Board 8 > my top 32 tabletop games

(+) Yeah! (+)

i'm certainly interested, but getting five friends to commit for ten hours seems daunting. i'd also be left over with a box would likely not get used again for another year...! but yes, definitely something i'd love to try at some point.
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23. Wits and Wagers (2005)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, trivia, betting, real time, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 7-10 games with 5-7 players (2015-2020)
Previous ranks: 24/100 (2016), 30/80 (2018)

Summary - A trivia question is read with a numerical answer ("How many pounds of potatoes does the average American eat per year?"), and everyone then writes down an answer. These answers are simultaneously revealed and ranked from greatest to least, and then there is a betting phase where each player can wager their chips on up to two responses that they think are closest to the correct answer. Payout odds are determined by how far from the median answer they are (i.e. the median answer pays out 2:1, while the highest and lowest answers pay out more like 6:1). The game lasts seven rounds.

Design - Wits and Wagers has a lot of great features - it's simultaneous, it plays up to seven, it's trivia, and you can win without actually knowing trivia. These categories are all huge wins for me as far as party games go.

The best part of Wits and Wagers, and what obviously distinguishes it from a generic trivia game, is the betting part, which is interactive. While you don't influence one another in terms of the answers you write down (and each person is incentivized to write the closest answer), during the real-time rush of placing bets, you're allowed to change your bets depending on others' bets. In this sense, you don't need to have written the correct answer; instead, you can make educated guesses on the right answer, and even if you have no clue after seeing what other people guessed, you can still try to follow the herd based on where people are placing their betting chips. This can often lead to hilarity and befuddlement when people find out just how misled the confident better was.

The one problem with Wits and Wagers is that it's a bit too short. If you miss on a few rounds, suddenly you can find yourself at the end of the game having made only one or two winning bets, far behind everyone else. Granted, this is a worthy tradeoff because the game can have a huge compounding leader effect; if you are behind after seven rounds, odds are you'll be behind by even more after fifteen... or maybe not. I guess we'll never know! Wits and Wagers also provides relatively few cheap, lightweight currency chips, so in practical effect, the components don't actually suit a bigger game.

Experience - A friend got Wits and Wagers and introduced it back when massive game nights were common. Now, it's a one-time-a-year affair. My biggest want in most games is for a few more rounds to try to get into the game, but I might drop it a few spots on a re-rank, because falling behind early in the the most recent play wasn't so great.

Future - That said, I'm still eager to see this hit the table again. You're theoretically limited by the number of cards in the deck, but in practice, that's not an issue for me. Whenever it comes to the table, I'm still excited to play.
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Holy crap I played that game once years ago and forgot it exists

Wits and Wagers is probably a Top 5 Party game for me -

Time's Up Title Recall
Captain Sonar
Wits and Wagers
Code Names
Just One

Those are probably my Top 5 Party Games.


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just one would chart if i ran the list again. got my second play in recently. for "goat" two of us put "brady."
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spirit island is a good game, but it's just more complex than the kind of game i want from a co-op. really, i think it brings about a huge sense of AP, because it generally feels pretty solvable, and highly optimizable if players really talk things through, but there are so many possible decisions and just a lot of stuff to consider, that it takes too long to get there

the theme is neat though!

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Always looking for good party games so I'll have to look up Just One and Title Recall

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I picked up Just One on clearance at Target last week for under $8. Hoping to get a few games in this weekend since I'm having some friends over.

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SBAllen posted...

I picked up Just One on clearance at Target last week for under $8. Hoping to get a few games in this weekend since I'm having some friends over.

Wow, that's an amazing deal.

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SeabassDebeste posted...

i'm certainly interested, but getting five friends to commit for ten hours seems daunting. i'd also be left over with a box would likely not get used again for another year...! but yes, definitely something i'd love to try at some point.

I get it! It's definitely a game that's very group-dependent. Anecdotally, the first time my group ever played it, it was a five-player affair that took about seven hours and we had such a blast that we even gave some thought to running it back the next day. But that sort of story is certainly the minority among all the people that have groups where it never gets to the table and isn't finished when it is. So I understand the trepidation, especially when the game itself isn't cheap.

If everyone takes to it, though, it's a completely unique board gaming experience.

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22. Food Chain Magnate (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Economic, tableau-building, area control
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 120 to 240 minutes
Experience: 6-8 games (mostly tutorial) with 2-5 players (2017-2019)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs a 1950s fast food chain, attempting to conquer an initially unblemished suburb. Each round, players can play out a hand of their employees, who (depending on role) can recruit other employees, train up other employees, market food and drink, produce food and drink, slash prices, open houses, and more. Then there is a dinner phase, where each house that has received sufficient marketing will look for the restaurant (player) who can supply them what they want at the lowest price (and closest distance) and purchase that food. Players then pay their staff with the money they've earned.

