Board 8 > a short ranking of the tabletop games i played in 2021

(+) Yeah! (+)

not much time for gaming lately!

Unsure how i missed this topic before! Tagging for sure

A friend and i tried to get wingspan going at pax east, but the rules were difficult to make sense of and ultimately neither of us felt like it was worth it to learn.

Wingspan makes perfect sense to me but most everybody else seems to struggle with it, IDK what it is

i thought wingspan was pretty simple

Maybe after it gets going, but the instructions were quite lengthy and tedious

did someone teach you the game, or did you try to learn it from a rulebook? i think wingspan isn't the hardest game to learn to play, but learning any game straight from the rulebook can be a 30+ minute affair even for just one person - 80% of the time, for me eurogames that take 60+ min to play, i would advise against trying to learn it without a rules teacher right before trying to play it

i've been looking for board game recommendations- hopefully we'll get to the games you whole-heartedly enjoy soon!

had my first board game "day" in a while with new people recently. I had a great time with Oceans as well as Western Legends in particular

38. Tzolk'in

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126163/tzolk-mayan-calendar

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Worker placement, resource management, tableau-building, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-120 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 4-6 plays with 2-4 players (in person), 10+ plays online

Tzolk'in is a Mayan-themed worker placement eurogame. On your turn - of which you have twenty-four, representing one year - you either place or remove one or more workers from the board. You get the actions represented by your workers when you remove them. Between your turns, The worker placement spots are all located on gears, which rotate one tick each round, moving each worker one tick higher on the track. By pulling off your workers, you generally collect and trade a variety of resources, increase your technologies and workers, and purchase monuments for victory points.

The most important part about Tzolk'in is its board. The board is absolutely fantastic - those interlocking gears have an incredible table presence, and it's an ingenious idea to let all the workers "age" (i.e. become more potent in power) by moving a single gear in the center. The central gear also counts as the game timer; each quarter-circle is marked with a feeding phase, while the full revolution indicates that the game is over.

Playing Tzolk'in and identifying goals can feel opaque. The game feels point salad-y; you can score VP in all sorts of ways, from building monuments to advancing on tech tracks to advancing on god tracks (which also give you midgame rewards). There are five different gears that each have eight different steps, and you've got both a limited number of workers and a limited amount of corn (the primary currency of the game), and you need to pay more corn the more workers you place at once, or the higher on a gear you place them. Sometimes you'll be forced to pull workers you don't feel ready to place; sometimes you'll run out of corn and have to beg while placing, or starve during feeding.

I have heard that Tzolk'in can be broken. I believe there is some sort of big-resource strategy that is pretty dominant, though I've never been able to pull it off. Because of the opacity of the strategy and tactics, I can sometimes feel lost.

There's a lot of game to Tzolk'in. I'd really like to get actually decent at it, since it's very satisfying when you actually can get something done in the game. Just need more reps and perhaps a teacher who can explain situations to me. The game can hurt my head but I like it a lot as a mid-heavyweight eurogame.

SeabassDebeste posted...

did someone teach you the game, or did you try to learn it from a rulebook? i think wingspan isn't the hardest game to learn to play, but learning any game straight from the rulebook can be a 30+ minute affair even for just one person - 80% of the time, for me eurogames that take 60+ min to play, i would advise against trying to learn it without a rules teacher right before trying to play it

It was the rulebook - neither I nor my friend knew anything about the game other than the grapevine's assessment of its quality. That was 100% the issue and I'm sure we would have enjoyed it if we had a teacher.

I really enjoy tzolkin but agree with your salad comment. The times I've played where I felt like I was doing horribly, and not maximizing any synergies at all, I've either won or come within one point of winning thanks to end game scoring that I didn't consider. The one time I felt like things were coming together and I had a plan, I got slaughtered by end game scoring.

tzolkin sounds fun to me

37. Tigris and Euphrates

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42/tigris-euphrates

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tile-laying, area control
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-90 minutes
First played: 2019
Experience: 5-8 plays with 2-4 players

In Tigris and Euphrates, you control one of four civilizations, competing to have the best-rounded civilization in four spheres, represented by four different colored tiles and leaders: religion, trade, agriculture, and military. You score these points by laying tiles and controlling leaders in the corresponding colors. Conflicts will arise when two leaders of the same type are in the same kingdom, either by having one leader deposited into another's kingdom (revolt) or by having their kingdoms joined (war). These result in leaders and tiles being removed from the board and other scoring opportunities. Your final score is the number of points you scored in the weakest of your four categories.

This is one of the oldest (designer) games on this list - released in 1997 by the venerable Dr. Reiner Knizia. It is often cited as one of his absolute best designs and once sat atop the boardgamegeek Top 100.

This is possibly the single game on this list that would jump the most if I created it today versus at the end of last year. I've since played it a few more times at meetups and with friends, and plus gotten in some more reps online.

Tigris and Euphrates is beautifully elegantly designed. Each of the four colors has a unique gameplay purpose, which infuses the seemingly abstract game with more theme than you might expect - the religious temples anchor leaders, who need to have the support of the church in order to maintain their influence; the Trader, when spanning across kingdoms with treasures, will collect the treasures; farms and only farms can cross rivers; and the king of the military will collect points in all colors in which a specialist leader does not exist.

