Radlands

2 Plays

Back when Radlands launched on Kickstarter, I had already determined that Roxley’s other popular dueling game, Dice Throne, wasn’t for me.  To be frank, dueling games aren’t exactly among my all-time favorite tabletop genres, and only the very cream of the crop seem to really excite me. So while I appreciated the psychedelic color palette and premium post-apocalyptic production that Damien Mammoliti, Manny Trembley and the Roxley team were bringing with this new offering, I had no intention of biting.  That all changed when Dan Thurot (Space-Biff) published a glowing preview of this card game.

Dan’s overwhelming positivity about the style and substance of Radlands was enough to reel me in for a pledge, and this month was the moment of truth where I finally received my copy.  As Roxley productions tend to go, Radlands was immediately impressive straight from the unboxing.  The actual game fits into a compact box that includes a couple card decks and chunky water discs.  The deluxe version of the game (only available directly from Roxley) is exponentially more remarkable with a stylish magnetic box, indestructible plastic cards, and premium water discs.  I’m the type who frequently lacks restraint, so I of course opted for the deluxe version plus the player mats which require a larger, standard sized game box to hold the mats and small box.

While I have encountered my fair share of deluxe games with upgraded components and accessories that made me question their purpose and value, Radlands is not one of these games.  It was immediately obvious that these fancier cards and tokens enhance the tactility and durability of the game, while the player mats supplement the flow and organization of your actions and pieces.  That’s a great start when digging into a new game, but how is the actual design?

From the get-go, Radlands shows its mechanical polish and elegance within its compact rulebook and minimalist card text and iconography.  Your turn consists of three simple steps:

1. Advance and activate your event cards
2. Replenish your water supply and draw a card to your hand
3. Take any number of actions as much as you’d like

You always start with 3 water discs each turn, and these serve to both restrict and fuel your action economy.  Most actions available to you cost water.  Drawing an extra card costs two water.  Playing a card costs 0-4 water, depending on the strength of that card.  Activating card abilities requires water.  Any post-apocalyptic world worth its salt makes water king.  And as always, it’s a slippery thing, that water.  You can’t stockpile water discs from one round to the next… it always resets to 3.  The only trick you have up your sleeve is a permanent water tower that sits in your player area, where you can spend one water this turn to pick up the card now and spend that card later to earn yourself a fourth water token for a turn.

Yet, because gaining extra cards into your hand from a shared draw pile is tricky enough already, cards can serve another purpose that doesn’t cost you a single precious drop of H2O.  Instead of paying to play a card into your area, you can simply discard it to use its junk effect.  But ‘junk effect’ is a bit of an oxymoron, because these effects prove to be endlessly enticing and massively useful.

But what’s even the point of all this watery wheeling and dealing to play, activate, or junk cards?  The explanation is simple, really.  And nothing explains it better than the opening page of the Radlands rulebook:

You and another player represent competing tribes desperate for scarce resources in a battle to the death.  Whoever eliminates all three of the enemy’s camps wins.  And boy does it hurt to lose a camp.

Camps are powerful starting cards the function somewhat similarly to the draw deck of person and event cards.  Each player will be dealt 6 camp cards from an excitingly diverse deck of 34, and you simultaneously select and reveal 3 to be your lineup.  Each camp offers a mighty ability that comes with a cost.  Stronger abilities cost more water to trigger each turn, while selecting better camp cards in general means that you’ll start the game with less person and event cards in your hand.  It’s a tradeoff where you must decide whether to come out punching fast and early with a bigger hand of cards or hope to protect your camps long enough for their extra-useful effects to fully payoff.

As the battle begins, you’ll be placing people in front of your camps to protect them from harm; most attacks can only damage unprotected cards, or cards at the front of each column.  When a card takes a hit, it is turned sideways, meaning it is one more hit away from being completely destroyed and its abilities cannot be used until the card is repaired.  The unique thing about camps is that you can always use their ability, even when the card is damaged.

So the people cards act as both a buffer for your camps as well as momentum for your objective.  While the draw pile contains a thrilling variety of characters and abilities, you quickly grow familiar with the cast and then learn how use them to your advantage or defend against them from your opponent.  The event cards are equally useful and fearsome, but they rarely trigger immediately when played.  Usually, an event card will take one, two, or even three rounds to trigger, where an opponent can scramble to brace themself for impact.

Once you start to strategically synergize your characters, camps, events, abilities, and junk effects together, Radlands becomes a kaleidoscopic harmony of back and forth blows.  In a recent game, I constructed a combo that quickly irked my wife thanks to its devastating effects.  I utilized both a sniper and a catapult to circumvent her defenses and blow up one of her camps in a single turn.  It cost me a lot of water to pull off, thus I had to carefully construct and execute this strategy over multiple turns.  I had both of these cards defended so well that I managed to blow up two of her camps in quick succession.

Immediately, Camille was protesting the unfairness of my combo.  Yet I had put in the hard work to make it happen, so I gleefully basked in my glorious progress.  My glee was short-lived.  Camille had a massive hand of cards at the time, and she found the perfect opportunity to unleash a firehose of junk effects while triggering powerful card abilities of her own.  Within minutes, I went from having three thriving camps protected by many characters to one limping camp protected by a single card.  What just hit me?!?

With the tables quickly turned on me, I was suddenly facing down a huge army of her own with only one measly person in my area and a only a couple cards in hand to back him up.  Yikes.  Fortunately, I was not without hope, for one of the cards in my hand was none other than Famine.  Famine is a delightfully brutal event card that wipes out all of both players’ character cards but one.  Since I only had one character card out anyway, this was suddenly the perfect time for widespread starvation.  Normally, once famine is played, it takes an entire round to trigger, meaning Camille would have had more than enough time to finish me off before losing her army.  But it just so happened that one of the camps I had drafted, the only surviving camp in my tribe, was miraculously the Omen Clock.  Spend 1 water to advance an event.

And just like that, I played the famine card, advanced it to immediate activation, and wiped out her army in an instant.  The playing field was level once more.  The remainder of our game was a desperate rush to deal the final blow, but Camille ultimately emerged victorious.

While many will point to the giants of dueling card games that inspired Radlands, such as Magic: The Gathering, and wonder what’s new here, I’ll keep pointing to that small, beautiful box that it comes in.  Gorgeous production.  Compact package.  Tight gameplay.  Tense experience.  There’s no need to sell your soul to an immortal card game with an endless stream of new packs and cards and expansions that will scare off newcomers from it’s growing complexity as it consumes your money and home like a black hole.  Besides, I’ve already got the board game hobby in general to do that for me.  I don’t need a sub-genre of living card games to double the black hole hobbies in my life.  Especially when Radlands gives me all the glorious excitement of dueling in a single, small box. 

Current Rating: 9/10

Anno 1800

1 Play

Call me crazy, but my experience with Anno 1800 compares must closely to budgeting and accounting.  It’s long and tedious, yet it somehow gives you a satisfying sensation at the end of it all.  I just don’t know if my enjoyment from the economic engine building outweighs the feeling of work.

That aura of tedium hits you the moment you open the box to set up the game.  Bland colors, icons, and illustrations are littered across endless piles of tiles that must be organized like a spreadsheet across the game board.  Player aids come in the form of flimsy paper featuring a wall of text explaining the many actions you can take.  The most appealing visuals in the game ironically come from the components you don’t even interact with while playing: the box face and the back of the game board.

Fortunately, once you get into the gameplay, you find that individual turn actions tend to be simple and quick.  The complexity and analysis paralysis of Anno 1800 stems from the planning it takes to get a card in your hand played onto the table.  That’s the aim of the game, to play out your hand of cards, as these will make up the bulk of your points.  Plus, the first person to empty their hand triggers the end game and gets 7 bonus points.  The problem is that often, playing a card from your hand feels like it is a thousand actions away.

Perhaps even more than budgeting and accounting, Anno 1800 is like navigating through a corn maze.  Your hand of cards is the end of the maze, and the dozens of tile types mixed with various workers and actions are the many paths you can take.  You’ll have to send your brain on detours, in circles, or to dead ends and back in order to find your way out of this economic field. Progress is frustrating yet fulfilling all at the same time.  It’s like you start the game in a hole and the only way out is to dig yourself deeper.

You’ll need more worker cubes and better worker cubes if you want to thrive in this world.  The problem is that each cube added to your board also comes with another card you’ll need to fulfill.  While that should feel like a golden opportunity to earn more points and bonuses (which it is), it honestly feels more like a painful extension of the game length.  This is one of those weird systems where the game length can vary widely depending on whether players rush the end or not.  It seems like if the entire group were to get lost in this maze of engine building, then the ending would never come.

It certainly can be satisfying to have a lengthy game of growth and snowballing, but much of that is undercut here by copious luck of the draw.  Your hand could have a combination of cards that align together neatly, or their requirements could be all over the place.  Thankfully, you can trade with other players and borrow their tiles to get what you need.  But in a 2-player game, there will be tiles that are never built and therefore cards that can never be played.  There are of course ways to get around bad luck of the draw, but these detours come with a cost—mainly action efficiency.  There’s further luck of the draw from cards and tiles that come out of other decks and provide end-game points or permanent bonuses.  With the amount of freedom of choice and long-term planning that factors into Anno 1800, you’re not likely to see luck be the determining factor in the game, but it still feels disproportionately lucky for a 2+ hour game.

For a design with a player-driven tempo and crucial trading core, one would think that the player interaction should be strong here.  Yet that is not the case.  Trading is abstracted down to one player spending trade tokens to use another player’s tile, and that player getting a gold token for it.  The gameplay here is mostly heads down and focused on reaching the next personal objective while occasionally borrowing stuff from others.  The interaction here is a far cry from Wallace’s Age of Steam and Brass.

Although our final turns provided a nice climax of elation by activating card bonuses, achieving long-term goals, and emptying our hands, I’m not sure I want to trudge through this labyrinth of cardboard again.

Current Rating: 6/10

Stockpile: Epic Edition

1 Play

Stockpile: Epic Edition is the first game I’ve played that features stock investments, manipulation, and insider information.  It turned out to be precisely as engaging as I had hoped, yet I still have some reservations about the overall package.

The Epic Edition is a complete bundle of the base game and all of its expansions, so us newcomers were essentially thrown into the deep end of the pool here.  But it turns out that this was for the best.  While the expansions add significant time and supplemental mechanisms to the experience, they prove to make the session far more dynamic and interesting.  You see, these expansions feel less like supplemental variety and more likely the core game realizing its full, evolved potential.

Without one expansion, in the 1st edition base game you have a vanilla game board with companies that all have the exact same value track.  There are no high-risk investment opportunities or low-risk steady dividend options to weigh against each other.  Likewise, the base game has no bonds.  Bonds are an easy way to make money on your excess cash each round, and they quickly show their merit for players who have far more cash than they can possibly spend during each bidding phase.  The Epic Edition also includes action cards, asymmetric player abilities, far more interesting forecast dice, and tempting commodities.  

Essentially, the Epic Edition makes the standard edition look like an unfinished concept with a bland game board, an excess cash problem, and a flat playing experience.  I’m sure it’s still somewhat of a pleasure to play thanks to the interesting concept at the heart of it all, but the base game seems like a downright crime now that I’ve tried the more interesting and thematic Epic Edition.  

Of course, Stockpile isn’t the only game where fans would declare its expansions a must.  A Feast for Odin and Viticulture are a couple other examples where the expansion makes the base game feel incomplete.  The hardest part to swallow comes in the form of the value proposition (go figure) of Stockpile: Epic Edition.  The complete bundle indeed does include two expansions, all promo cards, and all stretch goals unlocked from the game’s Kickstarter, but at the end of the day it’s still an hour-long game in a standard sized box with some cards, cardboard tokens, a few dice, a few wood pieces, and a game board.  So how on earth this game comes out to having a $105 MSRP is beyond me.  Perhaps the publisher uses a more expensive manufacturer, or they simply feel that the price is justified by the extra gameplay and design content provided.  But as a potential customer who would consider picking up my own copy, I’m left baffled by the price tag.  For merely $15 more, you could purchase the mammoth production of Oath from Leder Games.

In all fairness this version of Stockpile can only be bought directly from the publisher for a discounted price of $80.  But even then, I’m still hesitant to bite.  Sure, the interaction and experience provided by Stockpile: Epic Edition was splendid, although I’d prefer it to end a round or two earlier.  And perhaps if it was the only option out there for me to scratch a stock market gaming itch, then the cost wouldn’t hurt so much.  But Stockpile will very quickly have some serious market competition in the form of the $34 Bear Raid coming from publisher Board Game Tables and designer Ryan Courtney.

Time will tell if Bear Raid is able to hit the same sweet spot at a fraction of the price, but the current forecast shows that Stockpile: Epic Edition might be a surprisingly bad investment for a really good game.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Mind MGMT

2 Plays

My relationship with hidden movement games is starting to feel like one of those inevitable “It’s not you… it’s me” sort of breakups.

I found Jaws to be charmingly thematic, yet aggressively tedious and long.  Even though I got the most exciting job of being the fearsome great white shark, I was done with the game after one play.  

I enjoyed Captain Sonar, but the game had far too many barriers for getting it to the table, and so that box was fired away like a torpedo from our collection as well.  

I suppose the hidden movement game that’s had the best chance of really sticking the landing has been the small head-to-head card game, Fugitive, with its simple and slick bluffing.  We first played it during the summer of 2020 where I gave the game a very positive rating.  The only problem is… Fugitive has collected dust on my shelf ever since.

In other words, hidden movement games have consistently failed to capture my heart.  I was hoping that Mind MGMT would be the one to break the mold.  Especially considering that the critical connoisseur of hidden movement games, Space-Biff, declared this one to be his favorite of the bunch.  While I agree that there is something special here, I just don’t currently have the fire to pursue it further.

Part of my ambivalence toward this genre is just how restrictive gameplay typically is for the hidden mover.  I understand why it has to be this way, because if the hidden mover is not at least somewhat predictable then the seekers would have no chance of finding them.  But when you’re left to spend most turns deciding which space out of three you should move into, and one of those spaces is the most obvious choice, then all of the excitement of the game depends entirely on your opponents and whether they are hot on your trail.

The core loop of Mind MGMT splits the turn structure between the hidden recruiter and the agents who are trying to capture them.  The recruiter moves one space, then two of the four agents take their turn.  The recruiter is trying to navigate into spaces where they are able to recruit more figures, once twelve are recruited they win the game.  Agents can gather clues about where the recruiter has been (and when) as they to try to piece together their path and position, they win by figuring out the exact location of the recruiter and capturing them from that place.

Once you are past the initial training session, the strategy opens up a bit more for both teams where the recruiter can also move immortals each turn to help secretly protect them while openly making progress toward victory.  Yet the agents can shakedown the immortals and try to guess and reduce the recruiter’s desired sites.  The game also features a “Shift” system where the losing side of each game gets more goodies that can help them win the next session while altering the feel of the experience.

But as I said, if you are the recruiter in a particular session where the agents are floundering throughout, then you essentially spend an entire game snailing a path through the board until you reach an easy victory.  Conversely, if the agents can catch on to your trail early, then things get much more interesting as you decide how to prioritize progress against survival.

I’ve yet to try the game as an agent, but it seems that the agent experience is more consistently engaging.  For those who enjoy deduction games, you’ll basically be deducing the path and objective points of the recruiter in a race to catch them before the end of the last round or before they recruit all 12 figures.  That said, my opponent who played as the agents seems to still prefer The Search for Planet X and Cryptid over Mind MGMT when it comes to deduction experiences.

Ironically, I still find that my favorite hidden movement style game is one where the hidden thing never actually moves.  I’m referring to Treasure Island, where Long John Silver marks an X on their secret map and spends the entire game manipulating the pirates away from the treasure.  Rather than focus the entire experience in on dead simple deducible movement, it elects to focus on the bluffing, double bluffing, clue giving, and pirate greed of the players at the table.

It’ll probably have to stay a pirate’s life for me.  But for those who are bigger fans of the hidden movement genre, I’d say you really can’t go wrong with Mind MGMT.

Current Rating: 6/10

Quantum

1 Play

Quantum has long been on my wishlist of games to acquire and play, but I’ll be honest, I had given up on any hope of that happening.  This one has been out of print for nearly a decade, and the resell market is withholding their copies for anything beneath $100 plus shipping.  

I figured my best shot of playing Quantum would be if I miraculously came across another gamer who owned it and invited me to play.  That is until I found myself at a board game sellers market in Mesa, Arizona, merely a few Saturdays ago where there it sat atop a pile of used games for sale.  I couldn’t believe my eyes, and better yet, the game was selling for only $50.  It was the fastest I ever snatched up a game for sale.  It turns out, this copy had never even been played before—the deck was still in shrink-wrap.  You win some, and you lose some, but this time… I won some alright.

When I finally gathered a group of 4 around the table, I was brimming with excitement for the chance to play this critically acclaimed unicorn relic.  Quantum is a design that manages to do a whole lot with merely a handful of chunky D6 dice and some planet tiles numbered 8, 9, or 10.  Each die represents a ship, and it’s current value designates the type of ship: it’s combat power, movement capabilities, and special ability.  Lower numbers are larger ships that move slower but hit harder.  Higher numbers are easy to take out, but these smaller ships are effective at getting around quickly.

You get three actions on your turn which can range from moving and attacking to rerolling your dice, but one of the most important actions is to construct a quantum cube on a planet.  You see, Quantum is a quick, punchy racing game where the first player to put out all 5 of their cubes wins the game.  You’ll have to bring multiple ships in orbit to different planets to take the construct action.  If a planet displays the number 9, that means that your dice must orbit the planet and their values must sum up to exactly 9 for you to construct a quantum cube there.

The game starts out with plenty of options for players to surround planets.  The problem is that the construct action eats up 2 of your 3 action points, so most turns see you setting yourself up to place a cube next turn and hoping your orbiting ships survive an entire round in the meantime.  But alas, Quantum is meant to be an aggressive game, so it’s rare to have a player display a huge target on their back and not see any opponent take the shot.

If one player has an obvious lead with more cubes out than the rest, that’s the equivalent of putting a self-imposed bounty on their head for their neighboring hunters.  Yet even if you’re lagging behind in dead last, your ships are never safe from bullying.  Quantum encourages players to bully each other with multiple incentives:

• To keep the leader from winning
• To increase your dominance level and decrease others’ dominance levels by winning battles—once your dominance level reaches 6, you automatically place out a cube anywhere on the board, then reset your level to 1
• To prevent a planet-orbiting player from placing a cube on their next turn
• To make space around a planet’s orbit for your own ships

With all of these great reasons to go after an enemy ship, it can be easy for one player to incidentally become the group’s punching bag where they find themself in an endless cycle of getting their ships back out onto the board and losing all their progress between turns.  I saw that happen to an opponent in our first game, and it didn’t seem like they had the most thrilling experience as a result, but the beauty of Quantum is that this game is filler-length, so the hopeless plays don’t last forever.

One of my favorite aspects of this game is the combos you can execute from ship abilities and advance cards.  By placing out cubes or taking the research action, you can earn yourself powerful cards that either grant a one-time effect or recurring benefits.  I acquired one card that let me reroll dice any time I rolled them (for combat or reconfiguring ships), and another that earned me a fourth ship to add to my fleet.  These cards are literal game changers, and one even allowed a player to snatch victory from my grasp.  The winner had a card that let him increase his dominance by two instead of one every time he won an attack, plus he earned another card the instantly bumped his dominance up two more, so he managed to place two cubes in the same turn by both constructing and attacking for a blindside victory.  It was a most impressive combo that alluded to the depth that lurks beneath Quantum’s simple premise.

Like Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (one of my favorite games), Quantum is also a space-faring 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate), yet it crams this experience into an impressively small, short, and streamlined package.  While the production is showing its age (the art is stale but the graphic design is still perfectly functional), and picked-on players won’t always have the best of times, it’s still a worthy addition to my collection.  I’m not sure the game quite lived up to my mile-high anticipation, yet I still enjoyed it as a very slick and clever tactical game.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Siege of Runedar

2 Plays

It was a long wait, my friends, but The Siege of Runedar finally arrived on my doorstep nearly two weeks ago.  It’s not available in the US yet (it could be many months before we see it hit US retailers, if publisher Ludonova’s other games are anything to go by).  I had to order my copy straight from the heart of Spain, but fortunately the box has both Spanish and English components.  Immediately upon opening the box, Siege of Runedar starts showing off the tricks up its sleeve.

The box insert is unlike anything I’ve seen before.  Rather than existing to simply hold components, there is not one inch of this insert that was designed as a storage space.  Instead, the corners of the insert rise far above the edges of the box rim and are shaped to be fortress towers.  Beside these towers are three walls and a channel referred to as the “Tunnel.”  The towers, walls, and tunnel surround the heart of the fortress containing five sections: The Carpenter’s for working wood, the Foundry for working metal, the Tannery for working leather, the Central Chamber which holds your gold, and the Tunnel Entrance Courtyard where you’ll be digging through rubble to escape to victory.  The box also comes with large cardboard punch outs and plenty of double-sided tape to decorate the floors of these sections and the wall of the Courtyard.  Wherever you open your copy of Runedar, be sure to have a pair of scissors ready for the tape.

The rest of the production is more standard board gaming components—wood tokens, standees, several decks, combat dice, and so on.  As I’ve come to expect from Ludonova, it’s a solid package with excellent art—this time by Andrew Bosley (Everdell, Tapestry).  But the rad insert is only the first twist that Siege of Runedar brings to gaming table!  Designer, Reiner Knizia, has a few design tricks up his sleeve that he shows off in this his second deck-building game (the first being Quest for El Dorado).  More on that later…

Runedar is a challenging cooperative game that reminds me of Ghost Stories / Last Bastion in a lot of ways.  Each player controls their own figure which they move around to unique spaces in the central play area to perform different actions.  One of the core objectives is to survive and fight off enemies that are constantly appearing and advancing in on your valuables from four different directions.  In-between rolling dice to ward off enemies, you’ll be working to progress and improve your abilities and preparations.  All the while, the game chips away at your chances of survival as it ramps up in tension and difficulty.  Speaking of difficulty, even the “normal” mode presents a real challenge where you are far more likely to lose than win… especially in your early plays of the game.

Well now that I’ve made The Siege of Runedar and Ghost Stories sound like the exact same game, let’s talk about how they differ.  Survival is secondary in the Siege of Runedar.  You’ll of course lose if you don’t survive, but you’ll only win if you dig through the mountain tunnel and escape with some amount of gold before it’s all snatched up by the orcs.  As I mentioned, Runedar is a deck-builder, but it does deck-building in a way that I’ve never encountered in other games.  Of course, players start out with same personal deck of 12 cards, with two of these cards being ‘junk cards’ in the form of Orcs.  But then things get really interesting from there.

You’ll start the game by shuffling your deck and immediately placing two cards unseen into your face down discard pile.  From there you’ll draw five cards, play them on your first turn, and then draw the remaining five cards to play on your second turn.  Then you’ll do it all over again: shuffle your deck of twelve, put two cards into your discard pile, play two hands using the remaining 10 cards.  So with each cycle of your deck, there will always be two cards that don’t make it to your hand.  This instantly brings a fascinating twist to the deck-building formula.  You always hope that one or both of your orc cards end up in the discard pile where you won’t have to deal with them on this cycle.  Furthermore, you can have a hunch for what cards remain in your draw pile, but you can never be sure.

This element of mystery to your cycling deck means that you’ll frequently be making decisions based on potential risks and opportunities that are constantly hiding within your draw pile.  Aside from this unpredictability, your deck is fairly easy to track because it will always contain exactly twelve cards.  Any time you gain a new card into your deck, it must go straight into your hand where it immediately replaces another unused card.  This is a brilliant mechanism, because you are instantly gratified by being able to use a powerful card in the same turn you gained it, but it also means you have to decide which other card in your hand to get rid of forever (and you can never get rid of orc cards).

Each card can be spent on only one action: movement, working materials, close or long-range combat, and digging at the tunnel.  A side-board displays up to 5 available cards that any player can contribute resources to by working at the various sites.  Once a card has all the necessary resources, it is ready for any player to claim at any time on their turn.  And here lies the first cooperative element of Runedar.  Typically in deck-builders, you’ll use your own hand of cards to instantly buy more cards for your own deck.  Here, the effort requires the help of all players and often takes several turns of contributions before anyone can upgrade their deck.  So I suppose one player could hog all the best cards for themself and enjoy a deck built on the blood, sweat, and tears of their teammates, but that’s a recipe ripe for failure.  It’s far more likely that players will be happy to help a teammate acquire a juicy card, especially because it feels good to churn out these resources onto the hungry card market.

Speaking of the hungry card market, even the mechanism that refills this market is clever.  The central space of the fortress, the Chamber containing your gold, is an important place to end your turn occasionally, as that is the only way you can refill or flush out cards in the market.  When you add more cards to the market, you’ll have to decide which of three draw piles to pull from: Yellow, Grey, and Red (Good, Better, and Best).  In our first play of the game, I found myself drawn to the Red deck early, tempted by it’s powerful possibilities.  Like the One Ring of power, my wife tried to talk me down from its poisonous promises, but I could not resist its pull.  Undoubtedly too soon in the game, I began to refill our market with one or two Red cards, some Grey cards, and not enough Yellow cards.  The problem is that the better cards demand far more resources before you can claim them, and resources are hard to scrounge up when you deck is mostly made up of measly starting cards.  I’m sure that somewhere in Germany, Reiner’s designer senses were tingling and he was chuckling at my foolish greed.  But the mere fact that he lets you decide how greedy to be—to have to find the right pace of card progression—means that Runedar provides another layer of experience and progression over the course of repeat plays.

It’s likely (and I think it wise) that players diversify and specialize their own decks into a more narrowed range of action options.  The reason for this is that movement is inefficient; it eats up one, two, or sometimes three cards of your five-card hand if you want to do multiple things in multiple places.  If you can loosely divide up areas of the board between players, then your turns can really get cooking.  Of course, the good doctor can’t simply allow players to get too comfortable, so he throws a wrench into things with the deck of 50 siege cards.

Any time you start your turn with one or both orc cards in your hand, the first thing you have to do is play those cards by drawing and resolving a siege card for each.  These siege cards are events such as adding one or more orc figures to the space outside a specific wall, advancing orcs inward (first on top of the wall, then into the fortress, and finally into your Central Chamber where they each steal one gold before instantly vanishing), or activating the catapult or siege tower.  

These siege cards slowly get more brutal as the game marches on, so it’s essential for players to be prepared with upgraded decks of weapons and tools.  That’s especially true because there are plenty of different ways to instantly lose the game such as running out of gold or getting hit by too many catapults.  But rather than instantly blindsiding you with the effects of an event, the game usually allows players a little time to anticipate and put out these fires before they do real damage.  

The rules encourage you to communicate the problems and capabilities of your upcoming turn based on your hand as you work together to survive.  Yet the fact that each card provides multiple different action options means that quarterbacking is much more difficult for alpha gamers when they can only see their own hand.  So far, I find that Runedar strikes a perfect balance of cooperation, teamwork, and interaction.  The high level of interaction is especially impressive here, as that is commonly something that is naturally minimized by your standard deck-building game.

I’ve spoken about a lot of the fascinating nuance to this design, yet there is still so much more I haven’t covered.  Such as the mercenary cards, where you can spend two of your precious gold to instantly activate a one-time effect that will bail you out of trouble or boost your chances of success (the game comes with five mercenary cards, but I would say that the five extra promo cards that bring your total up to ten are essential additions to this game—even if you have to make your own—simply because they are awesome).  These mercenary cards are relentlessly enticing, but if you aren’t careful with your spending then you might simply accelerate your defeat as the gold supply dries up.  The combat dice add a nice element of drama as well where some rolls result in painful failures while others surprise you with glorious successes; and you can even play multiple weapon cards together to increase the number of dice rolled.  The most mundane yet important action of the game, digging debris from the tunnel, is sprinkled with exciting moments of goblins emerging from the mountain and demanding bribes or death like obnoxious trick or treaters that interrupt you from your work.  The trolls ride into your fortress on siege towers and likewise block your escape path while the catapults hit spaces on your card market and obliterate the beautiful tools and weapons you’ve been working so hard to acquire.  Your dwarf can stand atop the tower and snipe enemies on or outside the walls, and while it requires a lot of movement from your cards to get to the top of a tower (dwarves have short legs, you know), your crossbow is your only defense against an incoming siege tower or catapult.

There is certainly an active presence of drama-infused luck to this design, and the gameplay is minimalist in a lot of characteristically Knizian ways, but as most Knizias go, there is so much juicy nuance to it all!  I don’t love many cooperative games (too many are bloated and fiddly or lacking in tension, challenge, and replayability), but so far I love The Siege of Runedar.  I really do.  

Currently, the main thing I wish was different about this game is the game length… or I at least wish the game length was adjustable.  As is, this epic game is well suited for a long, lively cooperative event.  The game box may say 60-90 minutes, but so far we’ve been easily exceeding 2 hours.  I’ve seen some comments from other early players who also feel that the game can drag a bit.  I would love to see a variant where you don’t have to dig through all five blocks of tunnel rubble, or where you skip past the first 20% of the game, but that type of adjustment is far easier said than done.  There are too many elements to this design—the quantities of siege cards and gold and rubble and troll tiles and catapult cards and market board spaces—that are all perfectly balanced for anyone besides Knizia himself to reliably shorten the playtime.

The other aspect that is likely to frustrate some folks is that fickle Lady Luck and the amount of sway she has on your success.  While our first play had plenty of great rolls and draws, and we lost with only a few chunks of rubble left to clear, our second play was unbelievably brutal.  In play two, nearly every combat attempt was one epic fail after another, and those pesky orc cards just wouldn’t leave us alone—we couldn’t discard them to save our lives.  It was like our dwarves where hopelessly drunk and wildly swinging their axes around with the handle end out.  And when they tried to aim at anything with their crossbows, their unkempt hair fell down over their eyes and they blindly launched an arrow careening into outer space. All the while orcs were relentlessly streaming in from every direction. That’s how uncannily bad the dice rolls and hand draws were for us.

My hope is that we eventually see an expansion from Reiner that brings further excitement to Runedar, accelerates the action, and maybe even helps mitigate the occasionally horrible luck.  The mercenary cards (including the promo cards) are certainly a brilliant addition that do exactly this, but I’d love to see this thrilling romp expand and evolve even further.  Regardless, I think we’ll be enjoying many more plays of The Siege of Runedar as we keep trying to scrap our way to our first “normal mode” victory.  That’s plenty challenging on its own, and there are still two harder modes on top of that!  I want to meet the human who beats Epic Mode so I can shake their hand in awe before accusing them of filthy lies and cheating.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post Candid Cardboard: 1st Impressions of Siege of Runedar, Radlands, Mind MGMT, Anno 1800, Stockpile: Epic Edition, & Quantum appeared first on Bitewing Games.

I always look forward to comparing, ranking, and declaring my top games of the year.  When I tune in to other content creators’ lists, I’m frequently fuming or cheering at their selections and omissions: 

“How could you leave this MASTERPIECE completely off your list?!?” 

“Thank you!  THAT’s what I’m talking about!  This gal just gets it!” 

“Yeah, I played your favorite game of the year, and I seem to recall it being a HOT MESS!”

“Can confirm, this game is freaking LEGENDARY.”

But at the end of the day, these lists represent the unique experiences that people shared with a particular design, and they reflect one’s individual tastes and preferences within a medium that mixes art, entertainment, and narrative.  Ultimately, these lists are a celebration of designers, illustrators, publishers, and countless others who had a vision, worked tirelessly to make it a reality, and succeeded at bring joy to others.  

Despite my vain, passionate feelings on this subject, I fully acknowledge that my rankings are no more right than others.  All I can offer is some insight into how this list might provide some unique benefits.  So let’s talk about that for a moment.

Every hobby has it’s own subgroups of individuals and types.  You have the casual dabblers—those who merely enjoy a simple, convenient sampling here and there.  The hardcore campers—those who find their sweet spot, set up camp, and pay no mind to their wider surroundings because they are content with digging deeper and deeper into their cozy niche.  Then there’s the hungry explorers—this is what I consider myself within the industry.  We explorers set out to find the very best within each region, the cream of the crop.  And there are very few categories that we don’t extract enjoyment from.  We certainly stub plenty of toes and hit plenty of dead ends along the way, but the constant feeling of discovery within a world of creativity makes it all worth it.

I’m likely one of the more critical explorers in this hobby, as I’ll hold no punches against games that don’t land for me. Concerning tabletop games, my strongest biases are probably against sprawling, cumbersome cooperative designs and any game that heavily prioritizes tangible style over mechanical substance.  You’re not gonna see these types of games on this list because they just don’t speak to me from a design perspective, so I didn’t even seek out an opportunity to play them.  Anything that flaunts its components or theme so hard that I have difficulty seeing a clever and clean mechanical underbelly gives me enough reason to leave it alone while keeping an open ear out for them among the critics I follow.

I’m not surprised by many of the games that have ended up on other’s top 2020 lists.  I’m much more surprised by the games that haven’t ended up on other’s 2020 lists!  These are the unsung gems that I’ve set out to play and analyze to ensure that they’ve gotten the love and attention they deserve.  This is why my list is debuting in March of 2021 rather than December of 2020.  And this is why I’ll return at the end of this year to revisit 2020’s releases again, just like I did with my Best Games of 2019 list.  Come December, we’ll be looking back at the Lovers, Keepers, Dumpers, Flingers, and Seekers of 2020 after an extra year of playtime.  As for now, we’ll stick with my current top 15 board games of 2020. 

Fair warning: you may find some of these selections to be upsetting. Several of my top 15 are either second editions, re-implementations, or basically re-printings.  And for those of you who feel inclined to protest, I suggest you first direct your pitchforks and torches to popular reviewers Shut Up and Sit Down or No Pun Included, who hilariously and entirely selected games that existed before 2020 as their top games of 2020.  I only jest, they’re a bunch of great folks who had great picks all-around.

I debated whether or not to include these remixed games among my rankings. Ultimately, I realized that without their 2020 versions, I may never have discovered these absolute bangers.  If that excuse is not good enough for you, then you are welcome to simply cross those out on my list and shift everything else beneath them upwards.

Finally, let me just add one more hot take:. Anybody who claims that 2020 was a weak year for board game releases has simply spoken too soon…  or they are a “hardcore camper” in the hobby who is unsatisfied with their particular genre of releases.  This was one of the most excruciating lists I have ever had to rank.  Pushing certain titles down the hierarchy had me writhing in pain.  Leaving several of these gems outside of my top 15 feels like tossing my precious children out of the house, locking the door, and abandoning them to the desolate cold.  I played at least 20 new firecrackers from last year, and at the end of this post I’ll be sharing even more remaining contenders.  2020 was unquestionably a killer year for board game releases.

Top 15 Board Games of 2020

15. Beyond the Sun

The first thing I want to say about Beyond the Sun is that I’m honestly shocked that this game didn’t end up higher in my rankings.  I agree with So Very Wrong About Games’ Mark Bigney in that this is one of the best new Euros of 2020.  But full merits are given to this stellar design and the other 2020 releases that just barely squeezed past it on my personal rankings.

Beyond the Sun is a triumph thanks to its unflinching commitment to being extremely good at one particular thing: A Tech Tree.  The possibilities branch ever outward in this space civilization game where the actions start out few and simple yet quickly multiply into many powerful options.  The strategy of developing your technologies is well-balanced against the opportunities for controlling and colonizing the systems of space.

For anyone looking for the best Euro of 2020, Beyond the Sun is a strong contender.

14. Iwari

Iwari is a breath of fresh air every time I play it.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this gorgeous production is a visual and tactile pleasure.  But there are plenty of games that can reach that bar these days.  What sets Iwari apart from the pack is its simple, breezy gameplay mixed with insanely clever rules.  I can easily recall these 3-2-1 rules from memory: Play up to 3 cards to place 2 pieces in 1 territory, then refill your hand back up to 3.  Boom.  That’s all there is to it.  The only thing that functionally matters about each card is its color.  Play some colors and draw some more.

I’m gonna toss out some phrases like candy on Halloween.  If any of these mean anything to you, particularly if they fill your heart with childlike joy, then you’ll know that Iwari is must-try for you because it evokes strong feelings of the following:

• Cube Rails
• Knizian Elegance
• Dynamic Player Interaction

For the rest of you, Iwari compares quite similarly to the worldwide phenomenon known as Ticket to Ride.  The key differences are that Iwari contains more depth and room for strategy, but feels entirely abstract.  That’s quite easy to forgive because, again, this game is a real looker.

13. Durian

If you aren’t familiar with a publisher known as Oink Games, they are an extremely charming Japanese brand known for their tiny, rectangular boxes crammed with stylish components that make for quick, simple, and (usually) engaging games.  Shut Up and Sit Down does a great job reviewing a whole heaping of their games, even ranking them into tiers from “Worst” to “Average” to “Best.”

The 3 Oink Games that made their top tier include A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Insider, and Startups.  I can confirm that that all 3 of these titles have been hits at our table and keepers in our collection.  Wait, I thought we were supposed to be talking about Durian! Why all this preamble?!  Oh, that’s right.  Because Durian is one of the latest offerings from Oink Games, and I’m here to formally nominate it to be ranked in the Top Tier list alongside the Big 3!

Durian is the type of game you can set down in front of your complexity-averse mother-in-law, get her fully engaged in the competition, and yet still have a blast playing yourself.  That’s exactly what I did very recently when she flew out to help take care of our newborn.  We had such a great time trying the game that we found ourselves back at it the very next night!  

This game of deduction and bluffing sees players acting as clerks running the same store.  Each person displays one inventory card toward everyone else and away from themselves.  You can’t see the types or amounts of fruits on your own card, but you can see all the other cards.  Thus, everybody has imperfect information about how much inventory is in this fruit store.  One at a time, players take an order card from the deck and add it to the center, deciding which of the two options on the card to add as a customer order.  The moment a player feels that the orders exceed the inventory, they can instead ring the bell, calling the grumpy gorilla manager to inspect the problem.  Players lay all the inventory cards face up and determine whether the tattletale made the right call.  If they did, then the previous player (in turn order) takes the blame for taking the last order!  But if not, then the tattletale gets punished for their false alert!  Whoever has the lowest sum of angry manager tokens at game end wins!

Durian just hits the SPOT as a filler game.  It has the perfect amount of luck, drama, suspense, and mystery to make for tense, addictive rounds that end with a thrilling ring of a tiny bell.   Even at 3-players, we’ve had so many memorable rounds.  Despite us playing the game many times, I still haven’t won it a single time.  Yet those moments of me being one decision away from sweet victory, confidently ringing the tiny bell, and watching it all crumble under the gleeful eyes of my mother-in-law as I discover that I was horrifyingly wrong about my own inventory card is a memory that holds a special place in my heart.

12. Fort

From the moment Leder Games announced Fort, I knew we were in for a treat.  How can a game that is illustrated by the legendary Kyle Ferrin and all about being kids who build forts, make and steal friends, and collect toys and pizza not be pure delight?!  Spoilers:  It is pure delight.

Although, you have to come into Fort with the right mindset.  Those who see that this is a “deck builder” and come rolling in with their truckload of associated expectations are either going to be pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed by this subversive design.  Within Fort, you won’t find many of the popular ingredients that most deck builders contain like mega-combo turns or meticulously crafted player decks.  What you will find is refreshing and rare deck building ingredients including significant player interaction.

Fort is less about calculating the entire trajectory of your strategy and more about rolling with the punches.  This works extremely well because the game plays so quickly.  There are also a good handful of icons to learn at the beginning, but they’re well designed and easily remembered thanks to the handy player aids.  While this game contains surprisingly more rules than its appearance suggests, the act of playing Fort feels nimble, whimsical, and joyous.

11. Renature

Ever heard of a little game called Azul?  You know, one of the top selling board games of the past several years?  Well I would suggest that Renature deserves to be the next Azul, and that’s not just because they share the same father (designer Michael Kiesling).  Consider this: both Azul and Renature are pretty games with chunky pieces.  Both games serve up elegant rules above a platter of agonizing decisions with a hearty dollop of cutthroat nastiness on top.  Only Renature is MORE.  More elegant, more agonizing, and much, MUCH nastier.  When the placement of a single domino and a single plant token can cause my wife to say in a burst of rage, “I’m never playing this game with you again,” that’s when you know you’ve found a rare treasure.

In fact, now that I reconsider it, Renature likely won’t reach the same heights as Azul simply because of how evil it allows its participants to be.  Don’t get me wrong, I am in LOVE with the diabolical opportunities this game presents, but you’ll require some thick skin to get through this fiery furnace of fun, especially at 2-players.

You’re probably wondering if I’m even talking about the right design at this point.  Yes, I am talking about the cute, cuddly game with colorful animal dominoes and cheery chunks of foliage and bright sunflower tokens.  Speaking of dominoes, I’m gonna plant my flag right here and declare that this is the greatest domino game of all time.  Come at me, Dominites!!!

10. Cosmic Frog

What a strange beast of a game, that Cosmic Frog.  Across the entire list of my Top 15 Board Games of 2020, this one is likely the most polarizing.  My personal experience with Cosmic Frog up to this point has been ripe with bad luck.  Yet for those who can appreciate the bizarre, refreshing package that this game provides, those moments of horrible luck are part of its memorable charm.

That charm oozes from every inch of the production.  Take one look at the psychedelic art or read a brief description of this whacky concept and you’ll get what I mean.  Players control 2-mile-tall cosmic frogs that leap through the interstellar aether, consuming planetary shards that are stored in their gullets, before disgorging their gullets of valuable terrain into their inter-dimensional vaults.  Simple enough, right?  Only these frogs can hit each other so hard that they vacuum the shards out of each other’s gullets or even blast their victim into another dimension learning their vault unprotected.

This is the only game I’ve ever encountered that transforms turn order into a randomly shuffled deck.  That’s right, on one end of the spectrum you can sometimes have multiple turns in a row, on the other end you might be waiting what feels like AGES for your next turn to show up.  Designer Jim Felli fully embraces this chaos by asking players how far they wish to push their luck.  By making player turns feel like unicorn sightings, players develop this insatiable hunger and greed to milk each turn for all its worth.  The problem is that you only get one free action each turn; if you want to take a second action, you’ll have to spend precious Oomph, and less Oomph in your supply translates to a larger target on your back because Oomph gives frogs significant advantages when spent in combat.

The luck in Cosmic Frog is like a huge serving platter where players must decide how many expensive drinks in fragile glasses they are willing to carry at once.  Successful deliveries can equate to huge gains, but a tilt of the platter can be disastrous.  I’m the type who can’t resist using up all the precious platter real-estate, and thus I’ve landed myself in more than a few self-inflicted messes.

I think at this point you know whether this is game for you.  And if it is for you, then boy are you in for a trip!  So BUCKLE UP!!!

9. Scape Goat

Like Durian, this is another under-the-radar gem that I haven’t seen on ANY top games of 2020 lists.  I can’t exactly blame anyone for judging this game by it’s cover, because one can’t help but assume that the goat puns are the only standout feature here.  Let me be perfectly clear that such brash assumptions are entirely WRONG.

Scape Goat is the epitome of a sleeper hit.  At the time of this writing, which is nearly three months into 2021, this game has a whopping total of 222 owners and 62 ratings and an overall rank of 7,930 on BoardGameGeek.com.  For those of you not familiar with the stats, that’s a depressingly low number for one of the freshest designs in the entire party deduction genre. 

The conventions of social deduction are flipped on their head here.  From the get-go, everybody knows exactly who the Scape Goat of the round is because their individual cards reveal this person to them, except one player’s card is lying to them and that player could be YOU.  

So do you think you’re the Scape Goat?!  Why is she acting that way?  Why did he take that card?!?  You better run to the police before your traitorous gang throws you under the bus!  But hold up, you’ll jeopardize everything if you aren’t actually the Scape Goat…

While your own teammates might scare you off within the game, don’t let the term “party” scare you off about this game.  This one is meant to be played with only 3-6 people.  And if you want experience the most paranoid-induced 5-20 minutes of your gaming career, then you’d be wise to pick up a copy of Scape Goat.

8. New York Zoo

We’re on a roll with the animal games here, so let’s continue with the excellent New York Zoo. What can I say about this delectable racing game featuring diverse polyomino enclosures and colorful animal breeding that hasn’t already been said? I’ve already spent paragraphs upon paragraphs gushing over this design in my feature article, Battle of the Polyominoes, where New York Zoo is a close runner up to the greatest family-weight polyomino game of all time (more on that later).

What lands New York Zoo so high on my Top Board Games of 2020? Satisfaction. The pleasure of moving an elephant around a rondel. The relief of claiming the perfect piece to fit your zoo. The amusement of breeding penguins and kangaroos and arctic foxes. The achievement of snatching a precious rollercoaster from the supply. The pride of timing your moves and your spaces perfectly while predicting your opponent’s decisions. And the ultimate satisfaction of completing your zoo first and becoming the winner.

7. Undaunted: North Africa

Undaunted: Normandy made my top 10 games of 2019, so it should come as little surprise that Undaunted: North Africa is keeping the hot streak going. Despite this Undaunted sequel retaining the same core system, we still haven’t grown tired of this stellar head-to-head deck builder. This fusion of deck building and tactical war commanding is a match made in heaven.

North Africa cleverly builds on its predecessor by polishing the rules, speeding up the playing time, increasing asymmetry, and smoothly implementing vehicles. Yet, for complete newcomers to Undaunted, I still might recommend Normandy first because it is a solid game that will provide you with at least a dozen worthwhile plays and make the jump to North Africa feel like an exciting evolution of the fun. But you really can’t go wrong with either game.

The Undaunted series will go down as one of the most played experiences in our entire collection thanks to its tense decisions interlaced with slick gameplay across many thrilling scenarios.

6. Tournament at Avalon

I’ve been enchanted by this trick-taking game ever since my first play of it. The extra large cards and the appropriately thematic art contribute to a highly satisfying card game with charmingly medieval brutality.

There is no winner of each trick in Tournament at Avalon. Rather there is merely a loser who plays the lowest card and takes the trick of played cards into their “wound” pile which will bring them that much closer to death. All of the other rules, powers, special cards round out this compelling entree for a fantastic feast of fun.

No other game makes me as excited to be in last place as this one. Last place means that I get to have a unique, overpowered ability for an entire round. Last place means that I’m the closest to activating my secondary power. Last place means that I can rally my fellow opponents around a common cause: bringing down the leader.

You can explore my full review of this riotous romp here.

5. Curious Cargo

Speaking of full reviews of stellar games, Curious Cargo earned one from me recently as well. One key takeaway from my review is that this 2-player puzzler isn’t for everyone. It’s best suited for those who love spatial analysis, crave dynamic player interaction, and feed on adaptive challenges.

I can’t get over how dense and indulgent this small box feels. The PVC material used for the six unique player boards, the screen printed wooden cargo tokens, the player forklifts, the long truck tiles, the double-sided conveyer tiles, the Kwanchai Moriya art… Mmm, mmm, MMMM. Of course these would all mean nothing if the game wasn’t also highly compelling and repayable challenge.

Curious Cargo is all that and a bag of chips. It’s one that I just don’t see myself ever turning down a chance to play.

4. My City

Well, it’s time to make good on my promise from back when we were talking about New York Zoo. The design that has proven to be the greatest family-weight polyomino game of all time is Reiner Knizia’s My City. You don’t have to take my word for it! Go look for yourself! My City took down heavyweight champions Patchwork and Barenpark, for crying out loud!

Beyond being the GOAT (greatest of all time) in that category, I’m gonna throw down the other gauntlet and say that this is the best legacy game by a country mile. Legacy game fans may cry foul here, citing the lack of a heavy narrative to accompany this mechanical rollercoaster, but I’ve yet to see a legacy game as slick, streamlined, and focused as My City.

No other Legacy game that I’ve encountered fundamentally changes my entire strategic approach from one play to the next like My City. No other Legacy game I’ve encountered feels as gut-wrenching, tense, and personal as My City.

I named the city on my player board Wolverton, in honor of the gray wolf symbol on my board. We’ve been through soaring highs and crushing lows, Wolverton and I. We’ve seen eras come and go… times of prosperity and times of famine, times of opportunity and times of trouble. From the stickered trees to the cursed rocks, from the winding river to the sprawling buildings, there’s a familiar coziness to this game that I will desperately miss when we conclude our final episode that is now only a few plays away.

My only hope is that the good Dr. Knizia will give us a sequel to My City before too long…

We now enter the top 3 games of 2020 which, admittedly, all have existed in some form before last year. Since I’m making guilty admissions, I’ll also toss this one out for you to chew on: I’m not confident in how I ranked these games against each other. It feels like my opinion on how these should be ordered could change tomorrow… or in an hour… or right now—One second, let me just swap number 1 with number 3… Yeah that’s better… Hold on! Number 2 looks like it accidentally got pushed one lower than it should. We’ll just bump that one back up…. there we go! And then we’ll just tidy things up by rearranging 3 with 2 and 2 with 1… and voila! I now present to you my top 3 Board Games of 2020!

3. Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

Every hobbyist gamer deserves a good war game in their collection. An old, reliable friend who will always be there for you when have large table, a few enthusiastic companions, and a wide chunk of free time that all need spending.

And no, I’m not talking about a war game like the previously mentioned Undaunted: North Africa. I’m talking about a wooly mammoth war game that rarely emerges from its spot on your shelf but always makes a splash when it does hit the table. I’m talking about the kind of game that often requires 2 or 3 tables, 4 or 5 hours, days or weeks of prior planning.

This is the type of game that I considered a “bucket list” experience. I figured, “Hey, if I ever get the chance to play somebody else’s copy of one of these mega-hits, then that sounds great! But there’s no way in heck I’m dropping 100 bucks or more on a game like that when I don’t even know if I’ll ever get to play it!”

At least that was my attitude until I met Eclipse: Second Dawn. The creators of Eclipse looked long and hard at what gamers love about this genre and what barriers are keeping everyone from enjoying it more. Eclipse Second Dawn, a reimplementation of the 2011 original, was their answer. And this game is one heck of an answer!

Within Eclipse, we have a sprawling, epic game that can be played in a very reasonable 2-3 hours (maybe 4+ for complete beginners). We have a stunning production that feels perfectly tailored to enhance and supplement the entire experience. And we have a whole cornucopia of engaging decisions and weighty consequences within this beautiful blend of Euro-like management and Sci-fi style conflict.

2. Sidereal Confluence: Remastered Edition

Sidereal Confluence is all about being a wildly unique alien who exchanges resources and ideas with other intergalactic beings in a quest to maximize your strengths and develop new technologies.  In other words, it’s an epic simultaneous negotiation game featuring cubes, converters, and asymmetric factions.  

While the original edition of Sidereal Confluence released in 2017, and I was fully aware of it before 2020, it was 2020’s Remastered Edition that finally convinced me to give this game a try.  The Remastered Edition changes nothing about the core gameplay; rather, it aims to increase readability, clean up graphic design, improve the rulebook, provide a useful teaching guide, and modernize the overall look of the game.  Call me vain, if you must, but this newer version is infinitely more attractive and approachable, and that’s precisely the push I needed to dive in to this negotiation romp.

Even subtle touches such as trimming the alien names down from “KJASJAVIKALIMM” to “K-JAS” on the player shields is a wise change to avoid scaring off newcomers.  Despite the thematic liberties that Tauceti Deichmann has taken to challenge our lingual abilities, his design is as rock solid as ever.  The fresh makeover is a fitting production that matches the high quality of the design.  

This is the ultimate negotiation game where almost anything goes as players desperately strive to acquire the resources and converters that will propel them to victory.  Few things are as satisfying as turning a pile of useless resources in a cornucopia of opportunities via the art of negotiation.  Just be prepared for a crowded table and lot of noise, as this game hosts up to 9 players, and things can get wild.

While it demands much in terms of time, space, and participants, this is an all-time favorite that will undoubtedly make it to my table for years to come.

1. Hansa Teutonica: Big Box

Hansa Teutonica is the type of German game design that wipes the floor with other Euros before gobbling them up with glee. It requires no decks of cards, no piles of money and resources, no desperately extravagant variable setups… It simply gives each player a small board with a bunch of cubes and a few discs and challenges them to use these “tradesmen” wisely upon the game board.

Each turn, participants have 5 options for spending their 2 actions (or more actions, if they develop their player board). Actions are as simple as placing a tradesmen on an open space along a route, moving your tradesmen already on the board to other spaces, paying extra cubes to bump another player’s tradesmen and take its place, establishing a trade route along a path that you completely control, and restocking your personal supply of tradesmen.

The layout of the game board and the development opportunities of the player boards are what make this simple premise exquisitely deep. The playing field is ripe with golden opportunities for those who can discern the strategic intentions of their opponents and exploit these to their benefit. Like a little point leech embedded in the fur of a beast, players can establish trading posts to profit off of the efforts of others. Yet decisions become more precarious and more tense as the three possible game-ending conditions threaten to cut the legs out from under your strategic grand finale.

Be warned, inexperienced players are more susceptible to strategic group-think, where one area or aspect is perceived as superior to the rest. An expert player can quickly make such assumptions look foolish by exploiting the blind spots. And herein lies another great secret of this unassuming classic: Hansa Teutonica is a living, breathing game that will grow with the experience and knowledge of the players surrounding it. When the group meta zooms in too closely on one strategy, that simply opens the door wider for one creative schemer to sneak off with the victory. Only those with an open mind and a courageous trigger finger will come to love and appreciate the deceptive depth that keeps the dynamics of Hansa brilliantly balanced.

The entire game looks and sounds like standard Euro fare, but make no mistake, Hansa Teutonica is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack. With its shared incentives and network building, it holds much in common with timeless train games. Through its elegant rules, brisk pace, and boundless depth, it resembles the legendary designs of Reiner Knizia. By its complex interactions and dynamic opportunities, it shames the vast majority of Euros releasing today.

Hansa Teutonica: Big Box is a fitting tribute to a modern classic and the perfect place for newcomers to jump into the fun. While it would have been nice to see something like an Ian O’Toole-caliber makeover to the visual presentation, this design and production is a well-oiled machine that has no problems producing one of the finest tabletop experiences in the entire industry.

Remaining Contenders

Whether we’re awaiting a North American release or simply a re-print of these unavailable titles, these are the games that will almost certainly make an appearance in my Revisiting of the Best Games of 2020 (coming this December):

Anno 1800

Economic Euros are a staple of tabletop gaming, yet there were very few new ones that successfully captured my heart in 2020.  Last year’s Rococo Deluxe is one such game that is solid on all accounts, yet I couldn’t quite find the magic within that would earn it a long-term spot among my collection.  For games like this, the elephants in the room will always be our all-time favorites: Brass: Birmingham, Great Western Trail, Concordia, A Feast for Odin, Pipeline, etc.  These are the kind of greedy elephants that don’t like to share time at the table or space on the shelf with lesser animals (at least at my household zoo).

Yet within the the green shrubs of opportunity hides a promising beast, waiting to pounce on my unsuspecting collection when it is localized in North America.  The blood of a greedy elephant courses through its veins, as it is a sibling to Brass Birmingham and child of Martin Wallace.  This sneaky predator is known as Anno 1800, and its time has nearly come….

Of course, it just as easily might leap from the bushes and land on its face, embarrassing itself at my table.  We shall see!

Nidavellir 

If I had a dollar for every time I heard the phrase, “This game is a Splendor killer,” I would have….. 5 dollars, probably.  Nidavellir is the latest title to add to this imaginary wealth.  And despite my increasing numbness towards anything Splendor-like, Nidavellir in particular has pinched me back to a sense of intrigue with two simple words: constrained bidding.  What the heck is exciting about that, you ask?  Consider this… Three absolute bangers in my collection contain this same mechanism of bidding for something using the limited options in your hand: namely Ra, High Society, and For Sale.  So with the early positive buzz this one has received, I’m definitely planning to check this light weight, accessible game out.

Kyoto

I’ve got a hunch that Kyoto will be surprise banger of a game.  It sees players representing selfish countries that have come together to negotiate unselfish topics, specifically climate change.  I get the impression of mix between Q.E.’s amusing theme and Chinatown’s engaging gameplay.  It’s also coming at us from the hot new publisher, Deep Print Games, who recently busted open the industry’s Saloon doors with the fantastic Renature.  I could be wrong, but Kyoto is at least one to keep on the radar.

The Search for Planet X

My household enjoys a good deduction game including the popular Cryptid and more recent Loot of Lima.  The Search for Planet X appears to be among the best of the bunch, and it’s one I’m looking forward to trying whenever it decides to show up in stores again.  This game keeps things running smooth with a handy app, freeing up players to focus in on the space riddle at the table in a hunt for Planet X.

Switch & Signal

I’ve already talked about this highly accessible cooperative train game in my most anticipated board games of 2021 list, and now I’m back double dipping on this title in my remaining candidates for the top games of 2020.  So is this game a 2020 release, or a 2021 release?…. The answer is yes…. probably.  Kosmos seems to be dragging their feet getting it to North America, but like the little engine that could, I think they’ll eventually come around.

Sumatra

Even after hearing the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast’s lukewarm reaction to Sumatra, I can’t help but try it for myself.  This light set-collection game intrigues me with it’s characteristically Knizian elegance.  The game is a simple as either move ahead one space or hang behind and draft another tile, but players set the pace of the movement by forcing others to keep up with the pack in this chill game about touring an island.

Best Art

Fort – Kyle Ferrin

Not only does the theme of Fort snuggly fit Grant Rodiek’s design. It also perfectly matches Kyle Ferrin’s art style. Kyle does a masterful job evoking all of the weird, wacky wonder of being a kid. I’ll let his art do the talking:

Best Art Runner-Up: Cosmic Frog

Best Production

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy – Lautapelit.fi

Just to be clear, the best production does not equal the most expensive game. Our pick for 2019’s best production was the $35 Wavelength thanks to the way its production felt essential to the experience. Yet in this year’s case, the best production of 2020 is, in fact, the most expensive game on this post: Eclipse Second Dawn.

Without the Game Trayz in this box that serve to organize, enhance, and streamline the Eclipse experience, this game would be significantly more cumbersome. As it is, Eclipse’s production serves to carry it over the barrier of “event game of the month” into a much more approachable “feature game of the night” by reducing playtime, simplifying setup, and deluxifying the experience. This game both looks and feels freaking phenomenal.

Best Production Runner-Up: Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

Best Expansion

Root: The Underworld Expansion – Leder Games

The Underworld Expansion to Root offers even more of that asymmetric good stuff! The new board is gorgeous and shakes things up nicely while the new factions are delightfully unique and solid additions. The moles are a tasty tableau builder while the crows are slimy sneaksters.

Our plays have been very well balanced and competitive between the new and old factions. No complaints here! This one is absolutely worth the purchase if you are a fan of base Root.

Best Expansion Runner-Up: Downforce: Wild Ride

This concludes our Top 15 Board Games of 2020! What were your favorite new releases from last year? Share with us in the comments below!

Article written by Nick Murray. Keep an eye out for his first published design, Social Grooming, which will debut in a Kickstarter bundle alongside two games from critically acclaimed designer, Reiner Knizia! Don’t miss out on this killer filler bundle coming in 2021! Subscribe to the Bitewing Games monthly newsletter to stay in touch.

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Not much of a reader? You’re in luck! This post also exists in podcast form shown below. Happy listening!

It’s about time to kiss (or more appropriately, kick) 2020 goodbye! As we hopefully look forward to a new year of long-awaited returns to normalcy, what better way to get hyped than to peek behind the curtains and get a glimpse of the most exciting board games to come!

I’ve cooked up quite the list with a variety of promising titles that might just deserve a spot on your wishlist. Several of these games were also explored in my Kickstarter Case Study: How to Win Backers and Fund Projects. Let’s see what’s on the 2021 menu…

Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile – Q2/Q3 2021

We might as well start off with my most anticipated game of 2021. Cole Wehrle’s magnum opus is right around the corner. With the publishing passion of Leder Games, the artistic flex of Kyle Ferrin, and the design chops of one of the industry’s hottest designers, we’ve got a recipe for success in Oath. Along the lines of Root and Pax Pamir, Oath is a highly strategic, cutthroat, and political game that best suits a group of regular players.

This title innovates upon legacy and campaign designs by taking the results of one game and integrating them into the objectives and setup of the next. Nothing is scripted or predetermined, rather the game organically follows a meta narrative controlled entirely by the decisions of the players. The ripple effect of players’ actions will be felt by all for games to come, and they can even keep record of this fascinating history in the Chronicle Session Journal (included in the kickstarter copies or likely to be available directly from Leder Games).

Kemet: Blood and Sand – Summer 2021

The area-control darling, Kemet, has been an established favorite for nearly a decade now. In 2021, Matagot will be releasing version 2.0 with a completely revamped presentation, improved rules, and new gameplay. Matagot’s legendary dudes-on-a-map trilogy has proven its worth to me with the incredible card-drafting Inis and solid auction-style Cyclades; Kemet is the remaining classic that I have yet to try, and Blood and Sand appears to be worth the wait.

Hibachi – Fall 2021

Hibachi flew a bit under the radar when it recently launched on Kickstarter, but it appears to be firing on all cylinders as a family-friendly set collection dexterity game. The design is a reimplementation of 2010’s Safranito that retains the core fun it presented.

Players toss poker chips onto a large board in an attempt to center the poker chip’s hole over ingredients and bonuses that will help the fill orders. The catch is that your poker chips are also used as a sort of blind auction for drafting order and other privileges. The value of your chips will stay face-down as you toss them onto the board, so a combination of skillful tosses and wise chip selections will ensure that you come out on top when the chips are flipped and the ingredients are claimed.

Grail Games promises that the leftovers from this Kickstarter will go to retail (or you can late pledge here), so keep your eyes peeled come Fall 2021 if you’re hungry to jump in on this fun feast.

Coffee Traders – May 2021

Capstone Games has gone all out with their debut of Coffee Traders. This heavy economic Euro from the makers of Wildcatters boasts over 650 deluxified, colorful components including wooden donkeys and plastic coffee beans! More importantly, the design promises a meaty, interactive competition within the sprawling coffee industry of the 1970s.

While we’re likely to see a more affordable, standard version of the game down the road, it’s hard not to get behind such an ambitious, beautiful project spearheaded by a highly capable publisher. If you can’t get enough sprawling Euros in your life, then this one is a no-brainer for any group of 3-5 players.

Whale Riders – Spring 2021

Dr. Knizia is on another hot streak spanning back to 2017 with the likes of Quest for El Dorado, Babylonia, My City, and more. Whale Riders brings us another team up of old faithful designer Knizia, ever stalwart artist Vincent Dutrait, and the consistently solid publisher Grail Games.

In this economic race, players must decide how to spend their 2 actions each turn as they ride whales along the arctic coast. You can sail ahead to claim the greatest treasures for yourself, but you’ll be missing out on golden opportunities along the way.

Next year, if you find yourself in need of a simple strategy game with enough subtle tension to satisfy everyone at the table, then you’d be hard pressed to bet against Reiner Knizia.

Undaunted: Reinforcements – August 2021

For fans of the Undaunted series, Reinforcements is the modular expansion you never knew you always wanted. This title will include new scenarios, units, and rules to keep the fun rolling. Compatible with both Undaunted games, this expansion even provides 4-player and solo modes for owners of either version. While the details are still sparse, this series already earned its right to the title of Undaunted when it initially debuted among the top board games of 2019. Undaunted will go down as one of my all time favorite deck builders thanks to its elegant flow and painful decisions. I’m thrilled to have more reasons to dive back into this excellent system.

Anno 1800 – Q1 2021 (English Version)

While the game setup isn’t exactly easy on the eyes, Anno 1800 doesn’t need to look amazing when it boasts the design talent of Martin Wallace, creator of Brass: Birmingham and Age of Steam.

Anno 1800 is based on the popular PC game from Ubisoft, but I’m more interested in what Mr. Wallace has done to create a city building tech-tree game. The German version is already on the market, and early buzz around this medium-weight Euro is positive.

Switch & Signal – 2021 (English Version)

Speaking of German games that have yet to make it overseas, Switch & Signal is a cooperative train game from one of the designers of Undaunted: Normandy. This game is as simple and accessible as Pandemic, yet thankfully it is not another Pandemic clone. Switch & Signal sees players guiding trains across a map of Europe or North America to deliver cargo to its destination before time runs out. Each turn involves deciding how to spend your cards to move trains, adjust signals, and switch tracks to keep engines along the most efficient paths possible.

There’s no official date for when this game hits North America, but we can safely assume that Kosmos is planning to localize and release it sometime next year, as it debuted in Germany just a few months ago.

Don’t Get Got: Shut Up & Sit Down Special Edition – Apr 2021

Don’t Get Got is a clever party game that has been around since 2018. It received high praise from popular critic site Shut Up & Sit Down in their highly entertaining review. Thereafter, Big Potato Games reached out to the funny folks at SU&SD and pitched a collaboration for a special edition which successfully funded on Kickstarter this year.

Don’t Get Got is a meta-game that can be sneakily tucked into the background of a game night, group party, or work environment. Each player receives a small wallet with unique objectives that typically require harmless but ridiculous tasks. These tasks span from “Get a player to compliment your hair” to “Make up a word and get a player to ask what it means.” The catch is that if players suspect foul play, they can call you out on your odd behavior and cause you to fail that mission. The first player to complete three missions wins the game.

I’m hoping to receive this game while I’m still at my General Practice Residency program with 7 other dental residents, where the setting is ripe for getting got!

Ra (New Versions)- 2021

Ra, one of all-time greats of the auctioning genre, has been criminally out of print for years. It’s a game that perfectly mixes agonizing auctioning with precarious push-your-luck mechanisms. 2021 is the year where that changes. Dice Tree Games is a South Korean publisher known for its deluxe productions of Knizia classics including Modern Art and Winner’s Circle, and they have a version of Ra ready to release seemingly any day (the game is listed as a 2020 planned release).

25th Century Games, best known for its Splendor-like 2017 release, Space Explorers, is a US-based publisher planning to release an English version of Ra in Summer 2021 as well. Details are sparse, but this release will be one to keep an eye on for anyone looking to jump into this masterclass design. I reached out to Chad (25th Century Games) and learned that he’s aiming to “create the nicest quality and visual art version of the game to date.”

It sounds like a fantastic way for new fans to jump in or old fans to update their copy. Although for those who already own a copy (Alea, Rio Grande, or Uberplay versions in particular), Board Game Geek will be offering delectable Geek Up bits in the spring! All hail the year of Ra!

Tutankhamun – Jan 2021

Speaking of 25th Century Games, they’ll be releasing another Knizia design that has been refreshed and revitalized in Tutankhamun. Players travel down the Nile and collect artifacts in a race to 30 points. The rules are easy enough for any friends or family, simply move your boat downstream and collect the tile you stop on. The key is to have majority in artifact types and lunge for the special power tiles when the timing is right to end up on top.

Dead Reckoning – May 2021

Dead Reckoning is nothing short of ambitious. This mega-project from AEG and John D. Clair (Space Base, Mystic Vale) takes their card crafting concept to the next level. Transparent cards will be combined, flipped, and rotated within sleeves to create a deck-building experience that sends players on a 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXtort, eXterminate) journey through piratism.

It also features a wildly creative combat system where cubes are dropped onto a battleship that sends them cascading across a battle board, giving a cannonball-like effect that determines the result of the attack by where the cubes land on the board.

This game has so many mechanisms and pieces crammed into it that I’ve opted to leave it on my radar and wait to strike if the reviews come in overwhelmingly positive. It won’t be simple or cheap, but it promises quite the epic adventure.

Kabuto Sumo – June 2021

BoardGameTables.com is back at it with another novel design and gorgeous production. Kabuto Sumo is inspired by coin-pushing arcade games and real-life rhinoceros beetle wrestling. That’s pretty stinking awesome if you ask me.

Players will be shifting the push platform around the sumo ring to line up their move of pushing a piece into the ring in hopes of shoving opponent beetles off. This combination of physics, tactics, and dexterity promise to be a breath of fresh air for any game night. The world can never have too many refreshing dexterity games, and Kabuto Sumo is teed up to be the next one.

So, You’ve Been Eaten – 2021?

That’s right, the game is titled So, You’ve Been Eaten. With a name like that, it has to be good!…. Right?…

After initially rearing its head and riding high on the hotness wave of BGG, news on this title seemingly vanished… like it had been eaten. But more recent updates indicate that they’ve been quietly cramming even more tasty content into the game as they prepare for a Kickstarter launch.

