Board 8 > my top 32 tabletop games

(+) Yeah! (+)

I have a sealed copy of Concordia. I would like to get to it eventually, but there are so many great games to play.

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concordia getting a lukewarm reception is prob my biggest surprise of this list so far!
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Concordia is definitely a game I want to try but havent had the chance to play yet

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16. Forbidden Island (2010)/Forbidden Desert (2013)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Point-to-point movement, action point allocation
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-60 minutes
Experience: 30+ plays of Island (2011-2019); 12+ plays of Desert (2015-2019) with 2-5 players
Previous ranks: 10-12/100 (2016), 8/100 (2018)

Summary - Each game sees players taking turns versus the modular board trying to collect four MacGuffins (treasures in Island, ship parts in Desert) and escape dangerous terrain. Actions involve moving your pawn around the board, maintaining localized threat level (flooding on Island, sandstorm in Desert), and and collecting the objects. Objects are found in Island by collecting cards (dealt by the game) and in Desert by flipping the tiles that comprise the board. Players must escape before the flood or sandstorm level overwhelms the map.

Design - I love the simple design of these games. The children of Pandemic, they all have familiar feelings: bustling around the board, managing threat levels, and ultimately fulfulling objectives. Granting each player a special ability (such as enhanced threat management, or diagonal movement) is a delectable way to give a stronger sense of individual agency, and the little statues/plane pieces that you pick up are great components. (You can assemble a tiny plane in FD! How great is that!) The games are simple and quick enough that anyone can play, and their decisions aren't murderous, and their playtime always wraps reasonably.

Forbidden Island, among these, has the best feeling of focus. It inherits Pandemic's "intensification" process, meaning that you localize the threat. (It also gets rid of the random card from the bottom that can result in inevitable outbreaks, thank god.) One brilliant simplification Forbidden makes is that it only has two threat levels: flooded and sunken. It removes the arbitrary epidemic tracker and "cubes run out" losing conditions and instead focuses you on preserving the island itself. As worthless tiles sink, the board naturally ups the tension, because you also remove the irrelevant cards from the flood deck, so valuable locations recur more often. The island on high difficulty often comes fown only four to seven of the initial twenty-four tiles.

Desert adds complexity while losing no accessibility, arguably making it more relevant to experienced gamers while retaining excellent gateway status. Retaining water level in a desert is both thematic and easily grasped. The tile exploration replacing the clunky hand-draw/set collection mechanic is excellent. And I love shifting the board around during storm cards. On the slight downside, it scales worse than Pandemic due to the complexity added with water levels, and luck seems to play a much larger role: you can draw five harmless storm tiles straight, or five that immediately wreck your shit for life. Discovery feels a bit luck-driven as well, due to the geometry of the board - much moreso than the relative consistency of both card draws in FI.

Both Forbidden games feature modular boards. While less complex than Pandemic, this is just flat-out better - a random layout, with funner components, wins over a static, bland-looking world map. To me Forbidden Island wins by a hair because its dramatic arc so consistently comes to such a brilliant point, racing against the destruction of Fool's Landing.

Experience - Forbidden Island is my gateway hobby-game. I hated Catan the first time I played it and wanted a more pleasant couple's game. Bought it cheap off Amazon after reading reviews and was wowed. Have brought it out countless times with different company. It's still among my go-tos as a gateway game, though I mostly don't need those anymore.

Forbidden Desert, in January 2015, is arguably the game that really brought me into "the hobby." That session way back when, after the agonizing massive games, let me know that hey, people in the hobby enjoy the simpler non-euros too. I've since leaned way into eurogames, but that was the foundation of a new set of gaming friends - three straight games in a night. I got it myself in 2017 or 2018, and it's since hit the table several satisfying times as well.

Future - I have no active desire to get FI or FD to the table. FD has some more novelty, but it's well-worn now, too. However, I'm still happy to play them, as long as people are willing and enthusiastic. The components, the board presence, the dramatic arc, working together - landmarks for me, and still worth revisiting.
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My wife and I really enjoy island. Havent tried desert but it seems good to.

Anyone try Forbidden Sky?

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I've played FD a couple times and it just hasn't landed with me. Guess that's my general anti-cooperative leanings coming through again, probably combined with a less consistent but still-prevalent-enough-to-be-a-pattern distaste for a lot of gateway game-esque design principles.

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Maniac64 posted...

