game with a big-ass panda on the cover.

Experience - I played Takenoko twice, borrowing a friend's copy. It was fun and had great table presence. And it had a panda.

Future - The only people who own Takenoko in my group I usually encounter in larger-than-four settings. I wonder if it would be a good game to play at home, or if it'd be too simplistic and gaming buddy #1 wouldn't be as into the panda. But despite its not being the most interesting game, the mere process of writing about it has gotten me interested in playing the game 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

71. Acquire (1964)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tile-laying, economic, stock market
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-75 minutes
Experience: 3-4 plays over 3-4 sessions (2016-2017) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: 26/100 (2016), 48/100 (2018)

Summary - Each player is an investor trying to acquire the greatest net worth at the end of the game. On your turn, you choose one square tile from a small hand to lay on the printed (on-tile) coordinates on the grid of the game's map. The tile you lay can either found a new hotel chain or expand one (if it touches an existing one), and you have the option of buying one share of that chain's stock. When you lay a tile that merges two hotels, the larger chain acquires the smaller; the shareholders of the smaller chain get dividends plus an option to sell (the only time when you can sell). Larger chains' stock is more valuable than smaller chains'.

Design - Acquire is incredibly elegant and clever. In those senses, it may be one of the best designs on my list. Investing in hotels can be counterintuitive and inherently has some sort of "push-your-luck" element. Liquid money starts drying up as the game wears out, meaning you have to pick which chains to invest in carefully. Adding to the difficulty of the decision is the fact that you can never increase the value of your stock on the same turn that you buy it - the simple fact is, you can only buy stock after making all the existing shareholders richer (by expanding that hotel), but when you buy stock, it's at the new, inflated price. Inverting this would change the incentives - it makes the decisions more infuriating but meatier.

And then there's the game's namesake, the acquisition events. Nothing makes people excited like getting paid (even if it's with shitty paper money), so mergers are absolutely thrilling.

Acquire is from the '60s. It has its share of luck limiting your agency (tile draw determining where you can place), and some might criticize its rather grim, dreary color palette (though it has its own beauty-of-the-game thing going for it). Paper money is an annoying component to deal with (though of course it can be overcome). And it can feel punishing when you are out of money and can't figure out how to score points anymore. Sometimes, a player's early decisions win the game, sometimes based off luck, even though they appear to do little else throughout the game (though that said, it's nice that the winner isn't always the person who takes a long time make a bunch of extra moves.)

Experience - I've played Acquire three times and generally sucked at it. Crappy tile draw and being low on cash can be tough in any economic game, and I don't know if it's because I wasn't in last place that it wasn't more painful. But it was interesting enough that following the arc of the game as a somewhat active participant was exciting.

Future - Given its appearance and age, I'm (perhaps hypocritically) not as inclined toward buying Acquire (and notably, it's not a 2p game). The friend who owns Acquire rarely comes to game night anymore. However, its playtime is extremely manageable, it's interactive, and earning money is fun. I feel there's unexplored depth to this game that I'd like to plumb, if only time and circumstances allowed.
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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...

Those bgg plastic chips are so good for this game. The first time I played, I played a copy that had them. The second time I played was a copy that didn't and I really did notice how much better it felt to use plastic chips over the cardboard.

this pimping out has to cost like at least 60% of the game's value, 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

72. Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Deck-building, push-your-luck, simultaneous action selection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 3-4 sessions (2019) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player is a quack medieval doctor randomly adding ingredients (chits, drawn from a bag) to their potion, which both increase the potion's marketability (giving gold to buy more ingredients, and victory points) but can also cause the potion to blow up (and therefore only award gold or VP, but not both). You get to choose when to stop drawing ingredients. The game ends after a fixed number of brewed potions.

Experience - As I see it, winning can have an outsized impact on people's enjoyment of a game. I've only won Quacks once, but it was the first time I played, and it did successfully make me want to play it more.