The game claims that it is for 0-2 players. You read that correctly, zero players. A bold miner takes on a massive beast by burrowing into its intestines for crystals as the beast’s immune system fights back. Players can take on the role of either the miner or the beast… or neither?… in a 1v1, 1vGame, or GamevGame showdown.

Bristol 1350 – April 2021

The Dark Cities games have always taken the bones of a classic social deduction game and dressed them in various thematic mechanisms. From witch trials to pirate mutinies to wild west bank robberies to now escaping the Black Plague.

I’ve already played Bristol 1350 plenty of times leading up to my written preview of the design. The timing of this plague-themed game is uncannily coincidental, but the design has been a blast ever since I first tried it two years ago. I’m looking forward to experiencing the full vision that Facade Games had in mind for this quick, engaging gem of a deduction game.

John Company (Second Edition) – 2021?

Wehrlegig Games, the publisher of Pax Pamir (Second Edition), is cooking up their next project in John Company (Second Edition). Designer Cole Werhle’s most recent update reveals that the design has received a complete overhaul to help streamline the rules, focus on the game’s strengths, evoke the period art, and presumably deluxify the production. This heavy political economic romp is sure to be a strategically engaging and historically informative exploration of the British East India Company.

Railroad Ink Challenge – Q1 2021

One of our household’s favorite roll & writes makes an explosive return with Railroad Ink Challenge. The Shining Yellow and Lush Green editions promise player interaction, special structures, and new dice to help keep the puzzle fresh and interesting for series veterans. The development team has also cooked up a cornucopia of extras from an Epic game board to loads of expansion dice.

Iberian Gauge – Summer 2021

Like the previous two games in Capstone’s Iron Rail series, Iberian Gauge already exists among many other cube rails options. These cube rails games possess a common thread of stock investment, railroad expansion, and shared incentives. The key differentiator with the Iron Rail series is that publisher Capstone handpicks a solid design from the many options, gives it the Ian O’Toole makeover, and brings it to the masses. These slim, gorgeous boxes contain a single sheet of rules but pack a huge punch in roughly 1-hour of fun.

Sleeping Gods – Q1 2021

Sleeping Gods was on our most anticipated games of 2020 list, and it’s back again for another round of hype! The good news is that this cooperative exploration adventure is right around the corner, with fulfillment planned to begin in January. Players will be chipping away at this epic adventure a little bit at a time, and they can save their progress and pack it back into the box at any time. I spoke more about how Red Raven convinced me to back their project in my Kickstarter Case Study: How to Win Backers and Crowdfund Projects.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea – March 2021

Ooo baby, designer Thomas Sing is dipping back into the well in an effort to satiate my unquenchable thirst for more of his brilliant cooperative trick taking. All we know thus far is that we’re going from space to sea, but hopefully Mr. Sing still has a few more tricks up his sleeve to mix up the formula. Either way, I’m all in on this sequel to one of the greatest cards games of all time.

Publishers To Watch

That’s right, we’re not done quite yet! Many publishers like to play their cards close to the chest, meaning that there are surely more hype-worthy games waiting to be announced and planned to be released direct-to-retail than the 19 we’ve already covered. We’ll point you toward a handful of publishers that have been on hot streaks recently and show no signs of cooling down.

• Capstone Games: At the time of this writing, I’ve had the chance to try ten of Capstone’s releases of 2018-2020, and they have all been killer games. 2021 releases will include Coffee Traders, Iberian Gauge, Pipeline Emerging Markets (expansion), and more.

• Leder Games: Most famously known for the deceptively charming and deeply asymmetric war-game Root, Leder Games is banking on their next mega-hit being Oath. But with Oath development wrapping up, they’ve shared that their next big project will be another Root expansion featuring militant factions of a Rat warlord and Badgers (expect a Kickstarter in Q1)! Patrick Leder is also working on his own spin on Twilight Imperium known as Void Lich. And who knows, maybe we’ll get a Fort expansion as well…

• Boardgametables.com: I’ve found that the best approach to take with Boardgametables.com’s publications is to expect the unexpected. They’ve brought us a band touring roll & write, an unchained auctioning game, a thinky pirate treasure deduction game, a trio of pretty fillers, and soon a coin-pushing style dexterity game. Whatever they cook up next, it’s sure to be unique and well-produced.

• Eagle-Gryphon Games: With recent killer deluxe versions of Rococo and Age of Steam, heavy hitters like On Mars, on upcoming refreshes such as For Sale Autorama, Eagle-Grypon games is not a publisher to be dismissed.

• WizKids: WizKids has been bringing their A-game recently with the incredible Sidereal Confluence: Remastered Edition, spicy Tournament at Avalon, and juicy Super Skill Pinball 4-Cade, all from 2020 alone. I’m hoping they have just as good of a lineup for 2021.

• Grail Games: This Australian publisher has earned a spot on my radar because of their ability to dig up and dust off the underdog games of yesteryear. Thanks to them, I’ve been able to discover and enjoy Knizia classics including Stephenson’s Rocket and Medici, and I’m excited to try Yellow and Yangtze and Whale Riders. Outside of Hibachi, they have many more exciting plans in the works for 2021 and beyond, including a Yellow and Yangtze expansion, an updated version of cult fan-favorite Fjords, and a two-player climbing card game known as ChuHan from the designer of Race for the Galaxy.

• Osprey Games: This publisher is based in Great-Britain and has drummed up at least 1 killer title every year for the past few years. Those games include Cryptid, the Undaunted series, The King is Dead (Second Edition), and more. They certainly deserve our attention for whatever else they have in mind for 2021 besides Undaunted: Reinforcements.

Designers to Watch

We’ll top this post off with a list of designers that, much like the above mentioned publishers, are on hot streaks of their own. Whenever I catch wind of a new release coming from one of these creative folks, my ears always perk up:

• David Thompson: I’ve talked plenty about David’s upcoming Undaunted Reinforcements and Switch & Signal, and that merely scratches the surface of David’s designs that are hitting the market in 2021. Others include War Chest: Siege (an expansion to Undaunted-like abstract game, War Chest), Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms (a WWII inspired solitaire game), Sniper Elite: The Board Game (a hidden moment design based on the video game series of the same name), and Dire Alliance: Horror (a cooperative/competitive tactical deck builder). And those are just the ones we know of. Needless to say, he’s certainly one to keep on the radar.

• Paolo Mori: We’re big fans of Ethnos, a family-weight area majority game that was #8 in my most recent top 50 games of all time list. We’ve also been digging 2019’s Blitzkrieg, a 2-player tug of war game that made a fantastic 1st impression and still holds up after several more plays. There’s no telling what Paolo will do next, but odds are it will be amazing.

• Alexander Pfister: This is the legend who brought us the excellent Great Western Trail, Isle of Skye, Maracaibo, and much more. His latest release, CloudAge, should probably be among the list of games up above seeing how the North American shipment appears to be delayed into the new year (thanks for nothing, Covid!). Regardless, the man is a machine who continues to impress with his designs. I expect to see another big one from him in 2021.

• Wolfgang Warsch: From The Mind to Quacks of Quedlinburg, from Wavelength to That’s Pretty Clever, you know him, you love him, he’s Wolfgang Warsch! After seemingly bursting onto the scene in 2018, Wolfgang has been on a design rampage ever since. Hopefully he hasn’t run out of steam for 2021. You can do it, Wolfgang!

• Kramer & Kiesling: Like Peanut Butter and Jelly, Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling have been tearing it up together for years with classics such as Tikal or Mexica and more recent releases including our Holiday Board Game Gift recommendation, Renature. Not that they actually need each other, as Mr. Kiesling is the genius behind Azul and Heaven & Ale while Mr. Kramer is mastermind behind El Grande and Downforce. Indeed, these gentlemen should already be on your 2021 watchlist.

• Cole Wehrle: I started this entire post out with Cole’s upcoming design, Oath, and quickly followed it up with his returning hit, John Company (Second Edition), so you already know where I stand here. He’s both a lead designer/developer at Leder Games and he runs Wehrlegig Games with his brother, so anything coming from either company is going to have his fingerprints on it. Why do I appreciate his handiwork so much? Aside from him owning two spots in my top 10 games of all time, I’ve found Cole to be more interested in creating immersive experiences than tossing out gimmicky, shallow designs. He’s churning out arguably the most fascinating designs in the industry with the help of many talented colleagues. Keep it coming, Cole!

• Ryan Courtney: Ryan is the newest published designer among those on this list. In fact, his first game, Pipeline, was categorized as a Lover in my recent revisit of the best games of 2019. His other design, Curious Cargo, continues to impress as well. The man takes “thinky” to the next level, and I’m there for whatever he cooks up next.

• Uwe Rosenberg: It’s breeding!… It’s polyominoes!… That’s right, it’s Uwe Rosenberg. Uwe is one of the all time greats in the industry, and his most recent hits, including New York Zoo and Nova Luna, prove that he’s still got it. He’s always a safe bet when heading into a new year of releases.

• Reiner Knizia: Alongside Cole Wehrle, Reiner Knizia is my absolute favorite board game designer. I own and love more games from Dr. Knizia than any other designer (15 and counting)! He’s best known for his decades old evergreens including Tigris & Euphrates, Lost Cities, and Ra, but he’s been on another hot streak with recent bangers including Babylonia, My City, and Quest for El Dorado. This man is the Willy Wonka of board games, with over 600 titles to his name. Of course they’re not all going to be amazing at that kind of output, but the sheer number golden designs that have come from this one mind is staggering. I’ll take three more decades of Knizia releases, please and thank you.

Hungry for more board game hype? Then continue on to PART TWO of my Most Anticipated Board Games of 2021!

Article written by Nick Murray. To learn more about his tabletop gaming tastes and preferences, check out his blog series: Tabletop Tastes: My Favorite Flavors in Board Games. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

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