My wife and I really enjoy island. Havent tried desert but it seems good to.

Anyone try Forbidden Sky?

A friend has it but I don't see her enough.
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Sky is weird.

It definitly feels the hardest of the three. Adds complexity, honestly too much probably

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forbidden island is fine, but is just like pandemic jr. basically (with amazing art)

desert rules though, it's maybe a little luck driven and super goddamn hard with 5 players but it just feels fun to go sifting through the desert

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15. Castles of Burgundy (2011)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Dice placement, tile-laying, drafting, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 35 min per player
Experience: 10-15 plays with 2-3, 4 (team variant) - 2016, 2018-19
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/100 (2018)

Summary - Everyone competes for the most victory points by laying (connected) hexes on a personal board. Each round, players roll their two dice and, in turn order, take actions for each order. Dice actions include drafting tiles (based on die face) from the market to your supply, laying tiles from supply to a legal spot on your player board, and selling goods. Each placed tile has either an immediate ability (which often will allow you to chain abilities) or an ongoing ability, and finishing connected regions on the board awards points.

Design - I love the combination of simplicity and depth in Castles of Burgundy. One of the few games in my collection best at two, Castles essentially is an ideal depiction of breadth, constraint, and tactics as depth. The theoretical decision space is massive on each turn, and perhaps if you had every option available, you'd make the same board every time - draft and lay the same tiles, the like.

Instead, your two dice limit your window to something manageable. If you want a tile, you have to take it from the marketplace, which means it was first offered on the marketplace, and no one snatched it before you. And even if it falls to you, you'll need to have the appropriate die face, or a plan to get that die face using disposable worker tiles, or the appropriate building to let you "cheat" the action in. Depending on your style and the point of the game you're in, you'll find yourself both strategically angling for the right tile, by hook or by crook, and tactically just taking the best action your dice offer you.

Like any dice game where you roll your own dice, Castles of Burgundy can have luck screw you. But it does a really damn good job at mitigating horrific rolls. You have three spaces in your supply, so when you can't place a tile, you can draft. You have silverlings that let you buy the tile you might need without using dice. You have the sell-goods action, which doesn't build your board but seems rather convenient. You can spend worker tiles to adjust your die faces, and in the worst case, throw your dice away to get worker tiles which, hey, even if you never use, are worth a victory point at the end of the game.

Yes, the default "I pass" action awards you VP. Each game is exactly fifty die-actions, meaning your score to beat is fifty if you just throw away all your workers. Make no mistake, Castles of Burgundy - the only Stefan Feld title on my ranking, I believe - is arguably the definitive point salad. The vast majority of points are scored immediately, so while you can feel a bit bad falling behind, you'll also get that thrill of scoring many, many different times. Sell goods? Points! Mine income? Points! Lay animals? Points! Finishing regions? Points, points, points!

Which isn't to say you can play with no focus at all. The biggest bumps in Castles of Burgundy come from a concerted effort in animal tiles (with no hate-drafting), completing large regions, or finishing small regions in early rounds. At the end of the game, you'll score for certain yellow tiles, but as those are based on the player's board and the tiles they've laid, your decisions will still be paramount there.

Essentially it boils down to, you get tons of choices, almost none of them bad in a vacuum. Any given turn is high-luck, but over the course of fifty dice and five separate entire-market refreshes, your tactics and planning should shine through. Even if you don't win, CoB is the type of game where your score often reflects how well you've played.

And it is very satisfying to play. While there's a lot of overhead/rules-consulting regarding specific tiles (eight different brown building tiles and dozens of yellow tiles!), the core gameplay is super-simple, with just four different die actions (one of which is degenerate). I think it's notable that depending on situation, pretty much any of the six suits of tiles can feel amazing to get. The right yellow tech, the right animal, the right timing on a castle, the right timing on a boat, getting the mine at the right cost, and any of the amazing buildings - that feels like the heart of the game. You get two actions on your turn, but when you slap down the castle, you get a free action. That lets you place your building, which in turn lets you take down a boat. Great, now next turn you can place that, seize first-player, and sell goods! The combination of effects is brilliant and the most satisfying part of it.

Experience - Of course, perhaps there is a large bias here... It was enjoyable but not spectacular the first time I played it, but when it came on my local market at $15, I snapped it up. This is probably the top game for me and gaming buddy #1, at 2p. It's the perfect length for a two-player middleweight euro, and it's the game we've spent the most hours playing. I don't often get to explore heavier games in as much depth as I've gotten to explore CoB.