Design - Food Chain Magnate has one of the most ingenious designs. While it is among my heaviest games in terms of playtime, board complexity, and overall brain-burn, the ruleset is actually rather simple. Like Kemet, it overloads you with information at the beginning of the game - you have access to every employee type with a massive tech tree - but there's no card-reading afterward. The depth of FCM comes not from insane rules or powers but from the wide decision space. And intelligently, FCM is very emergent in terms of gameplay - because marketing is entirely player-driven, you have to play at least somewhat heads-up. Building your company by hiring lots of employees is satisfying, but intelligently fulfilling demand and slashing prices is the goal, and that is entirely context-dependent.

There are so many cruxes to the game - when do you market? How much should you train each marketer? Which goods do you want to specialize in producing, and are you still capable of diversifying after that? Do you slash or raise prices? Can you afford to open new houses/to fulfill their demand/to market to them? Can you overflood with demand to cause your opponents to fail to fulfill their orders? FCM tells you "just play a dozen employees each round and resolve their relatively straightforward effects," but because the board state is so dependent on others, it's never just that. Then there are the milestones, which multiple players can earn, but only if they attain it on the same turn. The ruleset is elegant, but the way it links together creates a clusterfuck of a puzzle that's just so deep and rich.

Component-wise, FCM is not particularly lauded for its art (though I enjoy the '50s-style cartoon-art). Its menu player guides, however, are brilliant - thematic, helpful, and pretty much complete as well. I also love the wooden food tokens, very intelligently used as both actual food and the demand that customers have. Then there are the modular tiles which can make every map different - huge fan of the different board states that they can create. The worst part, without question, is the paper money. It's thematic, but UGH.

One of FCM's greatest weaknesses is how punishing it is to mistakes in the early game. As far as I have been able to tell in my very limited experience, picking anything other than Recruiting Girl or Trainer to beign the game will cause you to lose. Trainer is the best opening for a new player, I find, because the milestone associated with it gives you the ability to avoid firing at least three trained employees - absolutely key in terms of keeping your head afloat and not having a miserable experience. Placing a bad restaurant location to open the game can also tank you for enough turns that, if the bank is small, you have zero shot at winning from the get-go.

The other possible weakness is the long bureaucracy. While it's exciting to see each restaurant fill its orders it's fun to maniuplate the wooden burgers, pizzas, and drinks, it's actually rather painful to do repeated arithmetic for five minutes each round, followed by another few minutes of resolving the marketing (and in order, too).

Experience - I'd been intimidated to try FCM for a long time, but in mid-2017 I finally got a chance at a semi-public meetup at a meetup member's apartment. We played a five-player game that took five hours including the teach, and it was fucking miserable. I actually came in third, but the players ahead of me were taking insanely long turns and agonizing over every decision. We also played a full, non-tutorial-length game.

I also could not stop thinking about the game. Given how expensive it was - in the $130 to $190 range at the time - I stayed away from buying, but the decision space of the game was so interesting that I kept turning it over in my mind for weeks afterward. Not many games get me to do that! When the game finally was reprinted and available for $90, I pounced on it.

Have I gotten $90 worth out of it? Not exactly. I've played it over five times since then, and each play has been decent, but FCM is the type of game that clearly demands you play kind of cutthroat to get the best experience. Like Kemet and Spirit Island, nearly every play of FCM I've had has had at least one new player and therefore a tutorial game (where we use the milestones, but not a full-sized bank). I still want the real meat of the game, and I want to be able to justify buying the expansion - at least the milestones seem fantastic.

Future - I want to play FCM with people that I like. It's too mean a game to play it with people I might feel bad about playing with. But getting those people up to speed requires a lot of time and commitment, and there's so much else out there, and I'm not trying to play it with two. It's an even longer shot than Spirit Island to get a ton of good wear, but I'm still holding out hope.
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I was actually looking at FCM earlier today. But it's like $130 now zzz

I got viticulture essential edition instead for a third of the price. maybe some day!

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food chain magnate is too big a game for me to want to ever play tbqh. i'm sure it's good though

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I've played FCM once and it was the usual situation where the one guy who knew the game crushed while me and the other guy were way behind the whole game.

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Catan being so low hurts me deeply since it was my gateway game and I still enjoy it. I read your reasoning though and I guess I get it...

I've found that 3 players with the base game and 5 with the expansion are the absolute ideal ways to play. Anything else ends up being pretty strapped for resources and there are definitive winners and losers. The special building phase in 5/6 players helps create some excitement for me and balances it out pretty well.