Design - Push-your-luck is a mechanism that distills the "yes -- yes -- NO!!!" or "ugh... YES!" sensation. Building a bag, like in Quacks, is the same process as building a deck. But unlike most deck-builders and even bag-builders, Quacks will never cycle through the whole bag. At the end of every round, the ingredients you bought go into your bag along with the ingredients you just drew to make your latest potion. So there's no guarantee you'll ever see any given potion you put into the bag. That type of luck can be frustrating but is a good reminder not to take the game too seriously.

There's a lot of fun stuff about how the game works, too. Real time drawing makes sense; it's largely a multiplayer solitaire other than the racing mechanic. To prevent an economic snowball, there's a minor (though arguably insufficient) catchup mechanic depending on your current VP count. There are lots of feels-good chits you can draw - a few of the basic ingredients have synergies with others, but possibly only when drawn in sequence, or preferably at the end, or preferably at the beginning. The track by which you measure your progress is fantastic: a spiral, where you start at the beginning and move gradually outward.

On the downside of Quacks, aside from luck, I'd say that building a giant, giant spiral is fun but arguably not as fun as it could be. It's a necessary evil, of course, but the victory points don't accelerate in any way as you get further into your potion. This is obviously in place to prevent runaway leaders by a single round of amazing luck, but it diminishes a bit from the adrenaline and keeps the stakes low when you're deep into your potion.

One important thing Quacks does to keep the game fun, in my view, is protect you from your own failures. In many push-your-luck games, busting once can obliterate your prospects. Quacks lets you keep either the gold or the VP when you bust, which is extremely forgiving.

Future - Quacks is a little long for a filler, and it's not particularly interactive, but its simultaneous play, whimsical theme, and fun mechanisms (not to mention relative recency and presence in my friends' library) make it a good candidate to hit the table again. With limited depth, though, I don't think it could realistically rise much higher.
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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

big ups to AA6. to me, it's literally all about 6-3 (to some extent) and 6-5. AA5 is much more consistent and has arguably higher average quality, but AA6 hits at a stronger level.

i loved the N64 paper mario and was content with the gamecube one. dunno that i have time for bug fables - how many hours would you say it is?
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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

alas i have not played rex arcana!

might be able to crank out a few tomorrow and get back into rhythm
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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

73. Word Domination (2017)

Category: Player vs Player, Cooperative
Genres: Word game, area control, spelling
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30 minutes
Experience: 4 plays over 2 sessions (2017, 2019) with 2-4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Letters are laid out, representing territories. Your goal is to use sets of them to form words. Getting multiple uses of a letter can eliminate it and make it yours, and the area control ultimately helps you to win the game. In the co-op variant, you're instead trying to hit every letter with a theme of sawing legs of a building down.

Experience - My first few plays of Word Domination were dull. The area control mechanism seemed take-that-ish and to resist the fun aspect of spelling games. Thus, playing the co-op variant months later was a shock - I absolutely loved it. Having only played that variant twice in one setting, I'm not ready to bump this game super-high.

Design - Why does Word Domination work as a co-op but not as an area control game? Well, part of that probably has to do with the player's appetite for area control. Essentially, in order to claim a letter in the original WD, you want to hit that letter multiple times, ideally in the same word. Letters you don't use enough can be bumped off, which encourages defensive play. Plus, your plans can get foiled turn to turn and you get fewer options as letters get bumped off.

None of that is fun when it comes to word games! You want more options as a game goes on, not fewer, and it's no fun to have to reevaluate each turn instead of being able to plan ahead. The co-op game takes care of pretty much solves every complaint of mine. Instead of having to play defensively and kick other people off of being able to form full words, you get to collaborate and plan ahead (given the board's predictable issues) on how you want to put words together a few turns in advance. Meanwhile, a tactical element with fresh blood of letters gets injected from its spectator mechanic - an increasing number of extra letters that, when it exceeds a certain limit, loses you the game. So you're incentivized to use those letters, but you're still focused on your long-term goals of the "main board" letters. Plus, everyone can join in.

