Full List (A-Z) • What is Best in Life

This is an ongoing project to review the hundreds of games I’ve played.

I am using the following Board Game Geek rating guide to give these a score on how much *I* like these games, but all this is just, like, my opinion, man:

10 – Outstanding – will always enjoy playing.
9 – Excellent – very much enjoy playing.
8 – Very good – enjoy playing and would suggest it.
7 – Good – usually willing to play.
6 – Ok – will play if in the mood.
5 – Mediocre – take it or leave it.
4 – Not so good – but could play again.
3 – Bad – likely won’t play this again.
2 – Very bad – won’t play ever again.
1 – Awful – defies game description.

With that in mind, here are a few of the board games I’ve played, and my thoughts on them:

1856: Railroading in Upper Canada from 1856 (6) – I haven’t played enough 18xx games (only a handful) to accurately weigh in on them, but in general I’m more of a track builder, so all this stock manipulation isn’t really my cup of tea. This is pretty heavy and calculationally intense, and I’m not sure the fun level is there for all the work you put in to pay off.
5 Minute Dungeon (7.5) – This real-time dice rolling (a mechanic I don’t typically like, but it works well enough here) game has great production values, and the short play time does not overstay its welcome. There are good opportunities for teamwork (as long as everyone is on their toes) which work well with the real-time element. The only real flaw is that the cute cards are purely for flavor, so the jokes about cacti needing hugs will probably wear thin on multiple playthroughs as you use the same cards over and over for each Boss.
5 Minute Marvel (7.5) – A Marvel-themed version of 5 Minute Dungeon, this improves on the original by adding a small deck of special cards for each character (of which there are plenty to choose from!) The special cards give a welcome bit of both flavor and strategy, and each deck plays quite differently. The jokes in the villain deck wear out just as quickly as the original, but the game-play remains reasonably diverting.
6 Nimmt (8.5) – This classic game of everyone blind bidding a card from their hand, and then lining them up in order next to a series of starter cards is great fun. The twist is that a row can not have a sixth card, so if your card ends up having to go in a row with five cards, you take the five cards as negative points. It’s a simple, fun, clever mechanic, and I’m always impressed when I play this one. Detractors will say that you can play your cards randomly and still do just as well (which miiiiiight be partly true in games with large numbers of players), but that sounds more like sour grapes for getting stomped to me.
7 Wonders (10) – One of the best games out there for large groups (as long as the new players don’t mind taking the first half of the game to learn how to play), this one plays fast, and is just fun as hell. You spend 3 ages drafting tech and resources to build better tech and resources (as is the wont of all civ games), while periodically scoring military points. It’s all very elegant and clever, and the fact that it doesn’t play two well hardly matters as the official 2 player version, 7 Wonders: Duel, is an even better game!
7 Wonders: Duel (10) – Fantastic 2-player version of Seven Wonders that is probably even better than the original game. The drafting is replaced by a new computer-Mahjong style method of unlocking cards (full of deep tactical thinking), everything else has been tweaked to shine in 2 player mode. Seriously, this is one hell of a game, reasonably simple for the amount of depth, fun and positively nasty, and full of agonizing decisions.
A la Carte (7) – This is a game full of gimmicks, but they are all implemented pretty skillfully. Most of the game boils down to how good you are shaking irregular shaped “spices” out of small mouthed jars (the crepe flip element especially feels a little tacked on) into your cute little pans. It’s fun enough, but I probably wouldn’t want to play without all the bells and whistles.
Acquire (6) – The random tile drawing can be a little chaotic, and there is potential to get completely hosed from the beginning if you add poor play to the random tile draw. The real drawback for me is that this is another stock market game that I just kind of suck at (I don’t think I’ve ever perfectly timed selling off a company). The elegant design is a classic for a reason, but I’ve never finished a game of this wanting to play again.
Advanced Squad Leader (10) – The rulebook is over 200 pages of DENSE acronym-filled, 6 point font verbiage, the pieces are so small you need tweezers to move them, and the graphics haven’t been updated since the 80s–and yet it still falls firmly on the “really fun” side of the line between great game and complete waste of your life. The rulebook (of which you probably only really need 100 pages) is actually pretty manageable due to an excellent index, and whether or not a tactical conflict simulation with no fog of war is an accurate simulation aside, this game more than any other makes you feel like you are actually on the battlefield. Plenty of downtime for rule look-ups, but once you get competent, the system, the THOUSANDS of actual historical scenarios, and the tactical combined arms maneuvering really can’t be matched by any other game.
Advanced Squad Leader: Starter Kits (9.5) – While the rulebook is a definite improvement on getting people to actually PLAY Advanced Squad Leader, my chief complaint is that with just a bit more work (and a teacher who has already waded into the full rulebook and returned to tell the tale), you could be actually playing FULL ASL. At this point, with the system including guns, tanks, campaign games, and more, I think it should mainly be used as a jumping off point rather than an end in itself. And really, aside from snipers (easy), concealment (harder), and elevation (hardest), 98% of the rules you use the most in ASL are already here.
The Adventurers: Pyramid of Horus (8.5) – At first I was disappointed that the linear progression of challenges from the first was gone, but, honestly, this one has proven to have better staying power. It is still just a basic push your luck game with a ton of bells and whistles added, but the theme is great, and there is a real sense of urgency as to when you need to quit gathering treasures and get the fuck out of the pyramid. The falling rock end-game timer can be flukey, but this one is still always a hit.
The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac (8) – If you can overlook the fact that this is just a simple push your luck game hiding under all the chrome, this ends up being remarkeably fun and thematic. I suspect the water path is overpowered, but each Indiana Jones style (complete with a rolling boulder) challenge is very fun and evocative as you race to gather more treasure than your fellow temple robbers.
Age of War (Risk: Express) (7.5) – This is a feudal Japan re-theme of the original Risk: Express, but the core game-play remains the same. It’s the usual game of Yahtzee style rolling and rerolling, but with plenty of good decisions by giving you lots of options for which card to go for.
Alhambra (7) – The tile laying (like most tile laying games) is quite fun, though there is a serious lack of control with more than 3 players. Very much a Ticket to Ride feel (if not quite as good) here in the way that you horde resources to snatch up the good tiles when you get enough.
Amazonas (8) – This is a clever, simple game of capturing various villages on the map in order to give you gold to spread out and add more villages to your network. Nothing to make it really stand out, but it’s a tight, fun game that is full of nice decision making points.
Android (8) – Pretty massive Bladerunneresque game where you travel around a huge city (on earth and the moon) to prove your starting “guilty hunch” is the culprit in a murder (imagine a reverse Clue). Many novel ideas (from characters having good/bad sides and the need to balance them, “happy ending” side missions, even puzzle pieces for the board) make this a lot of fun, but it can also be pretty overwhelming and potentially a bit random under all the “chrome” rules.
Android: Infiltration (8) – Make your way through rooms (represented by a line of cards) in a cyberpunk corporate facility, downloading zetabytes of information and stealing/destroying everything you find in this very flavorful heist game. There are a lot of bells and whistles, but the main choice is when to turn around and head back to the entrance as anyone still inside when the threat dial maxes out will be out of the game. Like most games of this type, it’s pretty random when you need to leave if you try to push it, so more often than not you will find yourself with no hope of escape due to an unlucky card. Still a lot of fun, but it’s not exactly the tightest game.
Android: Mainframe (8.5) – Based on an abstract area-enclosure game, this adds on a “Hackers trying to take over sections of a super computer mainframe” theme reasonably smoothly. It’s a good, quick game set in the Android universe, though too often it can come down to the winner being whoever wins a push and pull battle of attrition over what cards come up. Also, the special cards each hacker gets vary WIDELY in power levels.
Ankh’or (7.5) – Collect Splendor style discs to buy octagonal tiles to arrange in a grid in the most points-beneficial way. This all works very well, with good shifting choices in what you can buy, however, despite great components and a ton of scoring choices (some not explained super well in the rule book), this doesn’t really feel like it would have the legs to see regular play.
Apples to Apples (3) – This is the game that is responsible for just about every shitty party game that I secretly judge new gamers for bringing to game night. It basically boils down to you looking at your hand of cards, picking the weirdest one, and saying: “oh look I played Michael Jackson on “sexy”…isn’t that funny!!” There is precious little game or choice here, Dixit does the same general concept SO much better.
Arena Maximus (6) – Fun, simple chariot racing game that does a decent job of capturing the flavor. Unfortunately, there are a few amateur design tells, including a potential runaway leader problem and some awfully swingy magic spells. None of the flaws are game breakers, but there are plenty of better options out there in this space.
Ark of the Covenant (7) – This is one of the best straight up Carcassone copies due to the simple fact that there are no more dead end road tiles (that create unbalanced “super fields”). While the simplified wolf/sheep scoring is an improvement, suppose I do miss the interaction between completing cities and fields. The ark and Prophet don’t add much, but at least they are easy to leave out, just like the pasted on Christian theme.
Arkham Horror (7) – This has definitely been surpassed by Eldritch Horror (due to how fiddly the whole system is and how much work it takes to keep it running smoothly). That said, this overstuffed and overlong monstrosity is not without its charms as some of the fiddliness does pay off in increased flavor and generally cool shit. Just, for the love of the Elder Gods of Downtime, don’t ever play with more than 4 (and 4 is even pushing it).
Axis and Allies (4.5) – Don’t let the super cool components trick you too much, this game has NOT aged well. Fun enough, but a modern classic like Nexus Ops (or even Memoir 44) will give 10 times the enjoyment this clunky beast does once the nostalgia factor wears off. You can tell a game isn’t great if you can’t ever actually remember finishing a game.
Azul (7) – In this game you draft tiles from an array of tile supplies in the middle of the table in order to fill up your grid of tiles in the most efficient manner possible. There is good tension in choosing what to draft before someone else gets what you need, and the presentation is very elegant. However, the game itself is pretty dry, excellent use of drafting aside.
Babel (7) – Tight little game of building up/moving cards around to create combos to trash your opponent’s side of the board. This is a lot more confrontational than most of the Kosmos 2-player line, and there really is a lot of opportunity for clever moves. Unfortunately, sometimes the most clever plans can be hamstrung by luck of the draw, and the knocking down of temples can make the game overstay its welcome. Worth playing for the right two players, but this will easily fall flat with the wrong two players.
Bacchus Banquet (8) – Despite the somewhat low budget presentation, this was actually a pretty solid bluffing game. Lots of opportunities for double think (mostly in the “did they give me poison, or are they hoping I think it’s poison so I give them back something good accidentally” vein). Some of the roles (the gift collectors) are fairly obvious to figure out, and once the special power cards are out of play it’s not too hard to force a victory, but still a worthwhile game.
Bang (4) – Seriously flawed hidden role game that hinges on the moment in which the outlaws turn on the sheriff. With no way to get extra information, before that moment everyone just shoots randomly, and after that moment, everyone just shoots the outlaws. The flavor is great, and there IS potential here, it’s just wasted potential.
Bargain Hunter (6.5) – Just a simple trick taking game, with the twist that each player has to collect certain numbers and loses points for any cards they win that are not those numbers. The novel scoring system makes it stand out a bit from the other trick taking games out there, if only just barely.
Battle for Rokugan (8) – Fairly simple, bluff-heavy mechanism of playing hidden chits of varying power levels to battle for control of provinces and groups of provinces in a fantasy eastern-themed map. It is all very efficiently done, and quite cheap to buy (though the cardboard-only presentation, while it looks nice, can be a bit hard to read on the fly), making this a success in the realm of short, light “wargame-ish” games.
Battle Line (9.5) – One of the all time great two play games, this plays very similarly to Lost Cities, but with a good deal more strategic depth. The theme is pasted on, the production has a very cheap feel, but the “just one more card before I commit” hand management gameplay will keep you coming back for more time and again.
Battle of Five Armies (10) – This war game uses the same basic framework (and piles of plastic) as the classic War of the Ring (you each roll a handful of action dice and then take turns using them to do stuff–bring more troops on board, move/attack, draw/use cards), but despite an overabundance of chrome, the game actually feels a bit more streamlined. Part of this is due to an accelerated end game timer (that does a good job of risking time for better options), but, the brilliant as always incorporation of theme almost justifies all the little extra rules. One minor complaint is that the Free People’s player has massively more options than the Shadow player each turn, though the “hanging on by the skin of your teeth until the end game” feel is still there.
Battlelore (7) – The C&C system remains one of the best light wargames out there, but this time around the setup is bordering on the ridiculous…if you use all the rules, you will literally spend almost as much time setting up the game as you do playing it. The lore cards are fun, but, at its heart, this system does not mix well with all the fiddly bits piled on to this version.
BattleLore (Second Edition) (7.5) – An improvement on the first edition in many ways. Some of the customization of the first is missed at times, but overall everything that was cut was cut in the name of making a more playable, and faster to set up (no more flags!) game.
Battleship Express (6.5) – This has very little to do with the actual Battleship game, instead it’s a Yahtzee style dice game where you pick a ship and roll its allotted assortment of dice to try to take out opposing ships. Special powers keep things interesting (I’d recommend the advanced rules), even if it does all feel pretty random (and some ships definitely have better odds to hit than others).
Battling Tops (7.5) – Not much of a game (despite forums full of debate over the best winding strategy), but this is a decidedly fun exercise in watching spinning tops smash the shit out of each other. Maybe not worth the ridiculous prices the current Battling Tops renaissance has made the game sell for on ebay, but definitely worth playing a time or ten.
Bausack (8.5) – This is one of my favorite stacking games due to the super cool pieces (even if they are mostly just left over cabinet making supplies), and the clever bidding mechanism where you horde your precious bidding beans to force others to take super hard pieces to stack, or to claim a super easy piece for yourself. The Bausack version looks the best, but if you can find a cheap Bandu version on ebay, it’s basically the same thing.
Beasts of Balance (8) – Way overpriced, but definitely a cool integration of a stacking game with an app. It is definitely fun to try different strategies to get the most points, though it does seem like the game might have a limited amount of competitive fun in it as there seem to be a few strategies (discovered by my 6 year old) that will get the most points. Still, it looks amazing, the app is cool, and the oddly shaped pieces make the stacking very fun.
Beasty Bar (10) – A simple game of animals jostling each other in line to get into the titular bar. Each of 12 animals has a special power that manipulates the order of the line as they take their place, and the interactions create a surprisingly deep and fun game. Perhaps a little random as you only have 4 cards in hand to respond to new animals from your opponents, but this is a game that remained fresh and fun no matter how many times I’ve played it.
Beowulf: The Legend (9.5) – Fantastic auction game that manages to put just about every foot right in creating a fun, immersive, even, gasp, thematic gaming experience. Naysayers complaining about the luck-fest of the “risks” are massively overplaying the problem (and overlooking one of the most fun elements of the game). Definitely one of the best combinations of auctions and hand management out there.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill (6.5) – Overall this haunted house romp is pretty fun, if a little underwhelming. This definitely has its good points, but the simplicity and randomness of the system is a little limiting, and the scenarios are ridiculously swingy.
Biblios (10) – Brilliant two part game (like For Sale) where you collect cards and then use them to get more cards. At the end, whoever has the most cards of each color gets the corresponding dice (at whatever point value is showing on the face). The central mechanic is an ingenious push your luck variation where you draw a card for each player, a face down end of game pile, and yourself, the twist being you do them one at a time and decide which pile they go into, thus risking leaving yourself with a shitty card if you wait too long. Simple, elegant, and, most important of all, fun.
The Big Book of Madness (8) – This is a cooperative game of using cards (acquired via a lite-deckbuilding system) to cast spells to help you stop a series of horrible monsters unleashed when a bunch of Slytherinesque students had to go and open up the Big Book of Madness. There is kind of a lot going on, but it all remains pretty manageable due to everyone having the same simple starting spells, and some nicely interlocking game mechanics. Quite a good time, though it does have maybe one too many hoops to jump through as you batter your way through the Book of Madness.
Big City (7) – Keep the player count low (randomness rapidly increases with each player) and this is really a quite fun (and beautiful!) game of city building. The theme works wonders as you see the city taking shape with the super cool plastic components.
Bites (7.5) – Simple game of moving colored ants ahead to collect the food of their color for yourself. Ultra simple, but full of good choices (the ant that finishes first will have the food worth the most, so you have have to trade off collecting the food you need vs making sure the ant you want finishes first. Absolutely stellar components (double layer food tiles look fantastic), but the gameplay was just a little too simple for my tastes.
Black Hole Council (5) – This negotiation game of getting certain colored cards in the slots you want them has some good stuff in it, but ultimately there is just too much fiddling around with moving things where people secretly want them moved to really work as a pure negotiation game. Too often you had 6 different people asking you to do 6 different things…it isn’t impossible to sort through it all, but I’m not sure I’d call it fun. Also, the graphic design is nice, but is far too abstract (for me) for a futuristic space game.
Blink (6.5) – Split the deck in half, draw a hand of three cards, and then race to empty your hand by playing them to the middle, the twist being that you can only play a card if it matches color, shape, or number of the top card in the middle. It works great, and is super quick, but speed identification games like this always leave me a little cold.
Blokus (8) – Classically simple “minute to learn, lifetime (or a dozen playings or so at least) to master” abstract game that remains tense and enjoyable throughout as your are constantly tactically responding to new threats on your territory. The pieces and board have a nice tactile feel too.