I had kind of the opposite experience of you though where I grasped this style of game much quicker than my group. Catan to this day is a game I would rarely say no to playing, even if there are games I have enjoyed a lot more. I like to think of it as Monopoly, but with the chance of it not being an awful experience for everyone involved

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Food Chain Magnate is awesome. But it is definitely one of the most punishing games I have ever played. It looks innocent enough, but one early mistake will take you out of the game. Because of that, it has left a couple of my friends very turned off to it. They think it's terrible that a game would give newer players almost no chance to win. I sort of get their viewpoint, but that's why I prefer playing a game multiple times to really get to know it.

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KommunistKoala posted...

I was actually looking at FCM earlier today. But it's like $130 now zzz

I got viticulture essential edition instead for a third of the price. maybe some day!

i've gotten more "real" plays out of VC than FCM. the learning curve is so different. so yeah, understandable!

Naye745 posted...

food chain magnate is too big a game for me to want to ever play tbqh. i'm sure it's good though

i mean it takes as long as dominion to set up...! (fun fact, last night, late, we were at 3p and were discussing what to play. i suggested dominion and catan. catan was turned down just for fun factor perhaps, and dominion, my friend who knew it felt the teach/setting up the market/explaining the cards would take too long.)

Great_Paul posted...

I've played FCM once and it was the usual situation where the one guy who knew the game crushed while me and the other guy were way behind the whole game.

yeah, i feel if you know the game in FCM, it is your responsibility to make sure no one is eliminated in the first three rounds. i always put myself first in turn order and highly recommend trainer/RG... a friend in 4p picked marketer and wound up getting destroyed. that game i unknowingly boxed myself in where i literally could access only one house. you can lose a short game of FCM in round 1.

cyko posted...

Food Chain Magnate is awesome. But it is definitely one of the most punishing games I have ever played. It looks innocent enough, but one early mistake will take you out of the game. Because of that, it has left a couple of my friends very turned off to it. They think it's terrible that a game would give newer players almost no chance to win. I sort of get their viewpoint, but that's why I prefer playing a game multiple times to really get to know it.

with so many games and only so much time to play them, it's hard to get people to commit to two hours for a learning game, with a promise that the next three hour game will be much more fun. for me at least.

imthestuntman posted...

Catan being so low hurts me deeply since it was my gateway game and I still enjoy it. I read your reasoning though and I guess I get it...

I've found that 3 players with the base game and 5 with the expansion are the absolute ideal ways to play. Anything else ends up being pretty strapped for resources and there are definitive winners and losers. The special building phase in 5/6 players helps create some excitement for me and balances it out pretty well.

I had kind of the opposite experience of you though where I grasped this style of game much quicker than my group. Catan to this day is a game I would rarely say no to playing, even if there are games I have enjoyed a lot more. I like to think of it as Monopoly, but with the chance of it not being an awful experience for everyone involved

catan hits a lot of the same pleasure buttons as monopoly with its dice rolls and trading. i've never played an expansion, but i agree fully that three is more fun than four, simply because it's not fun to get boxed in.
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setup doesnt bother me though, it's game length. i also just don't tend to like games that take 3+ hours where you can lose in the first 10 minutes. games with "scripted" openings are unappealing imo

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A comparative review

86. Century: Eastern Wonders (2018)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Point-to-point movement, area control, resource conversion
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-60 minutes
Experience: 3-4 games with 3-4 players (2017-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player plays as a spice merchant/trader sailing across a hexagonal grid of islands. At each stop, you can collect basic spices, trade your spices for better spices (depnding on your tile), build an outpost, and upgrade your player abilities. At special ports, you can trade your resources for victory points.

21. Century: Spice Road (2017)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Hand-building, card-drafting, order fulfillment
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30 to 50 minutes
Experience: 12+ games with 3-5 players (2017-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 29/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player competes for points, scored primarily by trading resources for point-cards. On your turn, you perform an action: playing a card (which generally gains or upgrades your resources in specific ways), drafting a card to your hand, resting (to replenish your hand), or purchasing a point-card. There are four different resources, which are organized in tier value from greatest to least.

Design - Century Spice Road is one of my favorite games, and perhaps for "not the right reasons." It's almost a guilty pleasure how much you can multiplayer-solitaire it: other than watching for who is going for which milestones and the occasional person who will steal your preferred action card, there's pretty much zero interaction in CSR. As an unwind game, I love constructing something of an engine (really just a chain of cards that get consistently more valuable) and just running it and running it until I've loaded my cargo with high-value spices - and then I go shopping.

It's just so smooth - it takes a long time to gather the resources for almost any good card, so you can just fixate, take a look briefly to see if anyone else is going for it, and just spend 4-5 turns doing exactly that. You can reduce CSR to almost a comically simple decision space, and it flows ultra-smoothly given the quickness of each turn (play a card and trade the according resources). In contrast to Food Chain Magnate's malicious interactivity, CSR is one of my absolute favorite "heads-down" games. Toss in clear/fun/oversized cards, attractive spice cubes, and elegant cups for holding those cubes (unnecessary but oh-so-pleasant!) and you've got an excellent experience.