Future - I don't have a burning desire to play Word Domination, but I feel like it could potentially fit a very interesting niche. Cooperative word games are really rare, and the rules overhead is quite low.
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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

74. Shipwreck Arcana 2017

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Clue-giving, deduction
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 20-30 minutes
Experience: 4 plays over 2 sessions (2019) with 2-3 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player receives two number tiles, 1 to 7. They keep one (that must be guessed) and place another on one of four revealed cards, each of which states a fact about the remaining number (fate), such as "the number is even." The others can either guess or not. The next turn a second tile is drawn and again, one of those two tile has to be placed on a card that may give more information. Once enough numbers are placed on cards, the cards "fade," and a guess soon becomes compulsory. Right guesses advance your score while fading increases the losing clock.

Design - Shipwreck Arcana is really, really simple to play. It's a logic puzzle that occasionally puts you in a spot where you have to perform a coin flip or one-in-three shot, or a coin flip that could lead to another coin flip. While it's not a particularly game-y mechanism, like word games or social games, process of elimination is fun, and based on the clues present, you can often infer something about the cluegiver's hand ("It would be more helpful to reduce us to 1, 4, 7 than to tell us "odd numbers," so we can assume it's not 1, 4, or 7... so it's probably a 3 or 5.") Therefore, you have opportunities to feel clever, and due to the timer mechanism, you also get chances to high-five each other when you guess correctly based on luck.

There's also a painful element in the game where you'd ideally want to keep giving clues about the same fate, placing newly drawn tiles as clues. However, it can often happen that the new fate you draw cannot be played on any of the hint cards. In such cases, you actually must place your existing fate, if able. And that definitely happens, which can really throw your teammates off!

In a game this straightforward, you really look for nice components, and the art absolutely delivers. Each player gets their own set of deduction tiles, which the guessers can request be turned over to indicate which numbers they have eliminated. The tiles themselves are a beautiful black and white design; the cards with clues on them, aside from statements, have completely unnecessary but gorgeous art. In this incredibly simple abstract, component quality is fantastic and really improves the feel. I believe nominally the theme refers to fortune-telling, and it feels ominously occult thanks to the art.

Experience = Full disclosure - I've never lost a game of Shipwreck Arcana. That said, that includes plays with some expansion cards, which are more difficult, and a few of those were relatively close calls. That can put in a bias, but in my opinion, Shipwreck being relatively easy doesn't really detract from its fun. It may not necessarily be a huge challenge to win, but there's a calm satisfaction in the thinkiness of it, just like there's a calm satisfaction in the mindlessness with which you can wreck the AI at Hearts on your phone.

Future - I'd like to check out the expansions, which I could definitely see causing me to lose a game. Shipwreck Arcana feels like an amazing game to have as a warmup because of the atmospheric-looking art, which makes you want to be contemplative and quiet as you examine and think through it. Alas, my main two-player potential gaming mate isn't big on the deduction type where the guesser benefits a lot by trying to infer the cluegiver's intentions. So it's not joining my collection, but will remain on the radar for future plays when we just want to feel kinda smart together.
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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

75. Burgle Bros (2015)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Point-to-point movement, tile-exploration
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Experience: 3-5 plays over 2-3 sessions (2017-2018) with 3 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Everyone works together to explore and then rob a building with three separate floors, then escapes via the rooftop. After each player's turn (during which they can move around to explore the floor, move between floors, or try to crack a safe) the guard on the floor blindly moves a certain number of steps. Any player getting caught is an insta-lose.

Design - Like many co-op games, Burgle Bros follows a recipe of "you get some basic actions most turns but have to perform a few special acts to win the game - most of the time you'll be staving off loss." It distills the board's escalating actions into one threat: the threat of getting caught by a guard. I really like the way escalation just means the guards move more steps per flip, and how there are just a few ways to avoid them other than running. The multi-tier approach is interesting as well; it encourages everyone to spread out onto different floors (and thus explore early). There's an odd little dice minigame when you attempt to crack the safes that can be a little frustrating, but it adds just enough weird variety to distinguish it from the regular gameplay - and of course, dice allow you to get that little rush when things go right.

A really cool game with a great aesthetic.

