#opinion AIL: 0

Boardgame Recommendations

in Personal

After reading Kevin's board game recommendations I realised two things:

  1. He and I have very similar taste in games
  2. I regularly make recommendations in conversation and should just write them down

So, here we go.

If you don't want to read lots of words, skip to the tl;dr. You can also see my complete collection here.

Top 5

Leading with the best. If I could only have five games in my collection, these are the five that I’d have.

Power Grid

My undisputed favourite game since 2014. Power Grid is an economy/auction game where you bid on power plants to power cities. Each round you have to purchase resources for your power plants.

The genius behind this game is that when buying resources, the person in last place buys first. As it’s a supply and demand based market with fixed restocking that means that the person in last place needs fewer resources for the same resources than the players that are pulling ahead.

With a huge selection of expansion maps, Power Grid is a game that I’ll never get tired of playing.

Viticulture

Viticulture is a worker placement game about making wine. On your turn you have a limited number of workers to place one at a time. Each location that they could be played in also has limited space, and someone might beat you to it. It’s a strategic game of building an engine that produces lots of wine, but that doesn’t take too long to get started in case someone else ends the game.

I enjoyed the Viticulture base game, but the more expansions I play, the more I love the game overall. The Tuscany expansion is the sweet spot right now, but maybe I just need to play Bordeaux some more.

At this point I mostly play Tuscany on BoardGameArena, and Viticulture World (which is a very hard co-op expansion) in person. If you’ve got a regular group to play with, I can highly recommend Viticulture World as a way to challenge yourself.

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is classed as an “action selection” game, but that doesn’t really explain what it does. The idea of the game is that you’re all explorers looking to build up your plantations in Puerto Rico (yes, the theme isn’t great). On your turn you can choose an action for everyone to take. As the person that selected it you get one bonus (e.g. a special plantation, produce one more good).

The trick to winning Puerto Rico is to take the action that benefits you the most while also not benefiting other players.

It’s hard to imagine until you play it, but I highly recommend giving it a go. It’s also on BoardGameArena, and if you like it there’s an Awaken Realms reprint that’s massively overproduced, but also beautiful.

Lords of Waterdeep

Lords of Waterdeep is one of the original worker placement games. This is my go-to game on my iPad when I’m travelling, and I finally got my hands on a copy of the base game and skull port expansion thanks to the recent reprint.

On your turn you visit locations to collect resources. Then spend those resources to complete quests. The quests have various synergies with each other and depending on which you take you can generate a ton of victory points thanks to the interactions between the cards themselves.

Ra

Finally, Ra! Another reprint that I’m very glad I backed. Ra is the quintessential auction game. Each player starts with some bid tokens and uses them to bid on a tableau of tiles that have been drawn. When you win a bid, you swap your chip with one of the values in the middle. This is how people that start with high values end up with low value chips and vice versa.

The tiles that you win are placed in front of you in one of eight spaces. Four of them are reset every round, and four persist for the whole game. Figuring out which combination of spaces you want to invest in and which to ignore is most of the strategy. Careful though! If you’re building for a specific win condition people will start outbidding you to stop you getting the tiles you need.

Quickfire Round

Worker Placement

We already covered Viticulture and Lords of Waterdeep, which are positions one and two.

The final worker placement game is The Manhattan Project, which is a tight game about building bombs, spying on other players and destroying other player's factories. You have different types of workers that can take specific actions, so you need to balance the workers you have at various points in the game. Each player can see what every other player is doing, so there is plenty of opportunity for calculation. Who can run the most efficient program?

Deck / Bag Builders

Although I'll usually reach for worker placement games, deck/bag builders are my comfort game when I only have a short amount of time. Deck builder games are where you start with a hand of fixed cards, then spend resources available on those cards to buy better cards. Then use those cards to get even better cards.

The strategy is to balance getting victory points (useless each round, but they're how you win) with economy and attack cards. Balance things correctly and you'll be victorious while everyone else is still building their economy.

A bag builder is the same as a deck builder, but instead of drawing cards you pull tokens out of a cloth bag.

  1. Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game takes the top spot for me in this category. It comes with both a competitive and a co-operative mode. Personally, I prefer the competitive mode but the co-op is great too.

    If you're a fan of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn novels, you'll love how thematic this game is. Burning metals to take actions, with characters you know and love available on the cards themselves. I've played this one half a dozen times already this year.

  2. Mystic Vale is an intriguing game. The cards you buy are transparent, and you make your own cards by layering cards on top of each other in a plastic sleeve.

    The aim of the game is to collect victory points before they run out by adding victory point slots to your cards. But be careful, if you fill them up with victory points you won't be able to purchase any new cards.

    Mystic Vale had a great push-your-luck mechanism where you can keep drawing cards, but if you draw too many curse icons you lose your entire hand.

    I play this one a lot on the iPad when I have a few minutes to spare.

  3. Quacks (formerly known as Quacks of Quedlinburg) is a push your luck game where you draw tokens from a bag, gain money then spend that money on better tokens. You start from the same position every round, so there's a tension between improving your starting location and getting better chips in your bag to score higher each round.

    Quacks is the game I'd choose if I were introducing someone to deck/bag building games.