And I suppose that's part of why Century: Eastern Wonders bothers me. While still based on the four-resources, order fulfillment paradigm of CSR, CEW takes away the "stare-at-your-hand-and-chain-together-moves" aspect of the game. Trading actions are now printed on a static board instead of on draftable cards, so you need to go to a spot to take an action. There's a small element of blocking that comes from there, as due to a player-mat mini-game you're incentivized to go where other people don't so you can avoid paying them to occupy the same slot as their boat and to get the chance to plant your own structures on spaces where they have none.

This produces a wealth of complexities. Your ideal reachable board spot for building might not be your ideal spot for performing the printed action. The sense of ownership is vaguer as your ship needs to keep moving around and anyone can use any tile, as long as it is within reach. You need to make more impactful decisions, as you balance the board state with your personal desires - is it more important to chase a player-mat upgrade by going to an unoccupied territory, or to build a chain so you can get the resources you want and fulfill the right order? Can you strike a balance or better yet, do both? Can you avoid the blocking?

This produces arguably a richer and absolutely a more difficult game. There are many more decisions to be made and considerations to take into account on your turn. And due to having a map and cute boats, CEW's table footprint is extremely attractive (though the tiles themselves are visually noisy). It's a very clever sequel, one that preserves enough thematic and component ties to the original to be recognizable, but which digs deeper as a "gamer's game."

Experience - And as you can tell from the ranking, to me, CEW loses much of what's great about Century. In a vacuum, CEW is a game with a lot of cool elements - some route-building, some customizability, a mix of shorter-term and longer-term tactics and a mini-tech-tree. But because of its chrome, it will always remind me of what it's not: Century to me is about that frictionless glide of churning an engine, even if you lose.

Probably worth it to note as well that my plays of CSR at three or four have been far more satisfying than at five - when the amount of downtime begins to exceed the amount of thought you need on your turn (very low), the spell does get broken.

Future - CEW seems like it'll be a while before it returns. CSR is a go-to cool-down/warm-up game that I'm a little sad the #1 gaming pal didn't love. But I'm still eager to play it and was happy to request it earlier this month.
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i am one of the (seemingly) few people who really preferred eastern wonders to spice road

spice road never did much for me though. i get why people like it but there are games that do its thing but just better (for me!)

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The Century games are a solid trilogy for sure. I'm teaching Eastern Wonders at a local convention next weekend.

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Naye745 posted...

i am one of the (seemingly) few people who really preferred eastern wonders to spice road

spice road never did much for me though. i get why people like it but there are games that do its thing but just better (for me!)

CSR has been tagged a splendor-killer. the thought definitely occurred to me - a simple engine-builder where you're trying to assemble sets of cubes/tokens to fulfill orders. to me splendor feels like a tighter design (in something of the way dominion has the tightest deck-builder design), while century is actually less interactive
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I got to play Pillars of the Earth and Firenze yesterday. I was surprised at how mean Firenze was for being a relatively simple game about building towers. Anyone who likes mean games should check it out. Since I do NOT like excessively mean games, I will be trading it away, lol.

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Played Just One over the weekend, was really fun and definitely worth the under $8 I paid for it.

Also got to play Jaws for the first time. I was the shark, swept Act I but barely got beat at the end of Act II due to some bad luck for me and great teamwork for the humans. It's fun though and definitely want to play it more and try out playing a human.

Friends brought over Horrified which I had only heard of and didn't know much about. It was a pretty neat concept but I think it's one of those games where the more people who play, the harder it gets. We spent too much time taking out The Mummy and ultimately lost due to too many deaths even though we were pretty close to finishing the other two monsters (Invisible Man and Wolfman). I'd like to play again sometime but maybe with fewer people or only two monsters.

The Thor hero pack for Marvel Champions should be arriving in the mail today so I'm looking forward to testing him out tonight. Not sure who I want to go up against, maybe Mutagen Formula or Klaw..

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SeabassDebeste posted...

CSR has been tagged a splendor-killer. the thought definitely occurred to me - a simple engine-builder where you're trying to assemble sets of cubes/tokens to fulfill orders. to me splendor feels like a tighter design (in something of the way dominion has the tightest deck-builder design), while century is actually less interactive

yep, and there's a game i prefer vastly to both of them (gizmos) that actually does what i wanted those games to do.
that said, i get the appeal, and they aren't bad games!

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i thought pillars of the earth was fine but felt a little dated. the worker draw mechanism that i mostly forget was really good though, that's the one thing that actually stands out amongst the now-rote worker placement and resources-to-points converting.

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Naye745 posted...

i thought pillars of the earth was fine but felt a little dated. the worker draw mechanism that i mostly forget was really good though, that's the one thing that actually stands out amongst the now-rote worker placement and resources-to-points converting.