Experience - Learned this at a meetup alone, then taught it and grinded through it a few times. I've gotten both blown off the face of the map and made it pretty far, but don't think I actually won any. Burgle Bros may be better designed than some co-op games higher up than it, but it just hasn't really gotten the reps to really worm its way into my heart.

Future - If it winds up landing in our game group, then yeah. I've had a tendency to play co-op games a lot until I beat them historically, though my desire to replay them drops a bit afterward depending on how complex. Could see it rising if that happens.
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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

i just took a look at what's coming up. there are maybe 5-10 games that are a little iffy (mostly in the next 20), but almost every other game above this cutoff has one or more of these qualities:

- would eagerly play it again
- find its design super interesting
- gotten a lifetime's value out of them
- i've had at least one incredible play 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

Naye745 posted...

the gap between my favorite and least favorite games of yours from this tier is quite impressively large :)

can't help feeling like that's true even for myself! hard to rank a lot of these with respect to each other, especially ones that are cool but i don't particularly want to play more, or ones that i've had negative experiences in occasionally but do want to play more

SBAllen posted...

6 nimmt is one of my favorite openers for people who aren't big board/card gamers. Super easy to learn and tends to really get people hyped up quickly and ready to try more new things.

it's good you get that response! it's so different from most hobby games that i wonder if it's a good bridge.
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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

Large tier that in hindsight probably deserved 2! Games here are kind of hard to order. I think in general, the games in the next tier mostly belong above the games in this tier, with the occasional case of one that was too high or one that was too low in this tier.

Settle For It
111. Settlers of Catan (1995)
110. Ticket to Ride (2004)
109. Machi Koro (2012)
108. Yeti Slalom (2001)
107. Fire Tower (2019)
106. The Grizzled (2015)
105. God's Gambit (2014)
104. Sushi Go! (2013)
103. Ghost Stories (2008)
102. Paperback/Hardback (2014, 2018)
101. Bloody Inn (2015)
100. World's Fair 1893 (2016)
99. 4 Gods (2016)
98. Zombicide (2012)
97. San Juan (2004)
96. Dice Forge (2017)
95. 7 Wonders (2010)
94. It's a Wonderful World (2019)
93. Small World (2009)
92. Qwirkle (2006)
91. Roll for the Galaxy (2014)
90. Thunderstone (2009)
89. King of Toyko (2011)
88. Balderdash (1984)
87. Call to Adventure (2018)
86. Century: Eastern Wonders (2018)
85. Welcome (Back) to the Dungeon (2013, 2016)
84. Two Rooms and a Boom (2013)
83. Anomia (2010)
82. Coup (2012)
81. Lost Cities: The Board Game (2008)
80. Quadropolis (2016)
79. Love Letter (2012)
78. D-Day Dice (2012)
77. Turn the Tide (1997)
76. 6 nimmt! (1994)
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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 even heard of it before. that seems like a pretty clever mechanism! some tension in how low you can go without colliding.
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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...

love letter is great for what it is, but as far as fillers go, coup and (especially) welcome to the dungeon have it beat for me.

fair assessment! i think it beats coup, but WTTD was probably underrated here. 6nimmt might be a bit high with respect to those...
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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

76. 6 nimmt! (1994)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Simultaneous action selection, sequence-building, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 5-20 minutes
Experience: 15+ hands over 5+ sessions (2015-2019) with 4-8 players
Previous ranks: 33/100 (2016), 39/80 (2018)

Summary - Everyone is dealt a hand of cards with only numbers (unique integers) and pips (negative points). Each turn, each player simultaneously selects a card to reveal. Those cards are, in ascending order, sorted into buckets based on cards that are on the table. If you place the sixth card in a bucket, you empty it out and get all the cards (and the pips associated with them) in it. A hand ends when all the cards are played, and the game ends when one player has hit some losing total of pips.

Experience - I naturally don't have any sparkling memory of 6 nimmt!, but I remember being stuck in very large groups early on, with no one being able to decide on anything except this game. And honestly, for managing that large group rather painlessly, I give 6 nimmt! a lot of credit.