I haven't particularly made strategy breakthroughs in this game. It strikes me as highly tactical - because there is no engine-building, and because of the random nature of the tile-draw, and because you can't control who your opponents choose to attack, to me it feels like you can rarely make big plans beyond a couple of turns and maybe setting up one big-time war or revolt.

For me, this game is just about kind of seeing how the board develops - the initial race to unite the base temples with their treasures, the clusters of tiles that fill up the board, the monuments that may or may not crop up, the reversals of fortune that come when people cut apart a kingdom with catastrophe tiles, the drastic effect of a revolt that allows a leader to steal the support of an established leader, the wars that reshape the board entirely by eliminating the opponent's supporters and blowing their leader off the board. Each player plays all four colors; you are delineated only by your leaders, who are distinguished not by color but by sigils representing your clan (bull, archer, potter, and lion). Again, without much flavor text, art, or chrome, this sort of ebb and flow of the board state can evoke the actual rise and fall of civilizations.

The most Knizian part of this game is the way the final score is determined. You can try to specialize as much as you want - build up that giant military and try to steamroll all your opponents' black tiles and score up to twenty or more black points. But the final score mechanism is so punishing, because if you neglect placing any blue farms, then your score will literally be zero. The idea that in the end, you'll by judged by your weakest category, is incredibly Knizian. In this way, while you may have a "player who's specializing in scoring red" and the "player who's got all the green points," you're forced not to lean into this strength, but to scrape for the way to make up your weaknesses.

And because it remains opaque to me, in some ways I respect the design and experience of T&E more than the attempt to win. While players can get analysis paralysis in Tigris and Euphrates, overall, the game - especially at four players - can often feel almost too short. There's no engine to build, and your desperate attempts to draw into the right points will often leave you scrambling. It's hard to get stuff done, and in some games you won't actually get anything done. But as long as people are moving along, you'll get to be a bystander or victim in others' conquests. And that's part of the beauty of it.

Tom Bombadil posted...

tzolkin sounds fun to me

It's on bga! And honestly is kind of nicer to play there because it does the math for you.

SeabassDebeste posted...

The idea that in the end, you'll by judged by your weakest category, is incredibly Knizian. In this way, while you may have a "player who's specializing in scoring red" and the "player who's got all the green points," you're forced not to lean into this strength, but to scrape for the way to make up your weaknesses.

this is antithetical to my usual playstyle for games (I'm all about wombo combos) and sounds like a blast anyway

yeah, tzolk'in might be worth a shot on BGA - but i'd also suggest learning/playing it IRL, because when you're forced to do things by hand, 1. you get to spin the awesome gear manually and 2. you'll understand better how the numbers are calculated.

T&E is a scramble. it's a weird experience that feels totally different from most contemporary eurogames. but it's also pretty brilliant, and even if it doesn't become a favorite, i think it's worth appreciating what T&E actually is. just don't get too attached to thinking anything is "yours," even if you lay the tiles yourself!

more to come!

36. Stone Age

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34635/stone-age

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Worker placement, resource management, order fulfillment
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-90 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play with 2 players

Stone Age is a worker placement game set in theoretically caveman days, where you try to maximize your victory points. You do so primarily by going to spaces where you collect resources (sometimes with the help of a die) and then going to other spaces where you can claim markers with victory points. Periodically, you will also need to feed your clan of workers or face starvation.

I'll just be honest with you - I remember very little of the details of Stone Age. I played it once at a meetup, and it was the last game of the night, after a brain-burner. It was a 2-player game and I think we might have managed the game in 30 minutes flat, we were blazing through the actions so fast.

And that right there perhaps shows one of the strengths of the game: in one of the strengths of the worker placement mechanic, it's incredibly fast to make any individual action. By reputation, Stone Age, along with Lords of Waterdeep, is considered perhaps the best gateway game in its genre. And the fact that it could be taught and played with such breeziness, while still maintaining those classic eurogame trappings, is why it's up here.

I'll probably have to relearn the game from scratch next time I play. But the teach will still only be five minutes, and I'll still be able to tear right through it. What's not to like?

35. Shogun

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20551/shogun

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Area control, player combat, troops on a map
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 120-180 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play with 6 players

Shogun is set in imperial Japan, with each player vying for influence for their shogunate. Throughout the game, players muster and feed troops, build structures into their cities to improve life, levy taxes, and of course march into one another's territory for war. The gameplay is broken into a planning phase, when everyone simultaneously assigns each territory they control to perform one of the myriad actions available, and the execution phase, where in a random but partly pre-determined order, each of these actions is resolved for each player's city. Combat is resolved using a cube tower - each player tosses cubes into the tower, and a random assortment of the cubes that went into the tower then come out, and that determines the victor of the battle.

What a glorious assortment of mechanics. Shogun isn't just a straight-up combat game like, say, the Game of Thrones board game. You get points by controlling landmarks that people actually have to create, and on your turn, if you've got enough territories, you're expected to build up landmarks. The taxation also adds another layer of complication, a currency that needs to be checked. And man, that cube tower is fantastic in how you know that the cubes that go in will eventually come out... but you don't know when they will, and which cubes will come out first.

One of the most important aspects to the feel of the game, though, is the structure of a round itself. Like in the Game of Thrones board game, there is a planning phase, where you assign which order you will do for each action. However, the order in which these ten events occur is randomized each round. On top of that, you only know the order of the first five events, meaning the final five events can occur in such an order that you can't actually execute your build step because taxation hasn't happened yet. This type of "commit to a plan without knowing how the steps leading up to it go down" is uniquely murderous for my analysis paralysis (AP) and helped to make for a super-long game.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get to play Shogun again. It's random, confrontational, and kind of rough around the edges. If you don't know the geography of Japan, the locations' names are a bit hard to remember and read off your little markers. But for that one play, what an experience.

well that sounds like a game for me, or at least some mechanics for me

34. Kemet

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20551/shogun

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Area control, player combat, troops on a map, tableau-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 120-180 minutes
First played: 2017
Experience: 8-12 plays with 2-5 players

Kemet is an Egyptian-themed combat game. You raise your pyramids, marshal troops, leverage your pyramids to buy technology cards to improve your combat or economy, and then go try to win battles. Play alternates between a night cleanup phase and a day phase, where each player takes five actions, only two of which can be marching orders. Temporary VP can be awarded for controlling temples or high-level pyramids; permanent VP are awarded for successful attacking or holding multiple temples at the end of the day phase. The game ends if someone has eight or ten VP at the end of a day phase.

Probably the best part about Kemet is that it's a combat game where sure, it's good to hold territory, but you are really incentivized to get out there and fight, as opposed to solely turtling up - essentially, you're going to lose territory, so you might as well score some permanent VP while doing it, and then get that territory back! Ties go to the attacker in the simultaneous-card-reveal system combat system.

The tricky thing of course is that it isn't that trivial to win those VP - your troop size plus card value still needs to tie or exceed the total value of your opponent's troop size plus card value - but critically, your troops need to survive the battle. Your tech tiles and combat cards have blood and shield symbols, which will kill opposing units or save your own, respectively. If you win a battle but your troop has been annihilated and no one remains to claim the territory, no VP for you. This leads into a push/pull relationship between how much you should commit to making sure you win the combat, versus how much you need to shield your troop from retaliation of bleeding.

Kemet's tech tree, to which I've alluded, feels more eurogame-y and pretty clever. While each player starts off symmetrically in terms of powers, the pyramids you choose to upgrade will give you access to buying power tiles in the open market. Every tile is available from the outset of the game, and there are three pyramid types roughly corresponding to three different types of skills - white for economy, blue for defense, and red for offense. Some of the tiles have printed VP, and some of them have extra actions, and the coolest of them have monsters that you can add to buff one of your troops. Each player's set of actions will thus vary, creating asymmetry in who is more dangerous to attack and who is more dangerous when attacking.

One area where Kemet could be optimized (and indeed, in the 1.5 rerelease, is) is its turn order mechanism. I love decoupling turn order from seating order; however, the player in last place gets to determine the entire order. The updated, superior version has players choose in order of fewest VP where they specifically want to go, but not where everyone else goes in the turn order.

My biggest issue with my plays of Kemet is that I'm always teaching it, and people never seem to internalize the rules, and thus it takes forever. The game should actually zip along, and it does when there's no combat or people aren't trying to buy power tiles. But when that does happen, there's often a lot of hemming and hawing and trying to remember what the tiles do or how combat works. The issue with the tiles is somewhat inherent to the game, but the issue with combat rules is more group-dependent. But I'm still taking it into account and dropping the game a tad for that.

I don't play a ton of direct combat games, and certainly don't rank them too highly. But this is unique and fun and not too turtle-y and I really appreciate that.

more this week

33. Azul

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230802/azul

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tile-laying, abstract, drafting, pattern-matching
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 25-40 minutes
First played: 2018
Experience: 8-12 plays with 2-4 players

In Azul, your goal is to score the most victory points by filling up your personal 5x5 "floor" with square tiles of five different colors. You get these tiles by drafting them from pods shared by the whole table, choosing to take all the tiles of a color off one pod (and then emptying that pod into the center of the table), or by taking all the tiles of a color from the center of the table, where the discards have gone. You then place them in your staging area, before moving them at the the end of the round to your final floor mosaic. You score points for each tile you place on your mosaic and for patterns you form.

Like another game of very comparable weight on this list, Azul's best feature is how accessible it is - both from a gameplay perspective and a tactile perspective. Those tiles feel substantial, and they look like Starbursts, and the patterned mosaic they wind up forming on your board is excellent.

And that's probably the best sell I can give for it. The rest of the game is clever - you have to fill each row with its own stuff; you don't want to overflow in any specific category; there's a teetering balance between taking large piles to fill your rows and taking small piles so you don't overflow. It's easy to understand the tradeoffs - if I fill the five-row with only four tiles, then what are the odds I can get a single-tile grab in that color later? How bad is it if I have four tiles committed to that row next round? Am I willing to take a three-tile grab and overflow to prevent that? - and that's on top of the natural puzzle of optimizing your scoring - you would love to have every tile in your mosaic filed, sure, but even so, filling them in a certain order is preferable to another.

So ultimately, what we have here is a thinky puzzle that looks great and feels great and has nothing really bad about it (other than the individual scoring markers being a black cube that's easily knocked about on your player mat). I love the smooth consistency of it and I love that it can be so easily introduced to new gamers.

good ol azul

nice and easy game to pop on BGA

Azul is that nice mix of accessible to casuals but strategic enough to tickle my brain

32. Viticulture: Essential Edition

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/183394/viticulture-essential-edition

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Worker placement, card play, order fulfillment
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 60-90 minutes
First played: 2018
Experience: 6-10 plays with 2-5 players

As its name suggests, Viticulture is a game where you run a vineyard. Each round of Viticulture represents a year, during which you bid for turn order and then make worker placement choices. Each year consists of a Summer and Winter phase, during which different actions are available. In Summer, you draw grape cards and attempt to plant them in your vineyard; give tours of your winery, and construct buildings that can give you powers; in Winter, harvest grapes from your vines, brew them into wine, and draw and fulfill wine orders by selling your wine. Each round also contains some bidding for turn order and opportunities to play one-off cards for their effects.

As a Stonemeier design, Viticulture ranks extremely high in accessibility and components. It has what I consider to be one of the great themes of board gaming in running a vineyard. And while the engine is fairly intricate, its thematic resonance really helps it here - you need to prepare fields and possibly equipment to plant grapes. You need to have a grape seed before you can plant it. Once you've planted the grape, then you can harvest it. Once it's harvested, then you can mash it into wine. And then when the year passes, your wine ages and becomes more valuable. Each of those subsystems, if rendered abstract, would not flow nearly as logically and consistently as it does in Viticulture, which I love about it.

The game also introduces some nice mechanics to prevent it from getting too punishing. The random card draw can give you some pretty swingy effects, so beginners can get a jumpstart even if they misplay in other aspects You don't need to feed or pay your workers, removing one of those possibly painful parts of games like Tzolk'in.

But perhaps most critically, the game's primary mechanic through which you perform actions - worker placement - has some of its edge taken off by virtue of the Giant Meeple. Normally, in a worker placement game, if someone occupies the last available spot for an action that you want to perform (say, planting a field), you're shit out of luck until next round, when your opponent's workers are reset. But in Viticulture, your Giant Meeple allows you, once per round, to take an action even if it's already blocked off. This massively lessens the pressure on a new player.

And that allows the game to be slightly tight (you have to fight a little and hope for the right grape and order cards to get your engine going and fulfill orders), but still satisfying (after going through the whole wine lifecycle, doesn't it feel nice to fulfill a big order of rose?). There are escape routes to make points if you are not getting the right grapes or wine cards - directly selling your grapes, simply bidding for victory points during the turn order phase, going for the tour bonus. And because the game is a race - the final year is triggered when someone crosses a threshold of VP - you are (or at least someone is) highly likely to end the game wishing you just had noe more turn.

The game has some issues, and I get the sense that some of that is tied to the way it is so accessible. While it's not quite on the level of Lost Ruins of Arnak, the worker placement here doesn't feel that satisfying - there are many phases where it seems like you don't have any good actions at all, and then there are phases where it's do-or-die. Along those lines, the clever turn order bid system winds up feeling pretty pointless late in the game as well, when you've got your engine and going first/being able to draw order cards/fulfill orders is all that matters. And because of the way seasons work, it's also kind of punishing that being first player allows you to be first in both the Summer and Winter phases, doubling the benefit.

On a similar note, the resources system doesn't feel all that well thought out; money starts out tight, like in many eurogames - you're scrambling to try to construct your structures until you can get your coin income going. But once you've actually got that coin income rolling - and you absolutely do, once you fulfill wne orders - there's not actually a lot to do with it. Coins have virtually zero lategame usage and are not worth VP in the endgame - so the fact that you generate it automatically in the lategame feels kind of silly and not entirely well thought out.

That said, while I consider Viticulture not to be the best midweight eurogame, as I said, it's one of the most accessible and thematic for its weight. It doesn't feel like it drags, thanks to the racing element (usually 7-8 rounds can get played). And it's not too mean, at least at first. I'd say the strong early-to-mid-game definitely outweighs the "just get the right cards and play first" element of the endgame.

I've also played Viticulture's expansion, Tuscany, which largely improves the game, mostly on a thematic level. I just didn't manage to get it played last year.

KommunistKoala posted...

good ol azul

nice and easy game to pop on BGA

when it comes to BGA, azul maintains 50% of its greatness - the accessibility - but loses 50% of it, which is touching those tiles!

AriaOfBolo posted...

Azul is that nice mix of accessible to casuals but strategic enough to tickle my brain

good way to articulate it!

Viticulture was another one I played once, liked a good bit, and promptly forgot all about it!

that's a pretty fair take! viticulture wound up getting played a lot more because, after i played it at a con and thought it was okay, someone in my meetup group was selling the base and the expansion for a combined $30. i thought it was too good a deal to pass up!

31. Point Salad

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Card-drafting, set collection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 5-10 minutes
First played: 2020
Experience: 6-10 plays with 3-6 players

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/274960/point-salad

In Point Salad, you play through a deck of double-sided cards. One side of the cards shows a vegetable (e.g. a tomato, or spinach); the other side of the card shows a way to score vegetables (e.g., 2 points per tomato but minus 2 points per onion). A certain number of these cards are placed on the offer, and on a player's turn, they can draft either one scoring card or two vegetables. Once the collective deck is drained, the values of each player's scoring cards - based on the veggies they have taken - are tallied.

I do love a good pun/reference, and Point Salad's is phenomenal. Many eurogames are described both affectionately and disparagingly as point salads - i.e., there are a variety of ways to make points. The scoring cards in Point Salad kind of suggest that indeed, you score in a variety of ways. However, the game is actually pretty focused - you can't actually just draft any old vegetable and hope to get away with it; you need to make sure it doesn't conflict with your scoring cards, and you need to make sure to get the right scoring cards as well.

There's also a surprising amount of hate-draft potential in Point Salad, which has certainly frustrated me at times! I've admittedly played only with But at its insanely fast pace, I've never had a bad experience of Point Salad. I've also never won a game of Point Salad. Now I'm salty!

I see your Point Salad point salad and raise you a deck builder about building decks (the ones on your house), named Deck Builder.

okay that is also cool af

30. Just One

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/254640/just-one

Category: Cooperative
Key mechanics: Clue-giving, word game, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: <1 minute per turn
First played: 2019
Experience: 4-6 plays with 4-10+ players

Just One is a micro-party-game. One player is a guesser, and everyone else is a clue-giver. All the clue-givers write down one word each, and then the guesser looks at those words and attempts to guess the word. The catch - before the guesser can look at their clues, all of the cluegivers show each other their words. Each clue-word that is shown twice on a guesser's card is then discarded, and the guesser must proceed without the benefit of those words.

The fun is seeing if the word is "tuna," which players are going to be the bold ones who go with "fish," and which ones will go with "salad," "yellowfin," and the like. It's of the family of party games that is relatively resilient against replay, since you don't know who will change their clue this time, and who will end up with collisions, and what type of words the main guesser will be left with. It results in laughs and nods for cleverness and clever moments, and "argh, but WHY" moments - in other words, a lot of the stuff you want in a party game.

This is one of those games that lacks game-i-ness. I think there's some sort of scorekeeping, but it's obviously trivial. It's probably a stretch for me to have this game this high, but I do enjoy it. There will be further games that are even less game-y but which gave a fair share of entertainment in 2021, and hey, that is the purpose of this list!

Azul - great game for casual and non-gamers. One of the better gateway games.

Viticulture - I love it. The cards can be a bit random, but the theme makes it a pretty intuitive worker placement game.

Just One - One of the better party games out there. I was even able to play this one over Zoom with friends that are far away during the pandemic and it was still fun.

29. Modern Art

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/118/modern-art

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Auction, hand management, set collection, push-your-luck
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-60 minutes
First played: 2018
Experience: 4-8 plays with 4-5 players

In Modern Art, players are art dealers, buying art at auctions and selling them at the end of the season to the public. Each player is dealt a hand of cards containing artwork including two features: the artist and an auction type (open auction, turn-based, hidden-bid, or set-price). Players take turns being the auctioneer, meaning that they display a piece of art from their hand, along with the auction type. The other players then bid for that art, with the winner paying the dealer for it.

At the end of a season (a set number of rounds), each artist's art is valued based on how many of their pieces of art were sold, and all of the auctioned art is liquidated into cash. The catch is that only the top three artists of a season have any demand for their art; the remaining two artists' art is thrown away. Over the course of four seasons, the price of an artist's work can actually be compounded, since last season's popularity affects this season's price - but even so, only the top three most popular artists from this season will have their art bought.

One of the older games on this list, Modern Art is a classic Knizia design. It features abstraction in mechanics, an amazing implementation of that distilled mechanic itself, meaningful player interaction, push-your-luck elements, and a cool theme with beautifully cynical implications.

You don't really spend any time managing the art itself, or in running the gallery, hiring underlings, or anything else. You buy art. And you sell art. Directly to other players. In an auction. There are four different auction types, and each of them has its own style. The open-auction and blind-bidding put the onus more on the bidders, putting you in direct competition (either open or invisible); the set-price auction puts the onus on the auctioneer and gives the advantage to the player to the left of the auctioneer; the one-shot bid gives the advantage/final say to the player to the right of the auctioneer. And you're always considering that you're competing with your opponents for art, trying to influence your own artists' popularity without tipping your hand to their valuation, and paying or receiving money from your opponents directly.

That push-your-luck element - you don't know what art others have and which ones they want to play - is also incredibly Knizian; you can try your hardest to win the first three pieces of art shown in a round, but if you don't actually have the cards to pump that artist going forward, you have no guarantee that it'll actually do anything. In another Knizian turn, the fifth piece of art displayed by an artist immediately ends a round with no bidding; it influences popularity, but since its value is known for sure, no one gets to bid on it. You have to evaluate everything with incomplete information.

And of course, while the chrome is lacking, Knizia actually presents a pretty comical take on the world of art collecting. Each piece of art has zero intrinsic art characteristics! Instead of making judgments on the quality of the art - and hey, these are actual abstract paintings on your cards that you can examine! - Knizia gets straight at the idea of what actually sells. And the answer to what sells is: what's popular. As dealers, your wheelings and dealings actually cast you as influencer as well. If the big minds think this artist is hot, then all of their art that season is commoditized and becomes hot. And if the same artists is the most popular year-in, year-out? Forget about it, their art becomes the gold standard. They might go out of style, and then quickly your collection turns to garbage... until they come back in style, just as expensive as before. It's a great little bit of social commentary, and while that doesn't affect the gameplay materially, it enriches the "text" of the game.

Of course, the brilliance aside, Modern Art is fun to play. Because it's so stripped down, there's nothing really getting in your way of just enjoying this auction. That might also be its downside - when you get your ass kicked in a Knizia game, there aren't a lot of shared laughs, and you can't look happily at the farm/castle/space colony you've built for yourself, and you don't really get to reminisce over razing your opponent's strongholds or anything. You just realize you badly lost the math game. Which doesn't mean the game is bad; it just offers no minigames or chrome with which to amuse yourself.

28. The Fox in the Forest Duet

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/288169/fox-forest-duet

Category: Cooperative
Key mechanics: Trick-taking
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15-25 minutes
First played: 2020
Experience: 6-8 games over 3ish sessions with 2 players

The Fox in the Forest Duet is a two-player, cooperative trick-taking game, a followup to the competitive original Fox in the Forest. In this game, there is a token on a linear map representing the titular fox. The path contains gems on it. The goal is, over the course of three hands, to be able to move the fox to each location containing a gem to collect them. The fox moves with each trick that is played; each card will have a suit, a rank, an associated number of steps to take, and an optional ability. Winning a trick sends the fox in the winner's direction of the path the number of steps indicated on cards.

I played a lot of MS Hearts and real-life Spades; in fact, online Trickster Spades with my old friends got me through a lot of dark months during the early lockdown. Two-player games don't get my flames stoked quite as much as do team games, but the trick-taking/classic-card-game affinity is there.

The simplicity of this game is pretty great. The hands you get are obviously random each time, and some cards will be removed. Your hand will usually offer you a good number of options - cards in each of the three suits, cards with abilities (odds have abilities while evens do not), cards with footprints, cards without footprints, trump cards, the like. There are two dangers in FFTFD - one being that one player wins too many tricks and runs off the map; the other that you simply aren't able to be precise enough to land on the steps that you need to in order to get the gems you want. While there aren't that many total gems, that count does replenish each hand, so it's not like you can go into the third and final hand needing only one gem left.

The cards and footprints obviously add a slight complication to traditional trick-taking. The abilities - always optional - can include disregarding the footprints played, reversing the winner of the trick, change the trump suit mid-trick, and exchanging cards. Since directly sharing what's in your hand and outwardly discussing strategy is not allowed, there's always a little bit of "aha" feeling when your partner manages to pick up on your intent (I'll play this 7 and give you this 4, now I'm going to lead this 2 with a bunch of footprints on it, so you'd better use that 4 and move the fox a long way toward you!) There will also be misses, but that's hte nature of two brains with hidden information!

As an experience, I don't think there are many flaws to FFTFD. But it also is not a particularly ambitious game. The experience is quite consistent, and the positive sensations are quiet fist-pumps, or nods, or small high-fives, or sometimes just "all right, we did it, nice!" It's not a stirring game, and the lack of competition in it means it doesn't necessarily have that "battle of wits" feeling, either. But that smoothness can be an asset when you're just looking to solve a quiet, low-drama puzzle together.

Really enjoy Viticulture, need to play it with the Tuscany expansion

yeah, i didn't discuss the tuscany expansion in my writeup since i didn't play it last year - but probably the best part of it is the actual game board. there are now four seasons, and that just thematically clicks for me (though each phase again has the same turn order). i think they also change up the way bidding for turn order works a little bit to make it dependent on passing in the winter phase.

27. Klask

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/165722/klask

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Real-time, dexterity
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 5-15 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 8-10 plays over 2 days with 2 players

Klask is played on a small tabletop board. Each player controls a magnetic pawn via a magnet under the board, and your goal is either to knock the game's ball (around the size of a marble) into your opponent's goal, or to get three little obstacle magnets to stick to your opponent's pawn. You can also give your opponent the goal if you lose and cannot regain control of your pawn, or if you drop your pawn into your own hole (a Klask).

Of all the games on my list, Klask is by far the least like any of the others. While yes, the game is literally atop a table, it has more in common with what I'd consider to be "sports" like table tennis, foosball, or especially air hockey than it does with classic tabletop games like Settlers of Catan, Chess, or Monopoly.

And hey, that's cool too. Klask has a manic energy to it that's characteristic of these physical competitions. Controlling your pawn always takes some time to get used to - it's a fun experience moving your pawn through this dividing layer. The area where you can move your pawn is limited to a fairly small portion of your size of the board; you'll never find yourself directly assault your opponent's pawn with your own. The motion of the pawn feels a little clumsy. And yet, there's a reasonably unbounded level of dexterous skill, combined with the semirandom motion of the little white magnets, combined with the fact that you're not actually getting physically tired playing it... people were able to get up to speed fairly quickly playing it over just that one weekend and were able to have a ton of fun playing against one another. One of those really nice toys just to have around for people to play with.

SeabassDebeste posted...

So ultimately, what we have here is a thinky puzzle that looks great and feels great and has nothing really bad about it (other than the individual scoring markers being a black cube that's easily knocked about on your player mat). I love the smooth consistency of it and I love that it can be so easily introduced to new gamers.

Agreed, especially on the cube. When playing in person, my friends and i just use our calculator apps.

26. Jungle Speed

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8098/jungle-speed

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Pattern-recognition, dexterity, real-time
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15-20 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 15-25 plays with 5-8 players

In Jungle Speed, each player has a facedown deck of square cards that each have a pattern printed in a specific color. On your turn, you flip over your top facedown card onto you faceup pile so everyone can see. If it matches someone else's someone else's faceup card, then the two of you "duel" - grabbing a center totem. The loser of the duel takes both participants' faceup piles and adds them to their facedown deck, and play resumes. Grab the totem incorrectly or knock the totem over and take a penalty of cards. Run out of cards and you win.

When it comes down to it, sometimes all you want to do is fight over a stick like dogs over a bone.

The totem that you fight over in Jungle Speed is great. It's soft and firm and rubbery and ridged and it stands up nicely and it's not a perfect cylinder. I bring these things up because of course, you will be trying to grab the totem very often throughout the game. It's thus incredibly important that it be fun to grab, and I can confirm that yes, indeed, it is. There's also a great rule that in case of near-simultaneous grabs, the winner is the player with the most fingers directly touching the totem; i.e. if you get an partial grip or your fingers are on top of your opponent's, then that will inform the winner of the duel. The totem is not responsible for the (admittedly possible) scratching! Cut your nails, folks!

Of course, any speed game like this will get the blood pumping fast. In some ways Jungle Speed works like a microgame, since each battle is contested over the flip of a single card. But because your card stays open and you never know when someone will flip your card, to me, it feels like the arc develops over the course of the game..And getting on a streak, watching other people contest the totem, and diving in when special cards flip (everyone race for the center; everyone flip a simultaneous card; match colors instead of numbers) is always fun as well.

I don't think Jungle Speed is particularly worth playing with fewer than five players, and it's not exactly a "crunchy" experience. But in within its own genre of semi-party games it performs great.

25. Forbidden Desert

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/136063/forbidden-desert

Category: Cooperative
Key mechanics: Hand management, set collection, point-to-point movement, action point allocation
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 40-60 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 15-25 plays with 2-5 players

A research team's plane crashes in the titular forbidden desert, and you need to excavate the pieces of your plane and escape the desert before the dunes get too dangerous, or the sun cooks you to death. On a player's turn, they can move around the 5x5 square grid, or remove sand from a square, or look for/collect plane pieces. After the player's turn, the game acts - blowing the tiles around, adding sand, and sometimes hitting you with a sun flare. You need to randomly unearth two locator tiles to collect each plane piece.

Forbidden Desert is the spiritual sequel to Forbidden Island, which in turn is the spiritual sequel to Pandemic. In the past I've ranked all three of these games together. Each of these games features players taking a set number of actions, including movement and threat mitigation, followed by the game doing a predictable-but-increasing amount of damage. They feature essentially perfect information and are all fantastic gateway games, especially since they're co-op, which I love.

In 2021, I only played Desert. In some ways, it is the best of the three. Flipping over locator tiles is a fun mechanic to get the pieces you need for the ship, compared to simply drawing cards automatically in Pandemic and Forbidden Island. The water management and sun-beats-down system adds a mostly pleasant layer of complexity to manage, with the layout of the tunnels being another fun subsystem added for minimal rules overhead. And most importantly, Forbidden Desert has the moving board, which I find ingenious - the cards you unearth show you the direction that the wind blows; your 5x5 grid actually only contains 24 tiles, so one is empty, and the tiles in the row/column containing that empty tile will move accordingly to fill in the gap, accumulating sand. Oh, and you get to assemble a literal little plane, complete with spinning propellor, which is awesome.

In exchange, you get almost certainly the least interesting possible game-over condition: running out of sand tiles. Pandemic also has an endgame condition of running out of disease cubes, but in that game, you're also concerned about breakouts, which are way more likely to happen than cubes running out. However, if you correctly manage your hydration in FD, the most likely endgame condition is simply that "too much sand has piled up." But to me, it's not clear why that should be such a game-ending condition; after all, your crew should theoretically still be able to remove it. I understand the principle of it, and the practicality of it; however, it feels pretty dang anticlimactic. It especially pales in comparison to the endgame of the sinking island in Forbidden Island. The scaling of this game also feels particularly punishing at higher player counts, especially with five, due to how many turns the game gets between your turns.

I am pointing out clear negatives here, but I really do love the overall formula of this whole series of games. Because the rules overhead is so low, you're just immediately pitted against the game - human versus nature. It's easy to grasp the board state, so you can collaborate (or if your group sucks, alpha-game) to brainstorm what players should do. And it plays in a delectable amount of time. Historically one of my favorite game series; FD has mainly slipped on this list because I no longer feel that much desire/have that much niche in which to play it. It's still in my mind a go-to for a light co-op.

up for now

haven't heard much about or had any experience with the last 3 unfortunately!

understandable! and this will continue very soon...!

24. Mysterium

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/181304/mysterium

Category: Cooperative
Key mechanics: Clue-giving
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 40-50 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 8-12 plays with 3-7 players

In Mysterium, one player is a Ghost, giving clues to the other players - paranormal investigators - about the circumstances of their death. They do this over the course of seven rounds by handing out vision cards to each investigator corresponding (in order) to that investigator's suspect, location, and murder weapon. If each player manages to solve all three of these stages in the seven rounds, there is a do-or-die bonus round for the win.