I didn't like how they came out randomly. However, I did like the mechanic that the person who had the opportunity to place first had to spend money for the privilege or pass. And that each worker got cheaper until the remaining onew were free. I think that's a cool mechanic that could be implemented well even if you knew the order of the players.

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20. Dracula's Feast (2017)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, social deduction, hidden roles
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 10-20 minutes
Experience: 30+ games over 12+ sessions (2017-2020)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 10/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is dealt a role of a monster: Dracula, Alucard, Werewolf, Zombie, and the like. The goal is to deduce everyone else's role and, on your turn, to make an Accusation: by revealing your role and handing a second copy of the role card to each other player. On your turn, instead of accusing, you can also take one of two information-gathering actions: querying (asking a specific player whether they are a specific role, to which they must answer honestly) and dancing (asking a specific player whether they would like to dance - if they accept, then you look at one another's cards.) Each role also has a special ability to throw confusion into the game.

Design - I love the positive feelings Dracula's Feast provides. Microturns, deduction, quick snappy decisions. The artwork on the role cards is great, as are the "whisper" cards that you use for queries. The way the roles interact can change games from whisper-filled to dance-happy, and depending on which happens more often, a single game can go longer or shorter.

If you've played Clue, the direct questioning of people should feel relatively familiar - but here, you've got mix-ins like the Trickster, who always responds "yes" to a query, Alucard, who always responds "yes" to being asked if he's Dracula. It's not uncommon for an entire circle to be asking "Are you Dracula?" Meanwhile, it's also not uncommon for many players to be asking (or being offered) dances. Dancing is high-risk, high-reward; giving away your own role can be dangerous, but getting 100% assurance on your dance partner's role is a huge leg up against others. Including three must-accept-dance-invitation characters is also a great move from the designers; if you sit back and refuse dances and just try to play the asking game while everyone else is dancing, you're likely going to fall way behind.

In some games of Dracula's Feast, the last player will literally only get one turn before the game ends. That's just the way it falls sometimes, and because the game plays so quickly, I don't find it to suffer because of it. In fact, it encourages players to take risks - as in all deduction games, Dracula's Feast gives you lots of opportunities to feel really clever or really stupid. You can only win by accusing, and you can only accuse by revealing your role. Your guess will inform others, and your exposed role will of course also do the same, so your reveal makes it more likely that other players will also attempt to solve the game. This does create something of a weird tension where you often want to be the second person to reveal yourself.

If there's a flaw with the game, it's that not all the roles are equally fun to play, and that they can be a bit confusing. The Werewolf, Zombie, and Van Helsing in particular feel overpowered, while Beelzebub and Dr. Jekyll feel clunky to play. I usually wind up excluding many of these roles in any given game.

Experience - Dracula's Feast is my baby. To date, it's the only game I have backed on Kickstarter. It comes in a small box with the proportions of a coffin, and I brought it everywhere I could expect 5+ players for months afterward. It's a game I feel stupidly proud to own because I got on the boat early, even though it hasn't exactly become a crossover hit in the mainstream market. The game had lain fallow for several months over the second half of 2019, but I managed to get it to the table again last month, and it was just as good as I remembered.

The game came with Advanced Roles, which I've used considerably less (since they require additional cheat-sheets for each player), and a Cthulu Expansion, which I've never even opened. I've also got the second edition, Dracula's Feast: New Blood, which has changed up the rules, but which I have yet to play.

Future - It's almost entirely dependent on the group. My main gaming group is the least receptive to social deduction games, unfortunately, and they only found the game so-so. But with any group that enjoys it, I obviously have a ton of content to blaze through. Can't wait to get it to the table again.
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Oh interesting, this sounds really cool and I've never even heard of it.

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not sure my main group has played any social deduction game aside from avalon, that one sounds pretty interesting

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SBAllen posted...

Played Just One over the weekend, was really fun and definitely worth the under $8 I paid for it.

Also got to play Jaws for the first time. I was the shark, swept Act I but barely got beat at the end of Act II due to some bad luck for me and great teamwork for the humans. It's fun though and definitely want to play it more and try out playing a human.

i really like the design of just one! it's arguably not game-y, but i think it holds up well with the likes of telestrations, for example

jaws i tried once - it feels more like an "experience" game than a "gamer's game," due to the way acts 1 and 2 feel like completely separate entities, but it was fun!
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gizmos is definitely more complex, but when i want an engine building game, i like one that actually lets me build an engine. i think there's enough "random" parts that the randomness balances out, and obviously like splendor you can reserve cards in the center rows that you feel are essential

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Great_Paul posted...

Oh interesting, this sounds really cool and I've never even heard of it.

KommunistKoala posted...

not sure my main group has played any social deduction game aside from avalon, that one sounds pretty interesting

i think it might be hard to get a hold of it rn, but night of the mummy will have the same mechanisms + different roles, and its kickstarter launches in 2 weeks. i'll link it when it does!
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19. Pictomania (2011)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, drawing, real-time, deduction, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 30 minutes
Experience: 7-10 games over 5-8 sessions with 4, 6 players (2019-2020)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player is secretly assigned a word to draw (based on a master list that everyone can see). You earn points by finishing your picture before others, by being guessing others' pictures successfully (and before others), and by having others guess your picture successfully. The game is played over four rounds, and the words to draw get harder each round (i.e. in round 1, you might have to draw distinct animals like a cat and a rabbit, but in round 4 might have to distinguish between a wolf and a dog.)

Design - Pictomania is fantastic. Real-time games are great, and drawing is great. Synthesizing the two isn't always that easy to do in game form; Pictionary, for example, feels distinctly card-draw-dependent/has a poor game component. Meanwhile, Telestrations seems like a vessel for chaos and not really a game at all. Pictomania rewards you both as an artist and a guesser, and its controlled chaos is just about perfect. The question isn't how well you can draw in a time limit, but rather how quickly you can draw while scoring points. It's a great equalizer for those that do not fancy themselves artists.

That said, it may swing a little too far in the opposite direction. Pictomania's scoring system probably overly incentivizes speed versus drawing, in my opinion. The trouble is that being first to guess each player's drawing is worth up to three points, and being first to finish is another three points. On the flip-side, you actually have diminishing returns to everyone guessing your picture correctly - it's worth 3 points when the first person guesses your pic, but subsequent correct guesses give fewer and fewer. It really lowers the incentive to draw a clearly recognizable picture.

While each round of Pictomania is entirely independent of the other rounds, Vlaada Chvatil, the designer, did an amazing job picking the cards. Early rounds have really simple pictures and will literlaly have people grabbing for the completion tokens within ten seconds. Later rounds will have at least a few players just throwing their hands up in frustration of how to draw period, a few lucky/ingenious artists illustrating their points quickly and effectively, and the embattled few who will communicate an abstract concept effectively but wind up scoring very few points because they finished last.

Experience - It seems almost unfair that I only discovered Pictomania so recently. I love pretty much everything about it, and it's a party game that can be played with as few as four players.

Future - Pictomania hasn't got quite as many reps on it as my long-time favorites that will dominate the top of this list, but it might rank among the highest of my want-to-play party games that I've actually played a fair amount. There's a slight worry of the cards getting stale, but I'm not overly concerned. Would buy if it weren't for my friend's owning it; it's become one of my favorite endings to a four-player game night.
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Damn, Ive never even heard of Draculas Feast, but it sounds 100% like something I would have kickstarted

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i'm like two months late with this but i'm surprised both carcassonne and settlers of catan are so low. from what little i know of tabletop games, they're both quite popular!

never played carcassonne but love me some catan (though i'm not very good at it).

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carcassonne is enjoyable for what it is, though it's super duper random and unpredictable.

18. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015)

Category: Co-operative, campaign
Genres: Point-to-point movement, campaign, set collection, action-point allocation
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 45-60 minutes
Experience: One campaign of 16-19 games over 8-10 sessions with 4 players (2016)
Previous ranks: 4/100 (2016), 7/80 (2018)

Summary - It's Pandemic, but a legacy game, like a campaign in a video game. Played over twelve "months," each game you play changes the setting of the next game slightly: edited event deck, edited infection deck, a scarred board, permanent research centers, upgraded (and new!) characters. Additionally, plot events happen when you progress through the game, adding additional rules. Once the campaign is completed, the game is finished and not really intended to be replayed.

Design - While it's fiddly, I really enjoy the storyline and flow of Pandemic Legacy. Opening those new boxes (something I never had to do) is exciting. Adapting to new rules is exciting. Bringing a group together for so many sessions is exciting (and getting the same amount of wear on each of my games as I did on Pandemic Legacy is a pretty significant milestone.) The addition of faded figures added a ton to the table presence of the game. And of course, it all fed into the standard Pandemic game style, which I really enjoy to begin with.

Zombies was a well-worn trope among storytelling in 2015, but it came as a twist in the Pandemic universe and really upped the ante. I really also liked the abilities granted by the military roles in the game and the military heel turn near September. The final month is also really unique, basically unrecognizable as the original Pandemic game but really fun in its own way.

Experience - Pandemic Legacy is one of the seminal experiences. It was reaching #1 on BGG (overtaking Twilight Struggle) when my friend (who has sinced moved away) proposed splitting the $79 or so four ways and getting it played. It was December 2015 when we got it and January 2016 when we started it. It wasn't always super-fun - since she was moving away at the end of March, we initially agreed to do one game-month per week. When we started missing weeks and certain months took more than one game for us to beat, it became easy to see it as a chore: we had a few weeknight game sessions that left us pretty drained after a failed mission.