Future - And the thing is, that high degree of play makes me no less interested in playing CoB. Having a willing partner is huge, but CoB is also brilliant because the tactical dice decisions shape the game so much. CoB is just as consistent as Concordia, and it plays better at 2. It's a big winner.
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Naye745 posted...

forbidden island is fine, but is just like pandemic jr. basically (with amazing art)

desert rules though, it's maybe a little luck driven and super goddamn hard with 5 players but it just feels fun to go sifting through the desert

i think desert is probably more fun on a turn-to-turn basis, while island forms a better narrative arc. love both obviously!
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Castles of Burgundy might be my all-time favorite. Looking forward to learning about 14 games that are better!

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heck yea castles of burgundy

One of many (several by the same guy) on the list of games I played once and would love to play more but we see those friends infrequently enough that there are always new games to try instead

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my friends played it and raved about it when there were only 4 people available to play games but I havent been able to try it yet because always too many people

2 or 3 player will never happen though lol

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castles of burgundy is amazing
stefan feld is my hero

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Castles of Burgundy might be my all-time favorite. Looking forward to learning about 14 games that are better!

I feel decent about putting a lot of the remaining games about CoB, but in terms of competitive couple's games that play in 60-90 minutes, I think this is actually #1!

Tom Bombadil posted...

heck yea castles of burgundy

One of many (several by the same guy) on the list of games I played once and would love to play more but we see those friends infrequently enough that there are always new games to try instead

i sympathize - i almost always want to play something new in addition to the old. the solution is just to have more game nights total imhhhho

KommunistKoala posted...

my friends played it and raved about it when there were only 4 people available to play games but I havent been able to try it yet because always too many people

2 or 3 player will never happen though lol

yeah, unfortunately 4p adds nothing but playtime and board complexity. it's really good and if you ever do find yourself for whatever reason having a small-group situation, i totally recommend! i assume your group never splits into smaller games?
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Castles sounds fun. I need to check it out. Some of the stuff you were saying sounded a little bit like Seven Wonders Duel, though they definitely sound different in other regards.

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castles of burgundy isnt as painfully zero-sum as 7 wonders duel. like, if you want to just build up your castle and i build mine that's totally cool

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14. Werewords

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, social deduction, word game, clue-giving, real-time
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 5-10 minutes
Experience: 50-100+ plays over 15+ sessions with 5-9 players (2017-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 17/100 (2018)

Summary - During the pre-game, each player is assigned either to be a Villager or Werewolf, with one Seer on the Villagers' team and one Mayor. The Mayor chooses a secret word from an app, and then the Seer and Werewolves independently see the word. The meat of the game lasts four minutes, timed by the app, during which each player (out of turn order) asks yes/no questions about the word to the Mayor. The Mayor answers with a finite supply of yes/no/maybe tokens. If the word is correctly guessed, the Villagers win unless the Werewolves (who reveal themselves) guess the Seer. If the word is not correctly guessed, the Werewolves win unless a plurality of all players identify a Werewolf.

Design - Werewords is really just Twenty Questions with window dressing. You have to like guessing games to like Werewords. It, like so many other games, just isn't that mechanically intricate.

But Werewords does go beyond pure laziness. It adds just enough to the formula to make it far more replayable and mechanically solid, starting with an app. I don't play a lot of games that involve the use of an app, but Werewords's app provides choices for words, which is fantastic, plus handles the night phase and the timer. The night phase is of course necessary because of Werewords's sole other innovation, adding roles to a guessing game. Having a Seer is a huge asset since you'll never be left with literally no one having any idea what the word is (which evens out really difficult/abstract situations), while the presence of Werewolves forces the Seer to be subtle in helping. Incentives are added very cleverly, because as the Werewolves are free to guess or mislead, it also becomes important for them to appear helpful, lest the word be guessed and they get isolated by the Villagers.

I love eurogames, but they were a learned taste. I have always loved games that are based off non-"game" skills - wordplay, trivia, art, storytelling, simple math, pattern recognitions, reading people, and the like. So many games based on those, however, don't provide a solid, game-y framework. Werewords's core mechanic is definitely a non-game skill (though obviously it can be improved with experience), and it integrates game-i-ness perfectly. Games can still go awry with words that are too easy or too hard, though arguably those are some of the funniest experiences, and the games are short enough not to agonize over. Slightly worse is when the Mayor doesn't know any of the words on offer by the app - in these cases, it's a simple matter of resetting the game... which takes a perhaps just a minute, but which can feel a bit cumbersome if it happens more than once per session.