Design - Here's an elegant game that provides a nice, consistent experience. As I mentioned in Turn the Tide, simultaneous action selection in a quick game allows you to have lots of opportunities to feel clever or lucky, or to feel unlucky and cheated. You can feel both emotions very quickly between one played card and the next. 6 nimmt! isn't exactly mean, because you can't really make a move maliciously not knowing what other players have chosen or put in their hands, but it can definitely happen and feel really good when you undercut someone's card by exactly one, forcing them to be #6 in the pile instead of #5 like they anticipated being.

The game isn't particularly visually attractive for a filler. It's just a smart design with a bunch of cards (which, come to think of it, could be the basis of a few other games that are also just numbered cards... including one later on this list.)

Future - Like Love Letter, 6 nimmt! is lovely as a microgame, but it unfortunately isn't great with two, so it lacks a niche in my collection, and I've mostly seen what it has to offer. I don't think this game could particularly rise by more plays, but it's not like I'm turning it down as a 20-30 minute exercise in crowning winners and losers.
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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

77. Turn the Tide (1997)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Simultaneous action selection, separate hands, bidding
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20-40 minutes
Experience: 2-3 games over 2-3 sessions (2016-2017) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 61/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a hand of numbered cards and is attempting not to drown. There are two cards in the center representing water height. Simultaneously everyone plays a card, and the two highest among the played cards get the two water height cards respectively. Then the player with the highest water height drowns (loses a point). These initial points are assigned based on the estimated difficulty of the cards in your hand. At the end of a hand, your hand is preserved and passed to another player, and the game ends once you've played a hand using everyone's initial hand.

Design - Turn the Tide is super-clever. Any balance issues are solved practically by default due to the pass-your-hand mechanism. (You can get screwed by card deals; a hand with almost zero points has very limited upside, while a hand with all middle cards (that have more points) will give you little agency.)

I really enjoy simultaneous action selection and bidding as mechanisms - they can make you feel wonderfully clever or super-dumb, and the stakes can be high, but the action is quick. Turn the Tide has an interesting set of incentives. When you start the game, you actually have no water-height cards at all - which often means that you may want to avoid taking the card by playing a low card. However, if the water-height cards are low, you may want to burn a high/mid-card by taking one now - you'll lose a life potentially, but you get to save your low cards, and you preserve your lower cards. And if you get stuck with a high card, to avoid drowning multiple consecutive rounds, you're going to have to bid high the first chance you get on a lower card.

In this way, both low cards and high cards have benefits, because they hold the power of control, which is super-helpful in this game. Very clever design.

Experience - Uh, I think that a slow group can make this pretty rough. I also find that playing with a group of five is just slightly worse, because playing five hands feels a little longer than you need. But a four-person game feels snappy and fair and fun.

Future - I don't really have any desire to play Turn the Tide again, but I recognize its cleverness and I like the mechanism behind it. Might rank it a bit lower with careful thought, but it's a cool game and I wouldn't veto if it came up, especially with four players.
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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

78. D-Day Dice (2012)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Campaign, dice-rolling, point-to-point movement
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 20-30 minutes
Experience: 6-10 rounds of 4-7 scenarios over 2 sessions (2016-2017) with 4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 42/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player commands a military unit during the D-Day invasion. Those soldiers are represented by dice on a map. Each scenario corresponds to a different map. The goal of each round is to go from one end of the map to another and to defeat the boss there if need be. Dice are rolled and rerolled simultaneously to gain special powers/equipment, gain bonuses, or gain health. Then you move (or not) and face combat.

Experience - My old core group has attempted the campaigned twice. We didn't beat the entire game, but each time we played we played at least three or so scenarios until we beat them.