Blokus: Duo (7.5) – The two player rules for regular Blokus aren’t great (basically you each just play two colors), so this smaller board designed for two only is a welcome change. The compact box that actually fits on your shelf is appreciated too.
Blokus: Trigon (7.5) – Blokus, except with triangles. The game remains just as engaging (though, perhaps a bit trickier to visualize due to the hexagonally branching vertices) with each turn bringing a great decision making trade-off between furthering your own territory and blocking your opponents (also this plays 3 far better than regular Blokus).
Blue Moon (10) – Classic Knizia design that transcends its “War with special powers” roots to become something great. The eight wildly different (and yet exquisitely balanced) decks make sure nothing ever feels stale, the card abilities are all interesting, and, most importantly, the decisions on when to retreat, and when to commit are constantly tense and exciting.
Blue Moon City (7.5) – Very elegantly designed game of hand management and area control in the Blue Moon universe, though, it is unfortunately quite a bit more dry than its predecessor despite all the dragons and shit. Also the game is pretty tight in that it can feel like you were just a turn away from winning every time making me wonder just how much all the area control really matters in the end as long as you do your best to get what you can.
La Boca (9.5) – Very clever 3D block puzzle game where you place blocks to try to match the sides of the blocks facing you to a 2D picture of colored squares and rectangles, while your partner does the same with their side of the shared board. Some of the puzzles are a little easy, but it’s a very clever partner puzzle game that even has a great scoring system built in to keep it competitive!
Boggle (6.5) – Overall a pretty good word game, and though I like Scrabble a little better, at least Boggle doesn’t have Scrabble’s downtime. This can be tough to play against someone really good, and the act of writing down words is tiresome, but it’s still a clever take on a word game.
Bohnanza (7.5) – A nice, fairly light negotiation game that is good for larger groups since the negotiation reduces downtime. Easy to introduce to new players though sometimes the trading can get stale “uh…I don’t want this…will you take it? Cool…your turn.” But overall, it does what it does quite well. This is also a bit better with 4+ players too–with 3 there doesn’t seem to be enough competition sometimes to make the trades interesting.
Bonaparte at Marengo (9) – Like all of Simmon’s games, this is pretty hard to get your head around (despite the short rulebook). However, once you do, you are rewarded with a beautiful (seriously, these games have possibly the best presentations in all wargaming), quick playing, and highly strategic experience. The extra focus on Maneuver makes this a bit more fun than Napoleon’s Triumph, though it also feels a good deal more abstract, so maybe it’s a wash.
Bonbons (5.5) – Memory variant where you are trying to match cards from the center with your own set of 5 treats, first player to match all 5 wins. The “each player has their own set to match” mechanic doesn’t really work as you are allowed to match another player’s card and claim it for yourself (giving them one of your unmatched ones to replace it), so really you may as well just have a set of 5 cards to match per player out in the center for everyone. Otherwise the game looks great, and is actually pretty hard as all the candy/color variations are fairly subtle!
Bongo Kongo (7) – Pretty decent Loupin’ Louie spinoff where you try to hit food out of a big monkey’s backpack before he can turn around and hit you with his club. The big monkey swings around surprisingly quickly, which is appreciated, but, like a lot of these games, the mechanism for knocking food into your tray is pretty imprecise which can lead to some frustration.
Bonk (7.5) – Fun dexterity game of trying to push a rolling wooden ball into you opponent’s side by rolling little steel balls down a slide and hitting it at the right angles. Fun and chaotic, though, it is awful hard to maintain much control.
Boss Monster: The Dungeon Building Card Game (5.5) – On paper this is a great idea, and the retro artwork is very cool. Unfortunately having the (very few) scoring cards come up randomly each turn, AFTER you’ve already built your rooms, means that the winner is usually whoever gets the most lucky flips in their areas of specialty. Full of promise, but not there for me.
Boufbowl (9) – As a Krosmaster: Arena super-fan, obviously this one was going to be right up my alley–even if I’m not exactly a soccer super-fan. This is basically just a simplified version of Bloodbowl, spiffed up with super cute (and fantastic looking) chibi minis. On your turn you can do three moves and one action (pass/tackle)–a sequence each player repeats until someone scores. The blocking rules are simple but thematic (basically, if you are in the same area as another team member, you can’t move forward until you get a blocker), and everything feels quite evocative. If I have a complaint (aside from Ankama’s usual horrible rulebook), it is that the game can sometimes bog down in a drawn out tackle/stand up/repeat cycle. However, the full game with special power cards doesn’t add much complexity, and helps keep things moving by making powerful stalemate breaking combo plays more likely. Highly recommended.
Bounce It-In Game (3) – Almost not even a game as you have almost no control over what hole your balls land in. The novelty wears off after about 10 seconds, after that it’s pretty much just good for That’s What She Said jokes.
Brass Balls & Nerves of Steel (6) – A half-cocked cock and balls joke strapped on to a half cocked-game of rolling your balls into your opponent’s holes, this is a decent pastime, but there are plenty of other better dexterity games. The big ol’ balls have a nice heft to them though.
Brothers (8.5) – So simple that it will make you say “that’s it?” when you realize that all you do is take turns assembling a field, and then take turns placing as many of your fences (L-shaped for one player, straight for the other) into the enclosure as you can. It actually ends up being a fun (and super quick) little spatial game with lots of agonizing decisions over how best to cut off your opponent. As with most abstracts, experienced players will have a strategy edge (to some degree, I am still working on figuring out best strategies), but this ended up being more fun than I thought it would be (I initially bought it mostly due to the Krosmaster universe theme).
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game (8) – Considering its age, this is surprisingly fun (and a good implementation of theme for fans of the show). It shows its age with the dice movement and random combats, but you will be shocked to find out it is actually 20 years old, not 15!
Bugs & Co (6) – Ok game of grabbing tiles in real time and putting them face down in your hand if you want to keep them. The twist is you have to have 3 of the same tile to score it, so you have to remember what you’ve taken, and hope the other players don’t have one of yours. Seems like it might be a better tactic to only take tiles once you know where all three are, but I” not sure the game warrants enough plays to find out.
Bugs in the Kitchen (8) – Very cool game that uses a battery powered vibrating bug that randomly moves around a maze that the players will slowly shift in their favor based on die rolls. It looks great, and is genuinely fun, though you have to resist the urge to slow play and game the system when the bug is getting close to ending up in your scoring bin.
The Builders: Antiquity (6.5) – The Builders uses a fun engine building mechanic where you spend coins to buy workers (that are good at various building related tasks) to assign to buildings that you draft. The harder it is to finish a building, the more points you get. This version introduces a few new twists to the core system in the form of loans, training, and slave (er, “prisoners”). Like I said, it IS fun, but the turns feel a little bland in that there is usually only a few viable options as you min/max your way to the most efficient building path.
Bunny Kingdom (8.5) – A game of collecting the most areas of various types to get points, along with a ton of bells and whistles as you draft the cards to get you points. Fairly chaotic with all the scoring options and cluttered board, but it is fun to play and looks great!
Buy Low Sell High (7) – Despite the lame theme and art, there is actually a pretty strong game here (especially surprising since the market is so flooded with these games that people almost pay you to take them). The cards can make things a bit swingy, but as far as light stock market games go this is actually pretty good.
Call to Adventure (7.5) – Similar to Splendor, you draft cards, that give you more resources (or, in this case, 2-sided runes to cast), to get you better cards, etc. In theory, this is also supposed to construct a story for your character, but in the end all the choices, dark or light, feel pretty inconsequential as you mostly just care about how many icons and points you collect. Still, it’s pretty short and the art looks fantastic!
Cardline: Marvel (9) – If ever there was a good use of the Cardline system, it is in putting superheros in order of who is the strongest. No comic company has ever solved the riddle of actually figuring out an objective ranking system for their heroes, but honestly most of these felt close enough to me, so I’m calling this one a success.
Cash and Guns (7) – There are some good things at work here, but I suspect that the majority of this game’s popularity rests with the gimmicky foam guns. That said my opinion on this game has slightly risen over the years, so maybe it’s got a bit more to it than just taking delight in engineering a Mexican standoff every turn.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig (8) – Quite fun game where you draft rooms to add to your ever expanding castle. Rooms need to be placed for optimal points (for instance, don’t put your music room next to your bedroom) as you race to build the most efficient castle. Some of the bells and whistles can feel a little gamey, but the satisfaction of building your castle is definitely fun–if only the graphic design were better!
Carcassonne (6) – Contrary to what some say, the field scoring in Carcassonne is superior to simple point counting spinoffs as it gives a nice tension to completing cities in fields you own. However, there are too many dead end roads here that makes the end game usually devolve into who gets the resulting super-field. Still good tile laying fun even if the hand size of one makes it feel like a game of Magic in top-deck mode.
Cardline: Animals (9) – This is basically a much simplified version of Fauna, and an excellent use of the Cardline system. Each turn players have to add animals onto a line of cards arranged from smallest to largest by size, weight, or lifespan. If you insert your animal into the wrong place on the line, you have to draw a new card, first player to run out of cards wins. Reminding new players to play their hardest cards (the ones they know the least about) first is essential (as the placement only gets harder as the game goes on), but otherwise this is a fun, and surprisingly engrossing game that’s always worth a quick play.
Cardline: Dinosaurs (6.5) – Despite the cool theme, this one is a step down from the fantastic Cardline: Animals due to the simple fact that most people’s dinosaur knowledge doesn’t extend to accurate estimates for size and weight. I suppose for TRUE dinosaur lovers this would be great, but fuck if I know how many tons more some giant prehistoric shark would be compared to a giant prehistoric sea monster thing. The roughly human sized bird-like dinosaurs seriously clog up the low end too.
Cardline: Globetrotter (8.5) – All of the Cardline games are great, but for geography nerds, this is the one to get as putting countries in order of size is about as fun as it gets. It is amazing how little you can know about, say, the relative sizes of Pakistan and Indonesia, making for a very challenging and fun variation of the system. Population, GDP and Carbon emissions are even harder!
Carolus Magnus (7.5) – Good looking, slick area control game. Original mechanics, short play time, and tough decisions are all positives, though the endgame can bog down in AP.
Caylus (7.5) – Pretty fun even if there have been plenty of better worker placement games since this. Overall just a little too long, and dry for my tastes.
Château Roquefort (9) – Ostensibly this is a kid’s game, but it’s great for adults too. This is basically a multi-leveled labyrinth with a few extra bells and whistles (and some not insignificant memory elements). It’s actually a fantastic game that doesn’t just look amazing (the levels of the castle through which your mice hunt for cheese give a really cool 3d effect), but also gives a really flavorful experience. A winner for all ages!
Checkers (5) – Pure strategy games like this never get me very excited to play as it seems like I’d have to spend far more time with the system than I want to even get a coherent system of game play going. I suppose it could be fun setting up elaborate traps that involve multiple jumps, but at the end of the day there is just way too much other stuff out there that I’d rather be playing.
Chess (6) – Unless the players are evenly matched, Chess always seems like too high of a strategic learning curve to to just jump into. Or maybe it’s mostly that I’ve always preferred shorter term tactical decisions as opposed to games where I have to constantly be looking as far ahead as possible. There are definitely far better abstracts than this out there.
Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger (7) – Despite the dice, the equipment cards, and the Psychic Scale/Danger meter this is just a Choose Your Own Adventure book printed on cheap cardstock. As such, it’s a fun enough diversion, but it also suffers from the biggest weakness of the official books…your decisions have very little logical bearing on the overall story. Sure, rushing a deadly ghost will probably get you killed, but just about every other decision in the game is a crap shoot (and the ability to “go back” and try all the choices you skipped before moving on to the next level feels off too).
Chronicles of Crime (8) – Clever game that uses VR crime scenes to find QR-encoded evidence to use to question QR encoded suspects. A phone app controls the flow of information, with most being some variation of “this person tells you about this location, and when you go there you find two more people to tell you about more places, where you find more evidence…all eventually leading to enough information to solve the central murder. It is a blast to play, though, in one game we didn’t show one specific piece of physical evidence to the hacker and ended up completely stalling our investigation, which was disappointing.
Circus Flohcati (6.5) – Nice tension in the trade-off between melding cards and getting high numbers in each color. Nothing incredibly deep, but this is still a good one.
Citadels (8.5) – This new version of Citadels looks fantastic and even has a few minor rule cleanups that all seemed to be improvements–making it a welcome release of an older game that holds up quite well. Gameplay has some decent bluffing “They know I’m going to take this, so should I take this instead?”, scales very well (and plays very differently) from 2-7, and is nice and short as you all pick roles, trying to get the most cards and gold in order to build 8 buildings before anyone else. A game that will not only stay in my collection, it will also get upgraded to the new, fancy version ASAP.
La Citta (7.5) – Lots of tough decisions, and gives a decent feel for constructing a bunch of growing cities–but, at the end of the day, it’s still fairly abstract and Euro. Still pretty cool, though I’d probably generally prefer something with a bit more plastic in it.
Clank! In! Space! (7.5) – This really is a cool variation on deckbuilders, basically switching out action points for movement points to wind your way around a cool little map full of upgrades and enemies. The “Clank” mechanic of some cards making noise which puts your color of cubes into a bag (and thus making it more likely you’ll be damaged when you inevitably have to draw cubes from the bag) is really cool too. Unfortunately, there were just a few too many moving parts to really feel like it flowed all that smoothly (part of this could be due to us learning the rules on the fly). A really cool concept, but some of the chrome could be dialed back a bit.
Claustrophobia (9) – The beautiful cave tiles combined with decently pre-painted miniatures make this one of the best looking tactical combat games out there. The asymmetrical gameplay is quite simple (if you can get past a few chromey additions) with the demon player using dice to maintain a never-ending horde of imps (bolstered by a rotating big-bad) to keep the heroes from reaching their objective. The use of dice is actually quite clever (heroes must choose between boosting defense or attack strength each turn depending on the circumstances), and the game plays quickly, making this an easy repeat play for me.
Cockroach Poker (8.5) – Excellent game that distills the art of bluffing down to its most basic form, and is all the better for it. The scoring system and ability to “look and pass” add slight nuances to the Princess Bride style mental calculations around the game’s central question of “are they lying about what card they said they gave me?”
Cockroach Poker: Royal (8.5) – Part of the appeal of Cockroach Poker is its ultra simplicity as a game of pure bluff. I’m not convinced that adding in a new “is this a ROYAL cockroach, or a regular” choice adds anything to the game. Still a fantastic game, but I’d just as soon play the original.
Code Omega (7) – From the makers of Ubongo comes another puzzle game–this time you are trying to lay your three tiles onto a board so that you make a single black bar from top to bottom. It can be deceptively hard, but something about this rings a little flat (no pun intended) when compared to the more open arrangement of shapes in Ubongo. Also, it goes without saying that the scoring system is quite arbitrary and random.
Codenames (7.5) – Clever word game where you give your partner a one word clue to get them to guess as many of your 8 secret words from a grid of 25 words on the table (with 8 other words in the grid belonging to the other team). It’s a cool idea, though having 25 words out there can often make it hard to do really clever plays without inadvertently getting your partner to pick a wrong card that also fits your one word clue.
Coin Age (6.5) – Simple area control game in theory designed to be carried in a wallet and played with coins. Unfortunately, it is not good enough to be an “every day carry” and no one carries coins on them anymore anyway.
Coloretto (9) – Great game built around the simple concept of each person collecting slightly different sets of cards, and the players taking turns adding cards that benefit them the most to piles they will eventually take. This is easy to explain, it plays fast, and there’s a lot of good decision making at play each turn (that only gets more interesting as the game progresses). A classic for a reason!
Condottiere (7.5) – There is a good push your luck/strike while the time is right game here as you go around the table playing cards from your hand, hoping to stay in the lead numerically, but not over-commit (as the other players can usually fuck you over if you do). The artwork is great, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but part of it feels like maybe a few too many moving parts hiding the fact that the game is built around the simple decision of “do they have a card in their hand that will fuck me? …or not?”
Coup (9) – Great bluffing game where you play behind the scenes power brokers with influence on two political figures…over the course of the game you can claim influence over certain people to gain benefits, but if anyone calls your bluff you might have to show one of your cards to prove it. If you didn’t have the card, you lose one of your cards permanently, and the last person with face down cards wins. Great bluff incentives (though people who get the right cards and never lie can sometimes win easily), and the cool Dune-esque art is a big plus too. This does have player elimination, but it’s short enough I can probably forgive that flaw.
Cosmic Encounter (6) – Definitely fun, in the trashiest of ways, but it’s still a totally random luck-fest (most notably in the unbalanced powers). Also, the end-game has some serious bash the leader issues.
Cranium: Hoopla (6.5) – Of all the Cranium games (most of which are, at least, playable), this one comes the closest to satisfying gamers. Basically you roll a dice and use some kind of charades/pictionary/etc (one complaint is that the bigger than/smaller than category was a bit easy to “game” by just picking words that help players figure out your card) to get the other players to guess the various cards you have in hand. The timer is a nice way to incorporate some stakes to the game, and all of the various activities are fun. It’s still nothing special, but it’s at least pretty fun.
Cribbage (8.5) – This classic card game holds up pretty well against modern games, as there are plenty of choices to be made (especially in what cards you give your opponent. With only 12 cards in play out of 52, it’s very random, but there’s still plenty to sink your teeth into. The oddball rules about Jacks and shit don’t even detract from things all that much.
