Board 8 > eighty tabletop games, ranked

(+) Yeah! (+)

it's not agricola, but it's a pretty good weight - i think i only have one eurogame that's clearly heavier than power grid left on the list!
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SeabassDebeste posted...

Bonus question - What heavier game do you feel is awesome, but haven't quite gotten to the table enough to confirm?

I LOVED Lords of Waterdeep the one time I played it, but it could easily be because I won handily.
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well that is disappointing
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The Mana Sword posted...

well that is disappointing

this post makes me feel so good
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SeabassDebeste posted...

it's not agricola, but it's a pretty good weight - i think i only have one eurogame that's clearly heavier than power grid left on the list!

Power Grid is midweight at best, sorry.
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Agricola and Power Grid are two of my favorite board games of all time - they would both be in my top 10. Nearly all of my gamer friends enjoy Power Grid - and even a few non-gamer friends. And for the record - Powere Grid actually scales very well from 3 to 5 players. 6 players is still fun, but the games and time between turns can get long. 2 players isn't really that great, though.

Did you play Agricola with the Occupation and Minor Improvement cards? They do add a bit more complexity, but they give you a lot more ways to feed your family and/or score points, which actually makes the game feel less punishing. It's a significantly better game with the extra cards.


Bonus question - What heavier game do you feel is awesome, but haven't quite gotten to the table enough to confirm?


There are quite a few that I haven't played yet that look awesome, but as far as heavy games I played once that I think are or could be awesome, I would say -

Sid Meiers Civilization
Terra Mystica
Terraforming Mars
Orleans
Feast for Odin
Mombasa
Nations
Amerigo
Francis Drake
Empires Age of Discovery
Hyperborea
Xia
Golden Ages
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Navegador and Goa for the question

for some reason people are really hesitant to play heavy euros around here
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SeabassDebeste posted...

Simoun posted...

Unpopular Opinion time: I actually love BANG the Card Game. People who complain about the elimination just don't know "how" to play it. The game at least for us is deliberate, social, and requires even amounts of tabletalk to truly work. Sure, you can just shoot each other and in 2 seconds everyone's roles become obvious. But I've seen some crazy plays like a rogue Deputy whittling the Sherrif within an inch of his life so that his enemies can fight amongst themselves.

Bang the Card game is the one game I regret I can't play anymore as absolutely everyone hates it and prefers the dice version.

it's not just the elimination, though - the game moves at a crawl. coup lets you get killed early, but you know it won't last long afterward. the onslaught of MANCATO! cards, and the fact that you need a bang card to deal damage, is just killer!

If it helps, there was a fanmade expansion that allowed the dead to play as ghosts who had limited but disruptive abilities.

Still doesn't excuse the pace I know but it's like Samurai Spirit when you know the round is over cos you've lost your last villager but you still wanna recreate kurosawa's Last Stand with the rest of the raiders. It's about immersion, and the deliberate tension that comes with hanging on to that last sliver of health.

I dunno what to tell ya. Our group is always glued to the remaining players no matter how long it takes
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The heaviest game I love is Arkwright but I never get it to the table because i don't know 3 accountabts :D
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33. Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126163/tzolk-mayan-calendar

Genre/mechanics: Worker placement, point salad
Rules complexity: 8/10
Game length: 75-120 minutes
Player count: 2-4
Experience: 4+ plays with 2-4 players, including on boardgamearena
First played: 2015

Tzolk'in is a worker placement game with a twist (or a turn, ho ho ho), with a Mayan theme. There are five "gears" on which your workers can be placed, and you start placing at the bottom vacant spot of the gear, where actions are the weakest. At the end of the round, the gears all advance, and in subsequent rounds, you may pull your worker off a gear to take the higher-action level - which is your typical resources/trade/victory point salad action.

Design - Most of Tzolk'in is kinda derivative but competent. The theme, the resources used, the necessity of getting more, feeding your workforce, a set game length, a bunch of technology tracks that improve your efficiency, a few point-yielding structures you can trade your resources for, and random other mechanisms that let you advance on "god tracks" for yet more resources and victory points. That said, it's all on a reasonably attractive board, and it feels satisfying to do, and not being able to feed your workers isn't that punishing.

However, the biggest part that's cool about Tzolk'in is, by far, the gear system. At the center of the board is a giant gear with a bunch of etchings on it, and after a round - during which you can either place workers to get onto the gear, or pick up workers to gain their benefit, but not both - the central gear ticks. This central gear delineates round markings, when you need to score certain tracks, and when you need to feed your workforce. But cooler than that is that it is physically bound to the other gears. So your workers, which are put at the perimeter of those gears, physically revolve around the gear when the round passes. It's a possibly gimmicky physical mechanism that really gives the game a fun kick, for a euro.