Design - D-Day dice makes rolling dice really satisfying. It's got a nifty reroll mechanism that forces you to lock two dice; each die face is useful in its own way; and there's a tremendous payoff when you can get your sets to match - hitting the same face in all three of your colors (red, white, blue) gives you a massive additional bonus. For example, each single dude you roll heals you one troop (HP). But if you roll three single dudes of different colors, not only do you get the three troops, you get four additional troops (seven total), plus you get to heal four troops to a teammate. Chasing those bonuses can give a big rush, and because so many of your abilities can help one another/you only need one person to have some sort of equipment, the sense of camaraderie is very strong.

That's really the coolest part about it. I mean yeah, you theoretically have this theme about moving through and fighting in a war, but it's really about the dice and power-ups and going ham as you get more and more powerful, then going in and storming the fortress for the win.

Future - This is the group in which one player seems to have dropped off from caring about playing weekly. That said, we've only played twice, and the owner is still in the group. Maybe I can convince my new gaming buddy to join in... would be nice to clear a few more levels and maybe beat the game. I never really think about this game, but rolling dice and getting rewarded (instead of punished) is really nice, and it really does instill collaboration. Would be nice to get that sense of accomplishment.
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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

79. Love Letter (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Separate hands, deduction, player elimination
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15-20 minutes (full game)
Experience: 20+ hands over 5+ sessions (2015-2018) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: 25/100 (2016), 44/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a hand of one card. During their turn, they draw a card and play a card. The played card will generally give them a way to interact with others, including eliminating others (or the guesser). If people are not eliminated by the end of the 16 cards, the player with the highest remaining card is the winner.

Experience - As you can see by its high ranking in 2016, Love Letter felt like a godsend early in the hobby: a game with no rules overhead, an inference component, and a playtime/game structure that allowed for iterative play. Since then I've gotten more of an appetite for games that hit high highs rather than guarantee painilessness, but I still respect LL's style.

Design - Love Letter is a true microgame, and among hobby gamers, it has a Coup-esque quality of "everyone knows it and reasonably likes it." Any card game might be better if everyone knew the deck through and through, that that's an impossibility for many more complex games. Love Letter is a deduction game - the most common card lets you eliminate a player by guessing their card - and like Coup, it is a pure card game that has few enough cards that everyone can name each card by the end of a few hands.

Like God's Gambit (and perhaps Welcome to the Dungeon), Love Letter also has entirely independent hands. There is no arc to Love Letter, simply the knowledge that one round, which can last as little as a minute, provides insufficient dopamine hit and will make you want to play more. Given how short it is, I'm entirely fine with that.

Components can be huge in a game this simple. Love Letter comes in a beautiful bag, has beautiful art, and has these cute little cubes to denote you won a hand. Quality-of-life wins.

Future - While it's not the fault of the game itself, I think one issue preventing Love Letter from breaking out into my world big time is that it's not really a two-player game. It feels like the perfect type of game to have on hand during a non-game-night, but most of the time that would be a two-player scenario for me.

It would be easy to characterize Love Letter as repetitive, which could hurt its long-term value. That may be true, but given its insanely quick playtime per hand and setup time and the fact it can be played brainlessly, I wouldn't necessarily call that a bad thing. Its iterative play tends to feel like a "card game" instead of a "hobby game," and those have long, long histories.
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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

80. Quadropolis (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Drafting, tile-laying, city-building, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 30-40 minutes
Experience: 2 plays over 2 sessions (2018) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each round, a market of city tiles (parks, factories, etc) are laid out in a 4x4 grid. The players then draft those tiles by laying their arrows around the border of the grid, numbered 1 to 4: laying an arrow with 3 on it, next to the fourth row of common grid, means you take the tile 3 away from your arrow. That spot can then no longer have another arrow laid upon it. These drafted tiles go into your own 4x4 city in either the row or the column corresponding to the arrow picked. Victory points are granted at end of game depending on selection and placement of tiles within your city.