Crokinole (10) – Classic flicking game that can be instantly grasped (and less-instantly mastered depending on your flicking ability) and never gets old. 4 players is ideal, but if you have 4, this one should pretty much always come out.
Crossing (6) – Simple game of slowly filling up pots (mushrooms) of gems and then players simultaneously choosing to point at a mushroom (taking the gems), their neighbor’s stash (taking it for yourself), or covering your own stash and locking them away from future thieving opportunities. Again, as simple as it gets, but there are some good bluff decisions to be made here that keeps it worth playing.
CVlizations (7) – This is a simplified version of CV, and, like CV, I think most of the allure is due to the fantastic art, and cool concept. Honestly, as a civilization game, this kind of suffers as this territory doesn’t feel nearly as fresh as the original CV. It’s mostly just a lot of shuffling cubes around to try to buy as many cards as you can…fun enough, but nothing to get excited about.
Dancing Eggs (5) – Players take turns grabbing eggs off the table and holding them on various parts of their body. There is potential for fun, but the win condition of “first to drop an egg” is too easy to avoid with the low number of eggs causing the game to just go on and on.
D-Day Dice (8.5) – A Yahtzee style dice game with more special powers than you can shake a demolition charge at. The basic game involves rolling dice to get soldiers (lost each turn of the game…if you get to zero, you lose), courage (to move up the game board), specialist stars (to buy permanent upgrades), and tools (to buy one use upgrades). Each map is its own “puzzle” and you have to figure out the best combination of upgrades (reroll dice, exchange dice, etc) to use. It can be a lot to keep track of, but is quite fun (and even reasonably evocative of the theme), and, sometimes to its detriment, quite punishingly hard at later levels.
Dead of Winter (8) – Very thematic (and BLEAK) zombie game where you scramble around to various locations searching for items before the zombies get to strong. The “Crossroads” system of drawing a card each turn with a choice that has a gameplay effect works ok, but the effects are pretty minimal and felt kind of tacked on to me. My biggest complaint however is that the traitor mechanic (as with most traitor games) doesn’t really work. It is usually VERY obvious who the traitor is the first time they act against the others, and once found out it becomes basically impossible for them to win. A fun game, but not the masterpiece some claim it to be.
Deadpool vs The World (7.5) – The whole “vote on which one is the funniest” is WAY too overplayed in the flooded party game market, but, at least this game affords you the opportunity to write your own funny shit, making it infinitely better than the endless Apples to Apples/Cards Against Humanity clones out there. Deadpool is probably overplayed too, but I never get tired of writing silly captions to silly pictures, so I give this one a pass.
Déjà Vu (8.5) – Thirty-six annoyingly similar objects are spread out around the table, then cards with the objects on them are flipped up one at a time. The deck of cards has each object in it exactly twice, and as soon as you see a card flip up that has an object you saw on an earlier card, you can grab the object. If you were incorrect, the actual object will come up later in the deck, and you will be eliminated from the game. It’s a clever game that is surprisingly hard despite all the objects at first glance not seeming all that similar. Good fun, and actually recreates the promised feeling of déjà vu while playing!
Diamant (7.5) – Fun, super simple push your luck game. Very nice components and quick playing time (in addition to scaling to large groups well) make this one a staple.
Dixit (9) – New players will usually say “oh, this is like Apples to Apples/CAH,” but, importantly this game of selecting a surreally illustrated card from your hand is not judged on a vaguely subjective definition of “which is funniest,” but instead on the ACTUAL choice of describing your card in just vague enough terms that at least one but not all the players will guess it, makes this a better game by miles. Still just as accessible to new players as all the Cards Against Humanity clones, but all around a far more satisfying experience.
Dominion (8) – The game that started the whole deck-building craze is still one of the better ones. Sure, there are some poor graphic design choices (especially with making money all look the same), and the theme is pasted on, but the card mix is a good combination of simplicity and interesting powers. Endgame usually devolves to who had a chance to buy the most provinces, (I rarely see the game end on empty stacks) but overall this one still hasn’t found a way to outstay its welcome.
Dr. Eureka (8) – Super cool dexterity game of dumping balls from test tube to test tube without dropping any of them on the table. Simple, but slickly implemented, this is always fast paced fun!
Dragonheart (6) – Ok push your luck game where you take turns playing cards in various spots around the board, the twist being that most spots will then claim cards from adjacent spots. It becomes a game of trying to build up certain piles of cards and then snatching them for yourself before your opponent grabs them. In practice there are just a few to many places to put cards to really have much control over mitigating the risk of building up a pile.
Dream Factory (8.5) – This polished Knizia auction game is distinguished by its closed system economy and the brilliant theme of auctioning contracts for stars to fill up the movies your studio is trying to make. Though, the theme is only fun if you are an old movie buff and have the original Traumfabrik version (or a custom version like myself). It’s hell of a lot more fun to make Casablanca staring James Stewart than it is to make Berris Fueller’s Day at Work starring Eddie Smurf like you’ll be forced to do in the new editions.
dude (5.5) – Simple game where you draw cards and can say only “dude” in the manner suggested by the font. If you think someone else has the same card you do, and you both say “sweet” (because THAT movie is a timely reference in 2018), then you can both score the card. It’s fun for a bit, but the different dude variations wear out their welcome pretty quickly.
Dungeon! (5.5) – Ok dungeon crawl where you go into rooms trying to beat their guardians to collect treasure. Some characters are better in different rooms, and each has to collect a different treasure total that makes it all kind of come out in a wash. By the end game there are a few decent blocking choices, but the battles and card drawing is so random that I don’t think I’d recommend this to anyone over the hundreds of better dungeon games now out there.
Dungeon Command (6) – I appreciate the look and general idea behind the game, unfortunately combat is deadly boring, spiced up only by the cards (which tend to get used up pretty quickly). There is some fun to be had here, but as far as tactical miniature combat goes, this is definitely not top-tier stuff.
Dungeon Twister (10) – Brilliant brain-burner that is easily the best “maze” game out there. While there is no luck, the interactions can be so convoluted you almost have to play it tactically and just make the best of your turns as they come. Not that this is a drawback, the brilliant theme, and huge array of fun powers provide endless opportunities for cool moves.
Dungeonquest 3rd Edition (8) – I complain about some games being too random, and then there is Dungeonquest, the most random of them all–and somehow also one of the better ones. As long as you make peace with the fact that you will probably, certainly die well before the game end, it’s actually kind of fun seeing how far you can get by drawing tiles heading to the center of the dungeon. A few house rules will make this better though: get rid of one-turn kill cards like Swinging Blade (dying halfway into a dungeon is one thing, dying on the very first turn is another), scrap the combat cards (it’s a fun system, but WAY bogs the game down–use a variant that switches combat so a few dice rolls instead), and require a treasure from the center to win (not that anyone ever will, but it will prevent chickenshit running away after the first 4 turns).
Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game (7) – The first of the D&D 4th edition board games, this captures the feel of the series as good as any of them. It really works better without the added (though still minor) rules of the later games, though it still boils down to a fair amount of work for a game that at its heart is just “roll high on a 20 sided dice against a new monster each turn to see if you can last 10 turns. Thematic and fun enough, but there’s not much substance under it all.
Dungeons & Dragons: The Legend of Drizzt (6) – These D&D games are all pretty much the exact same game–each turn you have to choose between exploring and attacking monsters currently on the table (sometimes you can do both with the right positioning). Exploring new tiles gives you a new monster to add to the horde, not exploring forces you to draw an encounter that hurts your team. That’s really all there is to it, and, as the adventures go on, I find my interest in the system waning right at the point where everything starts to bog down in the book keeping of the final battle. This Drizzt version adds a few cool new rules, but nothing that really saves the game for me.
Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon (6.5) – Basically the same game as Castle Ravenloft and The Legend of Drizzt–this one falls somewhere between the two complexity wise. My big problem with all of these games is that 2/3rds of the way to the final battle the endless stream of samey (mechanically) monsters just gets kind of boring (and increasingly tough to keep track of) to fight.
Eat Poop You Cat (10) – This is the more free-form (and free) version of the Telephone–Pictionary game Telestrations. Players take turns describing a picture with a sentence, or drawing a picture of a sentence, then folding it over so only the most recent is showing and passing it to the next person. Inevitably this just descends into a bunch of adults filling pages full of poorly drawn dicks, and as such, I have to rate it a ten.
Elasund: The First City (6) – This just seems a little dry and soulless to me. It does a good job of providing multiple routes to victory along with the potential to block your opponents, but nothing seems all that original or even fun.
Elder Sign (7) – Arkham Horror themed dice game, with the usual amazing FFG production values and artwork. The game itself is the usual Yahtzee style roll and reroll, only this time with a ton of eldritch chrome added in. I’m not convinced it’s all that GOOD of a game however, as there is a bit more luck in the dice rolling (less chances to save dice/reroll than I would like) that I usually prefer in games like this. Also, the chrome kind of pushes this out of the light and quick realm it really wants to be in. Still, cool theme and it looks great, I’d be down for a few more plays.
Electronic Labyrinth (9) – This electronic version of Labyrinth is, ostensibly, marketed towards children, but it is also an overall improvement on the game, adding a slight memory element and focused quests for each player (along with multiple ways to score points). Don’t let the cutesy book and dialog fool you, this one is good fun for adults too!
Emojito (5) – This is a simple game of drawing a card, and then trying to get people to guess the face on it by mimicking the expression with your face, sounds, or both. I see what they were going for, but the game was barely there (and far too easy)–ultimately this felt like a lot of nice artwork in search of an actual game.
The Enchanted Tower (7) – On the surface this race game of one person with a head start trying to find the key you hid while you race to get there first is a pretty cool concept (and looks great). Unfortunately, the main decision is whether to go right or left as the finder…if you choose correctly, you will probably find the key.
Enigma (9) – Very cool puzzle game where each round players pick from one of four options: a 3D shape puzzle, a Tangram puzzle, a pipe connection puzzle, or a weight arrangement puzzle. Thus all players race o complete different puzzles (with the winner starting a short timer for the other players to try to finish). The scoring mechanism is a slightly overwrought mini-game, but it’s fun too once you get a handle on it–and does a good job forcing you out of your comfort zone to try puzzles you aren’t as good at. This one also does a nice job of balancing difficulty between puzzles–there will always be easy ones, but by and large the balance seems good.
Entdecker: Exploring New Horizons (7.5) – Pretty fun discovery/area control game–the tile laying element is pretty cool and makes for a nice looking map. There is also a fair amount of randomness and it is somewhat long for what it is, but overall it’s worth a play.
Escape the Dark Castle (9) – This is a real triumph of design, with every single element absolutely dripping with theme. Even the healing “potions” are dank and filthy: rotten apples, moldy cheese, and the like. The game itself is a fairly simple dice game with a few nice twists, enough to make it quite fun even without all the excellent black and white artwork to send it through the roof. Don’t get too carried away thinking this is a choose your own adventure style game, it really boils down to the same mini dice game over and over again, but it’s a good one and thus very worth playing if you like Dark Castles™!
Evo (8) – I like this one quite a bit, though the production value may be a good deal of the reason. Brutal and chaotic, (and perhaps a bit overlong and imbalanced with some of the cards) but the shifting environments are fun to try to work around.
Evolution: The Beginning (8.5) – Very good simplified version of the basic Evolution game. Each turn you basically have to decide whether or not to focus on making carnivores to hoover up food (victory points) or protect your herbivores. It actually has a nicely thematic feel to it, and makes for a surprisingly cut-throat two player game. If you play this seriously, you’ll be in for a nail-biter!
Exit: The Game – The Secret Lab (9) – This is a great escape room experience, with a good mix of clever puzzles (though they are a bit on the easy side). I especially like the cool code card that checks all your answers. All in all, a great time, it’s just too bad you can only play it for an hour before you have to just toss it in the trash (you will cut and write all over it as you solve it).
Exploding Kittens (2) – Absolutely dire “take that” game that tries to skate by entirely on the dubious charms of the Oatmeal creator’s tired back-hair jokes–all without a clue as how to make a remotely playable game (this even has player elimination…in this day and age!) You basically just draw cards and lob attacks at your opponents until everyone else has drawn a HILARIOUS exploding kitten card leaving you the overjoyed winner–honestly, I’d rather play UNO, and I fucking hate UNO.
Factory Funner (10) – The original Factory Fun is one of my favorite games, and this update basically improves on it in all areas. The basic game play of drawing machine tiles and then laying out increasingly complex pipe networks to bring feeder colors to the machines remains the same, it’s the little touches the improve things. The new hexagonal tiles open up so many more options (while the decreased board sizes keep the game challenging). Banning moving machines around cuts way down on AP decision making. Also, the new (or old if you had an original version) “cut out” pipes look much better than the printed Z-man ones.
Farkle (4.5) – This push your luck dice game isn’t as bad as I feared it would be, but it still by no means good when compared to the modern push your luck dice games. The main issue is that the randomness element is way to high–with the biggest points being awarded for lucky initial rolls. There’s some fun to be had here, but I can’t think of many situations where I’d pick this game over the horde of better options out there.
Fauna (9) – On the surface, a game about guessing animal weights/lengths/habitats sounds pretty lame, but the structured method of betting on your guesses is astonishingly fun. Constantly tense throughout, this one is always a hit.
Fireball Island (4) – Super cool production value, and I’m sure the nostalgia factor will be high for those who used to own this, but at its heart, this is just a roll and move, and thus, kind of sucks.
FITS (9) – Fantastic “Tetris” game of adding pieces one by one to your slanted personal player board, trying to fill up the space as efficiently as possible. There is nothing groundbreaking here, but this still elegantly captures the feel of Tetris with all the usual efficiency and polish you would expect of Reiner Knizia.
Five Crowns (3) – This game takes Rummy and makes it significantly worse. By eliminating the melding on existing sets rules, and extending the game waaay too far, it becomes a game of simply drawing card after card until you have enough wilds to go out in one turn. You will be ready for this one to be over 2 hands in…and that’s before the game really starts to take forever with the high card number hands.
Flag Dash (8.5) – Clever programmed movement capture the flag game, where you secretly select a couple of moves for your flag dashers, and hope they end up where they need to be after everyone has moved. It isn’t perfect, once you get a flag it’s usually pretty easy to win, and 2-3 player is a little awkward, but as far as super cheap programming games go, this is recommended.
Flee (7) – This is, supposedly, a mini legacy game, where new rules are introduced as you make your way through the deck. In Flee, you basically play one card a turn and the goal is to never let the person with the monster take a turn or you all lose (thus, most of the cards are some variation of skip a player or reverse direction). There is actually a decent game in here (and it looks great), cluttered up by the constant new rules and twists, which ultimately kind of detracted from what could have been a much cleaner experience. Also, I definitely got the feeling that I was just letting a stacked deck play me with few meaningful decisions as we progressed through the deck.
Fluxx (2.5) – Not really a game so much as an exercise in randomness. Winning always seems like a fluke (and pretty much always is)–any other illusion of fun is just an illusion.
For Sale (10) – Classic two part game of bidding on houses and then blind bidding to sell them. Great art, scales well, and the way the two parts of the game interact is just plain fun. My go-to filler game.
Forbidden Desert (8) – These Forbidden” games all take the basic Pandemic engine (use actions to explore tiles and perform tasks to keep them explorable while you search for items) with minor twists. They also all do a good job of feeling unique in their own right, and this one’s water meter and shifting sandstorm tiles is pretty cool. Add in the fantastic components for the price and you have another cooperative winner.
Funny Friends (7) – The theme is darkly hilarious, but winning seemed like it might be a little arbitrary. I suspect there is not a lot of game under the brilliantly used theme.
Fury of Dracula (second edition) (7.5) – Nice mix of bluffing and deduction. Sometimes the game slips into a less exciting mode (I suspect it is in Dracula’s best interest to just stay as far away from the hunters as possible…but that also makes the game drag if he never stands and fights), and combat is awfully overblown and yet still swingy.
The Game of Life (2.5) – This is a straight up roll and move with only a couple actual choices (that have almost no impact on gameplay). Maybe there is some nostalgia here, but otherwise there is nothing the least bit compelling about this design.
Game of Thrones (8) – Definitely a great implementation of a “dudes on a map” game to the Game of Thrones universe. There is a fair amount of chrome, but it all works easy enough once you get going. I wish that it had a little more of a Diplomacy style guarantee for alliances before battles are resolved, as otherwise there aren’t a lot of surprises about who will support you. Also, the end game definitely has a lot of pile on the leader until someone manages to sneak ahead to the win.
Genoa (7.5) – The ultimate negotiation game where everything is up for discussion/trade, right down to which way to move. Great design, and mostly very fun, but WAY too long and repetitive, especially if the negotiations are going full force.
Ghost Blitz 2 (7) – The same as Ghost Blitz 1, just with new pieces and a few new rules to make things even harder. Fun, though, also, importantly, not fun–in that it’s a beast wrapping your head around the simple game of “what piece or color is wrong,” especially with the extra rules that mix things up (to say nothing of the ridiculous rules that combine both sets!)
Glen More (7) – This is a solid euro about making Scotch, where you draft tiles Thebes style to go into your expanding tableau of activatable victory point producers. This is a good game, but it feels rather bland and I don’t expect I’d get this out enough to remember the best strategies for winning (which, otherwise come to you about halfway through the game).