Yet persevering was worth it. I loved watching the storyline unfold, loved the emotional investment that came from being forged in fire, perhaps due to the stress of having to complete the game on a deadline. I actually felt pretty upset when the Researcher I played and upgraded so much wound up betraying us when the Military turned out dirty. It took us two tries to beat December, which we played on the floor in my friend's empty apartment when we'd already moved out all her furniture. It's the type of experience that overcomes any lack of tightness in the game design.

Future - Maybe someday I'll play S2, but I'll never touch Legacy S1 again. It's a sad thought that the game will keep dropping in the rankings as other games overtake it, but that's life. I don't know how long it'll be before I can invest in any campaign game. I'll try to get the #1 gaming mate on board, I guess.
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I really enjoy standard Pandemic, but Legacy seems like you need to commit to regular playing times. Maybe when I have kids and they are old enough to not suck!

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Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is the only legacy game I've done so far, though I'm hoping to eventually get Charterstone played.

What colour was COdA in your game? For us it was red.

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Great_Paul posted...

What colour was COdA in your game? For us it was red.

i think we had black. we wound up nuking a yellow city, though.

Nelson_Mandela posted...

I really enjoy standard Pandemic, but Legacy seems like you need to commit to regular playing times. Maybe when I have kids and they are old enough to not suck!

yeah. if you like 2p a lot, you could run it with your wife probably - i think twice a month is enough not to lose track of the storyline. but opening all the boxes and grokking the rules requires longer than a normal pandemic game.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Damn, Ive never even heard of Draculas Feast, but it sounds 100% like something I would have kickstarted

will tag you when the kickstarter for night of the mummy launches...!

Mr Lasastryke posted...

i'm like two months late with this but i'm surprised both carcassonne and settlers of catan are so low. from what little i know of tabletop games, they're both quite popular!

never played carcassonne but love me some catan (though i'm not very good at it).

i had a very negative first experience with catan and didn't particularly enjoy trading in it. i do see the appeal, but i'd say that this is a case where catan benefits a lot from being one of the progenitors of the genre, instead of being outstanding within it. just me though!
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SeabassDebeste posted...

will tag you when the kickstarter for night of the mummy launches...!

Add me to that list too plz.

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god damn i love pictomania
as someone who is both fond of real-time games and drawing games, it hits a special sweet spot for me. i can understand why it's not everyone's cup of tea

pandemic legacy s1 was definitely the better experience (to me) versus s2, though i enjoyed both. without spoilers, i think s1 is just a little more accessible and compelling, while s2 has a lot more value for your choices (good and bad) and is a little less narratively hooking. (december in s2 was awesome though.)

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not sure if i can read that spoiler!

cyko posted...

Anachrony - Turbopun mentioned Anachrony. I've only played it twice. It's a long, deep worker placement game, but it's awesome. It's deep and seems really complex, but once you understand that the time paradoxes are basically just loans you need to pay back, it becomes less confusing. The game feels like it has a real story arc the way it builds toward the meteor crash and then you need to draw people into your faction as the board falls apart. It takes a while to play, but I would really love to play it again.

played anachrony for the second time last night. i think the difficulty of the game is severely dependent on faction powers? my first game i had a power that only gave points for having blue guys (managers) and wound up doing poorly, while this last game i gained points for each type of survivor i had, plus had other great player mat abilities. (won by a lot, including sweeping the five superlative awards at game end.)

i think the game is just a little too much. i have yet to spend a single action on the research tiles that let you build special projects, for instance. the random refills of resources and hirable workers is thematic and variable, but can also just randomly whack you.

still enjoyed myself, though!
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Mr Lasastryke posted...

i'm like two months late with this but i'm surprised both carcassonne and settlers of catan are so low. from what little i know of tabletop games, they're both quite popular!

never played carcassonne but love me some catan (though i'm not very good at it).

Historically, Catan was very important for the board game industry and helped revolutionize a whole new type of game. It showed that games beyond roll and move games and party games had potential to sell to the mass market.

However, the game has NOT aged well. I first played it 10-15 years after it came out and it wasn't very fun compared to other games I was playing around that time - like Ticket to Ride, Power Grid, Puerto Rico, Race for the Galaxy and Agricola.

Great_Paul posted...

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is the only legacy game I've done so far, though I'm hoping to eventually get Charterstone played.

What colour was COdA in your game? For us it was red.

Pandemic Legacy Season 1 was an absolutely amazing experience. My group had a ton of fun with it and there were twists to the story that we genuinely didn't see coming.

The same group also played Season 2 together and it was still fun, but the difficulty was very skewed. Depending on the cards you drew at the beginning, your month could be very easy or very difficult. Without any spoilers, some months put way too much emphasis on finding one specific card to advance the story. It made parts of the season feel way more random than Season 1.