Experience - My friends got Werewords at Gen Con 2017, and while I didn't get to play it with them then, we spent four or five straight hours playing twenty questions with Werewords words on the drive back. The game itself has become perhaps the greatest staple of the last two or three years in my groups when we exceed five or six people. Due to its length, Werewords can be played 5-10 times in a single sitting to allow everyone at the table to be Mayor once. It's cooled off lately, but mainly because I haven't been in as many situations that allow that player count.

On the note of twenty questions, it also became a game gaming pal #1 and I played non-stop for months when we first met. It wasn't Werewords, but we did use the app for inspiration more than once on the word.
Future - Last weekend I rotated in some lower-ranked game for the hell of it, but Werewords is still the most recent king of the larger-player-count party game on this list. Its usage will directly depend on the frequency of larger groups in the future.
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BoardGameBliss has 1 copy left in a small restock of Dracula's Feast: New Blood. Is that good to go for or is the new kickstarter going to be a similar/better game?

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the new KS i believe is the same game, but with all new roles - they should be compatible with new blood
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Ah, so similar to the One Night Ultimate series I guess?

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i actually don't know what follows ONUW!
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Vampire, Alien, and Supervillains. They can also be mixed with each other but I havent tried it.

I like Vampire the best, wasnt too fond of Alien, and didnt try Supervillains.

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Vampire is awesome though it takes a little longer to "figure out" which turns some people away

turbopuns3 posted...

Vampire is awesome though it takes a little longer to "figure out" which turns some people away

I like the fact that everybody has something to do. With regular ONU Werewolf you just have everybody saying "oh I'm Villager, I didn't do anything". The mark system is neat too. The roles in Aliens started feeling too convoluted.

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To stay on topic I will also say I really liked Werewords and I prefer it over the ONU games. Though I'm pretty bad at giving answers apparently because last time I was the clue-giver everybody thought I was also the Werewolf (I wasn't).

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13. Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis and Clark (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Dice placement, sequence-building, tableau-building, order fulfillment, card-drafting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Experience: 15+ plays with 3-4 (2015, 2017-19)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/100 (2018)

Summary - In the unexplored American west, each player competes to traverse and journal the most valuable sceneries. Each player had a set of colored dice. A turn consists of either placing dice of matching faces from your matching pool onto your player board, or recruiting all dice from the common discard area or all dice of your color. Dice are used primarily to recruit Indians to build your tableau or to traverse rivers and mountains so you can fulfill your personal route card and draft another.

Design - Like most heavily dice-driven games Discoveries makes it a point to have sweet dice - large and wooden, with custom faces and rounded corners. You actually roll dice fairly infrequently; most of your time is spent spending or assigning them to specific spots on the board. But when you do roll them - which happens when you recruit/recall dice, or pick them up off your board after fulfilling the route those were assigned to - it feels fantastic.

The infrequency of dice rolls also means you'll usually be looking at a static dice pool between turns, as the only practical way this can be tampered with is if you have other players' dice in the mix. Since you'll usually assign just 1-3 dice (of the same face), your turn will be quick, and since fulfilling routes requires several dice and multiple placements, you'll be forced to (and able to) plan a few turns ahead. Add this to the fact that rolling dice ends your turn, and you've got a recipe for excellent pacing, which winds up being one of the things I love most about the game. I will say that it needs rapid pacing, because it can be tight - in order to fulfill a route, you may need several dice of the same face, requiring relatively uneventful turns drafting dice and reassigning them. But if your group gets in the rhythm, this becomes a tightness and tension of efficiency instead of the potential tedium that could come from building Rome one brick at a time.

The other most satisfying part of running your engine and painstakingly setting up all your dice - the supermove. Each player always has a route card to fulfill on their own player board, while three cards are on offer for people to draft after completing their own route. A supermove entails placing enough dice to complete your own route as well as one of the routed on offer, sequentially, and fulfilling them at the same time. If you do this, you not only score both tickets, you also get a free turn afterward. It's one of the absolute most satisfying things you can do, and while I've gone games without doing it and I've never really seen a player do it more than three times, it feels like the ultimate payoff to all the meticulously plotting you've been doing. Mastering even a single route can be tough, if it's difficult; knocking off two at once - including one that can be disrupted by another playing drafting your second (usually simple) route, getting that extra turn, is phenomenal.