Go Away Monster! (5) – Not a game meant for adults, this is designed to play with 2-year-olds to teach them to take turns. That said, you could make an ok game by allowing adults to feel around for the pieces they need in the bag (while under a time limit). Still, no adult with a child would EVER play this without the child (due to being fucking sick of it).
El Grande (9) – This classic area control game can be pretty chaotic and thus somewhat hard to play long term strategically, but that’s half the fun. Maybe a tad complicated for new players, but it is definitely never boring despite all the cubes.
Greedy, Greedy Goblins (7) – Fairly simple game of flipping over tiles in a free for all to put them face down on various mine cards around the table as you push your luck building up a good mine to claim before someone sabotages it. There’s a good amount of variety to make mines better or sabotage other mines, making for a tense game, and the special power cards are simple enough to keep from complicating things too much. Overall another good (though not great) light game from Richard Garfield, who has been on a good (not great) roll lately.
Haggis (10) – Climbing game that is a great Tichu substitute for those times when you don’t have four players (this plays 2-3 very well). The three face up wild cards that everyone has adds a ton of brain burning decision-making that, honestly, almost makes this my preferred climbing game (though Tichu‘s partnerships are sorely missed).
Hanabi (6) – Unique game where all players hold their cards facing the table, and then each turn they can give one piece of information (regarding a fellow player’s colors or numbers) or play onto the center piles (that you must stack in order from 1-5). You are ONLY allowed to say how many of a color or number someone has (opinions differ on whether using a “plaintive tone” counts as cheating) so a lot of it is memory as you try to remember if that card you were told is a three was one of the 2 yellow ones they said you had 6 turns ago. This IS a good game, but it’s all a bit too much work for me to constantly try to stay focused and remember all your cards.
Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage (9) – Old school classic wargame that definitely lives up to the hype with its nice balance between fighting, and a political control tug of war. Just a lot of fun to look at the board and figure out what you could do in different areas and then see how to best use your hand to do that.
Hearts (8) – In this, perhaps the most famous (and simplest) of all trick taking games, everyone plays one card in turn, high card wins the pot. The twist is you don’t want to collect any hearts (and must play a card of the suit led if possible). A great game, but not something I play a whole lot due to the glut of fantastic modern trick taking games that are out there.
Heckmeck BBQ (6) – The basic dice rolling mechanism is fun (standard reroll and keep mechanism with the twists that you have to have at least one worm rolled, and you can’t keep the same number twice), but the game itself is kind of lame. Way too many numbers on the score chart keep things feeling random and arbitrary up to the end.
Hellboy: The Board Game (7.5) – I used to love these Ameritrash adventure games, but too often by the time you get to the end game and the board is covered in enemies, it just kind of feels like a slog as you end up spending more time bookkeeping than making meaningful progress. That said, the core combat system (of upgrading or downgrading dice) IS cool, the character abilities are fun and thematic, and it all looks very nice.
Hey, That’s My Fish! (8.5) – This is a pretty cool little abstract with a short play-time. The strategy can be really intense and yet not so deep that you have to spend a ton of time thinking about where to go.
Himalaya (7.5) – Cool combination of programmed movement and pick up and deliver game. With all the moving parts it can be a little tricky to know what you are going for, but, it is still good chaotic fun!
Hip Flip (6.5) – Not really much of a game, (and I don’t think this will be a Swivel killer), but still pretty fun. Basically set yourself up with a partner and a bar with a swinging arm in the middle, and then start gyrating hilariously while attempting to get the arm to swing around and around. Good for a few laughs, possibly even more than a few.
Hive (8) – Quick playing game with enough varied strategy to stay fresh for a while. I like it, but, like a lot of abstracts, the experienced player here will have a significant edge against newbies.
Hop! (6.5) – This is a ridiculous 3D board with even more ridiculous pre-painted chibi miniatures…all of which serves as a scoring mechanism for a simple game of tossing a foam rainbow ring and trying to get another player to catch it on their finger. There is a deck of cards to vary up the tossing and catching (sit on the floor/toss over your back/etc) and it’s fun enough, but this has to take the grand prize for needless over-production.
Horrified (8) – This is basically a Pandemic style game of running around and collecting items to take out various Universal Monsters terrorizing a town. There is probably sweet spot for players (3? 5 had too much downtime) and number of active monsters (3 was pretty tough) but I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Very simple, but plenty of tense decisions.
Hunt for the Ring (7) – Two-part Scotland Yard style hidden movement game structured around getting Frodo to Rivendell. A bit more elegance in some of the mechanics would have been appreciated as balancing all the moving parts feels rather unwieldy at first. Also, at first glance, it seems the shadow player will have their work cut out for them corrupting Frodo. That said, the theme positively hums, the game is a beauty to behold, and the War of the Ring “Frodo is in the wild” ambiguous movement mechanic is a nice twist on the hidden movement genre.
Hurry Cup! (5.5) – This is a much simplified kind of Formula D game, where you race to grab a colored die that will suit you the best, and then all players share a white die roll. As long as your combination of the two rolls doesn’t exceed the posted speed limit, you can move the amount shown on the colored die around the track. Various power ups are scattered around the track, along with a few extra catch-up mechanisms. It’s perfectly playable, but, honestly, the 2d6 roll is so random that the decisions on which colored die to take are rarely that interesting.
Ice Cool (8) – Great flicking game that has one player trying to crash into the other players while they try to flick their players through doorways. Once one player passes through all their doorways, the roles rotate, repeat until each player has chased once. The bottom heavy pieces can create some cool skittering effects when flicked just right, the box within a box (within a…) idea is great, and the theme of penguins stealing fish from Penguin school is quite cute. Factor in the closeout pricing the game currently has and you have a real winner!
Illuminati: Deluxe Edition (4.5) – Every turn was pretty much boils down to “lets see, 10 for that, 4 for that, 3 for that, 2 for that, um, that’s 19 power…um, I have 21 money to spend…OK let’s see how much power you have on the group I’m attacking… 5, 4, 6, …..” And the whole “omg, it’s so funny when the girly magazines and the phone company take over the KKK!” thing really wasn’t that funny. Still with more negotiation and bluffing it might be better. Also, because of all the number crunching that can get messed up even on accident, I don’t recommend EVER playing with the idiotic “cheating is allowed” rule.
Imperial (7.5) – Kind of like 1856 meets Risk which kind of sounds like more work than fun to me. The strategy is pretty deep, so this is really the kind of game that should probably get played a lot by the same people. Just remember, you don’t have to own the best country, just lots of stock in most of the best countries.
Indian Summer (7.5) – Another “play Tetris shapes on a board” game, this one expands upon the very basic Patchwork by include a ton of scoring complexity. It’s definitely a good time, but I’m not sure all the extra scoring hoops make for a better game.
Intrigue (7.5) – This is just as much a psych experiment as a game. Still, good play is rewarded, I can confirm that the “break every deal you make” strategy doesn’t seem to work too well. Fun and nasty!
Iquazu (7) – This is a fairly abstract (despite the production design) game of slowly building up color majorities and deciding between immediate points or long term investments. It works well, but was a little too dry for my tastes.
Jab (8) – This unique real time boxing game involves putting down various cards on your opponent’s body while countering (matching color or type) cards they play on your body. There are a few twists and patterns to look for, but it actually ends up working well and even feeling pretty thematic. Like most games of this type, repeated play would definitely improve the game, and, like most games of this type, I’m not sure I really want to invest the plays needed to get proficient, but I respect the design.
Jaipur (8.5) – Great little two player game where you have to balance taking cards at the right time against trading them in for victory points. Nice push your luck elements as you try to get just one more card to squeak out a few more VPs before your opponent snakes them from you. Beautiful presentation as well.
Java (8.5) – Possibly the best of the Mask Trilogy: not too long, good decisions, opportunity for lots of clever moves–and the board looks really cool when you play. Maybe a touch of downtime/AP like other games in this series, but overall very fun.
Junk Orbit (9) – In this game of delivering space junk, your ship shoots a piece of junk through space a set number of spaces, which pushes your ship in the opposite direction the same number of spaces, allowing you to pick up all the junk on your new space for further shooting fun. The goal is to deliver the junk where it needs to go, either by shooting it to the correct space, or dropping it off where you land. Aside from a few special powers for the ships, that’s really all there was to it, but it made for a very fun game. Lots of good choices, a very intuitive design, and a reasonable play time make this a game worth checking out.
Just One (7.5) – Decent party game where one person gets a random word (that they can’t see), and the rest of the table writes words that are not that word to get them to guess that word. If two people write the same hint word, they have to turn them face down. There’s not much to it (and most of the rounds were pretty easy to guess), but it was still fun enough.
K2 (7.5) – A nicely evocative mountain climbing game where you cycle through a deck of cards hoping to play them in the most efficient order to work your way up a mountain while avoiding the worst weather. Works pretty well, though it’s definitely easy to get screwed over if you mis-play a round or two.
Kahuna (7) – The theme (connecting Pacific islands with bridges) is pasted on, but at least it creates a very visually appealing game. Gameplay itself revolves around abstract connection building, with a neat chain effect of knocking down your opponent’s bridges when you control the majority of the bridges leading to an island. It’s fun enough (despite being pretty dry), though, I seem to have an awfully hard time wrapping my head around a good strategy while playing. Also, I’d definitely recommend playing with the variant rule at the back of the rule book that lets you replace an opponent’s bridge that you have removed with your own (if removing their bridge caused them to lose control of the island) as it keeps the game much more fluid and cutthroat.
Kamasutra (8) – This is just a deck of ADORABLY illustrated Kamasutra sex positions and a pack of balloons. You partner up and try to be the first to pop your balloon between you and your partner’s crotches. It’s a great idea, and obviously hilarious to play, but it’s hamstrung a bit by there being a delicate line on balloon inflation between impossible to pop and instantly popping…if you know what I mean.
Kemet (9) – This seems like a lot as you set up the huge array of technology improvements, cards, plastic armies, and various chits–but there is a fairly straightforward game under all the chrome. The brilliance of the design is evident in how all the moving parts connect so fluidly without feeling fiddly. The tech tree progression is really cool, the battle map never feels needlessly punishing (and rewards aggression–an important part of modern game design). If I had a complaint, it is that the game often feels truncated…the low victory point win condition can have the game over before you know it!
Key Harvest (6.5) – Key series game about getting enough resources to be able to hold the tiles you want on your board and buy up other player’s tiles from theirs. Fun enough, but I’m not sure you have all that much control over what tiles you get (and it can also bog down while you check all the other player’s boards to see what tiles are out, which is usually the sign of amateurish game design).
King of Tokyo (8) – Yahtzee style dice game where you choose between collecting points (to win), energy (to buy cards), or attacking/healing (to win by being last one standing). It’s good, simple, and fast, though the power up cards feel a little random/inconsequential most of the time. I wouldn’t play with too many as player elimination will be annoying, but otherwise, this is a dice rolling staple for a reason.
Kingdomino (9) – This is a very simple game of drafting tiles and placing them in your kingdom so that at least one edge matches a previously placed tile. The two twists are that if you draft (what is usually) the best tile, you will have to pick last for your next draft, and all your tiles have to fit in a 5×5 square with scoring being the number of crowns in a region times the size of the region. That’s really all there is to it, but each simple element integrates seamlessly to create a fantastic game (that looks great too). Highly recommended, especially for the price!
Kingdoms (6.5) – I always thought this Knizia design was a cool game, but in practice it really is awful dry. Still, fun to crunch the numbers for at least a round or two.
Kings on the Corner (5.5) – Simple solitaire card game where players try to play out their hand by putting cards in descending order with alternating colors. There really isn’t any decision making in games like this, but it says something to the inner OCD in all of us that putting chaotic systems into order is so inherently satisfying anyway.
Kingsburg (8) – Cool dice game of assigning your dice in groups to match numbers that give resources/points all while slowly building up your own player board to help your future dice rolls. Nothing that you haven’t seen before, but good production value and a ton of included expansions should keep it hitting the table.
Kissenschlacht (9.5) – This is the king of all catapult games as you try to launch your color of pillows into a central pit (while attempting to knock the other player’s tokens off the bedposts at the same time). The pillows and catapults are just balanced enough to give the launches the perfect level of difficulty, making for a ridiculously fun game.
Knit Wit (8) – This is a sort of Scattergories spinoff, where you are trying to come up with a word described by a series of interlocking spheres of adjectives (like “long,” “cold,” “hard,” etc). The groups of adjectives are created by laying loops of string over empty spools to create a sort of interlocking array of venn diagrams. It’s fairly easy to come up with words no one else has, but quite hard to come up with a word for the spool that has every goddamn string looped around it. Fun enough, though, figuring out which spool is enclosed by which loop is almost more work than fun sometimes.
Konig der Maulwurfel (7.5) – Bizarre game about rolling dice through “mole mouths” or something and trying to maneuver the direction of the dice roll around the table. Silly and fairly random, but still quite fun.
Krosmaster: Arena (10) – Easily my favorite tactical miniature game. Not as simple as the cutesy pieces might suggest, the fun here is all in your team interactions on a simple board with terrain that either blocks movement, or movement and line of sight. Teams are built by selecting four or so units from hundreds of unique units available to choose from, each with a host of special powers that will interact in unique ways. This can, admittedly, become a little bloated in that you have to keep track of two whole teams’ worth of special abilities and potential upgrades to buy. Of course, if you are willing to put in the effort, there is an infinitely replayable game here that is the perfect balance of tactical positioning and combos in a brightly colored chibi-fantasy world. has been my go-to gaming pick for the last 2 years, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. It’s also probably the best looking game I own.
Krosmaster: Blast (8) – Krosmaster: Arena is one of my all time favorites, so this was a bit of a disappointment. Ostensibly, this is a shorter game that is not about wiping out the other team, but rather controlling board elements while trying to avoid getting knocked out. In practice, I have NEVER seen a glyph victory as the smaller boards and high damage output makes the “kill half their team” victory condition the only one that really matters. The game itself is fun, and some of the simplifications from Arena are good ideas, but others (ultra punishing lock rules, much swingier (and more common) critical hits, lack of player engagement with no more opposed rolls, and that stupid stupid Forbidden City board with a central terrain element that is impossible to see over). This is a decent game, but haphazard, unbalanced, and poorly playtested…definitely not an improvement on Krosmaster: Arena, despite Arena’s flaws (overly complicated and unbalanced characters being the primary offenders there).
Krosmaster: Quest (7.5) – In some ways this simplifies the Krosmaster experience (despite turning it into an adventure game and adding a quest path, stock market, crafting, and destructible terrain) as you only have to control one character. Most games are simple affairs of “head out and harvest trees/kill mobs to get stuff to make stuff to kill more mobs,” but it really is satisfying to get stuff to make better stuff, so I think that’s a fine system to base an adventure game on. Some of the mechanics feel a little poorly thought out, evidenced by a rule book that is full of “feel free to play any of these three ways!” verbiage (for the record, each player taking turns controlling the “demon” is the best way to play), and tons of rules ambiguities, especially in the ways the game differs from Krosmaster: Arena. It also feels a bit too short…honestly, if you don’t focus solely on the quest path, you will DEFINITELY lose, and I can’t imagine many scenarios where crafting tons of equipment would ever happen (just like I can’t imagine many games where entering a dungeon would ever be worth it). For my future games I think I would change it to say the first player to finish the quest path triggers the game end, not simply drawing the last card. Despite all that, I had fun, and the game, as always, looks great (despite some seriously warping tiles).
Laser Chess (6) – This looks cool as shit while you play (even though you can’t actually see the laser without a ton of dry ice), but at the end of the day it’s just another abstract that I don’t really feel the urge to devote enough time to to get good at. Also, some of the more complex bounces make it even harder than normal in these types of games to see far enough ahead to stop your opponent’s attacks.
The Legend of the Cherry Tree that Blossoms Every Ten Years (5.5) – This is a simple push your luck game of drawing flowers out of a bag and hoping not to get too many of the same color. There are special cards that give you bonuses for pushing your luck further, and end game is a matter of calculating majorities of flowers shown and flowers hidden behind your screen. I found this a little unintuitive on my first play, with some of the subtleties of the scoring not immediately obvious. Further plays would help with this I’m sure, but nothing about it really grabbed me or made me feel like playing a second time, so I guess I’ll never know.
Legend of Five Rings RPG (3.5) – This was pretty much a complete failure for me. Admittedly, there were probably some rules issues our group didn’t entirely understand but even so this system seemed to just not work from the outcome. As we understood it, you can pick a stance with which to perform each test, leading to the obvious “well, I guess I’m going to do it in a “sneaky” air way since I have 3 dice in that element” reasoning for every roll. Skills also seemed wonky, with skills for stuff like “gaming” but not “perception” (this complaint could be a holdover from D&D thinking). Worst of all, the central Strife mechanic felt very artificial in play, and essentially only ended up forcing you to stop testing for fear of getting more Strife…and any mechanic that encourages you NOT to do “stuff” in an RPG needs to be cut from the system (to say nothing of characters with the right elements getting massively more strife than others, without any obvious attempt to balance it out).
Lexio (Lectio) (10) – Basically the same game as Tichu, except without partners and special cards, and the round ends with the FIRST person to go out, which provides a new set of strategic incentives to play out your hand instead of saving up for later in the game. The Bakelite tiles are a massive improvement over simple cards, but the confusing scoring system of 2 as the highest tile brings it back down a notch.
Liar’s Dice (8.5) – Classic bluffing game of everyone rolling 5 dice secretly, and then going around the table betting on how many of a certain number is under everyone’s cups. Bets can only be raised, either by the number on the dice “six sixes” or the number of dice “seven ones,” and continue being raised until someone calls bullshit. It’s simple, easy to pick up, can be played with hands and a handful of dice, and has a nice amount of hidden and shared knowledge (depending on the player count) to give it some interest. I even recommend it using 4 side dice with 2 players! If it has a flaw, it is that your decisions become less informed the more dice you lose–making it tough to get back in the game.
Linko! (8) – A rather unique drafting/push your luck/set collection game where you are trying to get rid of your hand of cards by playing them in front of you and hoping they make it around the table without anyone overplaying you. Good mechanics (though they take a while to sink in), this one is a worthy addition to your card game collection.
L.L.A.M.A. (7) – Simple game of playing cards in order, trying not to get stuck with a handful when someone goes out. There are some decent choices here between pushing your luck or just folding and eating a few points. Still, I’ve played quite a few games of this and don’t really feel the need to play any more.
Loony Quest (8) – This is a game where players have to draw on a transparency in front of them how they would progress through a picture, then they put their transparency on top of the picture and see how well they did at avoiding obstacles and collecting the items they are looking for. It’s surprisingly hard, and unsurprisingly quite fun as well. I could see it getting a little samey, but it’s definitely worth owning and busting out from time to time!
Loopin’ Louie (7.5) – For what it is (a motorized spinner dexterity game), this is quite fun. My only complaint is how often someone slamming their paddle down too hard will make your chickens fall out. Also, the Loopin’ Chewy 3-player spinoff has a few mechanical issues that make it not quite as good.
Lord of the Rings (8) – Fun cooperative game, though it can sometimes feel like there is a bit too much to explain to newbies–lots of places to “look ahead” to in this one. The group has to be in the right mood to play it, but it’s very well designed and remarkably thematic too.
Lord of the Rings: Journey to Mordor (8) – Another Yahtzee game, this one with a Middle-earth theme where you try to keep rings without rolling too many orcs and Nazgul. It works pretty well (and the advanced side with special abilities for each location helps (both with gameplay and theme). Nothing to distinguish it from the legion of other games like this, but recommended for the theme.
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth (6.5) – The tiles are beautiful (but WAY too samey), the cards and pieces look great, but, unfortunately there isn’t much substance to back it all up. You basically explore a world that is mostly populated by the same three types of enemies and endless variations of encounters with strange rocks “with something glinting underneath them.” That makes it sound worse than it is, the card driven combat is actually pretty fun, and I do still enjoy playing (despite the end game bogging down in a horde of creatures too often for my liking), it just could have been so much more. I mostly wish the story line and tiles would have had some of Mansions of Madness‘ creativity and variation.
Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (10) – While it may seem like there are a lot of situations (especially at the beginning) in this Stratego offshoot where it is essentially a crapshoot to who wins, and sometimes that can decide the rest of the game, this is not actually the case. Nice and short, very strategic, great bluffing element (which I am a big fan of), and the endgame is always interesting–I pretty much always want to play this one!
The Lord of the Rings: The Duel (7) – This is actually pretty cool little tug of war game where you take turns playing cards doing damage in one of four rows that your opponent will attempt to block with the left side of his next card (that also deals the next set of damage on the card’s right side). There are a few special powers, and each round you set 3 cards aside for the fourth and final round giving a nice “drawback now for benefit later” bit of strategy to the game. The biggest flaw here is that it all feels like it’s on rails…if someone attacks you on all four rows, typically you will want to defend with all four rows, which can at times make it feel like the game is playing itself.
The Lord of the Rings: The Search (4) – A game where Frodo and Sam race each other across a randomly generated map of “Middle-earth” collecting treasures and trying to be the first to reach the randomly generated location of Mount Doom (bring a ring of power with them provides an insignificant amount of points and is not a factor in the strategic decision-making). Jokes about the dire implementation of theme aside, there really isn’t much of a game here. It all works well enough, but it mostly boils down to a plodding sequence of place tile, move pawn, collect points, repeat–with rare situations cropping up where clever movement or strategic play will be rewarded.
Lord of the Rings Trivia Game (8.5) – Excellent trivia game that is built around an actual hand management/push your luck mechanism that is even kind of fun by itself. Be warned, the questions are pretty damn hard, so you may have trouble finding willing players.
Lost Cities (8) – Classic 2 player push your luck design that entirely hinges around the decision to commit to a color, or wait till you get better cards before committing. Exquisitely designed, this makes that one simple choice an agonizing decision each and every turn (and you will ALWAYS draw that 7 right after you play your 8)! I prefer Battle Line, but this is pretty damn good too.
Lowenherz (7.5) – Great area control game where setting up your duchy correctly from the beginning can be very crucial. Also, careful getting into the lead as the other players can drag you back pretty easily (which keeps things nice and competitive until the end).
Machi Koro (6.5) – This game takes the basic Catan mechanic of getting resources depending what you roll on a dice each turn and then adding on a clever twist of “leveling up” to rolling two dice at a point of your choosing. This lets you get the better powers at higher numbers but also has the side effect of making your lower number (1-6) powers not as useful. It’s a very elegant and reasonably fun mechanism, but it will quickly wear out its welcome as you are still just taking a one in six shot of getting money every turn. The only benefit of all the randomness is that it will slightly slow down the game’s real runaway leader problem.
Mad Scientist University (6) – Decent party game where players compete to give the best description of how they will do mad scientist stuff based on cards that get turned up. Not much of a game, but it can be fun to try to be quick on your toes. Too often devolves into people rambling about something they have worked out in their head that everyone else loses track of and doesn’t care about.
Mage Wars: Academy (8.5) – Mage Wars is basically Magic, except you have access to your whole deck at once, and must use your turn’s allotment of mana points to pick the perfect spell to counter your opponent’s plays on the previous turn. Mage Wars: Academy removes the “Arena” board, and I must admit that it ends up being a huge improvement over Mage Wars: Arena. The original would often bog down in a giant overcrowded pile-up in one square on the board, so this just abstracts all movement and range in the service of making a more streamlined, playable experience. It also plays much faster now, which is a huge plus. Some tactical crunch is lost, but not enough for me to really feel like going back to full Mage Wars.
Mage Wars: Arena (8) – Mage Wars on paper seems like such a cool game. Basically playing Magic with access to your whole deck (in a super cool “spell book”), and the ability to move around a board with your creatures and mage. In play however, it too often will bog down in a giant mass of creatures in the middle, all guarding/trying to break through the deadlock to do that final damage to your Mage. I haven’t played enough to know if this is just due to poor play or a flaw in the game, but even with this problem (and the general overlength), it’s still a pretty fucking cool game.
Magic Maze (8) – Very clever real-time maze-race where each player can only move the four pawns on the board in one of the four cardinal directions (along with a couple of special powers). Thus, all players have to work together to maneuver the pawns through the maze to various checkpoints before the sand timer runs out. The timer adds just enough tension that you will find a calm, ordered analysis of the evolving board state can be very tricky to achieve without the other players glaring at you until you move the yellow pawn north for them (the twist to the game is that no communication is allowed). Very fun, though this is a disaster when playing with players of differing skill levels.
Magic the Gathering (8.5) – Bloated, over complex, and overwhelming to jump into, but still a whole hell of a lot of fun. Most importantly there need to be an “agreement” between players to make decks that are of comparable power levels. The complete lack of balance in casual play is exactly what got me to move on to board games.
Mama Mia (7.5) – Clever game of taking turns putting pizza toppings in a pile and then trying to remember what toppings are in the pile in order to score your “pizza” cards at the right time. It can feel pretty chaotic if you don’t pay attention, but the core mechanism at play here is very solid.
Mancala (6) – The basic action of picking up a pile of seeds and then systematically sowing them counter clockwise around the board is quite satisfying, and, on a deep level, just fundamentally works as a game concept. However, as piles get larger and you have to count out the seeds to see where they will end up, the clunkiness of the system begins to show itself. The game works, and there are definitely opportunities for clever play (which also necessitates playing against a skilled opponent), but the difficulty of instantly evaluating the board state due to the many piles of uncounted seeds is a serious debit here.
Marvel Champions: The Card Game (5.5) – I assume we got a few rules wrong on this one, but as it was, it seemed like you just need to plop down a few heavy hitters and then ignore everything else while you attack the villain over and over again until he runs out of health. There might be a good game in here…but after stumbling through it one time, I had no desire to try again.
Marvel Heroes (6) – The comic theme is cool (even if the production value doesn’t look all that impressive), but the gameplay is lacking. The rules are fairly fiddly, and the decisions were too much work for far too little effect on gameplay.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Friendship Connection (2) – There would have been some amusement in the “guess which answer I think best fits me” questions, unfortunately all the choices seem to have been written by teenybopper narcissistic sociopaths. Otherwise, this is a thoroughly amateurish affair, both in concept and execution.
Master Fox (6.5) – This is a cute game of blindfolded players feeling around in a box for specific animals. This is fun and good for kids, though, for adults, the animals are pretty damn easy to find, making wrong grabs rare.
Mastermind (7) – Not a bad “game,” as it’s kind of fun to slowly narrow in on the combination of colors your opponent has hidden from you. Still, there’s not much to it, and a few lucky (or unlucky) guesses can wildly swing things.
Mechs VS Minions (10) – This game came out of nowhere as the League of Legends company’s first board game, and against all odds turned out to be nearly perfect. It’s a cooperative Roborally, with RIDICULOUS production value (that is also RIDICULOUSLY cheap for everything you get), and an awesome series of missions. It really perfectly captures the feeling of careening around a battlefield mowing down scores of minions with an evolving arsenal of cool weapons. After Krosmaster, my favorite game of the last two years.
Medici (7.5) – Knizia classic game of bidding on like, spices and shit, this is still an impressive design. The twist here is that you pick the amount of cards to put up for auction, with each player needing different items, and thus creating different considerations for each auction. It all works brilliantly of course, but it IS rather dry. Also, I never seem to find myself jumping in at the right moment in games like this.
Memoir ’44 (9) – This early Command and Colours game is still maybe the best version of the system. The emphasis on range helps keep things from bogging down in melee slugfests while the system is nice and lean (chromey magic/etc. rules are not missed). I don’t know that it actually feels like a WAR game (WWII or otherwise) to me, but it’s definitely fun!
Metro (8) – Tile laying game where each player tries to create the longest twisty turny subway tracks for their trains. The decisions are reasonably interesting (if a little random), and building the cool map is undeniably fun.
Middle-earth Quest (8.5) – Great adventure game set in Middle-earth between the times of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with generic hero characters travelling around and attempting to foil Sauron’s various between-books plots and machinations. There is a great adventure game here, with innovative movement/combat, lots of encounter cards, and a fun (though punishing if you make a misplay) Sauron player side for one player to take. Normally, all of this would rate the game a ten, but, unfortunately, the game seems to usually end in a tie, and the tie-breaker is a totally crap-shoot final battle that just feels deflating after investing a couple hours in something that basically ended up boiling down to a few quick rounds of cardplay.
The Mind (8) – Very unique game where players all attempt to play their small hands of cards (from a large deck numbered 1-100) in order from lowest to smallest…WITHOUT talking. It’s definitely a cool concept, and mostly works very well, the only issues being when someone has a 32 and someone else has a 33, then it’s basically a crap shoot.
Minuscule (7) – Passable line manipulation game that uses cards to move bugs up or down a line, the closer to first your two secret bugs get, the better! It looks nice and is reasonably fun, but there is precious little control over the line as you are pretty limited by the small hand of cards you have for line manipulation. The advanced variant is better, but still fairly random.
Mississippi Queen (8.5) – Another older game that holds up very well, this is a Powerboats style steamship race (with periodic stops to pick up the required passengers) that will inevitably have someone miscalculating and full on crashing into an island at some point. There are probably better options out there (Powerboats for one), but this is still absolutely worth playing!
Mölkky (9) – Fantastic yard game where you toss a wooden cylinder into a stack of numbered cylinders (resetting them where they land after each toss). The twist is that you get points for the total number of cylinders you knock down, OR, if you only knock down a single cylinder, you get the number printed on the cylinder (from 1-12). The other twist is that your team needs to get EXACTLY 50 points, going over loses you 25 points. All of which makes a nice trade-off between aiming for the single block you need, or trying to hit groups of blocks.
Monastery (6) – I didn’t hate it, but I’m not sure if my (small) desire to play again is just because I somehow kept missing very obvious bits of key game strategy. There were a lot of unique elements that I actually liked, but I felt like luck of the tile draw and the importance of going first (and relative difficulty in setting that up) could really screw people over.
Monikers (8) – Based on the public domain game Celebrity, this is actually a quite good combination of memory, charades, and coming up with the perfect single word to describe a famous person. The mechanic of continually cycling through a set of the same cards, first describing the people in full sentences, then a single word, and then just with charades to get your teammates to guess who you are is a very elegant way to incorporate memory elements into a more traditional party game.
Mountains of Madness (6) – The game looks great, and is definitely a fun, immersive experience (at least for a while), but there just really isn’t a fun GAME under all the bells and whistles. Basically, you are just as a group trying to decide which cards each person should contribute from their hands of cards to satisfy the color requirements of each challenge, hampered by a bunch of speaking restrictions each person has. So, while it’s funny to have to stroke someone’s cheek while you say “I have a green 6,” it’s not really all that fun to just do variations on that the whole game.
Mr. Jack (8) – This game of “find the serial killer” uses a clever mechanic of hidden vs seen to enable one player to slowly whittle down a list of suspects in order to catch the other player (by trying to keep the seen/unseen number as even as possible). I like it, though it sure seems awfully difficult for Mr. Jack to win (despite my 7 year old semi routinely beating me with Mr. Jack…but he just got lucky).
Mykerinos (6.5) – The simple “add a piece anywhere, or add two next to your own” mechanic is very elegant in an area control game like this. Some tough decisions, but not exactly all that compelling or unique.
Mystic Vale (9) – This clever variation on deck building fixes the deck size at 20 cards, and instead lets you upgrade the cards themselves with see-through upgrades you can sleeve into the base card. The artwork is amazing, and it’s a very fun concept even if it is absolutely multiplayer solitaire. Also, some of the cards are definitely a bit better than others leading to runaway leaders in most games.
Nacht der Magier (5) – Pretty much just a gimmick. Though, playing with glow in the dark pieces in the dark is a pretty good gimmick.
Napoleon’s Triumph (9) – Though the fluid and maneuverable gameplay of Bonaparte at Marengo is missed, I think I like this system even better. The big bloody battles are less abstract, the presentation is even prettier (which is high praise), and there is nice variation from game to game.
Necromunda: Underhive (10) – This uses a basic Warhammer framework (measure movement, roll to hit, then roll to wound/possibly kill) to enact skirmish level gang battles on ruined industrial “hive worlds,” and really nails it. This is a crunchy game for sure, you can outfit your gang with just about any weapon you can think of, each with a host of special rules. The base game is very fun in its own right, but when you play a campaign the system really sings with even more special rules for everything from captured gang members to interim chaos rituals gone wrong. It’s a bit of work, but far from the most complex thing out there, and it’s all very very worth it for the narrative it builds (and the simple tactical joys of throwing a grenade in just the right spot).
Neuroshima Hex 3.0 (9.5) – This is a fantastic asymmetrical (all the teams are wildly different and yet still appear to be quite balanced) tactical combat game that is all about positioning your pieces to be in the best place when the period battles get started. If you draw a battle tile and don’t quite like the looks of the board, you can choose not to fight, and keep trying to sway the board state in your favor instead. Add in the clever initiative system (some pieces will act before others in battle, thus removing the biggest threats before they can act), and plenty of maneuver opportunities and you have a brilliant, quick playing tactical combat game that will play out differently every time.
The Newlywed Game (5.5) – A modern version of this could actually be pretty good…and the 1967 version (which was REALLY obsessed with the husband cheating with “blonds”) was definitely good for a few laughs. The game itself ran far too long, and had too many dud questions to really be worth playing for more than the novelty value. Still fun to chant “fight fight fight” at the couples arguing over the answers to some of these.
Nexus Ops (9) – Fast paced and fun Risk variant that makes the important change of rewarding attacking and ending the turtling problem forever. It is awfully swingy though with tons of random variables that add up to make things even more random. Still, I can’t deny it is fun to play and good strategy has a decent impact on the game too.
Nine Tiles: Panic (9) – This is a really solid little game where you frantically flip over your nine tiles (with 18 unique total sides) to make a little 3×3 city that hopefully maximizes score based on the randomized objective cards drawn at the beginning of the round. Surprisingly hard to try to get the most dogs while also having the least roads and the most captured aliens. The only downside is that finishing first is a huge advantage (ties are pretty common on some score cards), and, at least in our games, everyone seemed to finish at roughly the same time–which made the scores pretty swingy.
No Thanks! (7.5) – Very simple game where, on your turn, you either take the top card (garnering points–which you don’t want) or place one of your chips on the card to pass the choice on to the next player. As the player’s money totals change and the cards become more or less valuable (if you get a straight only the lowest card is scored against you) decisions on whether to bid or not become quite interesting. However, for a supposed “entry level” game, a few of the more gamey strategies (pass on cards you want in order to force others to fill it with chips before you take it) are probably not immediately obvious to new gamers.