Like many of the games that lean more toward the party-game focus, Mysterium has questionable "game-iness" credentials, or at least tightness of rules. The ravens that a ghost can use to clear their hand, the re-draw rules, and the rules on discussion all lean more toward "just do stuff" than toward planned rules. A limited deck of suspects and dreams also can result in some similarities game-to-game. There are even different rules between the original Polish edition of the game and the American edition, which adds some bizarre competitive betting that we've never used.

But that doesn't particularly take away from the fun of Mysterium. Perhaps my favorite game of Mysterium involved only four players - one ghost and three guessers, each playing two spirit mediums. One of the reasons I say that Mysterium is so loose is that the majority of the fun in Mysterium doesn't come from player decisions or interaction or gameplay or even the art - instead, it's really just the loosely structured player interaction that results from it. Yeah, you're not allowed to read the Ghost's face, but it's just naturally kind of fun when someone gets a dream of a bear's skin floating like a cape, and then people can't decide whether that means the murderer is someone who kills animals or if they just have a lot of hair like a bear, and it's even funnier if you trash talk the other players during this.

Mysterium can also flop. There are times when people won't talk very much, or people will be weirdly uncooperative, or the ghost will take too long. It really relies on people having the tacit agreement to have a good time. And when that happens, it sings.

Love Mysterium!

Mysterium isn't my style but I liked it okay

I only played it once and it was a really bad experience. Maybe just not a good group.

Mysterium is on one of my favourite games, but you need the right group for it.
It works best as a chill game, you don't want people to tryhard it. I find that the cards and combinations often lead to funny moments, especially if people are talkative.

SeabassDebeste posted...

26. Jungle Speed

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8098/jungle-speed

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Pattern-recognition, dexterity, real-time
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15-20 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 15-25 plays with 5-8 players

In Jungle Speed, each player has a facedown deck of square cards that each have a pattern printed in a specific color. On your turn, you flip over your top facedown card onto you faceup pile so everyone can see. If it matches someone else's someone else's faceup card, then the two of you "duel" - grabbing a center totem. The loser of the duel takes both participants' faceup piles and adds them to their facedown deck, and play resumes. Grab the totem incorrectly or knock the totem over and take a penalty of cards. Run out of cards and you win.

When it comes down to it, sometimes all you want to do is fight over a stick like dogs over a bone.

The totem that you fight over in Jungle Speed is great. It's soft and firm and rubbery and ridged and it stands up nicely and it's not a perfect cylinder. I bring these things up because of course, you will be trying to grab the totem very often throughout the game. It's thus incredibly important that it be fun to grab, and I can confirm that yes, indeed, it is. There's also a great rule that in case of near-simultaneous grabs, the winner is the player with the most fingers directly touching the totem; i.e. if you get an partial grip or your fingers are on top of your opponent's, then that will inform the winner of the duel. The totem is not responsible for the (admittedly possible) scratching! Cut your nails, folks!

Of course, any speed game like this will get the blood pumping fast. In some ways Jungle Speed works like a microgame, since each battle is contested over the flip of a single card. But because your card stays open and you never know when someone will flip your card, to me, it feels like the arc develops over the course of the game..And getting on a streak, watching other people contest the totem, and diving in when special cards flip (everyone race for the center; everyone flip a simultaneous card; match colors instead of numbers) is always fun as well.

I don't think Jungle Speed is particularly worth playing with fewer than five players, and it's not exactly a "crunchy" experience. But in within its own genre of semi-party games it performs great.

What a great game. I love Jungle Speed.

24. Hanabi

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98778/hanabi

Category: Cooperative
Key mechanics: Clue-giving, deduction, hand management
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 20-35 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 20-40 plays with 2-5 players

In Hanabi, players cooperate to try to build fireworks - a.k.a. lay out sequences of five numbers in five different colors. Each player has a set number of cards in their hand and can play them freely - except that they cannot see their own cards, but only the cards of everyone else. Instead of playing a card, you can give one of a limited pool of hints.

The tension of the limited pool of hints is what drives Hanabi, which evidently is quite popular among science- and math-oriented folk. There should be an ideal algorithm for understanding one another, through which you can achieve great goals. But in the absence of it, the game can be chaotic... and still fun.

Granted, Hanabi does require that you have some stomach for mistakes. There can definite be a sort of passive-aggressive, "god how could you forget!" energy about the game - so a forgiving crowd is a must. Erring in front of a perfectionist can result in a very unfun experience. Ultimately, the game works well if players recognize that it's about trust and play into that - but don't take it personally if their faith in their friends' memories and powers of inference isn't always rewarded.

There are a few design choices that make Hanabi uniquely clever. There is a distinctly limited number of hint tokens, which makes you have to be really judicious with hints and aggressive about playing/discarding. The "every yellow card/5 in your hand" clue-giving restriction adds some delightful ambiguity which needs to be deciphered every game. And the distribution of cards - three of the 1s, two each of the 2s, 3s, and 4s, and only one of the 5s - really means your discards are likelier to be safe but more painful if you do hit that 5. I also love that 5s give you the clue back when you hit them correctly; that really gives a dopamine hit for completing a color!

Again, in some groups, Hanabi definitely won't work - it can be pretty unforgiving if you're a perfectionist (or playing with one). But if you find people who are on your wavelength or seriousness level, it's a great source of mild brainburn, occasional laughs, and hard-earned satisfaction.