The downside to Discoveries is also tied to there being relatively few dice rolls: it can be a bit luck-driven. And since it's multiplayer-solitaire-y, no one is really able to sympathize with your poor rolls. The fact is that your engine will be heavily determined by the Indian heads you roll early, in addition to the Indian cards available. However, because of the relative speed of most games, this doesn't feel so bad. The solitaire elements, if you ignore others' sprinting ahead of you, are satisfying enough in their own right to mitigate that.

Experience - Discoveries isn't the single most unique light-middleweight euro. It doesn't have the most unique design or mechanics. It is beautiful, and it filled an incredible niche, though - a eurogame with low conflict, high tactile feel, incredibly smooth play, beautiful art, and low playtime. It's essentially only with my core gaming group that I play it (since I don't own it), but it really was right place, right time - for a euro that's considerably more intricate than the likes of Splendor, it's astounding how much utility we could get out of it - it took the place of many other end-of-night fillers. Haven't yet played it this year, but huge on this one

Future - Almost got this to the table last night to close the night, but didn't quite. It's not "serious" enough of a game to wear out yet, in my experience. Still very eager for more.
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That is one of the top games on my list to try with my wife but it is hard to fine.

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many board games come into stock cyclically - pay attention to amazon, coolstuffinc, miniaturemarket, and the like. last holiday season it seemed to be available at around $18 (though without free shipping); right now it looks like there's just one copy at amazon, but for $40

i've also had good luck buying used games off boardgamegeek: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/171669/discoveries-journals-lewis-and-clark/marketplace/geekmarket
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I tried Discoveries a couple of years ago. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it really didn't do much for me. I have its big brother - Lewis and Clark - but I have not yet played it.

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$18? Man that's awesome.

I will try and keep an eye out.

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cyko posted...

I tried Discoveries a couple of years ago. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it really didn't do much for me. I have its big brother - Lewis and Clark - but I have not yet played it.

only played L&C once, but i found it slower, fiddlier, and worse than discoveries.
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterchayward/night-of-the-mummy

@Great_Paul @KommunistKoala @ChaosTonyV4 @Maniac64

for the interested!
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Awesome, thanks! Backed it at the limited tier, hell yeah.

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Dont have funds to back stuff right now but thanks for the link!

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just backed pax pamir reprint guess i might as well jump on this too, thanks!

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Thanks for the heads up. I backed the double pledge for the time being.

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Can I get a recommendation for a 1-2 hour game that is optimal for two people trying not to kill one another in this idiotic quarantine?

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incredibly, that is exactly what is next on this list! it's a bit heavier than castles of burgundy, but very much in the same vein:

12. Great Western Trail (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Action-selection, tableau-building, hand-building, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 60-120 minutes
Experience: 7-10 plays with 2-4 players (2018-19)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/100 (2018)

Summary - In the old American West, each player traverses a trail to Kansas City, shipping cattle each time. On your turn, you move at least one building on the trail and take either the action of the building (if it belongs to you, or is neutral), or take a generic auxiliary action printed on your player mat. Actions can include hiring workers to improve your capabilities, managing a personal deck/hand of cows, pushing a train along a track, purchasing cows for your deck, and building buildings along the trail that only you can stop at. If your last move takes you to Kansas City, you instead cash your hand of cows for money and place a token on one of the cities on the track. Victory points are awarded at endgame for cows in deck, buildings built, player board upgrades, train stations visited, cities shipped to, and more.

Design - Great Western Trail feels like one of the culmination of its age of eurogames - the type of games that are essentially taking a giant bag of mechanics and throwing them into a stew. Virtually none of its mechanics is particularly intertwined with the other. Money drives pretty much everything, and everyone has to walk the walk and go to Kansas City. But starting with the employees available for hire, they all seem to be playing their own game. There are many buildings available to build, it's actually possible to win novice-level games without building anything at all, and definitely not hiring a Builder. Cowboys seem most intimately tied to the general flow of the game - you will need to ship to different cow locations. And the Engineer's ability feels completely separate from anything else, a weird little minigame that allows you to push a little train along a track, picking up point-salad-y bonuses. You've got a board with random obstacles, an involved overhead for reaching Kansas City, important rules about distinction in the hand you build...