There also werent nearly as many big plot twists in Season two as there were in the first one. It was still worth playing if you enjoyed season one, just don't expect Season 2 to wow you as much.

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17. Concordia (2013)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Route-building, point-to-point movement, economic, hand-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-120 minutes (around 30 per player)
Experience: 9-12 plays (2017-2019), incl once with Salsa expansion
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 9/100 (2018)

Summary - On a map of the Roman Empire, each player spreads their colonists across the board to build houses in the cities and build the highest-scoring empire. On a player's turn, they play a card and perform its action. The cards abilities generally enable a player to move around the board/build cities, gain resources (and often allow neighboring players on the map to gain resources), trade resources for money or vice versa with the bank, buy more cards, or produce more dudes. The final score is determined by the cards in a player's hand/discard pile at the end of the game: each card is more valuable depending on the cities that a player has built.

Design - Solely based on its gameplay mechanics, Concordia is the most purely elegant game of its weight that I know. Like Century, Concordia is a pure hand-builder, where your entire turn is just playing a card. It's even purer than Century, in that your turn is always playing a card - acquiring cards, refreshing your hand, and spending your resources are not special actions; rather, they're all functions of specific cards as well.

Now, the actual decisions and actions printed on those cards are considerably more complex than simpler games, of course. You can chain together lots of smooth moves in Concordia, planning ahead a few turns as you angle for your goal, but unlike Century, you'll want to reassess your plan and try to manage the board state and your personal resources.

The elegance of the system means that despite its taxing decision-making, actually playing Concordia is super-smooth and relaxing. There are lots of small, quality-of-life benefits to Concordia. First, there is no round structure in the game where everyone stops to prep the board. Compared to peers like Power Grid, Spirit Island, Food Chain Magnate, and even Viticulture, this lack of bureaucracy keeps the game more relatively focused. That's not the say there isn't an ebb and flow that comes with that round structure, though - the way the Prefect action is replenished, the way the Tribune mechanic works, and the moving of the Prefectus Magnus card all give Concordia minor chapters within a game. But these are all player-driven instead of enforced by the game, which provides a smoother rhythm.

Probably the coolest part of Concordia is its actual gameplay positivity. Every action you take increases your economy, score, or both: even a Tribune action gives you coins and possibly adds a colonist - both coins and colonists are worth points. The Mercator always puts you 3-5 coin ahead and always improves your allocation of goods. The Senator and Architect, of course, allow you to grab the new cards and build the new cities that together comprise both your engine and your victory points.

And of course, there's the Prefect. While the Prefect is played only once every three turns or less, it's the single most constructive part of Concordia. Anyone who has played Settlers of Catan (or hell, Monopoly) will recognize how fun it is to receive benefits on someone else's turn. The way the Prefect causes resources to be distributed is straight outta Catan: in a given province, each city will produce its type of good, so everyone who's built in that city will receive the goods. The process of moving around routes to place cities, and using those cities to gain further resources on players' turns, should feel very familiar. What's missing compared to Catan is dice rolls and trading, both of which are very welcoming to me - player agency determines production, while there's no wasted time due to trading.

In terms of the actual game, Concordia is an efficency puzzle. That might not be the most exciting thing to everyone. The balance also tends to favor card-buys instead of house-builds to end the game in my experience, when house-builds are almost by definition more fun.

Experience - Concordia is one of those games that I knew was great from the get-go, even playing with a slow group. I tried it with a friend who brought it once, then requested it over and over at meetups. Gaming pal #1 gifted it to me a short time ago and I've been pleased to have it, even though it doesn't hit the table quite as often as I'd like - but then, that's almost all my non-party games.

Future - The one thing you could hold against Concordia legitimately is that it's a bit same-y. The only true variability in the game comes from minor variation in the order in which cards appear and some minor variation in the distribution of the citiea. Aside from Minerva cards, you can generally run a similar strategy each game. It also probably is better played with more than 2, to the detriment of my likeliest gaming group.

Nonetheless, I haven't even come close to playing out Concordia yet. It doesn't hit the highest highs, but it's one of the most consistently strong performers I know of. Eager to play again when I get the chance (and especially without having to reteach.)
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My second most unpopular gaming opinion: I dislike Concordia

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i actually didn't really like concordia when i played it

i'd have to give it another go to really feel strongly either way though

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I wish that I played it a little sooner. I only discovered it after a couple of years into the hobby, so I already have games with similar mechanics in my collection. Concordia does it all really well though, can't recommend it enough if you're looking for a more relaxed, not too complicated euro game that still makes you think and isn't completely multiplayer solitaire.

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Finally played the physical version of codenames. That was fun.

I'm not good at it but it was fun.

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