Ask HN: Best board games of 2022?
What are your favorite board games of 2022? I think saboteur might be kind of old, but it ranks for my favorite this year (as I just found out about it)
- Traders and Builders [1]
- Inns and Cathedrals [2]
The base itself is little limited - but with these two expansions you have one of the best sets for a nice evening with friends. You can also add River or River II expansion - but they only 'divert' the beginning of the game - so you can omit them.
The Carcassonne is really a simple game - yet it takes real thinking and strategy to really master it.
What I like the most about Carcassonne is its 'minimalistic' approach. There are roads/cities/grasslands/monasteries ... and nothing else ... yet taking someone else' city or road is very important strategic move - or splitting the work between X players.
You do not need cards, figures, notes, calculators, excel or dice. You just play and move the cones on the scoring board.
Regards.
[1] https://carcassonne.fandom.com/wiki/Traders_%26_Builders
I don't know any game that simple as versatile as Carcassone: you can play friendly or cutthroat, tactical or strategic, conservative or risky, focus on or ignore farmers...
+ Almost no setup, fast turns, equally good at any player count, you end up with a good looking map... this game is a jewel
The object of the game is to occupy ten planets (you start with five) via combat, negotiation, or shenanigans. Each player drafts two unique powers, each of which breaks the rules somehow. Just for instance, in the last game I played, one player had the power "you start with ten planets, but your planets are only worth half." Eventually I won by causing this player to swap places, but not powers, with me. Some such BS happens every single game, and never the same way twice.
[1] Specifically the Mayfair edition from the 1990s, although I understand the current version is pretty similar.
Either I just couldn't wrap my head around a winning strategy or we were getting the rules wrong because it was just miserable, and I say that even winning my fair share of games, but often times it felt like I didn't do anything particularly different to deserve that victory.
- Mosaic (disclaimer, I know the designer), Bullet Star, Planet Unknown, Fjords, Long Shot: The Dice Game, Wonderland's War
2022 releases I have but haven't gotten to the table yet:
- Eleven (waiting for it to arrive), Vagrantsong, Resurgence, Caesar!, Mind Bug, Puzzle Strike II, Creature Comforts, Verdant
Best "New to me" games for 2022:
- Memoir '44, Imperium Classics, Ark Nova, Res Arcana, Trekking the World, Nemo's War, Scout, Downforce, First Class, My City
I finally played Memoir '44 for the first time, and man is it amazing. My new favorite game, edging out Spirit Island. I now have a regular person I play with online and have racked up 25 games of it just this year, working our way through all the scenarios (of which there's a ton). The online version at BoardGameArena is excellent.
Best board game-like video game I played in 2022: Inscryption. Basically a "Slay the Spire" style deckbuilder mixed with a creepy vibe mixed with an escape room mixed with...well, you should play it and find out for yourself.
Great Western Trail Argentina(I have the 2021 reprint/update of GWT and this one seems even better)
Decorum
Woodcraft
Terracotta Army
Golem
Inscryption never grabbed me. Maybe I need to give it another go.
Other long term favorites are Castles of Burgundy, Scythe, and Viticulture.
You may be aware of this - this genre is called Eurogame
https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Eurogame
It's the type of game where you don't directly or fully interact with your opponents (at most, you can usually indirectly block one of their moves, but that's about it). People seem to like the less adversarial playstyle as there are many successful games in this genre: Catan, Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, Carcassone etc.
Games of the style "everyone plays somewhat independently, with some interaction such as blocking, but mostly you race to score points" have the key property that you can do much better if you spend a lot of mental bandwidth carefully tracking the state of all your opponents (how many points they have, what they're doing), which also contributes to a strong "a computer, or computer-assistance, would make this better" feeling, which in turn makes a game feel less fun to me.
I actually really enjoy Catan, in large part because of mechanics like inter-player trading and the jostle for the 3:1 / 2:1 trading ports, which makes for much heavier interaction with other players. Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, is a textbook example of the mechanics I find frustrating and un-fun.
I enjoy chess occasionally, with a player at a comparable skill level. That computers play it far better doesn't bother me in that context, the way it bothers me that a computer would be better at carefully tracking exactly how many points other players have in Ticket to Ride.
Bluffing games, guessing games, dexterity games are much more fun for me.
I think it really depends on the game, you can have your game with little interaction, and then the clashing of players type of euro.