Yet the haphazard mish-mash, while not clicking into place seamlessly, has a bunch of fun stuff you can do in it. The game winds up feeling almost sandbox-y, allowing you different options in how you want to specialize. There's some minor interaction in terms of denying people spots to build, cows, and/or dudes to hire, but in general the game leans much more heavily to strategy. GWT winds up being one of those games where it's just fun to play with all its options and loosely connected systems. To me the most satisfying feeling is landing a fantastic set of cows to deliver all the way down the line to San Jose or San Francisco. That said, I've also had fun just watching my friends push their trains past San Francisco and around the bend for whatever reason.

What's interesting about this mishmash of mechanics is that GWT still feels pretty tight. That's due to the economy of the game - you always have something useful to spend your limited dollars on, so you're always low. Additionally, you always need to pay attention to your cows, since you can't ship to the same location multiple times without hemorraging points in KC or sprinting off to San Francisco, which is pretty unlikely. It results in a very pleasant sort of tension, keeping you on your proverbial toes throughout the game.

Experience - This was one of my favorite games I learned at the game cafe - possibly my single favorite. I brought my friend to it, and he wound up loving it too. I actually felt almost sad when I bought it used "on his behalf" and wound up giving him the copy. It's become my favorite (deep breath) heavyish, non-confrontational euro. One thing I like about it is being able to control the pace without necessarily having to control who's winning - by zipping down the trail you can force an endgame, while if you want to meander to try to squeeze points at a more measured pace, that's fine too. I'm traditionally pretty big on rushing games to their conclusion, but GWT provides you so many places where you can micro-optimize before going to KC that I'm actually happy to explore its space at a more measured pace.

Future - When the friend who owns it inevitably moves away, buying it is a strong consideration. Gaming pal #1 has yet to play it because of its rather long teach and a theme/art that isn't particularly exciting. But I think it has a chance to dethrone Castles of Burgundy as a game we play together.
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Great Western Trail is a trainwreck that tries to do too many things and ends up doing all of them poorly

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Oh, I played Forbidden Desert for the first time last night on Tabletop Simulator.

We drew all the sun cards in the first two rounds, and because of struggling to get more water and a storm that loved to double back on itself each turn, piling up sand we were too busy to clear, it was basically waiting three hours for a game that was probably already over... I'd play it again though.

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PrinceKaro posted...

Great Western Trail is a trainwreck that tries to do too many things and ends up doing all of them poorly

It sounds pretty awesome but I'd love for you two to have this debate before I purchase!

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PrinceKaro posted...

Great Western Trail is a trainwreck

I see what you did there

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Grand Kirby posted...

Oh, I played Forbidden Desert for the first time last night on Tabletop Simulator.

We drew all the sun cards in the first two rounds, and because of struggling to get more water and a storm that loved to double back on itself each turn, piling up sand we were too busy to clear, it was basically waiting three hours for a game that was probably already over... I'd play it again though.

hmm, tabletop simulator must be a lot slower than IRL then? it really shouldn't take anywhere near that long. glad you liked it though!

PrinceKaro posted...

Great Western Trail is a trainwreck that tries to do too many things and ends up doing all of them poorly

this is an understandable POV that isn't incompatible with my experience with the game! it's not the best hand-/deckbuilder, or best rondel, or best whatever. and it's fiddly and a bit confusing to play at first.

Nelson_Mandela posted...

It sounds pretty awesome but I'd love for you two to have this debate before I purchase!

my pitch is it's always fun to me. there are just so many decisions you can make - how fast to travel, where to stop and take actions, what guys to hire, what cows to buy, what buildings to build and where, how to shape your hand, how much to prioritize the train track/certificates... it's a point salad (like castles of burgundy!) so you'll pretty much always be doing something constructive on your turn, but you have a wealth of options on how you want to set yourself up for future turns.

it's also relatively low on the "feels bad" turns (big for me). the worst feeling you can get is being unable to reach a stop where you can do something productive and being forced to take a single auxiliary action for your turn. that can only happen as the conscious effort of someone else (good), and you have ways to mitigate that (good): building more of your own buildings, increasing your walking ability to skip more useless buildings. the second-worst feeling is arriving in kansas city with a shit hand of cows. this is even easier to avoid (if you so choose) - there are myriad stops where you can tailor your hand, and auxiliary actions always give you that option; you can also ship to KC for money (which mitigates the awful feeling, especially early on).

in the end you have to figure out what it is you like about games. GWT has a broader decision space than COB, so you'd want to see if you've got the appetite to move into heavier games. like COB, it's not confrontational but not co-op either. i've got only three more practical choices for heavy-ish 2p games coming up. one of them i've never played 2p and might be dangerously cutthroat; the other is two or three tiers above GWT/COB in confrontation and game length; and the third is a co-op.
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my biggest problem with great western trail is the buildings, which seem super important and powerful but require a lot of trial-and-error to figure out what is actually the best strategically

it's a game that i enjoyed a pretty decent amount (and seemed to be pretty good at?) despite being heavier than what i like most of the time. it's still a bit heavy for me tbqh but it is good! and is one of the least thematically dicey games from alex pfister, which is a plus

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Naye745 posted...

and is one of the least thematically dicey games from alex pfister, which is a plus

sounds like the comment of a cowardly witch
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fun fact: broom service is the only game to make me chuck an object physically across the room in anger! i still really like it though!

also isle of skye is totally cool too, great western trail is mostly fine, i heard someone complain about indians but man they are totally fine there, it's abstracted to a reasonable point unlike maracaibo and mombasa where the uncomfortableness bubbles up to and across the surface

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i know it's only your "25th favorite game of all time" but dominion online is doing a free rotating expansion (plus base set of course) for a little while during the covid quarantine craziness

here's the schedule:
http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=4087.0

it's a good enough online implementation and hey dominion is fun, i recommend it to everyone

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11. Blood Bound (2013)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Hidden roles, player combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 15-30 minutes
Experience: 100+ plays over 30+ sessions
Previous ranks: 6/100 (2016), 16/100 (2018)

Summary - Players are divided into two equal teams, handed secret role cards from 1 to 9 corresponding to one team or the other. The goal is to kill the opponent's leader, which is the player with the lowest number. The active player is the one who holds the dagger. Play proceeds with the active player either handing the dagger to another player or stabbing someone. When injured, a player takes damage tokens corresponding to their rank: their rank token (the number), a question mark, or a color that indicates their team. Each role also has a special ability that can be activated once, by claiming the rank token. Four damage will kill someone and end the game.

Design - The first thing that has to be said about Blood Bound is its appearance. The original printing, which I have, has art that looks like Twilight cosplayers. It's undeniably stupid and hilarious.

For a game that lasts so little time, Blood Bound actually requires a fair bit of explaining, since it has so many tokens and since everyone needs to be crystal-clear on how taking damage works. From there, however, the game is extremely fast-paced and enjoyable. In any team-versus-team game, there's usually the opportunity for table-talk. Since neither team is inherently good, it can make sense to claim to be one color one turn and then the other color the next. That said, there's also a lot of concrete information in the game, since players start knowing the affiliation (but not rank) of one of their neighbors. The tokens you take as damage also give information; take a colored token and your affiliation is known (and potentially that's a good thing, since it can avoid friendly fire); take a question mark and the confusion continues.

The card distribution and powers associated with them are mostly the core of the game. You never know exactly which X roles will be present on an opposing team, and eventually it comes down to dire straits where one team will need to gamble that they think they know the leader of the opposing team, even if not every rank token has been exposed. (A common situation is seeing a player with two ? tokens (which guarantees them to be rank 2-4) in front of them, while your team has had their Elder's (1) rank exposed.) It might be worth it just to gamble that 1 isn't in the game and that the ?/? player is the leader. The encouragement of taking risks and the luck of the distribution together lower the stakes of a game and make it great to repeat-play. I've never had a session of BB last only one game, if only because setup is long relative to playtime.

Experience - Blood Bound was played on my very first "game night," and it was my favorite takeaway from that day. I got it months and months later, and it remains a favorite for even numbers.

Future - I've played Blood Bound recently and it clearly still holds up. Even before social distancing, 6+-player game nights were getting scarcer, especially with people who don't like hidden role games as much. One strike against BB is that playing with the Inquisitor is pretty unfun. The second is that this player-count is actually highly competitive for me. Setting aside new games I'd want to learn, there are multiple games above this that are good for six players, of varying weight.
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