It helps that nothing gets in the way of just enjoying this mechanism. For a worker placement game, Tzolk'in is astoundingly not-mean. While only one worker can occupy a particular tier on a gear, you can put a worker on

Enjoyment - I have never won a game of Tzolk'in. But I've played it both in person and online (with the in-person variant obviously being better due to the physical gear presence). The relative friendliness of the game, as noted above, has me pretty happy to play it.

Replay - Would love to get at least competent at the game. As my pace of learning new games slows, this is one I might request to hit the table in coming months.

Bonus question - What's your favorite gimmick in a eurogame?

Hint for #32 - a title with a nice metaphor for the passage of time
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T'zolkin is actually pretty good. I've only played it once, but the mechanics were really interesting.
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32. Seasons
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/108745/seasons

Genre/mechanics: Card-drafting, dice-drafting, tableau-building
Rules complexity: 8/10
Game length: 60-90 minutes
Player count: 2-4
Experience: 4-5 plays over 2-3 sessions with 4 players
First played: 2017

Seasons is a game about playing cards, paid at the cost of resources gained mainly by dice. The goal is to have the greatest number of victory points after three game years. At the start of a round, the first player rolls dice equal to the number of players plus one, and each player drafts one die with which to perform an action - generally related to acquiring cards, or the resources with which to play cards. The remaining die ticks the year forward between one and three months.

Experience - Admittedly, a big reason that Seasons ranks high for me is that I played it a bunch in a row and was able to see how the game came together a bit. Those plays also happened to occur with my usual, reliable playgroup. Online plays were with the same crew.

Design - Seasons is a nice-looking game, with its pretty dice and pretty calendar thingy. But it's really a card game. When 'gamer's gamers' talk about game design, it comes down to interesting decisions, and Seasons features a few layers of decisions there.

First is the drafting phase - determining the entire deck of cards you'll receive - the usual caveats apply, where you'll want a balance of cheaper engine-builders for the early game and high-valued victory point cards for the endgame. Then there's the card division - you'll have access only to one third of your cards for the first year, but you get to decide in which order you get those cards. The majority of the game is spent drafting dice (where you'll need to balance resources with cards) and deciding when to play which cards. The game really opens up once you've started to accumulate a tableau; the abilities printed on those cards (such as the ability to push time forward, possibly screwing over your opponents) are the real crux of the game and are what differentiate players' turns from one another. Engines can be distinct and satisfying.

Replay - Those plays all happened within like a month of another, a year ago. Would need to pick a day where we're ready to handle what's actually kind of sizable downtime at four players, but Seasons deserves more time on the table.

Bonus question - What's your favorite game that involves the "take one and pass the rest" card-drafting mechanism?

Hint for #31 - it's not that I'm lightheaded, I just can't remember the word
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7 Wonders is about the only drafting game I've played but I would like to fix that, and Seasons sounds very up my alley.

EDIT: oh wait I did play Sushi Go that one time. Still 7 Wonders.
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cyko posted...

Did you play Agricola with the Occupation and Minor Improvement cards? They do add a bit more complexity, but they give you a lot more ways to feed your family and/or score points, which actually makes the game feel less punishing. It's a significantly better game with the extra cards.

Never played without 'em, though I've also never drafted them. They can make your life easier, though the paucity of workers doesn't change - need to get them early so you have time to reap their benefits!

cyko posted...

Sid Meiers Civilization
Terra Mystica
Terraforming Mars
Orleans
Feast for Odin
Mombasa
Nations
Amerigo
Francis Drake
Empires Age of Discovery
Hyperborea
Xia
Golden Ages

I've played only a few of these before (and none more than once), and they've all been at least pretty solid!

th3l3fty posted...

for some reason people are really hesitant to play heavy euros around here

When I started out, I didn't like euros at all, even light ones, because of the passive-aggressive interaction in them. There are some games that I can enjoy that are true multiplayer solitaire (Karuba! - and a few more in the list), but something about denying people resources without actually attacking them really got my goat before. Add that to a long playtime and complex rules and the fact that playing without a defined strategy can feel like just pushing cubes... I guess I don't know your group, but that's part of the reason I'm always at least apprehensive before embarking on a heavy eurogame journey.

Tom Bombadil posted...

7 Wonders is about the only drafting game I've played but I would like to fix that, and Seasons sounds very up my alley.

EDIT: oh wait I did play Sushi Go that one time. Still 7 Wonders.

Have you played any games where you can draft cards optionally? In Seasons, you only draft at the beginning of the game (but could really just play it without drafting), but have to play them using resources as normal. Agricola and Terraforming Mars are two other board games games involving cards that have optional drafting.
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oh hm I have played Terraforming Mars, true
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7 Wonder is good for drafting games. I also like Among the Stars a lot.
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Yeah, there's something about being screwed by someone without any clear avenue to getting back at them that can be frustrating

I like being able to wave consequences as a deterrent, and when I can't it feels a little crummy

Not that every euro is that way, of course
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I played 7w once. It didn't make any sense to me and i had about zero fun.

Terra mystica, on the other hand... pure genius.
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https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/76412082

this list shall continue
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