Catan is particularly bad at this; if you have 6 points and someone with 9 points offers you a trade, your decision will choose who wins.
It's true that modern (that is, since 1994 or so) European games try to avoid "politics", e.g. individual dealmaking between players, or players having free choice over which other player to reward or hinder. European reviewers (and, say, SdJ judges) will typically consider it poor design if
1. Who wins can be decided by who gets targeted
2. Players don't get to play to the end (I.e. get eliminated)
3. Your win status can be certain and obvious long before the game is actually over.
But there is still plenty of room for that in older European games like Catan (1995)
What isn't, the text you are replying to, or the linked definition in that text?
The linked definition includes your point that "European reviewers will consider it poor design if ... players don't get to play to the end" for example, so your listing it doesn't work as a criticism of the definition.
The BGG definition seems quite comprehensive, and definitely not just "games you interact with your opponent".
From BGG:
Eurogames (or alternatively, Designer Board Games or German-Style Board Games) are a classification of board games that are very popular on Board Game Geek (BGG). Though not all eurogames are European and not all of them are board games, they share a set of similar characteristics. A game need not fit ALL the criteria to be considered a Eurogame.
Most Eurogames share the following elements:
- Player conflict is indirect and usually involves competition over resources or points. Combat is extremely rare.
- Players are never eliminated from the game (All players are still playing when the game ends.)
- There is very little randomness or luck. Randomness that is there is mitigated by having the player decide what to do after a random event happens rather than before. Dice are rare, but not unheard of, in a Euro.
- The Designer of the game is listed on the game's box cover. Though this is not particular to Euros, the Eurogame movement seems to have started this trend. This is why some gamers and designers call this genre of games Designer Games.
- Much attention is paid to the artwork and components. Plastic and metal are rare, more often pieces are made of wood.
- Eurogames have a definite theme, however, the theme most often has very little to do with the gameplay. The focus instead is on the mechanics; for example, a game about space may play the same as a game about ancient Rome.
- Eurogames are concerned with getting the most strategy from the least or minimal mechanics.
- Eurogames typically have multiple viable paths to scoring points or securing the win condition.
- Eurogames generally correspond to the BGG subdomain "Strategy".
Examples of Eurogames: CATAN, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, Tigris & Euphrates, Caylus, Power Grid, Ra, El Grande, Five Tribes
// As owner of the listed example games, I find the linked definition significantly superior.
I know it's well-loved, but when my wife and I tried playing it we found it dull and tedious. I'm curious if we're just missing something.
I have the Tuscany expansion, playing with 4 seasons and the unique workers makes the game even better in my opinion. I can see why some wouldn't like it, as it's a choice salad style game, and on first play through can seem like you're really doing nothing expect putting meeples down.
I actually wish they made a beer themed version of the game, call Bavaria or something.
this is what my family needs.
also, i heard this is a good game. might get it.
Beautiful packaging and pieces though! And it’s very cool that it works single player and two player. But nothing eventful at all happens, and nobody feels any compelling reason to rack up points.
So many other great games in the genre though.
The compelling reason to rack up points, if you're playing seriously, is to see if your engine works --- just like Race For The Galaxy, or games like that.
No, that's one of the reasons.
The expansions changed the game completely for me, it's more strategic and you're interacting with other player more (i.e. in-between round activation, end of round powers, more steal resource from other players, etc). I personally love that the game play is very fast, as you have limited number of moves every round.
The Oceania expansion with the nectar tokens and new board really let you do more in the game.
I would give it another try with the expansions, it's truly a different game.
I find the returns to skill in it are, if anything, greater than in Agricola, which is also one of my favorites.
The tension is all about the competition for a complementary strategy to what your opponents are doing.
Some people just don’t like weakly interactive engine builders, which is a fair objection to it, but it’s quite deep.
One weakness is that the Corvidae are too strong; many experts seem to have converged on either removing them or nerfing them.
In 2022 I’ve been focusing on very fast games, to add to my group’s repertoire of mostly mid-to-heavy games. Nidavellir and Jumpdrive both have been fun, here.
My favorite game of the last 5 years is Res Arcana with or without expansions; it’s a fun enough engine builder to appeal to most folks, but has high enough returns to skill to feel like it’s worth investing more plays in.
The most surprising hit for me this year is Star Wars: Rebellion. I’m not generally an Ameritrash fan, and I usually prefer 3-4 player evenings, but if you’ve got 2-3 hours with a single friend and even mildly enjoy the Star Wars atmosphere, it’s an asymmetric game which has felt epic every time I’ve played, win or lose.
Basically the empire gets awesome amounts of production, great battle units, and a lot more territory. But they have trouble finding the rebel base, and even if you do, you have to bring enough ground units (or a Death Star) to defeat the rebel base before they up and move the base somewhere else.
Really gets the flavor of the original trilogy, and the workers you place are themselves iconic leaders of the Star Wars universe, not just flat meeples.
I didn’t realize I wanted to routinely see Han Solo counter an offensive move by Palpatine instead of blander workers, but yes, yes that does make the game more satisfying.
Downside is it’s really a 2 player game (there’s a 2v2 4 player variant that just seems dumb to me), and until you know the game well, setup takes half an hour.
This should not be an acrimonious process. Think of it as a blameless postmortem. The goal is not to decide who made a mistake, it is to understand how to get better as a group and avoid losing the game the same way again. It will also help everyone empathize with the other players, since they'll actually understand what information the other players had and what their thought process was.
As you get better as a group, you should quickly get to a state where either it's clear to the player who misplayed that they did in fact make a mistake (and they'll apologize before the hand is even over) or everyone agrees it was unavoidable.
And while it's not exactly a boardgame, this year I finally got into DM'ing D&D campaign – it's more time consuming that I expected, but very satysfying.
If you like games which distill the notion of bluffing, you should also try Perudo. Very similar to Skull, but it uses dice.
It is (I think) a more strategic variant of the game Dixit and it is played with the same cards, so if you already own Dixit, you can use it as an extension to Stella and vice versa. The idea is that you have a randomly selected word and 15 randomly selected cards with surreal illustrations face up on the table. Each player has to chose a certain number of cards that he thinks represent the word. If you are the only one to pick a card, you lose, if someone else picked the same card, you both win points.
Favourite old game discovered this year: The King is Dead. An area control game with restrictions that interact in very interesting ways.
Perennial favourites:
Orleans - the most played game at my weekly board game group. Worker placement and deck building combined.
Concordia - a great resource collection game, plays well from 2-5 players with no rules changes
Hansa Teutonica - brilliant worker placement game. Looks bland, plays well, and now comes in a well-priced box with all expansions.
Just discovered Hansa Teutonica last week and it looks very interesting although the first game was frustrating as there is a lot to learn.
Instant favourite, the smoothest rules (I could not have imagined a game with this complexity could flow so well and have a manual so easy to navigate) Insanely good player interaction, at no time boring, and there's basically no downtime. Paying attention to other players is necessary and effortless. Paired with great rulebook and well defined order of actions, this made my first game flow incredibly well—even though the short scenario took over 6 hours. 2-3 hours in we all felt like we had been playing for 45 minutes.
True competitive co-op, nothing like terraforming Mars (which is co-op in flavor only). You generally want the company to do well while skimming a bit more off the top than your opponents.
And the game does not abstract away the horrible things you do. It's very clear that the players are not the good guys. Power is central to John Company, and not just in the sense of "might", although military strength s important—in the sense of political and economical power, unchecked except by those who would like that power for themselves.
10/10 might not be enough of a rating
Here's the play counts of games we played at least 3 times in 2022, dumped from the BGStats app I use to track plays.
45: Azul
36: The Isle of Cats
36: Tsuro
22: Lost Ruins of Arnak
15: Luxor
14: Hive
9: Carcassonne Big Box 6
9: Forbidden Island
6: Everdell
6: Project L
5: Watergate
4: Endless Winter: Paleoamericans
4: Paint the Roses
4: Hidden Leaders
3: Paris
3: Lift Off! Get me off this Planet! Expanded Deluxe Edition.
All plays are with physical copies of the games.
The Isle of Cats quickly became our family favourite. We play it with our two kids (8 and 6) in "family mode", and in normal mode with our gaming group. Highly recommended.
Lost Ruins of Arnak is wonderful at 2, 3, or 4 players. The Leaders expansion is worth it to add some more depth.
Luxor is my 6yo's favourite game, but don't let that make you think it's only a kids game. We have all the expansions and there's really a heap of scope in the game.
The Everdell plays were with the New Leaf expansion, and it really brought back my enjoyment of the game. It solved a lot of the problems I'd had with the base game (mostly related to the meadow cards getting stale if no-one wanted them).
Endless Winter felt a little "mechanics soup" to me, but it's solid. Unlike Arnak, it also felt like it wasn't very well balanced across the various things you could focus on.
Hidden Leaders was the stand out 6 player game.
I really love Paris and want to play it a heap more.
Azul, Tsuro, Hive are all worth picking up as "lets just have a quick game" options.
Games we only played once so far but are very keen to play more: Mosaic, Rococco, Windward, Paladins of the West Kingdom.
Edit: my kids and I had a quick little "test play" of Forgotten Depths and I'm really keen to play it with them a heap over the holidays. A co-op dungeon crawler style game with 3 female characters. The design is really sweet.
Endless Winter was super popular at Spiel, with endless lines of people waiting for the tables to play it, but I was a bit disappointed by it. "Mechanics soup" is a good description. I felt Ruins of Arnak was a lot more cohesive.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/276498/paris-la-cite-de-...
There's enough going on that it can hold my attention, but, each turn is super simple. And now that I think about it, while there's strong degree to which it feels like an engine builder, it mostly isn't. You do get combos, but they tend to be one-turn things. It's got the right mix of determinism and random; RNG won't win or lose you the game, but every game is going to be at least a bit different because of it.
Also new to me: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/342942/ark-nova AKA "Zoo Mars", since we like it for many of the reasons we like Terraforming Mars, although it's simpler, and turns go by faster. It does have a bit of an issue in that poor card draw on your part (or, in one game, excellent card draw on one player's) can lose you the game, as you do build an engine but not all cards will work with the specific engine you're building.
If you like games that you can always have on you, check oink games (https://oinkgames.com/en/). Scout (nominated to Spiele des Jahre 2022), Troika, Mask Men, Startups and Kobayakawa are my favorites.
Northern Pacific is a surprising mix of train games (which are often long and complex) and a party game with surprising strategic space. You only have two options, but the impact on other players is real. However, as the game ends in 15 minutes, you don't get the same feelings of betrayal and anger that you'd get playing something like Chinatown.
I strongly recommend it. I also recommend Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge, but those require a bit more of a time investment (1-2 hours) and Iberian Gauge is a bit too complicated for even well-behaved children under the age of 10 or so.
-edit- I just realized it was released in 2013, but I bought it this year so :shrug:.
However, having just gotten the two part kickstarter edition, it feels like they left out the … fun? The puzzles feel more like academic exercises than the joy that you get from even simple breadboard circuits that do stuff with lights, motors, speakers etc. I think maybe it needs a few more “output” parts to make the experience engaging.
Spintronics feels like a great teaching tool but not a great game.
Curious how others are digging it though.
Res Arcana - I've learned it a couple weeks ago and been enjoying it. It's light enough to learn quickly, yet I still have lots of depth to discover, seeing how my friends always destroy me.
Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization - I've played it before a couple times, but really only got into it more this year. Never fails to create strong emotions for me. I play async online and suspect that playing live the game might drag out a bit.
> I think saboteur might be kind of old, but it ranks for my favorite this year
Eh, why? If you're a saboteur you can pretend you're a good guy but that's just bad play. You might like Bang too, it has a similar mechanic.
There's a great iPad adaptation: it looks dated, but takes away the tedium of counting and remembering all that stuff (who has more military power? Is it time to make tactics communal? Did you forget to take away two yellow pop markers?).
Also it helped us when learning the game, even thoughwe've got the board game on the shelf, because the iPad version sometimes didn't let us do something, because of a rule we hadn't internalized already.
I highly recommend it.
Also, the expansion is good. It sounds stupid and expensive (only wonders and leaders, no new buildings or military cards), but it makes it fresh again. That said, we mostly play vanilla.
In the same vein, I really enjoyed Vizzles [0] which is a regular puzzle with themed "riddles/puns" (the ones we've done so far were plays on words of movies and books), and also Odd Pieces [1], in which you construct a puzzle that is _slightly_ different from what you see on the box (the "lore" is that the puzzle you construct is at a moment in the future of the scene played out in the box).
I found these to be refreshing twists on typical puzzles, which we enjoy a lot as well.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelmilham/vizzles-vi... [1] https://oddpieces.com/
- Eldritch Horror
- Fury of Dracula
- Betrayal at House on the Hill
- Nemesis
- Spirit Island
- Pandemic
And for the not-so-complex list
- Hanabi (more of a card game)
This one's essentially Arkham Horror if it hadn't sacrificed so much of its mechanics to its flavor that it became, more or less, a bad game. Plays much faster and cleaner. Does lose some of the atmosphere in the bargain, but playing Arkham Horror was such a slog that I doubt anyone at the table will want it back after playing this.
> - Betrayal at House on the Hill
The Legacy version of this is excellent. IMO adding those elements effectively completed this game, which never felt like it was living up to its potential, before.
Pandemic is another game vastly improved by the Legacy mechanics.
Yeah, I mean the old one. It made it to our table a few times on the strength of the fluff, but it seemed like every time everyone was kinda unhappy that we'd played it, by the time it was over. Like we just kept forgetting how not-fun it had been, and remembering how fun we wished it was.
(D&D and similar require one player to DM, but that player also gets to be subjective and improvisational and do storytelling and pull in player ideas, which is much more fun than being the mechanical interpreter of the rules.)
(I do think the new Arkham Horror still has some issues, notably an excessive opacity of mechanics sometimes that leads to "you just lose out of the blue for unforeseeable reasons". But it's still usually fun.)
I totally missed that a new AH was released in 2018. On BGG it's a 7.7 over 7.0 for the original, AND the expansions are ranked really well (obviously players who buy an expansion already liked the base game, so there is some bias). Fixing the randomness sounds really REALLY good.
Great. Due to this thread, I now have another ~200 Euros on my board game wish list. Thanks! :P
It was intense and gripping every step of the way.
Now a few games into Season 0 (the third game to be released, but technically a prequel to the other seasons) with a different group and it's OK. It's "broader" in complexity as opposed to deeper, meaning it tries to merge several Pandemic subsystems together, like there are both Russian agents and disease cubes (hope that's not too much of a spoiler... it is a Pandemic game after all) but your characters evolve very slowly relative to the past legacy games. The upgrades feel really stingy in comparison so game to game there's not as much growth. The game is overall harder too because you have fewer options at your disposal, like they're trying to confine you to tactical location-based gameplay instead of min-maxing your characters optimally, which was the part I enjoyed more in S2 previously. Arguably the movement tactics are the heart of Pandemic though, so I don't fault them for doing that. The plus side is that Season 0 makes teamwork more critical, as you can't simply have an OP character do everything and take over the game.
A side gripe I have with Season 0 is the theme (set in Cold War USSR). It feels antiquated in tone, like I'm reading some shitty spy novel lol. There's not much of a sense of a threat, narratively, just a bog-standard "red bad blue good" story. Season 2 (post-apocalyptic) had much more narrative freedom and actually felt tense. The Season 0 story by contrast feels out of place, like grandma pulled the board game out of the attic 30 years later lol.
In order of personal preference only, of the ones I've played, favorite to least:
- Pandemic Legacy Season 2
- Regular non-legacy Pandemic with all (or most) of its expansions
- Pandemic Legacy Season 0
- Pandemic Legacy Season 1
- Pandemic Iberia version
- Pandemic base (no expansions)
Season 2 got a bit convoluted mechanically and felt less smooth design wise. But it was fun.
About to play Season 0, we're excited for it.
- I dissent
- Panamax
- Pandemic Legacy, Season 2
- Root
- Dice Hospital
- Cthulhu: Death May Die
- Food Chain Magnate
- Letters from Whitechapel
- Terraforming Mars
- Space Base
- Dominant Species
- Cockroach Poker
There's plenty of info out there about it so I'll avoid giving a detailed recap, but since it's a coop game and it feels best with 3-4 players, if folks are interested in trying it out, I'd be happy to host a session. E-mail is in my profile.
- John Company II edition
- Root: The Marauder Expansion
- Horse and Carriage, splotter games
1. Little Town *
2. Cuba
3. Splendor Duel *
4. Hellas
5. Anno 1800
6. Heat: Pedal to the Metal *
7. Fast Sloths *
8. Scout! *
9. Faiyum
10. The Estates
I'm writing up a BGG Geeklist for these. You can find all kinds of "top" lists here: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklists?sort=recent
Some of my favourites from this year include:
CombiNations - a very quick tile-laying where you score points by making large contiguous fields of the same type, with added depth coming from bonus points and the way you can choose what tile to lay.
Clockworker - a kind of worker placement game with a twist: you can place lots of workers at once, but they only produce when they return home one at a time, giving the feeling of winding up devices that slowly wind down. Great concept slightly hampered by the iconography describing the various bonuses that the purchasable artifact cards provide.
Lost Ruins of Arnak -- significantly bigger than the other two, giving a real Indiana Jones adventure/treasure hunter feel. You need to have the right vehicle to travel to interesting locations where you can discover treasures, generally guarded by some monster. You're going to need some tools or weapons to defeat it. You collect stuff that you spend to get bonuses that help you get more stuff. Great atmosphere, great mechanics.
Revive -- After a big catastrophe, humanity finally crawls out of their caves and starts exploring the world again, hopefully gaining knowledge on how to operate these ancient machines. Beautiful board, clever mechanics.
Starship Captains -- Not about Star Trek at all! Honestly! Perfectly encapsulates the experience of captaining a starship on a 5 year mission to explore strange new worlds.
Seventh Continent is also fun from an exploratory point of view, though it has a bit more self-similarity in its gameplay loop such that the mechanics can get old, but the exploration doesn't.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jaipur is a two-player quick card game with great style and fun, great mechanics, and much of the "reading another player" of a gin/pinochle/etc style game.
I also played a lot of Flamecraft and is fun and cute. Doesn't scale up to large player counts well though.
As much as i love medium and heavy weight games, the world needs good light games too.
Board games have the right form-factor (sit around the table, colorful pieces dedicated to the simulation, clear rules easily referenced) but the wrong teleology. Any suggestions?
Edit: Heck, something like "doing our nails" might be seen as having sufficient utility.
Edit2: Folding proteins? Isn't that a game, somewhere?
0. The State of California "Budget Challenge" simulates exactly what it says on the tin, and I might try it at my next visit: https://www.budgetchallenge.org/
My other favorites are Pandemic Legacy (Season 0 came out in 2020) and The Crew (2019)
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/306154/2022-peoples-choic...
I had a great tabletop group but moved to a new city a year ago. I've been thinking about playing, by myself, some of the games I'd purchased for our group that we never got to play. And, open to picking up something new as well.
I am actually playing Gloomhaven. We bought it to play with friends years ago, but it’s only collecting dust.
I am fortunate enough to have the space to have the game always setup.
Midweight euros: Teotihuacan, Beyond the Sun, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Tzol'kin, Marco Polo II, Troyes, Rajas of the Ganges, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Concordia
Tableau/engine builder: Res Arcana, Deus, Race for the Galaxy, Gizmos, Everdell, Wingspan
Deck/bag builder: Ascension, Tyrants of the Underdark, Clank, Dominion, War Chest
Polyomino: A Feast for Odin, Barenpark, Isle of Cats, Patchwork
Roll & write: Hadrian's Wall, Welcome To, Troyes Dice, Ganz Schön Clever
Misc: Kingdom Builder, Babylonia, Space Base, Hive, Santorini, Dice miner, Cascadia, Air Land & Sea
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/365717/clank-catacombs
We also just got Dice Kingdoms of Valeria and it's making me rethink dismissing roll and write games.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345887/dice-kingdoms-val...
Tyrants of the Underdark is also fantastic (still waiting for the fan printing of the fan expansions, though).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/delvebros/taelmoor-the-...
I'm building a "roblox for online board games", and if anyone is interested in learning more then you can email me at boardgames@mathgladiator.com
This is all I talk about online, for the most part...
I'm a) surprised that some of the pretty older games (strat-o-Matic, etc) are still going strong and b) there are many newer games that improve on the concept and bring better accuracy and flow to the game.
- Quacks of Quedlinburg
- The Crew - Ruins of Arnak
- Dune (remake from GF9)
On BGA, personally I’ve really enjoyed Barrage (new!), and I keep going back to Jaipur (since forever!).
Also competitive Settlers of Catan has skyrocketed in 2022: https://colonist.io to play for free against friends or ranked.
Ancestor of the entire "build your deck during the game" genre, and for every new entry in that genre I've tried, I've thought, "yup, now I know there's a good reason Donald X. Vaccarino didn't do it like that in Dominion".
Works equally great as an over the board family game with more than 2 players as a highly competitive online 2 player game, too. That's pretty amazing, really.
I wanted to like Gloomhaven but it’s terrible setup time and complexity made that impossible. ISS Vanguard is the best giant coop thing. Digital gloomhaven is good.
1. http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Calvo%201998.pdf [pdf]
How do I figure out what I like? Is there a bluffers guide to board games? A top-3 covering set
They have faithful digital versions of many eurogames and you can either play with a public matchmaking group or host private games and invite friends for a remote game night.
Different people like different things.
However, I did find some success browsing the ShutUpAndSitDown recommended list:
https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/games-page/
It's not guaranteed you'll like the game just because it's on that list but:
1. it's a good initial filter
2. they have pretty entertaining review videos for most of the board games
Sadly, I think you just have to try playing the games to see which ones you'll like.
By the way, if you're in a reasonably populated area, you can try an in-person board game group on meetup.com (or something similar). I've had good success with that, but I do live in an European capital, so YMMV.
I'd also say to check out some of the bigger board game review Youtubers and just watch a mixture of their videos. Some games will appeal and others you'll bounce off of just hearing about the idea of them. Some of my favorites are:
* Shut Up & Sit Down
* Actualol
* Three Minute Board Games
* Dice Tower
* GameBoyGeek
Our party starts tomorrow!
First what I did not see:
- Dune: Imperium, maybe plus Expansion. Nice mix of deckbuilder and worker placement. Only thing that bothers me is the (missing) redraw mechanic for the pool of cards to buy (if there's only crap in the pool, some sucker needs to buy something for good stuff too show up; which the next player then buys). The expansion reduces this because the player can do other things and there are more cards causing cycling/trashing, but I'm still pondering a house rule (auction mechanic).
- Unfathomable: Did not play!!, but this reimplements the Battlestar Galactica board game, which we played a lot during university (maybe a bit too much? Naaa, who needs sleep). Social deduction/traitor mechanic. This is on my wish list, since BSG with all expansions costs about 500 bucks these days (and we only have one copy in my peer group). Drawback: The vibe of BSG is awesome, a lot of aspects of the show are well captured, and I only saw the show much later. Compared to that, Lovecraft [Unfathomable] feels a bit generic. But the principle is still great. And it seems to be streamlined, which is great if you don't have 4 to 8 hours (depends on number of expansions used). [oh, mathgladiator was quicker than me. Well^^']
- Hidden Leaders - played the demo in Essen and liked it. I don't recall details on the mechanics (except: card game), but it's still on my list.
I also got relatively new:
- Goetia, nice worker placement in which you summon demons.
- Galaxy Truckers, which was out of print for a while and is back as a second edition.
Classics:
- 7 Wonders, new edition. I love how it trades player interaction (which is limited in the base game) for scaling well into 7 players (less downtime).
- Power grid, also a new edition. Great auction mechanic. And there is no clear winner until the end (or unless everyone but one player plays bad).
- Hanabi. Cooperative card game in which you only see the other player's hands and can give them tips. The goal is to play cards 1 to 5 in 5 different colors. The basic variant is easy to master, but the real fun begins once you're playing with special colors (e.g. rainbow receives all color tips), or combinations of these. Can also be played at hanab.live - I've got close to 1000 games there. Best (at least imho) is to start playing as a group and develop your own way to play, guided by logics and experience. (And now you know how friends and I spent our time during Corona shutdowns).
The ones I upvoted included
- Root: mixed results with friends, but I like it. There is also a good online adaption in Steam, nice to try it before committing to buying the physical game.
- The Crew, as well as Mission Deep Sea.
- Secret Hitler
I also liked Caverna (again, worker placement).
From other people's posts, think I'll reconsider Betrayal at the house on the hill legacy (need to setup a group for that) and the revised Arkham Horror (we played the original plus various expansions a lot, still have it, but always felt the experience varies wildly between "wow, gg, had a great time" and "meh, what a waste of time", at least after dozens of plays).
It's fun, I love the IP, and it doesn't take 45 minutes to set up.
1. Secret Hitler (or maybe Avalon, which is the strategically marginally richer, but harder to pick up, cousin of Secret Hitler). It's a highly adversarial, intense and fun game. The main downside is that you can't have a relaxed game of Secret Hitler and it tends to expand to take up the whole night (people always want one more game).
2. Code names; more relaxed game, fun even when losing. The main drawback is that it's language focused and everyone needs to have a good command of the English language (at least in the base version of the game), which can be a problem in more international groups.
3. Chinatown; easy to pick up and play even for people with no board games experience. The core of the game involves bargaining with other players and trying to strike various deals to trade resources. The game is designed in such a way that you rarely feel like you're losing - all trades generate surplus for both parties, so the core activity of trading feels very satisfying.
I have introduced the games above to multiple groups and, generally, everyone loved all of them. The one exception being Secret Hitler, as some people found it a bit daunting at first or didn't enjoy the intensity of the game. (on the flip side, others absolutely loved it)
Also, I can tell you from experience, being the only Cylon (traitor) in BSG and talking all the Humans (non-traitors) into putting every. single. Human. into the ship's brig (except you) will cause them to be less excited to play that kind of game with you - but it's hilarious and the look on everyone's face once they realize they're screwed is totally worth it. IIRC after that I didn't survive many rounds of Secret Hitler, independently of allegiance. But that's cool.
Was thinking of getting it for my sister who lives in Munich, but I wonder how people in Germany feel about this casual Nazi game?
Luckily, one of the coolest aspects of SH is that's it's licenced under Creative Commons! So you can just download and print the rules and paper version of all the game pieces, right from their official webpage. This means there has been a vibrant community of modders who have made e.g. a star wars themed version.
For this reason alone, you should still go buy it! But I wish there was an officially licensed alternative like "Secret Palpatine" or something.
Some day we need to do a list of MegaGames, that is funnier.
And in classic board game enthusiast fashion, we are acquiring games faster than we can play them.
Disney Villainous Badder & Badder [0]
A 3-character expansion to Disney's Villainous game series. I like the game because the rules are pretty easy to learn so kids and adults can understand and play it, and with the ever-expanding universe, there are more and more favorite characters coming out. This one in particular includes Syndrome (The Incredibles), Lotso (Toy Story 3), and Madam Mim (The Sword in the Stone). I actually haven't played all the characters, but it seems to be pretty well-balanced.
Future Me Problems [1]
A game by a web comic artist whose work I enjoy (Sarah Anderson). It's super simple to pick up, and the art is cute, and the premise of the game is just how hard you can slack off. Good for kids and families.
Hand to Hand Wombat [2]
I can't leave a review of this game because this game is a 3+ player game and my wife and I haven't gotten around to hosting a game night. But the premise is that everyone is supposed to build a tower with their eyes closed, and the "bad wombat" (whose identity no one knows) must sabotage. Sort of a mix of tower-building and mafia, I suppose.
Dune Imperium Rise of Ix [3]
My boss actually bought this for me and I haven't gotten around to playing it, but its an expansion to Dune Imperium, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Mechanically it's pretty deep, so not recommended for non-gamers, but it's a fun twist on the deck-building genre.
Marvel Dice Throne [4]
I've never played a Dice Throne game before, but Marvel Dice Throne is pretty fun. With 8 characters to play as and lots of ways to sabotage your opponents, no two games are ever the same.
Verdant [5]
This is a pretty easy game to pick up, we've played with my in-laws. It's a spatial competitive "puzzle" game (aim is to optimally place your rooms and plants such that you maximize the favorable conditions for each plant and room). A nice blend of strategy and min-maxing. Somehow, despite my min-maxing strategies, my mother-in-law managed to win in our last game, which either says a lot about the game, or about my strategies.
Mind Mgmt [6]
OK, not technically a 2022 game for some reason, but this is a super fun deduction game. One player secretly moves their piece around the map and the rest of the players has to "interview" various tiles to determine where/when the character is. We haven't played past the training mission, but once you start playing the real game, there's a system they call the "SHIFT" system which adds more mechanics to the game depending on which team won. I like the idea, and the game itself is super fun and the art is nice as well.
Honorable Mentions: not board games, but puzzles!
Vizzles [7]
A regular puzzle with themed "riddles/puns" (the ones we've done so far were plays on words of movies and books)
Odd Pieces [8]
Construct a puzzle that is _slightly_ different from what you see on the box (the "lore" is that the puzzle you construct is at a moment in the future of the scene played out in the box).
While video games are enjoyable (just finished collecting all 400 Pokemon in Pokemon Scarlet), sometimes you can't beat a nice screen-free night with friends/family.
[0] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/352764/disney-villainous...
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/360177/future-me-problem...
[2] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/356909/hand-hand-wombat
[3] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/342031/dune-imp...
[4] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/348406/marvel-dice-thron...
[5] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/334065/verdant
[6] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284653/mind-mgmt-psychic...
[7] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelmilham/vizzles-vi...
Crew Mission Deep Sea
Wingspan
Azul
Lost Ruins of Arnak
Root
Macao
Viticulture
Castles of Burgundy