Nut so Fast (9) – This is a surprisingly great speed grabbing game, where players take turns flipping cards up looking for groups of four and then grabbing the corresponding nut before anyone else. Periodic silly gesture cards come up (that are surprisingly hard to remember in the heat of the moment) to keep things interesting. This has all been done before, but for some reason this one came off as an especially good version of this kind of game.
Nuttsy Tennis (8) – This old game with trigger paddles and a wire mounted tennis ball actually works very well as a fun 2-player diversion. It’s surprisingly tricky to get a good volley going, but not so much that you can’t get a few good back and forths going before someone fucks up. Definitely worth picking up if you come across this at a Goodwill.
Odin’s Ravens (9) – Brilliant classic two-player racing game with lovely art. Light but lots of strategic opportunities and all the mechanisms really work well together–you never seem to get screwed for too long.
The Omega Virus (5) – Not much of a game, you basically just run around a map and hope to have the computer randomly give you the components needed to win. I can see how it would be super cool for an 90s kid…as an adult in 2020 without any nostalgia there just wasn’t much to recommend it.
On Tour (9) – Very clever roll and write game where you slowly fill your map with numbers from 1 to 100 (rolled on 2d10). The goal is to be able to connect the most sequential numbers (good theme implementation with the tour planning idea). There are a few little twists with regions and wild rolls, but nothing that detracts from the welcome simplicity of the game. Definitely recommended!
Once Upon a Time: The Storytelling Card Game (9) – Not much of a game, but a very good storytelling exercise where you make up a fairy tale while playing a card from your hand whenever you can work one of your cards into your story. You absolutely can’t play too competitively, but with the right people this is pretty fun trying to come up with cool stories that “work” and throw monkey wrenches in other people’s stories to see how they get out of it. With the wrong people, however, you end up having a bunch of people stammering around then being like “um, can someone please steal and take over telling this story?”
One Night Ultimate Werewolf (10) – This takes everything bad about Werewolf (no information in the early nights, player elimination) and gets rid of it by massively upping the information available and restricting the action to a single round of “discussion.” Plenty of opportunities for roles to switch means it is rarely a sure thing who is who–I really don’t see much reason to ever play regular Werewolf when this is an option.
Operation (6) – For a one-gimmick game (can you remove a small item with tweezers without touching the edges of the hole it is in), this is actually reasonably fun. It helps that it is short, and can be played with mixture of ages and still stays challenging for all involved (as long as adults go for the “hard ones.”
Orcs Orcs Orcs (7.5) – This lazily named game combines light deck building with tower defense as you maneuver wizards around a tower while they attack a swarming horde of orcs. It feels a little uninspired, but works quite well, and is actually pretty fun (if, perhaps, 30 minutes too long).
Outdoor Survival (6) – Difficult to rate this one as it really is a pretty shitty game. You basically have to get to an outside edge of the map to win, but each turn you will most likely just move in a random direction (and then take ridiculously punishing losses for lack of water and food). That said, this one has become a tradition in my group (and even inspired the name of our yearly game “convention”), and there is a special kind of dumb fun to be had watching your hiker wander around in circles dying a slow death by dehydration.
Pack & Stack (9) – Brilliant game of spatial organization where each player is given a random number of differently sized boxes, then a bunch of truck tiles are flipped up and you have to race to snatch the truck that will best fit your “boxes.” You can not stack your boxes past the edge of your truck’s shape, or higher than its height limit. That’s basically it, but it is very fun to try to identify, on the fly, exactly the best truck for your random assortment of boxes. Once you have them, stacking them up rarely takes much brainpower, but this is a game that is all about making instant size assessments (usually to disastrous results if your assessment is off).
Pairs (8) – Super fast (5 minutes) game of trying not to get two of the same card from a deck with 10 tens, 9 nines, 8 eights, etc. Every turn you have to take a card, wipe your tableaux and take the lowest card at the table (the goal is to have the least points). You can teach it in seconds, and play it anywhere (with large groups too), and, considering the price, this makes it an auto include in most game collections.
Paku Paku (4.5) – The little plates are really cute, and there is a decent dexterity challenge in stacking them up without knocking them over. Sadly, the rest of the game is that genre of “roll dice over and over as fast as you can, which I never found very fun. The randomness of the scoring also makes this one WAY overstay its welcome.
Palazzo (6.5) – Fairly dry auction game where you try to build up enough cards to snag the perfect set of auction tiles to build multi level point scoring houses. If you lose a few auctions you’ll have more money for later auctions which was nice at least, but nothing in this one really made me super excited to play again.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (7) – The Legacy mechanic of slowly (and permanently) changing the game board and cards from game to game IS very cool and fun (seriously, actually ripping a card in half is exhilarating), but, and I’m not quite halfway through, I don’t know that the increase in complexity will be sustainable in this game. Base Pandemic is fun, the changes so far have been novel, but at some point the game will become way too bogged down in chrome. I feel like that point is getting close, and doubt I’ll finish the campaign, but what I’ve played so far HAS been enjoyable.
Pantone (8) – Very clever game where you choose small, colored rectangular cards and try to use them to get people to guess what they are (for example, if you drew a card that said “Oscar the Grouch, you might use a grey rectangle, with a green rectangle behind it sticking up, and then a sliver of another grey rectangle sticking up behind that). Lots of opportunities for clever pictures are here, and most of the things you have to guess are at least possible (though “painting” with rectangles is trickier than you’d expect). It is also surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) quite hard.
Parade (7) – This is a simple card game works quite well (though I had a hard time wrapping my head around the best strategy) as you try to minimize the number of colors you take (or, at least the numbers in each color) before the game end. The fantastic Alice in Wonderland art helps a lot too.
Pass the Pigs (4.5) – Completely random, on my last play a BABY beat everyone by a LOT. That said…it’s not entirely unfun, I still need to play a few times to see if I can finally get a jowler (of course the baby got one).
Patchwork (9) – Excellent two player game of Tetris-ing different shaped quilt pieces into your square “quilt” board. There is nice tension between picking up large pieces vs picking up smaller pieces with more buttons (income for future rounds). All in all, quite polished and, most importantly, fun.
Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Skull and Shackles (7) – There is a lot to like here, from the sense of actually developing a character and their associated deck of cards, to the location decks for you to explore, but unfortunately the worst rulebook of all time makes a lot of it very frustrating to play. And, I have a feeling repeated plays won’t reveal a lot of game under all the cool cards and rule ambiguities.
Perikles (7) – All the parts seemed to work well together (take turns adding influence in regions, then whoever has the most influence in that region gets control of that region’s armies, then you take your armies and fight over victory point chips). At times it felt a little dry, and I’m not sure how much I liked the combat–even with a superior force, I didn’t feel confident I would win…which maybe was the point.
Photosynthesis (9) – Due to the beautiful trees and the cool sun the moves around the board, this abstract feels anything but as you try to maximize your tree growth (while avoiding the dreaded shadows cast by taller trees). There can be a lot of analysis paralysis as you attempt to look ahead, but nothing too crazy in this cool little puzzle game that feels as unique as it looks.
Pick Picknic (8) – Nice simple bluffing game where you are trying to be the first fowl to eat the feed from various farms. A lot of fun, though the bluffing aspect is undercut by the limited hand of cards that will half the time make it impossible for you to even try for the food from the “good” farm.
Pictionary (6) – Honestly, not a bad game, though with even basic artistic skill, it is usually pretty trivially easy to get someone to guess your picture (or, the phrase is obscure enough it would be hard even with a master artist). Fun enough, but the game mechanics are missing the opportunity for cleverness/drawing stupid shit.
Pikoko (7.5) – Just a normal trick taking game with the twist that you are only able to play your neighbors cards (each player’s own cards face away from them making them unable to see their own hand), and you are betting on how many tricks each player will win. This creates some very interesting decisions for gamers, especially in guessing how others might bet/choose to play out their neighbor’s hands (either poorly on purpose, or to maximize tricks). Not one you want to play with new gamers, but for those looking for something new in the massively overcrowded trick taking genre, this one might just fit the bill!
Pink Godzilla Dev Kit (5.5) – Decent set collection game, though it all feels fairly half-baked. I’m really not sure how much of it is just “wait for the card you need come out.”
Pirate’s Cove (6) – This one really didn’t age very well as it quickly becomes apparent that the person who most successfully avoids combat will win. Which isn’t to say there are not good things going on here–it is all very thematic, it looks amazing, and the individual choices are fun–but at its heart this is just a simple bluffing game where the losers of the bluff get punished by having their ship smashed to shit.
Planet (9) – Very cool drafting game where you select tiles to put on your planet trying to get the right terrain bordering other terrain in order to attract animals. All animals to attract on future turns are visible, so you can either go for the short term ones, or try to plan ahead for late game points. It is very simple, but the choices are great, and the magnetic tiles on a big 3D globe look amazing. Obviously rated lower if it were just played on a board, but it’s not, so definitely check it out!
Pokemon Trading Card Game (6) – As a game overall, this is definitely playable, though can be kind of hard to get out of the Magic mindset when trying to evaluate card power (card draw, in Pokemon, is apparently (I have my doubts) nowhere near as broken as it is in Magic). My biggest complaints are about the OBVIOUS power level concerns–the first person to get out an uber Pokemon will usually win by one-shotting everything the opponent has until they get a big guy out. Also, the game end condition (take out 6 of their attackers) can really make the games drag on far too long.
The Potion (6.5) – Simple blind bidding game where all players see a certain amount of potion ingredients and everyone puts an ingredient in their hand. If the players match the potion ingredients exactly, everyone that helped gets to get rid of an ingredient…if they didn’t, everyone that contributed the wrong ingredient gets to get rid of an ingredient. Because you are racing to empty your hand (and because the game is fairly random), it gets a little gamey towards the end where you basically just put the ingredient you most need gone out and hope you get lucky. Extra point for the cool pill bottle box though.
Pow Wow (9) – Everyone draws a face down feather, places it face out where they can’t see it, then take turns going around the table guessing the total of all feathers until someone calls bullshit when they think the total is too high. Simple concept, but very fun, especially when everyone trolls the person who doesn’t realize they have a -20. It’s just too bad the whole cultural appropriation thing has NOT made the theme of this old German game age well…
Power Grid (8) – Very balanced, polished and fun game of buying power plants to power cities to get money to buy better power plants to power more cities. Can seem like an accounting exercise at times as you add up the money you need, but I always have a good time.
Powerboats (7.5) – Speedboat racing game where you add or remove one dice per turn to control your speed around a variable board (basically you want to make sure you are able to slow down for the turns). The full three lap race can be over-long and there might not be as many decisions as there at first seems to be beyond gambling on how many dice to use. Still, it nails the theme, specifically in capturing the frenetic feel of racing powerboats around tight corners.
Powerships (7.5) – Some of the special hexes are pretty cool and give some nice variability over the vanilla Powerboats boat-racing game. This board feels a bit more open, possibly giving more options as well (and the damage track is an improvement). However, the theme is a big fail and would make me play Powerboats over this anytime for the simple fact that…space isn’t fucking 2d.
Prophecy (7) – A decent game, with plenty of cool quest options and “build up your character” options in between the abstracted board spaces. Unfortunately, like most of these adventure games, this is just WAY too long (even in the short game), and suffers from the same “if you don’t beat the super hard final challenge, your character will be majorly set back” issues as the rest.
Puerto Rico (8.5) – There is still a very nice game engine here (though the opening tableau of buildings can be a bit overwhelming for newbies) even if it is just another “victory point machine” game. I’ve played this quite a lot and it still feels reasonably fresh when I come back to it, so that has to count for something.
Push (7) – There is a good push your luck mechanic at play here (you keep drawing cards and putting them in 3 piles, but if you have to put the same number or color in a pile, you bust), but the game as a whole felt a little unfinished for lack of a better word. Banking cards especially seemed to not quite work (or, at least, be worth it) in games with a large number of players–on the other hand, I only played it once, so maybe that’s just sour grapes from me banking cards when I shouldn’t have.
Push a Monster (7.5) – This is just a “kids game,” but a fun one at that. This is basically one of those arcade games where quarters keep getting pushed onto a table until they fall off the edges. It has a nice short play time, and, most importantly, the gimmick doesn’t wear out too quickly.
Puzzle Strike (8) – The graphic design is kind of amateurish, but the game-play in this Dominion clone is actually kind of cool. Instead of cards you have chips (you draw from a bag), and this adds the end condition of melding gems to “crash” into your opponents that actually works pretty well.
Pyramid of Pengqueen (8) – This re-theme of the classic Fluch der Mumie pretty much keeps everything the same as one player moves a mummy around a magnetic board attempting to find the other players before they collect enough treasures to win. It feels like their scaling is way off (certain player counts look massively easier for the mummy to win), but the gameplay itself is still quite fun.
Quarriors (8) – I can see why people dislike this game–like other sub-par deck (dice) building games, it does suffer a bit from “buy the most expensive thing you can each turn and you’ll probably win.” However, the dice instead of cards innovation, combined with the cute theme and fun powers make it fairly irresistible anyway. Also, the advanced rules of 2 buys per turn, and forced culling of any creature you score with are far superior and do wonders to prevent runaway leaders.
The Quest for El Dorado (10) – Knizia takes on a deckbuilder and absolutely nails it. In this case, player’s decks are used for movement through a South American maze of jungles, villages and rivers, and the trade off of moving slowly to build up your deck, or barreling ahead to try to get to the end on limited resources is as perfectly balanced as you would guess. There is something just plain fun about progressing through the colorful board, and the simple card choices actually help keep the game moving and focused on mechanics over rules. I’d play this over Clank! any day!
Quo Vadis (8.5) – Very nice to have a good pure negotiation game with such a short playing time. Starts off pretty laid back and ends up pretty cutthroat as the endgame looms.
Qwirkle (8) – For an abstract game, this is pretty great, especially when you take into consideration the fact that there is not a lot of room for clever tactical play beyond seeing what your best move is each turn. Still, every game of this feels fresh and fun, and I’m always happy to play!
Ra (9) – Very elegant (except for all the scoring options which can feel a little burdensome to explain to newbies) Knizia auction masterpiece that revolves around the concept that a shitty number to bid can be very powerful if you call the auction at the right time. It might be a bit dry, but there is something just fun about collecting sets of tiles too.
Railways of the World (8) – Cool plastic pieces, and a lot of fun route building gameplay make this a winner. Some of the cards seem a little overpowered, and there could be a bit of a runaway leader problem, but overall I’m always happy to play this one.
Red Dragon Inn (6) – I’m not a big “take that” fan, but at least the cards are cute and hand management is somewhat important. This also seems like it would work very well as a real drinking game (and playing with real money for that matter).
Reef Encounter (7.5) – Fairly computationally heavy game about growing your own coral reefs and consuming your neighbors’ coral. Tough to get a handle on the strategy at first, (there is a good amount of brain-burning planning behind it all) but if you are up for it this game is very well-designed.
Rent a Hero (6.5) – This is a pretty simple game, but I still found it a little hard to grasp the overall flow at first. Basically you are trying to collect an almost complete set of cards by passing them around the table face down. If you take a card that you already have you lose them both, otherwise you keep it and have access to its power once in the game. Fun enough once it got going, but I didn’t have much desire to play again.
Rhino Hero (8) – Very cute game of building a tower that a little wooden rhino slowly climbs (and unbalances). Adults might want to add a few cards to their hands for this card-stacking tower-building game as it can be fairly easy to empty your hand when playing with seasoned stackers.
Rhino Hero: Super Battle (9) – This super sizes all the cards from the original game, and makes for a cool multi level tower building game that looks fantastic in play. the climbing dice can make for a swingy win condition, but everything else was super fun here!
Riff Raff (8) – Great stacking game of putting wooden pieces onto a ridiculously wobbly ship. There is some bidding for turn order to mix things up, but otherwise this is just your basic stacking dexterity game, with the added bonus of having a really cool ship to put everything onto. The only drawback I can think of is that it’s really fucking hard, but that might just be because I really suck at this one.
Risky Adventure (5) – Below average dice rolling game that tries to throw too many bells and whistle at what is essentially a simple push your luck dice game. Some of the choices are fairly obvious when you need certain cards, and the dice don’t offer enough rerolling variety to really feel like you have much of an effect on their outcome. Overall probably best to avoid this one, nice presentation aside.
Rivers, Roads, & Rails (3) – The only reason to play this is the beautiful artwork, everything else in this “game” is pretty horrible. You basically just play tiles where you can, until you can’t, and then you wait to draw one you can play again. Repeat until one player finally runs out of tiles (and there are many to go through). Also, no table on earth is big enough to hold the final game unless there is major player cooperation to turn it away from the table edges at every chance.
Rivet Wars: Eastern Front (7) – The cute little peg like army men are adorable, and this looks fantastic all set up on the table, but the game suffers a bit from an attrition win condition where you have to send a continuous stream of guys to the front lines until one person wipes out enough to overwhelm the unluckier player. Still good fun to be had, but I’m not sure the perfect balance of map size and units (all of whom have a paper rock scissors effect against each other) to create the best scenario without it becoming a slow attritional slog until one side rolls enough 5s and 6s to win.
Roads and Boats (7.5) – This was pretty cool–though it has the major downside of having to move around a ton of little bits each turn. This gets so bad that by the later turns it’s easy to forget what you’ve moved, what you’ve produced and what you were going to do which ends up making it all seem like it would be best as a computer game.