Co-op Games

As mentioned above, Mistborn and Viticulture both have great co-op modes that I can highly recommend. For pure co-op games:

  1. Hanabi: You have five cards in your hand that everyone can see except you. They can give you information about the cards, such as "these two cards are the number 3", or "these three cards are red". The aim of the game is to build stacks of colour-matched fireworks in order from 1-5 across all players.
  2. The Game: A terribly named, but very fun game. Each player has a set of numbered cards that they're trying to get rid of. There are four piles in the middle to play cards on to. Two are labelled 1->50, and two are labelled 50->1. You can play on any pile, but the numbers must be sequental. The only way you can go backwards is by playing a card that is exactly 10 difference with the current card. The challenge is that you can't tell each other what cards you have - only vague sentences like "I have a REALLY good card for this pile" are allowed. If anyone can't play on their turn, the game is over and you all lose.
  3. The Shipwreck Arcana: I've been playing Hanabi and The Game for 10+ years. I picked up Shipwreck last year when I was travelling and finally got it to the table. It has tarot-inspired graphics, and is about predicting what fates (numbers 1-7) people are holding in their hands. There are shared places to play numbers on that say things like "play here if your numbers are exactly 3 apart" or "play here if the sum of your fates and all visible fates is a multiple of 4". It's hard to explain, so I recommend watching this four minute intro.

Two Player Games

If you're looking for head to head games, there are some goodies out there.

  1. Zenith: A tug of war game where you're trying to influence planets by pulling them towards you. You can win by influencing the same planet 3 times, and 4 different planets of any combination of 5 planets. There's a ton of variety based on the research track used, the players involved and the order of the cards drawn. This is regularly my most played game on BoardGameArena each month, and I play the physical copy too.
  2. Radlands: I've only played this a couple of times but it's already in my top 3. I waited for the super deluxe edition and the neoprene mats make all the difference to your camp setup. The idea is that you're rival gangs trying to protect your camps. You only space for have six survivors, and you can build interesting combinations of survivors to destroy your opponent's camp. Simple to set up, reasonable depth and it plays quickly.
  3. Lost Cities: A Knizia classic. Draw cards and build runs of numbers in a matching colour. Careful though - each run you start gives you -20 points until you play enough cards to offset it. Build numbers from 1-10 (so you only need a 3, 7 and 10 to break even). If you think you'll do well on a pile, play a wager card to increase your multiplier (both positive and negative - you can end up starting at -80 if you play three wagers in a single column!). This is another fantastic game to play on BoardGameArena. I'd recommend real-time for this one.

Other two player games that we love include Japiur, Schotten Totten and Sky Team.

Party Games

If you've got a larger group of people, party games work well. Party games are usually either competitive, social deduction games or co-operative. My top 3 are all co-operative, but the honourable mentions are all deduction games.

  1. Just One: A co-operative game where you're all trying to help one person guess a single word by giving one word clues. However, if two people write the same clue they're not allowed to share it with the guesser. I've played this with family over the holidays. I've played this at team offsites. It goes down well everywhere.
  2. The Gang: A co-operative version of Texas Hold'em poker. Guess who has the strongest hand, who has the weakest hand, and every hand in between. After each new card is revealed everyone takes a numbered chip indicating how strong they think their hand is. If you get it right, you rob the vault! If not, you trip the alarm. If your group knows how to play poker, this is phenomenal. If not, I'd give it a miss.
  3. Codenames: Split in to two teams and try to identify all of the words related to your team through word association before the other team finds theirs. Each turn, the spy master gives a one word clue and a number e.g. "Commonwealth 3". This means that there are 3 cards that relate to the word "commonwealth". Codenames scales to any number of players, and has a variety of editions (standard, marvel)

For competitive games we enjoy A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Spyfall and The Resistance: Avalon (which I played every day for 4 years when I worked in an office).

What I take to game night

It really depends on the night. Most nights I take one of the above games as the main game, plus Flip 7, Love Letter or Coup as a quick filler game for before or after the main game.

If we're feeling tired we'll pick up a lighter game. Something like Sheriff of Nottingham (declare goods that you're importing. The Sheriff may choose to inspect your bag. If you're smuggling contraband, you pay. Otherwise he pays you), Sushi Roll (a set building game. This is the dice version of Sushi Go) or Camel Up (a silly game about racing camels. Part luck, part strategy, lots of chaos).

Finally, there are a couple of honourable mentions that don't fit the categories above, but do make it to the table a couple of times per year as the main game:

  1. Canvas: A bit like Mystic Vale, this is a game where you combine transparent cards to make something. You purchase cards from an auction, then combine their abilities (the five colours on the card) in order to meet the randomly drawn composition cards and score points. It sounds abstract until you play it (or watch this video from the publisher). I've had a lot of success with people at game night and with family with Canvas.
  2. 7 Wonders: A tableau building, card drafting game where you choose a card then pass your entire hand on to the next player. There are 7 ways to score points, so every game can have a different strategy. This is a favourite for when you have a lot of players looking for a game as it goes up to 7 players (if there are 8 players, that's two games of four). Be warned: scoring makes zero sense until the end of your first game, then it's super easy to understand.
  3. RoboRally: There are many versions of this. The linked one is the one I originally played way back in 2014. I own the 30th anniversary edition, but they all play the same. Plan your moves by playing cards in order. Then hope that you planned correctly and that conveyer belts, weapons and other robots don't push you off course. Be the first to get to the objectives to win.

TL;DR

I wrote a lot of words above. Here's the short version: