Note: This written post features only my top 10 Spatial Puzzle games, but the podcast episode includes my picks plus 10 more picks from podcast guest, Ryan Flaherty. If you want twice the Spatial Puzzle gaming goodness via an audio discussion between friends, then check out our meaty episode!

Before one becomes a dentist, or even enters dental school, a prospective dental student in the US must take what is called the Dental Admissions Test.  This exam is an absolute beast of a hoop that one must successfully jump through if they wish keep their dental career dream alive.  Many folks (including myself) take off several weeks to spend 6-8 hours a day cramming biology, chemistry, mathematics, and more into our brains in preparation for the great spewing.  For a couple months or so, this pursuit essentially consumes your life as you cram, take practice exams, and cram some more as though you are trying to pour more knowledge fluid into an already overflowing brain bucket while patching up the leaky holes all over.

Oddly enough, there is one part of this exam that starts to feel like a game.  It is a section known as the Perceptual Ability Test, or PAT for short.  As the title describes, this section examines your ability to mentally visualize things such as 3D shapes, acute angles, and more.  The reason this feels like a game is that rather than solve problems or recall memorized information, you are challenged to rank angles, match keyholes, visualize folds, count cube surfaces, and more.  The reason for the PAT is because dentists are constantly using mirrors, x-rays, and models to visualize, shape, and diagnose teeth.  Thus, the PAT material is not so much something you can learn or memorize to be prepared.  Rather, it requires a spatially minded brain and a whole lot of practice to master the challenging types of questions you’ll encounter.  In a sort of sick and twisted way, this PAT practice becomes the “fun” part of your studying routine, and a great way to break up the monotony of the science subjects.  Over time, It’s quite satisfying to nail these questions with increasing competence.

Much like the PAT (but in a far more entertaining form), it is also very satisfying to take on spatial puzzles in tabletop games.  These puzzles usually take the form of cards and tiles which can be aligned, arranged, and overlapped in an open space of endless possibilities.  Typically, these games will punish you for poor spatial arrangements and reward you for clever planning.  While some games are pure spacial puzzling, others implement this mental challenge into a larger game packed with many more mechanisms.

We’ve had loads of fun exploring many games that include spatial puzzling in their repertoire.  Many titles in t  his genre have proven to be deliciously addicting and widely popular.  We’ve enjoyed them so much, that it is with great excitement that Bitewing Games here and now reveals our next published game to be… a meaty spatial puzzler.  That’s right!  We’ve been working hard these past several months to plan and prepare our next game for you.  You can find our grand reveal at the end of this post.  And in celebration of that reveal, today we’d like to share our Top 10 Spatial Puzzle games.  If you, like us, are a fan of many of these games and their puzzly goodness, then our next offering might just be up your alley.

But we’ll save the details for the end.  As for now, let’s talk about our favorite, highly recommended spatial puzzle games in no particular order…

Patchwork / New York Zoo

Might as well come clean right up front… there is definitely going to be some cheating involved on this Top 10 list.  It will actually consist of 13 games plus more honorable mentions at the end!  The reason for this dirty trick is simple: there are far more than 10 excellent spatial puzzle games out there.  Plus, some titles share so much in common that it’s too hard to mention one without mentioning the other.  Thus, with this first pick, we split the spotlight between Uwe Rosenberg’s Patchwork and New York Zoo.

Those of you who’ve seen my Battle of the Polyominoes article likely predicted that these games would end up here.  Polyominoes are to spatial puzzle games as dogs are to house pets.  They’re like a gamer’s best friend.  There is something about fitting various shapes together on a square grid that we gamers can’t get enough of.  This won’t be the only polyomino pick on this list—far from it—so let’s talk about what makes Patchwork and New York Zoo special.

Coming from the same designer, Patchwork and New York Zoo both feature an engaging rondel for tile drafting.  The former is all about an economy of spending and earning buttons while managing time to maximize positive points and cover up negative points to beat your single opponent.  The latter is instead an economy of breeding… that’s right… breeding animals in their exhibits at the zoo in a race to be the first to cover your board entirely before 1-4 opponents.  In both cases, you can enjoy pleasant themes mixed with compelling decisions from the polyomino connoisseur himself.  Which one is better is up for debate, but I say you can’t go wrong with either (or both).

Galaxy Trucker

While Patchwork and New York Zoo both contain elements of time economics or racing to the finish, neither of them are actual ‘real-time’ games where you are rushing your arrangements and burning your brain into overdrive.  But if that’s what you are looking for, Galaxy Trucker has you covered.  This wild, wacky game has been around for many years, but it recently received a new coat of paint with some minor tweaks to the formula.  Either version is dirt cheap and loads of fun, but you’ll need to have a group who can handle a bit of a rules dump up front.

While this one isn’t as family-friendly as it wants to be thanks to a few too many fiddly rules, it still has a major payoff for those who are fully invested.  The game consist of two acts: first, rush to reveal and arrange square tiles into a jumbled mess of a space ship that contains guns, thrusters, energy, shields, storage, and more.  The longer you take to arrange and nitpick your ship, the faster the best tiles will be claimed by other players because during this act you are scrambling to build your ships all at the same time and the tiles are first-come-first-serve.  The second act sees you laughing, cheering, and moaning as you send your ships on a risky voyage ripe with perilous dangers and delicious rewards.  Ship parts and sections get blasted and blown off, and all you can do is just hang on and hope you survive the journey.

Factory Funner

Speaking of rushing to grab tiles while cooking your brain, Factory Funner is also split into two phases: the first phase consists of brief real-time drafting, the second consists of crunchy spatial efficiency.  The cool thing here is that you are free to use connectors and other helpful tiles to your heart’s content, but each extra piece you use costs a dollar from your score.  As you have to add a new machine each round, you can also remove old pipes and tiles to establish new connections between the machine inputs and outputs.

The new version of this game (releasing within the next few months) comes to us from publisher BoardGameTables.com and features zesty new art, a non-real-time drafting variant for those who don’t like to be rushed, and the addition of a sixth player.

Pipeline / Curious Cargo

Since we’re on the subject of pipes, we might as well chat about the ultimate pipey games from designer Ryan Courtney: Pipeline and Curious Cargo.  Ryan burst into the board game industry with the critically acclaimed Pipeline, a slick economic brain burner about buying, refining, and selling oil.  While worker placement, loans, economics, engine building, and contract fulfillment are all major parts of this design, one of the standout features of this game is the pipe tiles where players must make long, winding connections of pipe of the same color to help refine their oil.  Purchasing and arranging these pipes is a compelling part of the challenge, and these different combinations of routes across dozens of domino tiles was something fresh and new in the spatial puzzle genre.

People loved it so much that the creators followed Pipeline up with another domino spatial puzzle game in Curious Cargo.  While many expected Curious Cargo to be a pure, simple distillation of the pipe element from Pipeline, in reality Ryan took this follow-up design as a challenge to cram as much complexity into a small box game as possible.  What resulted was a title that has perhaps been a little more polarizing in the industry.  This head-to-head shipping and receiving game contorts your brain with its even more difficult spatial challenges.  It demands much flexibility and adaptation from players as they draw tiles out the bag and must figure out how to best use those frequently less-than-ideal draws.  But I stand by my final statement in my review of this title: “Despite the emotional cuts, bruises, and occasional broken bones that this design doles out, I’ve found Curious Cargo to be one heck of a satisfying game.”

Azul

Let’s step away from the brain burning puzzles for a moment to talk about a few lighter options.  Azul mixes tile drafting with just a hint of spacial puzzling.  The sequence and location tiles added to your board is the core element of scoring, and it’s a challenge that comes into conflict with the dwindling drafting options of each round.  It’s just as important to be able to predict what tiles others will claim as it is to smartly plan your own moves.

Azul is one that ranks highly among our favorite 2-player games and 10 games everyone should try.  While there are now four versions of Azul out in the wild, I’m sticking with my guns and declaring that the original is the best.  At least that’s how things will remain until Azul: Queen’s Garden makes its way to the US for me to properly scrutinize it.

Carcassonne / Isle of Skye

If you’re looking to go even more classic and simple than Azul, then perhaps Carcassonne is the best candidate.  The procedure is dead simple: play the one tile in your hand anywhere into the growing arrangement of tiles and add a meeple on top of it if you’d like.  With the tiles, you’ll be accomplishing tasks as simple as growing, connecting, or enclosing fields, roads, or cities.  But the most important aspect is deciding when and where to add your meeples.  You see, these meeples are like investments in unfinished landscape features; the person with the most meeples in a feature when it becomes fully enclosed gets the big payout in points.  Things get extra spicy when opponents attempt to outcompete each other in the same region or when they try to sabotage the completion of a road or city.

Yet I can’t help but mention here another square tile game with an interesting twist.  In Isle of Skye, there is no shared, central region of growing tiles for players to add to like in Carcassonne.  Rather, you’ll be building up your own personal area as you’re pulled this way and that by the changing scoring criteria.  Each round, you’ll also be pulling 3 tiles out of the bag and deciding how to price them to either entice or deter your opponents.  Money is important here because you’ll desperately need it to be able to buy the best tile from a single opponent of your choice.  Plus, you’ll be using your own money to price your tiles, and if nobody bites, then you just bought them yourself for the price you set.

If you’re looking for a straightforward game that lets players dip their toes in the spatial puzzle waters by aligning and arranging matching features on square tiles, then you can’t go wrong with Carcassonne or Isle of Skye.

A Feast for Odin

For those of you who prefer your games sprawling and meaty, let’s now dive back into the deep end of spatial puzzle designs.  A Feast for Odin is a game that features a worker placement game board with over 60 possible spaces, hundreds of tiny polyomino tiles organized across several trays, and large player boards with supplemental island boards for you to arrange these many tiles over the course of a 2-3 hour playtime.  This is one big box game that will make you wish your table was at least… three times its size.

Yet, A Feast for Odin is one of the most satisfying Euros in existence thanks to Uwe Rosenberg’s steady design hand.  You’ll be hunting, raiding, farming, whaling, trading, and more to acquire viking goods that come in many shapes and sizes.  You’ll have to arrange these polyomino goods wisely in order to increase your income, surround and gain bonuses, and cover up negative points.  All the while, you’ll be feeding your vikings as they grow increasingly hungry throughout their many pursuits.  It’s a feast of game that is indeed worthy of Odin’s name.

Isle of Cats 

If you want to wrap your braintacles around one of the hottest polyomino games of the recent years, then Isle of Cats might just be what the doctor ordered.  You’ll be rescuing cats from the evil Lord Vesh by cramming them onto your boat board.  If that doesn’t already sound zesty enough for you, then consider that the other core mechanism of this game is card drafting similar to 7 Wonders or Sushi Go.

This game also has an easier, more family friendly mode for those who need it.  But either way, you’ll be playing a game that is currently ranked in the top 100 games on BGG and the BGG top 10 family games.  Need I say more?

Sprawlopolis

Those of you who are primarily solo or cooperative gamers, worry not, we haven’t forgotten about you!  Sprawlopolis is arguably the best wallet game that money can buy, and it is meant to be played solo or together.  It still blows my mind what the creators were able to pull off with only 18 cards:  The backs of these cards each have a unique scoring objective.  Your game will feature a random combination of 3 scoring objectives, and you’ll be using the remaining 15 card faces to arrange and layer a city of cards to try and achieve the scoring requirements.

You’ll lose points for each unique road, so it’s wise to try and connect them together to minimize damage.  Meanwhile, you’ll be trying to overlap and connect matching districts in all directions according to the tricky objectives of each individual play.  If the 3 objective cards are easy, then you’ll need a higher score to win.  This crunchy minimalist game comes highly acclaimed by many critics, and at such a low price you have no reason not to try it.

My City

Although this list was arranged in no particular order, we are going to end things off with my personal favorite spatial puzzle game.  While most of these games see players drafting or selecting tiles or cards to arrange in optimal orientations, My City makes its players fall victim to a bingo style draft.  A central deck with one card for each tile is shuffled at the start of the game.  Each round, the top card is revealed and players must decide where to place this building tile onto their city board.

One would surmise, as I once did, that such a system devoid of tile choice or player interaction would be aggressively dull.  Not so, dear reader.  Instead, this system creates an experience of suspense, risk, and anticipation as you plan and hope that the right tile will come out of the deck before you fill a suitable area in with something less ideal.  

A critical aspect of these rules is that you may spend a point to trash a tile rather than be forced to add it to your board.  And we haven’t even gotten to the real juicy part of the design:  My City is a legacy game where over the course of 24 sessions players will add stickers to their board, gain more tiles, encounter new challenges and objectives, and compete to be the ultimate city builder by tracking points earned during each play.  We’ve sung the praises of My City so much that our followers are undoubtedly now bleeding from all orifices and begging us to branch out to other games.  But alas, when one makes a Top 10 Spacial Puzzles list, one must listen to their heart and include the masterful My City among the champions.

Honorable Mentions

While there can only be thirteen games among the top 10 (our math is sound, don’t question it), the following are honorable mentions that we wish to list and celebrate so that we can minimize our chances of being flogged by spatial puzzle connoisseurs:

1. Blokus – classic, strategic goodness
2. Calico / Cascadia – hot new tile drafting and arranging games featuring animals
3. Arboretum – a tense cutthroat hand management game with a sprinkling of spatial arrangement
4. Railroad Ink – a solid roll & write of connecting highways and railroads
5. Barenpark – a favorite polyomino game for many… plus BEARS
6. On Tour – a roll & write about scheduling a tour by sequencing your route across the country
7. Sagrada – a popular game similar to Azul featuring gorgeous colorful token drafting (dice in this case) and arranging

A Bitewing Games Publication Reveal…

And here we have finally arrived… at the end of all things.  Or more accurately, at the end of all things yet published.  We are thrilled to finally unveil the next title that Bitewing Games will be publishing via a Kickstarter campaign in Q2 2022.  It is indeed a spatial puzzle game, but it is also a love letter to outdoor adventuring.  Introducing Trailblazers by designer Ryan Courtney:

Trailblazers are the gutsy folks who pave and brave the trails of the great outdoors.  Whether by hiking boots, cycling wheels, or river paddle, these tenacious travelers seek to feed their insatiable appetite for adventure.  With a scenic wilderness ever ahead and a freshly charted path upon the heels, one mustn’t forget to eventually find their way back to camp.  For there are always new environments to explore, further expeditions to undertake, and more trails to blaze.

In Trailblazers, players compete to earn the most points by building biking, hiking, and kayaking loops from their campsites of the matching trail type.  Each round, players are dealt eight trail cards where they’ll draft two cards, arrange those cards in their personal area, and pass their hand to the next player three times.  Cards must either be placed adjacent to or overlapping other cards.  While players can push their luck by aiming to construct long and elaborate trails, only closed loops that start and end at a matching campsite will score points.  Players also compete to fulfill “First To” and “End Game” goal cards.  After four rounds, the game ends and the player with the most points from closed loops and goal cards wins.

Compared to the travel edition for 1-4 players, the standard edition of Trailblazers features a second deck of trail & player cards so you can play with up to 8 players.  The box also contains two expansions (the Animals expansion and Adventurers expansion) that add another challenging layer of strategy and objectives to the experience.  

Trailblazers is the third spacial puzzle domino game by designer Ryan Courtney (the first two being Pipeline and Curious Cargo).  While they share a similar puzzly DNA that fans have come to know and love, Trailblazers differs by:

• Featuring simple, highly accessible rules in a 30 minute game for 1-8 players
• Boiling the gameplay down to pure spatial puzzling and card drafting with a dash of push-your-luck route building
• Using durable PVC cards that can easily be shuffled, dealt, drafted, and overlapped (found in the travel edition and deluxe edition)
• Including three challenging solo modes with a high skill-ceiling

Well there you have it!  We’re ecstatic to finally get that big news off our chest.  But we’re even more excited to launch this Kickstarter project next year!  For those of you who want to follow along or even try out the game early on Tabletop Simulator (once it is ready), simply subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter and join us for the ride!  In the meantime, keep on enjoying those spatial puzzlers!

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 Top 10 Spatial Puzzle Games + A Bitewing Games Publication Reveal! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Nick is joined by his lovely wife, Camille, as they discuss their Top 10 Board Games for Couples.  Whether you have a SO, a friend, or a stranger willing to play a 2-player game with you, we think you’ll find some killer suggestions within this discussion.

1:29 – Meet Camille
5:57 – About this list
7:53 – Cami’s 1st pick
11:29 – Nick’s Best Huge Sprawling Game
16:29 – Cami’s favorite no brain required game & Nick’s Most Prized Possession
20:46 – Nick’s Best Cooperative Game
23:43 – Cami’s next polyomino pick
25:08 – Nick’s Most Addictive Game
28:48 – Cami’s Chess-style preference
30:43 – Nick’s Most Polarizing Game
34:43 – Cami’s go-to card game
37:08 – Nick’s Best Non-Confrontational Game
40:31 – Cami & Nick’s Endlessly Entertaining Pick
44:17 – Nick’s Best AP-Inducing Game(s) + Cami’s similar alternative
50:13 – Cami’s favorite classic
53:21 – Nick’s Old Reliable Choice
56:03 – Cami’s final pick
59:00 – Nick & Cami’s Favorite New Game
1:06:11 – An exciting upcoming reveal… (Click here to follow along)

The post Top 10 Board Games for Couples — Podcast Exclusive 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.

The post Top 15 Board Games of 2020 appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Appetizing Agony

I’m not all that into playing contact sports.  After breaking a big toenail in half, taking a few shots to the groin, and witnessing plenty of other people’s injuries (from broken bones to haunting concussions), I prefer to stick with sports and competitions that keep the bodily wear and tear to a minimum.  I’m not sure why someone would want to submit themselves to being wrecked by a lacrosse stick or rocked by a sprinting tackle, but it sure is fun to watch!

Oddly enough, I have much different preferences when the game is played on a tabletop rather than a field.  Board games where players get curb-stomped by opponents or the puzzly challenge itself are right up my alley.  In previous blog posts, I’ve given loads of examples of games that hurt so good, they’re fun to lose.  I’ve explored why Salty Player Interaction is usually an essential ingredient for a game to keep a spot in my collection.  And I’ve observed how things can quickly become boring without a Spicy Tension to reel me in.  Indeed, when it comes to board games, I’m a glutton for punishment!

The reason I bring this topic up again is because I’ve observed an interesting polarization of opinions around the recent release, Curious Cargo.  Board game critic, Dan Thurot (Space-Biff), describes it as “entirely unpleasant,” while the British folks of Shut Up & Sit Down labeled it “Dinky and Devilish Perfection for Two.”  Meanwhile, SU&SD’s friends over at No Pun Included shared that they “didn’t like Curious Cargo at all” before I praised it as “living up to high expectations” and being “a gorgeous game, a top-notch production, and a frighteningly deep puzzle.”  The comments on Board Game Geek show a similar contrast of opinions.  

So what’s the deal with Curious Cargo?  Why is it fueling such passionate reactions in both directions?  I’ve thought about this quite a bit as I’ve listened to both sides of the spectrum.  If I had to boil down my answer to one word, I would select ADVERSITY.

Against the Current

Curious Cargo fits into the widely popular and ever-expanding board game genre of spatial puzzles.  These games require an ability to visualize objects in different arrangements and orientations as players seek the optimal placement of tiles.  Classic examples of this include the evergreen Carcassonne, where players are connecting square tiles together in a central area by aligning matching borders, or Blokus, an abstract strategy game of placing Tetris-like polyomino pieces on a board to cut off opponents and hog more space for yourself.  More recent examples of spatial puzzles include the colorful, quilt building Calico that sees players arranging hexagonal tiles on their personal board in a quest for maximum points, or the various versions of Railroad Ink that challenge participants to connect exits and spaces via bending railroads and highways.

For most popular spatial puzzles on the market, the interesting challenge of these designs is determining which tile you should place next and/or where you should place it.  Furthermore, many games of this type set players up to wait for the perfect tile or card or roll to emerge that they’ve built their entire strategy around.  Usually, these games give you those singular needs quite readily and swiftly.  Curious Cargo flies in the face of this style of design, and this is the element that seemingly makes the game so polarizing.

Curious Cargo hands players a few conveyer tiles randomly drawn from a bag and truck cards drawn from a deck and says, “Now go figure it out!”  It challenges two rivals to visualize a path along their individual player boards from the loading docks to the machine ports and then buries this path deep within a tangled web of spatial combinations and essential exchanges.  While drawing the convenient tile to complete your connection of focus is certainly possible in Curious Cargo, obtaining such a tile is far more rare than your average route builder.  

Adaptation Sensation

Some people apparently hate the amount of adaptation and thinking outside the box that Curious Cargo frequently requires when the easiest option doesn’t come out of the bag or deck.  I’m on the other end of the spectrum, where with more experience and a willingness to step outside my comfort zone, I’m finding this punishing style of puzzle to be much more rewarding.  I’ve found that the design provides plenty of flexibility for me to work around luck-of-the-draw, though I can see where players may quickly become frustrated if they neglect or forget their privileges.  

Every deceptively minor rule in this design is essential to success.  At first glance, some conveyor tiles that land in your lap may seem entirely worthless.  It can be easy to burn your turns away digging into the bag for that perfect tile while even better options pile up under your very nose.  You see, most board games have lulled our brains into this sense of permanence that punishes an inefficient arrangement and immortalizes a perfect placement.  The challenge of optimization has embedded itself into nearly every game on the market.  So when a game like Curious Cargo comes around, one that prioritizes adaptation over optimization, it seems that players can sometimes struggle to thrive.

Despite making its players victim to “luck of draw,” Curious Cargo follows the mantra of “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”  Participants have all the tools they need to succeed in this spatial puzzle, most notably the freedom to cover the segments of previously placed tiles.  Covering up a perfect connection may seem like a bad idea until you consider that such a move might allow for the establishment of a more important connection or prevent your opponent from piggy backing off your success. And frequently, when short-term objectives feel just out of reach, a spent construction token or shipping token provides that extra slack needed to succeed.

In addition to asking which tile should be placed next and where it should go, Curious Cargo adds an extra layer to its spatial puzzle by asking its players how its pieces and cards should be used.  Cards and tiles can be spent toward a wide variety of benefits.  2 discarded conveyor tiles can become 1 truck card.  1 discarded truck card can become 1-3 new conveyor tiles.  In the standard game, tiles can be put to use as routes to ship blue goods, ship red goods, receive blue goods, receive red goods, or a combination of these things.  Trucks can be used to push your opponent’s goods to your receiving docks or deliver your own goods from your shipping docks.  But it can be difficult to remember all of those great uses for 1 tile or 1 card when you desperately just want to establish a red connection to shipping dock 4 in order to deliver red cargo onto the empty space of your truck.

A Game That Bites

I do wonder if some players could have avoided their unpleasant collisions with Curious Cargo with the help of player aids or tutorial modes.  Perhaps more obvious reminders of the possible uses and exchanges between tiles, cards, and especially bonus tokens would do the trick.  And maybe some sort of introductory scenarios that lead players by the hand through building, overbuilding, routing, and rerouting their connections would help them to be more flexible with the main game.  But even with just a great teacher, a bit of patience, and a couple eagerly adaptable players, you’re bound to find the good stuff within Curious Cargo.

One would be wise to follow the council within its rulebook and quick tip guide.  While I eventually found myself ready to take on the expert 3-color mode, I was mistaken in assuming that my opponent was also ready to take the leap.  Our first play of this “Night Shift” variant was deliciously challenging for me and excruciatingly difficult for my opponent.  As the rulebook cautions, this mode is only for those who are “thoroughly proficient” in the 2-color version.

Mesmerizing Depth

Yet the adaptability required by Curious Cargo might be an acquired taste in addition to being a developed skill.  I’ve observed how many designers, publishers, and gamers prefer designs that maximize the feel-goods and minimize the feel-bads.  I understand how some people prefer games that soothe their stresses and stimulate dopamine release rather tangle their brains and trip up their steps. But against the backdrop of adversity, one’s successes shine all the brighter. And I can’t help but feel that Curious Cargo pummels its competition in the category of replayability.

Ryan Courtney’s design is a game where the setbacks feel bad, but clearing those obstacles feels amazing.  The skill ceiling is breathlessly high, and the puzzly challenge is tantalizingly deep.  This ever-present difficulty is why the thought of playing Curious Cargo again still thrills me even after several recent plays.  In comparison to this, the game Calico quickly lost steam as its challenge diminished over our first few plays.  By our third session, I had found my optimal play style and had no reason to budge from it.  Meanwhile, Curious Cargo is still forcing me outside of my comfort zone and into exciting new depths.

Despite the emotional cuts, bruises, and occasional broken bones that this design doles out, I’ve found Curious Cargo to be one heck of a satisfying game.

This concludes my Curious Cargo review! Have you tried this challenging game yet? Does the allure of delicious pain entice you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post Curious Cargo Review: Gluttoning for Punishment appeared first on Bitewing Games.

It has been a good month of 1st impressions, my friends. Ridiculously good. Here are my new release 1st impressions for games that have released in the past year or so!

Scape Goat

3 Plays

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

With Scape Goat, we have a social deduction game that turns the genre on its head. Instead of everybody knowing their own role and trying to deduce which opponent is the odd-man-out, Scape Goat’s premise is that everybody knows who the odd-man-out is BUT you are trying to deduce if that knowledge is a lie and YOU are actually the odd man out.

Not only does the game provide a fresh, exciting, and paranoia-induced experience, but it does so within an attainable range of 3-6 players in addictively quick 20-minute sessions. I can’t wait to break this out again and again with different people and unique personalities.

The presentation/production of the Scape Goat aren’t anything to write home about, but it’s hard to complain about a game this cheap. This game was extremely well-timed for social bubble game nights where you can only safely scrounge together one or two households worth of people and are hoping to scratch that social deduction itch.

Current Rating: 9/10

The King is Dead: Second Edition

1 Play

This area influence game is as tight and tense as they come.  The King is Dead is an extremely simple game with a whole lot of depth.  You’ll spend way more time thinking about what to do on your turn than actually taking it.  Each player gets the same hand of 8 cards and must decide whether to play one for early board momentum or pass for late hand advantage. Plays like a hearty salad bowl version of a Pax Pamir burrito grande, and who doesn’t like a good salad bowl?!

Current Rating: 8/10

Pipeline

3 Plays

Pipeline didn’t make a great first impression on us at the beginning of this year, but we eventually gave it another go, and I’ll admit that my first impression of Pipeline was off.  Part of that is because we didn’t fully grasp the rules after being taught them the first time.  The other part of that is because Pipeline has a steep strategic learning curve with a high skill ceiling, which means it gets better with more plays.

If you enjoy crunchy economic Euros with a dollop of spatial puzzling and don’t mind costly mistakes, punishing interactions, potential runaway leaders, and a constant feeling of making suboptimal decisions, then Pipeline is right up your alley!  If your group contains AP-prone players who sometimes drive you bonkers, then the thinky Pipeline is probably not for you.

I doubt that oil would be anyone’s favorite theme, but Ian O’Toole makes it sleek, sexy, and streamlined.  Capstone Games did a killer job with the production, and just thinking about the game has me hungry to play it again.

Current Rating: 8/10

Curious Cargo

4 Plays

Thus far, Capstone Games is 3/3 with 2020 releases!  

Curious Cargo has way more game crammed into it than most boxes of this size.  I was expecting a simple, streamlined, 2-player spinoff of Pipeline.  Yet what Curious Cargo sheds in tight economics, it makes up for in brain-melting spatial analysis.  I could spend many games mastering the beginner setup, and yet the production provides loads more maps AND a THIRD pipe color on top of that!

I’ve heard multiple reviewers say “Don’t even touch the three-color option,” implying that it is beyond the analytical faculties of a normal human. But after four plays, I’m feeling curious enough (no pun intended) to give it a shot. I’m finding that with the two-color setup, the game ends before players can really put certain tokens and strategies to good use. My hunch is that the three color version lengthens the game enough to allow for more strategic paths.

I’ve also heard some complaints from a small handful of players or critics that give me the impression they haven’t made it past the initial learning curve. Don’t be mistaken, this small box game absolutely has a strategic learning curve. It’s one that you can elect to climb on your own, or you can jump straight to Capstone’s quick tip guide for an escalator version of the curve. Either way, it’s going to take some getting used to the spatial tactics of Curious Cargo. If you’re looking for another cuddly one-night stand kind of game, then keep on moving along. This one is meant to be explored over many play sessions.

Even with the two-color setup, the strategies, tactics, objectives, and player interaction are incredibly dynamic.  I love that you can take advantage of your opponent’s setup while throwing wrenches in their plans.  It’s a game that demands extreme flexibility, as you’ll fall behind if you wait for the perfect tile or truck card to come along.

I’ve been looking forward to Curious Cargo since its announcement, and I’m pleased to report that it lives up to my high expectations.  It’s a gorgeous game, a top-notch production, and a frighteningly deep puzzle.

Current Rating: 9/10

Tammany Hall (2020 Edition)

1 Play

I’ve been brutally critical of some of Pandasaurus’s more recent releases, so let me start with this: Kudos to Pandasaurus for refreshing Tammany Hall and bringing it back into the spotlight! I never would have discovered this gem otherwise. And a double-kudos for the slick production and clean rulebook! The clear rules combined with the helpful game board guide make for a smooth experience. Everyone involved in this design and production deserve a huge pat on the back!

Tammany Hall quickly won me over with its Knizia-like emergent strategy and Splotter-like tactical nastiness. There’s a lot of layers to this onion, and I’m excited to dig deeper into it. If you don’t mind cutthroat interaction and do enjoy games like El Grande, then you owe it to yourself to try this one!

Current Rating: 8.5/10

The Quest for El Dorado: The Golden Temples

2 Plays

As big fans of the original Quest for El Dorado, we’ve now tried Golden Temples as a standalone game and as a combined expansion to the base game.  I’ll give my impressions for both ends of the spectrum: 

Standalone:

It’s hard to pass judgment on the standalone game after only one play (especially when it’s a Knizia), but we did have some unexpected experiences with The Golden Temples:

1) In our 3-player game, we all went in different directions.  The direction I chose was the only one that contained any trash a card spaces (this was the suggested setup).  I absolutely crushed my capable opponents in this game; when I reached the end, one opponent had only obtained a single gem out of three, the other had just barely acquired two.  I believe this is mainly because I was able to thin my deck early on by starting in the unique card-trashing direction.  I could certainly be wrong, but it seems like this is the only optimal strategy.

2) At one point, the other two players completely blocked each other from passing through.  In an interesting game of chicken, they had to decide whether they would be the first to retreat and change routes.  This was obviously a poor move by the second person who committed to this one-lane path, as I was clearly in the lead and they were only helping me further.  Yet this too presented another weird scenario that we never encountered in the one-directional vanilla El Dorado.

3) The English rules are severely lacking, both in clear description and in failing to explain certain rules entirely (mainly for the 2 player variant).  You can find these missing rules within the BGG forums.

4) The 3 smaller map tiles all feel pretty samey.  They all contain essentially the same mix of ingredients with slightly different proportions (kind of like Taco Bell).  I didn’t feel the need to adjust my deck between the tiles at all, especially when there are so many wild card options that let you plow through anything.

On one hand, I appreciate the interesting differences that The Golden Temples brings to El Dorado.  The new cards are a nice change of pace, the guardian tokens are clever, the pick-up-and-deliver mechanism is a nice twist, and the coins are a solid addition.

On the other hand, our game was MUCH less competitive than any game of regular El Dorado that we’ve ever had.  This is due to the above mentioned experiences, and I’m worried that this trend may continue.  The new cards and tiles also feel less diverse than the original, as so many of these new cards are basically movement wilds to get you through samey tiles.

Combined:

We combined the base game with Golden Temples for an epic race!  The game becomes quite the beast to setup, play, and tear down in this state.  It doubled our total playing time, but it was quite fun traveling over a long journey and managing a deck through different regions.  

Does this make The Golden Temples even better?  Probably.  Is it worth the extra investment of time?  Depends on how much you like the Quest for El Dorado.  It certainly adds a ton more variability/replayability to the game.  It also mitigates the family-friendly luck of the draw (for better or worse) by rewarding long-term planning, meaning that the best player will always win (and sometimes crush others into oblivion).

Current Rating: 7/10

New York Zoo

3 Plays

Note: I just released a comprehensive comparison and review of NYZ vs. other similar polyomino games last week in The Battle of the Polyominoes. For a quick summary of my thoughts on NYZ, continue reading below.

Uwe once again reminds us all why he is King of the Polyominoes.

I’ll be honest, I’m surprised at how inelegant this game is for a family-style Rosenberg.  There are several little rules that players kept forgetting or needed reexplained.  Even as I was reading through the rule book, I encountered several sections where I felt like I would soon forget these rules if I didn’t play the game quickly and regularly.

On top of that, the tiles are so similar in shade that you are doomed to fail if you’re just winging the initial setup (the tiles must be placed in many stacks of lightest on bottom to darkest on top).  Yet with trained eyes and good lighting, this quickly became a non-issue for us.

New York Zoo is surprisingly a bit of a mess to teach and setup, especially as a first time teacher.  But honestly, NONE of that matters for me.  This is an insanely fun polyomino game with a charming production and a surprising amount of depth.

With a rondel ripe for planning and risk-taking, the decisions one faces are both agonizing and thrilling… Do I snatch up a meerkat now so I’m ready for the next breeding, or do I risk putting it off just one more turn and claim that beautiful tile right there?  If my opponents all move the elephant a lot of spaces, then I’ll miss my chance entirely!

The adorable traveling elephant token is simply a disguise for the subtly cutthroat player interaction.  I can go here and get this decent tile, or I can go HERE and cost you the perfect action space for your plans, MUAHAHAHAHAAAA.

In a Board Game Vegetarian world dominated by bland Point Salads, it is SO refreshing to bite into a meaty race game where the first player to fill their entire board wins.  The tension of New York Zoo ramps up like no other polyomino game on the market.

Don’t let my minor gripes of rules inelegance and setup fiddliness scare you off.  In terms of production, charm, tension, and replayability, this game blows Barenpark out of the water.  It’s absolutely one that I can and will teach anyone and everyone.  The uninitiated may need a few reminders at first, but this is one trip to the zoo worth taking over and over again.

Current Rating; 9/10

My City

7 Plays

Note: I just released a comprehensive comparison and review of My City vs. other similar polyomino games last week in The Battle of the Polyominoes. For a quick summary of my thoughts on My City, continue reading below.