Robber Knights (7) – Basic abstract game of sending pieces out across a map, trying to end up with your color on top of any point scoring towns/villages/castles. Fun enough to build a map and try to protect your high point scoring tiles, but it’s still awfully dry.
RoboRally (10) – Granddaddy of all programming games, and still one of the best, this is a fantastic race game where you pre-program 5 actions for your robot (move forward/rotate/back up/uturn/etc) and then watch the chaos unfold as all the other player robots try to move into each other’s spaces and people get push/pulled in unforseen directions (onto conveyor belts/pushers/lasers/etc scattered about the board). 95% of the people I have played this with hate it, but for my money, there are few better game experiences than 8 players all trying to second guess each other while secretly programming 5 moves they really hope don’t go south at the first flip of the cards. Turns are even simultaneous, making this one of the few games that can play up to 8 players with zero downtime!
Roma (7.5) – The dice rolling makes things feel a bit random, but not too much in this fun card game set in Rome. Most importantly, the playing dice to activate cards gameplay is just plain fun, and keeps you wanting to come back to this one. I do recommend taking out the card that turns money into points if you want to avoid a quick broken win for the person that plays it.
Rumis (7) – When I first saw this game, I was hoping it would be a little more puzzley than it is. Placement is still key as you try to get as much of your color showing as possible by the end of the game. In practice, the early rounds don’t matter a whole lot as long as you make sure to keep a few routes open for final round placement. A fun tactile game, but never seems as interesting as I think it will be.
Runebound – 2nd Edition (6) – This does a lot of cool stuff, but at the end of the day it’s just way too fucking long. To make matters worse, the final battle is so punishing that if you try and fail, it can be difficult to remain in the game…and if all players try and fail, they usually just want to give up and stop playing rather than build up and try again. Again, there are some nice thematic things at play here (though most encounters end up getting skimmed over to say “ok, forget the flavor, what do I have to roll?” in order to cut down on time), but I don’t see myself getting too excited to play again without a ton of house rules.
RYU (5) – This game of grabbing cubes and using the to complete your dragon board was a major miss as I basically spent the whole game running between two tiles slowly building up enough cubes to win. I’m sure there is probably a bit more to it than that, but as it was, I didn’t see anything here that made me want to play again to find out.
Saboteur: The Duel (8) – This actually captures the feel of playing Saboteur quite well for a two player game (impressive considering how specific to large groups the original is). Everything works quite well in the two player version, from the acts of sabotage, to the construction of your tunnels–honestly, this probably better captures the feel of frantically digging for treasure while watching out for acts of sabotage than the original did!
San Juan (7.5) – Fun and fast paced game that puts the “cards in hand are also resources” mechanic to great use, but I feel like Race for the Galaxy is probably the better game. On the other hand San Juan is the simpler, cleaner design.
San Marco (8.5) – Very cool three player game that really should get more attention. More games should use the “you split I choose” mechanic, it always produces tense decisions!
Santa’s Bag (5.5) – In this Christmas-themed set collection game you slowly fill your hand full of cards that you turn in to collect pairs of kids and toys. It’s unassuming enough, but incentives to trade are usually fairly low, so you just kind of end up hoping to top-deck the cards you need for most of the game, which does not make for a very compelling experience.
Santorini (8) – Abstracts just kind of leave me shrugging usually, but the ridiculous production value (and the host of special powers) in this one keeps my attention. The basic game is pretty cool though it can feel a little attrition-heavy as you slug it out to set up the proper board position.
Scarab Lords (7.5) – This is an early version of the Blue Moon design, and it definitely could be cleaned up a bit. Still great fun, but it’s kind of obsolete due to Blue Moon being out there.
Schotten Totten (Battleline) (10) – One of the all-time great two player games, this plays very similarly to Lost Cities, but with a good deal more strategic depth. The Schotten Totten version looks MUCH nicer (than Battleline), with the only functional difference being that the cards go from 1-9 in Schotten Totten instead of 1-10 (it doesn’t seem to affect gameplay). Improved layout aside, it’s the “just one more card before I commit” hand management game play that keeps you coming back for more time and again.
Scrabble (6.5) – Really one of the better word games, hamstrung only by downtime that can range from annoying to ridiculous. And knowing all the two letter words and what is allowed can be a big advantage.
Scrutineyes (6) – Novel combination of Scattergories and hidden picture puzzles. The pictures are very detailed (if a little heavy on bird species), so it should be good for a couple plays before it starts to feel samey. Also, games that use the “Scattergories mechanic” of writing down everything you see and comparing with other players always feel like a slog as you spend most of the game frantically writing instead of doing actual fun stuff.
Scythe (8) – Beautiful presentation and artwork (though the board could have been toned down a bit), and more fucking ways to score victory points than you’ll know what to do with, this actually plays pretty smoothly once you get your head around the rules. Don’t let all the plastic fool you, this isn’t really much of a war game as it can be impossible to stop your opponent from attacking (or doing whatever they need to do) if they set it up right. I have to admit I had fun, but I’m not sure the amount of effort involved here is entirely worth it.
Seasons (9) – Cool game of rolling chunky dice to collect resources that will become worth more and less as you circle a season board. Add on a bunch of special power cards and there ends up being a lot of room for cool combos. Almost a few too many moving parts, but once you get playing it moves along very smoothly.
Settlers of Catan (6) – The game that got me into hobby gaming still mostly holds up. That said, I just don’t really find the “hope for good dice rolls to get enough stuff to build what I want” core mechanic to be all that fun anymore despite the design overall being quite elegant for its age.
Settlers of Catan: The Card Game (7) – Two-player card based version of Catan that is actually an improvement in the way the extra buildings give a little bit of variety to the original game’s “am I going to roll brick in time to build this last road” gameplay. It feels a bit overlong and clunky, but there is still fun to be had here.
Shadows: Amsterdam (9) – Very cool Dixit-style race game where one person on the team lays down a card (or set of cards) and the other person has to figure out which hex those cards were meant to get them to move to. Definitely challenging, but also an excellent implementation of the Dixit mechanic.
Sharp Shooters (8) – The usual Yahtzee style roll, reroll, etc, except this time everyone is working on completing the same card of dice combinations–some that score points, some that take them away. Basically a game of kill-stealing dice combos, with too many players it can feel pretty random, but with the right amount there are a ton of agonizing choices to be made here!
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (10) – Sure, this might be just a glorified Choose Your Own Adventure, but this is also a fantastic story game where you race all over London following up on leads as you try to solve various cases before Sherlock Holmes does. The London directory (full of possible leads to interview) is huge, there are a ton of paragraphs (results of following up leads) for each case, and most importantly, it really feels like you are solving a mystery as you scour London and the newspaper for new clues.
Sherlook (6) – A simple spot the differences race, with the first player to pick the correct number winning. A little confusing at times as some are differences, and some are missing items, but easy enough overall.
Shocking Roulette (5) – Not really a game as this just randomly shocks the shit out of one of four fingers that you all insert into the device. That said, it IS a great way to pick the first player.
Sidewinder (4.5) – Simple dexterity game of tilting a tray back and forth to get a ball to roll “up” to the top and dump into your opponent’s side. On the easy setting, this is reasonably fun, though it can way outstay its welcome if you are both competent ball rollers. On the hard side it makes you want to toss it in the trash.
Silver & Gold (9) – Use dry erase markers to slowly fill in drawn squares on your drafted Islands. Finish Islands quickly enough (and cover enough special squares) and you will collect enough points to win. Grabbing (usually through luck of the draw) big numbers seemed the best way to win, but other routes to points seemed viable as well.
Small World (10) – This is one of the better game designs of the last decade. Sure, it is just an reimplementation of the underwhelming Vinci, but the host of cool special powers, and the bright and colorful fantasy theme were just what this design needed. The decisions are agonizing, the presentation is top notch, and best of all, it actually kind of feels like the wargame it wants to be!
Smugglers (6) – Basically someone put a kind of jankety scoring system on the act of rolling a clay ball JUST big enough to fit through a hole at the bottom of a chute. There isn’t much else here, still, for a gimmick game, it really IS kind of fun, just make sure you keep this one as short as possible to keep its welcome from wearing out!
Someone Has Died (7) – This is just a group storytelling exercise, with a nice selection of silly cards to attempt to form your story around. There are some good ideas here (objection cards that force others to adjust their story), and it’s definitely fun with the right group. On the other hand, there are probably a few too many backstory cards to really make a good story, and, of course, it’s not really a “game.”
Song of Ice & Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game (8) – Pretty decent mini game, with a couple of cool ideas (especially in how non combat leaders are used). Rectangular trays allow for more interesting movement options than other skirmish miniature games, but without some work painting them up, they sure don’t look as good on the table.
Soviet Kitchen Unleashed (8) – Worth playing for the novelty of the color mixing app alone, this is a really cool system of holding cards over your phone to mix their colors together to get the closest approximation of the color on the screen. The twist is you can’t show players your cards, so there is lots of “Ok, I’ve got a dark green…” “I’ve got a light neon green…maybe we mix them together and we can kind of get a normal green?” I can see the rating going down drastically with a lot of plays, but tons of fun at first!
Spiky Dastards (9) – Part of a long line of “flip some cards up, grab the missing number/color/piece from the center of the table before everyone else grabs it” games, this one ups the ante by covering the objects you have to grab with sharp as shit plastic spikes. Highly recommended for a group of competitive masochists that find turn after turn of self-inflicted pain rather hilarious.
Splendor (7.5) – Simple game of “draw chips” or “spend your drawn chips to buy cards that give you fixed chips for the rest of the game.” There is some ticket to ride tension in the decision to draw more chips on your turn while hoping your opponent doesn’t draw a card you were hoping to buy, but mostly this game is about slowly chaining your fixed chip cards into better and better cards in the most efficient manner possible. It’s fun, and has a nice presentation, but the more I play, the more I suspect the game is not as good as it seems.
Split Second (6.5) – Simple trivia game of writing down the simple answer to simple trivia questions as quickly as possible. The questions are usually ridiculously easy (“What is the abbreviation for the Internal Revenue Service?”), so the only real challenge is how quickly can you jot down “IRS” or “8.” In my case, the answer is “not quickly at all,” which was a detriment in a game that “hinges” on getting your correct answer flipped up on the rubber band powered arm before anyone else. It really is a decent party game, though I thought it suffered a bit for rewarding fast writing over all else–that and the fact that my rubber band was obviously slower than everyone else’s!
Spyfall (8.5) – Unique hidden role game where everyone at the table gets a card with the name of the same location, except for one person who is the spy and has no idea where everyone is. Then, players take turns asking each other questions about where they are until either the spy is found out, or the spy guesses where they are. The goal then is to make your questions vague enough that the spy can’t figure out where you are, but specific enough that the other players don’t think you are the spy due to your nonsensical question. A lot of fun, though there is a serious issue in that new players won’t have all the locations memorized, and only the spy would intently study the single sheet of locations in the middle of a round. We usually work around this by handing everyone a paper with all locations on it, and having everyone look at their paper (whether they need to or not) a few times during the round to give the spy a chance to see some options.
Stack Market (4) – Fairly shitty as there is only one real decision in the game (when to bail on a company that is getting too high). Also, the “stacking” dexterity element wasn’t all that fun either.
Starfarers of Catan (7.5) – Probably my favorite version of settlers of Catan…the choose your own adventure cards, cool (if probably also unnecessary) dice rolling space ships, and other chromey bits all add to the fun. Unfortunately, it’s about twice as long as it needs to be, because this is still just Catan at heart, and as such, has no business lasting more than an hour.
Steam Torpedo (7.5) – In this somewhat unwieldy game of submarine combat you spend your turn maneuvering your submarine (in front, behind, or to the sides of your opponent), running crew members around and then firing weapons, trying to do as much damage as possible to your opponent (thus, running them out of oxygen). There are some cool ideas, but it never really feels like it flows as well as it should, making me always think I’m playing it slightly incorrectly.
Sticky Stickz (9.5) – Simple game of rolling dice and then racing to suction up as many tiles as match the dice combination as quickly as possible. It’s fairly easy to spot the ones you need to grab, but getting there in time (and catching the new ones that are revealed) is a nice level of suction cup stick-bending chaos. Again, it’s a simple concept, but it’s executed beautifully, highly recommended.
Struggle of Empires (7.5) – Pretty cool area control game with a few extra bits of chrome and wargamey elements. Fun enough, but it’s all a bit too much work, and way too long for what is essentially just a more complex Euro.
Stuffed Fables (7) – The storybook is verycool, the minis are great, and it does seem like some work was put into telling a cool story. Unfortunately, with what is essentially a book of 50 some scenarios, it really seems like very few of them would be interesting enough for a replay. Maybe this is because I only played through the beginning campaign, but they were mostly trivially easy to finish. I hear they get much harder later on, but that doesn’t seem like it would make the game any more fun (despite the dice pull mechanism being well implemented).
Summoner Wars (9) – Tactical miniature game that uses cards, simple adjacent movement and line of sight, and simple abilities and spells. All in all it works remarkably well, each of the sixteen races play very differently, the abilities are all interesting and simple enough to quickly pick up, and the basic movement and attack system is fun. Even better, they nailed both the game length and the “use cards in hand as resources or units” system for summoning. All brilliant stuff, though I feel like Blue Moon (despite being a very different game) does slightly edge it for simplicity and elegance.
Sumo Ham Slam (6) – Fairly random (due to the touchy nature of the magnets) dexterity game of slamming little magnet-controlled plastic sumo hamsters into each other. In theory the game revolves around rolling a dice to feed your hamster little plastic pellets before each fight, but in practice the pellets don’t seem to have a huge effect as long as one person doesn’t have way more than the others. Still pretty fun for the absurdity of it all, but there’s no shame in playing to a lower number of points as this can outstay its welcome (especially with 4 players).
Sushi Go Party! (8) – This new version of Sushi Go! adds a dozen or so extra cards to mix into the included basic cards. From there you pick your “menu” and then deal them out and proceed to draft one card at a time as in the regular version. All in all it improves one of the better light drafting games out there, especially if you are playing it a lot. If I have a complaint, it is that the increased set-up and take down is slightly annoying.
Suspicion (6) – There are some great ideas in this Clue style deduction game, unfortunately, it just seems like it is way too easy to figure out who the other players are, which ultimately makes for a somewhat dry set collection game. I do like the central mechanic of maneuvering the pieces and then seeing who can see the player you are looking for, I just wish there was a bit more challenge in finding them.
Swivel (10) – This 1970s “body action game” is as ridiculous as it looks (four people swivel their hips to try to swing a pendulum connected to their waists with strings in order to knock over pins), but, surprisingly, it is actually a really fun game once the novelty wears off. There is just something unique and satisfying about getting the pendulum swinging back and forth with enough precision to only knock over your color of pins–all in all, possibly my best ebay gaming purchase ever.
Takenoko (7) – Very cute game of placing bamboo tiles to create an expanding garden and then moving a gardener around to grow the bamboo, and a panda around to eat the bamboo. The presentation is amazing (especially the wooden, segmented bamboo columns), and the gameplay is quite fun, however balance is a little off in the scoring cards. Some are far harder to achieve than others, and in late game situations, certain cards are almost trivially easy to complete. Still fun, but, without the great presentation, I doubt it would hit the table all that much.
Tales and Games: The Pied Piper (7.5) – This is a simple “take that” game where you try to get rats to run through other player’s houses (and the Pied Piper to run through your house to clear out rats). Normally I don’t like take that style games, but this adds a welcome timing layer to move everyone that creates some good decision making in your attempts to lob rats at your opponents. Luck is fairly high, and it does include player elimination for groups of 4+, but it’s quick enough I’d forgive both of those complaints.
Tales of the Arabian Nights (8.5) – First (I think?) of the story matrix games where you input your choices (which reaction to make to which encounter you have) and then turn to one of thousands of pre-written paragraphs to see what happens. It’s pretty cool how the outcome almost always matches your choices (choose to “attack” the “all powerful Efreeti”? That isn’t going to end well for you…but grovel might just work), and the story paragraphs are always pretty entertaining. It’s not really much of a game–the win condition is pretty random, but it’s always fun to break out every once in a while (also, 3 is probably the highest player count, and 2 is my preferred way to play).
Tambuzi (7) – Electronic musical chairs game, this is honestly pretty slick as you move around variously kicking animals out of houses or jumping onto a welcome mat in front of the house. Like all games like this, the central mechanic of “finish your turn as quickly as possible” isn’t really all that fun, but this looks good and finishes quickly, so you won’t really mind.
Tara Wolf in Valley of the Kings (8.5) – There’s quite a good game hiding here where you build up allies to go into a tomb. Which ever player has the strongest team gets the treasure, first to four treasures wins. Great art, fun game play, and lots of choices made this a surprise hit!
Terraforming Mars (7.5) – This “number 3 best game of all time” is a pretty hefty engine-builder as you manage a whole host of resources and victory point tracks. However, the game is really just about the deck of cards, as that will dictate 90% of your choices in the game. Cards seemed reasonably balanced, but it sure is a lot of hoops to jump through to try to hope you draw the right cards at the right times.