Design - What a clever game. While it's a little tough to explain on paper, demonstrating how to play Quadropolis is an absolute breeze: just slap down the arrow and you're good to go. Denying drafts should be strong in this game, though in my experience I'm usually more concerned about how to hoard my arrows than how to hate-fill other people's spots. There's a lot of inherent fun in city-building games, in my opinion: trying to optimize points, getting your parks next to residences, cleaning up the pollution which will be worth negative victory points. But the uniqueness in any city-builder (and indeed many drafting/tableau-building games in general) comes from how you get the tiles and what rules you have to obey for placement. Tying the drafting mechanism together with placement restrictions based on the arrows is unique and clever, and it forces tactical thinking, even if it's unclear that it makes the game significantly more fun or deep.

Experience - I have fond feelings toward Quadropolis. Like Carcassonne, I learned it on the spot in a game cafe and then taught it to a friend, and then it turned to be a delightful little exercise. It was a surprise to me that it came up again at a different meetup, and I liked it a little less, but I still thought it was clever.

Future - Because you can draft virtually any building you want when you flop 16 tiles, I imagine it's not too hard to come up with similar cities each time in a small-player-count game, especially if that's what you're aiming for. I imagine that some of the replay value, however, might come from prioritizing different building types compared to the other times you build stuff. I have a hard time seeing myself request this (though that may be because no one in my groups owns it) - but it's a cute design that I'd always be willing to play given its length and weight.
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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

th3l3fty posted...

Coup was basically obsoleted by Coup Rebellion G54 anyway

also, just want to thank you for making me aware of the 5-5-2 variant of Machi Koro - the entire group agreed that the game was significantly more interesting and enjoyable because of it

never played rebellion g54, i think. played a version with teams once and it was ok.

i think i never played 5-5-2. if i ever owned machi koro harbor i'd definitely enforce that variant though, as the lack thereof made for a really shitty marketplace 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

81. Lost Cities: The Board Game (2008)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Push-your-luck, racing, sequence-building, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 30-40 minutes
Experience: 3-5 plays over 2-3 sessions (2017-2018) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 51/80 (2018)

Summary - There are five different paths, each corresponding to a color. Any player can go on any of the paths by playing a card (numbered 1-10) of the appropriate color. The trick is, to advance further on any given path, the next card you play in that color has to be either higher or lower than your previous card - and once you've done that, you have to keep going in the same color. Advancing further down a track gives more points, but if the time runs out while you haven't advanced much down a path, you get negative points.

Design - The original Lost Cities was a card game for two, and I only played it after the board game version. There's a lot to be said for a game that you can take anywhere as a filler, as opposed to a game with a big-ass box that takes up a lot of table space and is actually quite light.

But... the board game is better. It's not just that you can play with more players (which is really nice), but the major quality of life (and strategy improvement!) change is that you can build paths that go backwards numerically. In the original Lost Cities, getting dealt high numbers to start with was strictly bad (leaves you fewer maximum steps you can go) and getting low numbers later was strictly bad (no way to advance with lower numbers if you always have to increase). That's absolutely huge. I will also say that while the game itself is as simplistic in weight as as a Candyland type, there's a reason people like Candyland - it looks great.

But of course, it's got gameplay to back it up, and more specifically, decisions. I believe this is the first of around three ranked games on this list from the Great Reiner Knizia. He's not my favorite designer, but he unquestionably gets at what it means to be a game: making decisions. You have a limited hand in LCBG; on each turn, if you're not playing a card (and possibly cutting yourself off from future advancement), you're discarding one... and the discarded cards can be picked up by your opponents. Should you jump straight from 5 to 9 in blues and lose that future advancement of 6, 7, 8? Giving up the 9 to your opponent who hasn't even started blue yet is clearly not an option... but starting on white is dangerous - you might wind up with big negative points there! No decision is easy, and that's where LC:BG gets its meat.

LC:BG is made the slightest bit less cohesive by its three-round structure, which functions like a card game going "best out of three"/summing your scores. The only carry-over, like in Sushi Go!, is one set collection mechanic that stays. Nonetheless, it's so quick and juicy each runthrough that it does seem to round out your game.

Experience - Like I said, it's an impressive design, and even more so when you consider how much it surpasses its "source."

Future - Maybe because LC:BG is so abstract and light, it doesn't necessarily fulfill my hobby-game itches. But it's really solid game design. Would definitely play 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