Terror in Meeple City (9) – This is mostly just a flicking game (flick your monster’s discs close enough to buildings that you can drop your monster on them trying to knock down as much stuff as possible) with a ton of chrome, but all the little stuff that is added (from putting your chin on your monster and blowing a building down to throwing cars) is really pretty cool. Definitely a little chaotic, and once you throw in all the special cards probably a little more complex than it needs to be, but still a showstopper for new gamers.
Things… (7.5) – Party game where everyone writes a response to a question prompts like “Things that you do in a bathroom…” and then you have to guess who wrote what. The scoring is almost an afterthought, and there really isn’t much of a game here, but it’s definitely fun to write ridiculous dirty shit with close friends and guess who wrote what.
Through the Desert (8) – Very cool Go variation where you are enclosing off sections of a board with your camel trains. The four player game was pretty chaotic, but still a lot of fun tense decisions.
Thunderstone (8) – Dominion, except with a rotating dungeon of monsters to collect as VP instead of buying provinces, and it mostly works pretty well. The theme is massively better, but the game itself is a lot messier and less prone to deck tuning and slick combos. That’s a trade-off I’m probably ok with, but Dominion is probably still the better game.
Tichu (10) – Possibly the best four player game I own, and it’s just a card game. It belongs to the “ladder” family of card games where you are trying to play out your hand by playing progressively bigger cards (or combinations of cards) on a led card until everyone passes in turn and your card is the highest (affording you the opportunity to lead the next card). The 4 special cards, the endless ways you can break up your hand into singles and combinations, the partner dynamic, and the simple joy of getting dealt that next hand and seeing how many good cards you got to crush the other team all add up to make this one an absolute classic.
Ticket to Ride (8.5) – One of the best gateway games out there, using the simple joy of collecting sets and building routes to excellent effect. Gamers will love how cutthroat it can be (and the actual, interesting decisions you must constantly make despite the simplicity of the gameplay), though competitive newbies might have some issues with the screwage.
Ticket to Ride: Europe (8.5) – Slightly more complex, while at the same time being a bit more forgiving with the stations (though, there are still plenty of screwage opportunities). Probably a better game than the original.
Tight Squeeze (8) – This game is what the box cover shows…a slowly tightening belt that couples have to squeeze through from feet to head at the same time. There is a spinner and various configurations to make it more difficult, but really, dry humping your way through a tiny belt loop is plenty of fun all by itself.
Tigris & Euphrates (9.5) – Brilliantly designed game that can be a real brainburner despite its relatively simple rule set. Though I guess it may be a touch abstract/dry, that’s really only a minor complaint.
Tikal (7.5) – Clever action point game that suffers a bit from over-length and downtime issues. Also, the min maxing of points for the end game can be a beast for people with AP issues.
Time Stories (10) – Very creative game where you go back in time for 30 “turns” to explore a map and solve a mystery. Except you’ll never solve it the first time through, so each play through you “start over” and make different decisions with the previous run in mind. Once you beat an adventure, you can’t play it again, but new adventure are cheap, and always bring new clever twists. Everything about this, right down to the way it uses its central deck of cards for the locations, is innovative, and, importantly, very very fun.
To Court the King (7.5) – Yahtzee with special powers where you start with 3 dice and slowly add extra dice and reroll abilities based on what you roll. Very fun, though downtime can be annoying with larger numbers of players, and I suspect that once you get a few decent reroll powers and extra dice, there’s not much more to think about.
Tobago (9.5) – Very unique treasure hunt game where you play cards to narrow down where the treasure on the map is or isn’t (for example, if I play the “within 1 of the largest lake, then it narrows down the treasure location to a smaller set of hexes. Once the treasure is found, everyone races to divvy up the coins. There are a lot of clever and unique mechanics at play here that make this one a real delight. This is one I definitely need to play more!
Treasure Hunter (8.5) – Underrated drafting game where you draft different valued cards in 3 different colors to try to either get the most of the least total value to win the best treasures each turn. There are maybe one too many extra bits added to the game in the name of adding interest to a simple drafting game, but it all works very well and always produces a “oh yeah, this is actually a pretty good game” reaction when I play it.
Treehouse (4) – Not much of a game…there are cool ideas, but the dice rolling is so random you kind of just do what you can until you get the lucky roll that wins you the game. Not sure how to make it better, but this is definitely not the game to try to sell someone on Icehouse pieces.
Trias (7.5) – Competition for areas is complicated here by adding in a really cool (and thematic despite the complaints of some about this being too abstract and dry) mechanism for splitting and merging land masses. Maybe not something that will totally wow you, but still definitely worth checking out.
Tribune: Primus Inter Pares (7.5) – Ancient Rome themed worker placement/set collection game where you place your workers on a winding road through the city of Rome to collect cards in various ways. You then use the cards to control various factions which give either bonuses or fulfill end game victory conditions. The card drafting is very fun, but when it gets down to faction control the rules become a tad less elegant and almost more work than the game is worth. Overall, the game overcomes this as worker placement and set collection makes for a good time if you are in to that kind of stuff.
Trool Park (6.5) – I can’t quite put my finger on the main issue with this game, but there are a few. First, it is so short that it doesn’t quite feel like you have all that many choices in building up your amusement park, you are mostly going with the flow, attempting to grab the best stuff you can and hoping they will score you the most points. Also, some of the graphic design choices are annoying (sun and “fun” is the same color even though they aren’t actually related to each other) and the rulebook is the usual Ankama shit-show. There might be a decent game in here, but I’m definitely having a hard time finding it.
Turfmaster (10) – Brilliant horse racing game where you alternate playing cards/rolling dice to race your horses around a track. Everything gets bogged down in a mess of horses, front-runners get tired, and picking your moment to shoot ahead is of utmost importance. It’s amazing how realistic it feels with just a few simple mechanics, and the little horses look great to boot.
Twilight Imperium (3rd Edition) (8.5) – Overwhelming at first for a lot of new players probably, but man this game has everything. Diplomacy, trading, civ building, discovery, and of course, lots of space conquest. If you can find the players (even 3 works ok, though it makes the already lackluster trade feature even more lackluster) who are willing to spend the time, it can be fun. However, the frist two players to start attacking each other will usually lose which seems to be a pretty serious issue.
Twilight Struggle (8) – Very thematic “war” game that is basically the card system from Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage without the actual battles. Getting the cards you need at the right time can be swingy (and the game can outstay its welcome), but there is always more that you want to do than you are able to do, and there looks to be a lot of good history here too.
Ubongo Extreme (9) – Upgrading the standard Ubongo Tetris shapes to hexagons significantly increases the difficulty here. Still very playable (especially on the easy side), but the winner on the four piece side will probably be the person who lucks into placing their first piece in the right spot.
Ubongo Trigo (9) – Same as regular Ubongo, except this time it’s triangles, and you have to use your 4 (or 6) pieces to completely fill in TWO triangular shapes. If you like spatial puzzles, you’ll want to play every Ubongo game, if you don’t, you’ll hate this one too.
Ugah Ugah! (8) – This looks like just a simple kids game, and it is, but it’s also a decent Yahtzee variation that feels just different enough from the pack to warrant digging out every now and then. I like the way the dice help the pieces work their way around a circular track of tiles worth various points. Again, nothing groundbreaking, but better than the small Haba box would suggest.
Unlock: Squeek and Sausage (8) – Reasonably good simulation of an escape room that uses a clever mechanism of adding up numbers of cards that go together to get the new card you are looking for. There are a few hiccups, mostly in that the clue system definitely needs some work, the adventure falls into autopilot towards the end as you use up your last few cards, and the final puzzle, while definitely clever, seems a little unfair. Still fun, but I’m also not sure that it’s worth $12 for a game that becomes useless after an hour of play.
Unusual Suspects (8) – One person knows a secret person from an array of choices, and the other players try to narrow down who it is by asking general questions. Because the people are all of different ages, social classes and races, this is basically “Profiling: The Game,” where you must choose between answering the question “which one of these people would be most likely to be a bad driver” honestly, and say “there is no way to know if someone is a bad driver,” or the way a racist would answer and point to the Asian guy. The questions thankfully rarely delve into explicit racist stereotypes, but you still won’t feel comfortable answering any of them anyway.
Vegas Showdown (6) – There is nothing really wrong with this game, but I have to agree with the reviews that say it “has no soul”. Just a bunch of mechanics efficiently, but not artfully, lumped together.
Villa Paletti (7.5) – Solid dexterity game of taking pieces from lower levels of a rising tower and putting them on top. Good stuff though the tower never seems to get quite as high as you hope.
Villainous (5.5) – This looks fantastic, and the mechanics are sound, but I had two big issues with it. First, to play well, you really have to know exactly what your opponents need to do to win, and often what they have to do is really fucking complicated. Then, in addition to constantly scanning the complicated, evolving board positions of your opponents, your only real way to stop them is to draw cards and hope you get a “take that” card that will screw them. I won as Ursula because no one was able to draw my Ariel card to stop me (and because I happened to get a few win condition cards in my opening hand)–all of which is to say that it wasn’t the most satisfying game experience I’d ever had.
Voodoo Mania (6.5) – A speed recognition game that involves quickly spotting the missing color/item combination on the top card of a deck by finding it in your hand of three cards (front and back) and calling it out before the opponent (netting you the card for points). Fast playing and fun enough, though this space is already plenty crowded, and this game is slightly prone to someone calling out the wrong item without anyone noticing if you are playing quickly.
War of the Ring (2nd edition) (10) – Second edition makes very minor technical and aesthetic improvements on the already brilliant original. For a card driven game it doesn’t suffer too much from “memorize the deck or else!” syndrome–as long as you tell new players about a few key cards “don’t leave Saruman alone if the ents are out!” “there is a card in here that lets an army with a leader move two spaces!” you should be fine. Probably the most flavorful LOTR game I’ve played, and being the LOTR fan I am that is enough to move it to my top game list. The main negative I can think of is that the dice pool is so small that a few bad rolls of the action dice can screw you at times, which can be a problem since the entire game is built around the action dice.
War of the Ring: Battles of the Third Age (8.5) – The War of the Ring expansions have mostly been rereleased elsewhere, but the standalone battle of Rohan/Gondor games are unique here. Each is quite fun, though they are also both definitely a little wild and unrefined to the point that they just kind of seem like work to wrap your head around and actually play through.
Warcry (7) – This could have been so good, but instead settles to be just a fun dice chucking combat game. The dice special abilities are good, but the game’s biggest flaw is how critical hit focused it is, which makes combat really just revolve around rolling sixes–cover, armor, and strength be damned. There’s not a lot to sink your teeth into, but for running around and swinging swords, there’s still fun to be had here.
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar (7.5) – Despite this being one of the most expensive games I own, the actual gameplay has a few serious issues. Somehow it is both too simple and too complex…the base rules have been simplified to the point that there is very little maneuver to be done beyond wasting a turn of attacks to retreat/try to claim a different objective. Some of the simplifications don’t make great thematic sense (ranged units really shouldn’t be allowed to shoot while engaged in melee with another target). Additionally, the fact that terrain essentially only has an effect on where you can move is disappointing. On the other side of the coin, the ridiculously long sheets of special powers for each unit, many of which affect other units, make remembering to use all the special powers for your army very hard, and understanding the special powers of your opponent’s army almost impossible. That said, these are probably the best miniatures in the business, making anyone that likes painting an easy mark for the Games Workshop machine. And, I suppose, it really IS fun to roll a giant handfull of dice as you bash away at your opponent with a perfect attack. Thus, I’ll always be happy to play this one despite the flaws.
Warhammer Underworlds (9) – This game is pretty dicey (probably exacerbated by the fact that you only have 12 activations to do anything before the game is over), but that can definitely be offset by clever positioning (and pre-game deck building, if you are into that kind of thing). Randomness complaints aside, it’s a real blast to play, looks amazing (if you don’t mind a few (or more than a few) hours or so spent assembling and painting up the whole set). If you just can’t get enough tactical miniature games, this is a great one (and I can’t stress enough how appreciated the short playtime is)!
Warhammer Quest (5) – Classic dungeon delving game really shows its age, and mostly in bad ways. The theme and joyous overuse of chromey rules text is charming, but in play it all boils down to a pretty random experience of chucking dice at endless hordes of samey-feeling monsters. Perhaps the biggest drawback here is how static the battles feel. Movement is rarely a game changer, and is usually used to simply move a little closer to possibly cleave a few more targets from the horde of monster facing you. Also, a healing wizard is often essential, but it’s rarely fun to simply turtle in the corner while the wizard heals over and over.
Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress (7) – Fairly standard Dungeon Crawl with plenty of chromey rules to make you feel like you are playing more of a real game than it actually is. Not to say any of it was bad (I actually really liked the initiative system, the dice action system, and the tiered dice resolution system), but at its heart this is a game of hoping to roll well against a bunch of monsters before too many of them respawn. My biggest complaint is that there didn’t seem to be a lot of thought put into the campaign system balance–as it was mostly full of incredibly random side encounters that you’d be a fool to attempt, alongside a ridiculously hard sequence of encounters (we barely made it through one…but apparently you need to do 6 or so in a row on some of the harder missions). Fun enough, looks amazing, but there are plenty of better options out there.
WARS Trading Card Game (7) – This “deck cycling” game is honestly pretty good–you build up units at locations, which allow you to attack your opponent and remove their cards from the game, first person to have no cards loses. I really liked the clever way that the deck is used as your resources, life, and a few more things all at once. I liked less the 90s style wall of text on most of the cards, making it (as usual) very difficult to know exactly what your opponent can do without coming around and reading his entire side of the table.
Welcome to the Dungeon (7) – A lot of these Iello Mini games fall a little flat for me, and this was no exception. There is a good push your luck Yahtzee style game to be found here, but the cards over complicate things a bit, and there are a few too many broken combos to be found for my taste.
Werewolf (9) One of the all time great hidden role games that still suffers from two key problems. One, player elimination is a definite problem, especially for the early deaths, and two, there is usually almost NO information the first turn which makes the first death a total random pick. Still a great game, but One Night Werewolf solves both of these issues and is so much better.
Werewords (9) – Clever app based game that is more 20 Questions than actual Werewolf, but the Werewolf/seer traitor mechanic stuff is well implemented. You definitely have to be careful steering the questions too much if you don’t want to be found out, but with a bit of practice I could see this one being a stayer!
When I Dream (7) – Beautiful game where one person is blind folded and then each other player around the table takes turns giving them a one word clue about what is on top of the deck. The blind folded player can guess the top card at any point, the other players moving it either into a “wrong” or “right” stack and revealing a new card–repeat until a 2 minute timer is up. The twist is that half the players (assigned randomly) want the dreamer to guess wrong, the other half want them to guess correctly, so the dreamer has to mentally sort the clues and try to figure out which players are probably giving out misinformation. It’s a good idea, but with strong play, it’s pretty hard for the dreamer to sort the nonsense from the actual clues, perhaps making the game a bit too frustrating.
Wings of War: Famous Aces (8.5) – This aerial combat core system has been done a bit better with the modern X-Wing/Attack Wing variants, but it is still a classic design. Get the miniatures version if you can, it looks great! This also scales really well, though I’d advise avoiding two player 1 on 1 duels as they just devolve into endless flybys.
Wits & Wagers (8) – Cool trivia game based on answering questions that no one could know the answer to, and then wagering on who you think got closest to the answer (not necessarily your own guess once you see the others). Look for the later editions which simplify the scoring, to the game’s benefit as this wants to be as light as possible.
Würfel Bohnanza (9.5) – For all the Yahtzee style (roll, set aside, reroll, repeat) games out there, this is probably my favorite. There are tons of great choices to be made (and I appreciate that the cards tell you the odds) as you try to match the groups of symbols shown on your personal card. The push your luck element is executed perfectly, and the best part is there is even something for other players to do when it’s not their turn!
Yahtzee Deluxe Poker (7) – In this betting game you pull a card that has some set of dice you need to roll with 5 dice (and various amounts of tries). Then everyone bids on how much they will pay to try, followed by a round of bets on whether or not the person will succeed. It’s a pretty good idea, though I kind of wonder whether or not it is best to never bid on the cards and just bet correctly on all the low odds attempts.
Yspahan (7) – This beautiful area control game is pretty fun. Maybe a little swingy, but it is fast paced and seems to have potential as a medium filler.
Ziegen Kriegen (5.5) – The point spread (1-50) in this trick taking game sure makes it seem hard to have any idea how a card you play will fare by the time it gets around the table. Fun to be had here, but there are better options.
Zombicide: Green Horde (8.5) – The Zombicide system is functioning pretty smoothly here, as a large amount of chrome (to be fair, I was playing with a lot of expansions) mostly integrates into a smooth and quick moving zombie smashing experience. The minis and boards are beautiful, and there are good choices once you internalize the central concept of “no, seriously, never let these guys bite you.” There are probably a few too many bits of equipment, extra rules, and system management chores to really be considered one of the greats, but the scenario I played was great fun!
Zombie 15′ (8) – If I’m going to go on a big zombie kill-spree, keeping gameplay to 15 minutes seems like the way to go. This makes good use of the app to keep the pressure on (and the ever growing zombie horde really ratchets up the tension as well) as you run through the street attempting to take out as many zombies as possible in real time before your weapons are all out of ammo and the horde comes. Perhaps a bit too simplistic, though I suspect later missions add enough to maintain interest.
Zombies!!! (5.5) – The theme is actually fairly well implemented, and there are decent things at work here. The main problem is that there is way too much luck and the game goes on way too long.