Those who follow my blog or play games with me know that Reiner Knizia has become one of my favorite designers. Despite this positive bias, I had even more reasons to avoid My City. My City is a multiplayer solitaire, bingo-style legacy game where one card that displays a specific tile is drawn at time and players must place the matching tile onto their own board.  This description of the game was an instant turnoff for me, as it sounded like a shameless cash-grab smoothie of every current trend in tabletop gaming (fluffy low-interaction gameplay + legacy game + bingo-style flip & fill + polyominoes).  Yet if one designer deserves the benefit of the doubt, that is most certainly the prolific Reiner Knizia.

When I somewhat apprehensively picked up My City at a reasonable price, I was expecting a mildly amusing game at best. Despite my reservations, I was quickly blown away by how fun and addicting My City is. THIS is how you do multiplayer solitaire.  Simultaneous play.  Evolving, legacy-style sessions.  Interesting new challenges layered on to each successive play.  Providing catch-up mechanisms for those who fall behind in the overall objective while ramping up the difficulty for those who pull ahead.  Let us, once again, take notes from the legendary Dr. Knizia’s work!

Current Rating; 9/10

This concludes another episode of my new release 1st impressions! Have you tried any of these games yet? What are your thoughts on them?

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!

The post Candid Cardboard: New Release 1st Impressions (November 2020) appeared first on Bitewing Games.

So how is this board gaming industry still even a thing?  Is there more to it than… winning?  Of course there is!  You know that, I know that.  Perhaps in games of pure luck, there really is nothing fun about losing.  But when we begin to mix other elements into the game… the interesting friends, the dynamic strategies, the dramatic moments… that’s when the finish line fades and the journey prevails.  Let’s take a look at some of the many games that hurt so good.  In other words, let’s explore games that are fun to lose, and most importantly, why:

Close, Intense Battles for Victory

These kinds of losses are perhaps the most fun, at least for me.  When I feel that victory is within all of our grasps, and even when I’m not crowned champion, I love a good battle to the death.  I’ve encountered it time and time again in tightly designed titles including Inis and Pax Pamir (2nd Edition).  It’s what puts these games among my all time favorites.  You can never count a player out, because there is always a route for them to make a wrecking-ball comeback.

Competitive Races

Along the same lines, I love a close race.  When the winning objective is clear—reach El Dorado first in The Quest for El Dorado, or fill your mat first in New York Zoo—yet the competition is tight.  The games I just mentioned have provided multiple instances where opponents were one good turn away from claiming the victory.  It’s the kind of roller coaster of tension that I love taking again and again.

When You Are Proud of what You’ve Built/Accomplished

I love it when a game allows the players to approach its challenge in unique and creative ways.  Often times, the path you pave can be even more satisfying than reaching the finish line first.  You see this all the time in games like Junk Art, where players must stack wildly different shapes as they build their own teetering works of art.  Men at Work is another obvious example, as one player may not win the overall game, but they’ll pull off the most challenging task of all (to the “Ooos” and “Ahhhs” of their opponents).  More recently, I experienced this with our first play of Curious Cargo.  My wife ended up kicking my trash (nearly doubling my score), yet I was still mighty proud of the tricky network I had built and the maneuvers I had pulled off.

When the Strategy you Execute Plays Out Beautifully, and Somebody Still Outwits You

Pax Pamir (2nd Edition) is one of my absolute favorite games.  It quickly rose to the top of my list despite me losing the game over and over again.  I believe it took me 6 or so plays (even with less experienced people) to actually win the dang thing.  Despite my struggle, I loved every session of it.  Pax Pamir is the kind of game where the strategies and tactics are seemingly endless, and I’m always scheming up new plots to swoop in and win a dominance check (a scoring phase).  Often, I can get at least one of these schemes to pay off each game, and thereby position myself in the lead.  Even when my crafty opponents manage to snatch the victory from my salivating jaws, I still have a satisfied belly from the tasty schemes I hatched.

When an Opponent Shoots for the Moon and Wins Against All Odds

You have to respect the moon shooters of our hobby and the games that give them those tiniest of windows to hope and victory.  When I see an opponent, fresh out of reasonable options, shooting for the moon, I always give them an internal salute.  Everyone knows that they have the slimmest shot of victory, but the key is that they still have a shot… and you can’t help but root for the underdog.  Speaking of Root, this game’s Dominance Cards are a great example of shooting for the moon.  You’ll see one player just barely cross the 10-point mark as their opponents are closing in on the 30 point victory.  Suddenly, the 10-pointer plays out a Dominance Card, removes their score marker from the track, and declares that they will win on their next turn if everybody else doesn’t stop them.  Respect.

My utmost respect also goes to those folks who bet on the camel in last place winning the race of Camel Up.  To those in Lords of Vegas who choose to gamble all of their money at the enemy’s casino in a desperate attempt at a comeback, we salute you.  To that one wild Space Base card that is extremely hard to complete, but when completed it automatically declares its owner the winner (throwing out the whole points-based objective), I tip my hat to you and the player who lassos you up and rides you into the sunset of victory.

When You Set a Perfect Trap and They Still Manage to Escape

Two of the greatest dexterity games on the planet include Crokinole and Klask.  Perhaps one of the most underrated features of these games is the ability to set traps for your opponent.  In Crokinole, that involves planning and positioning your discs in the hardest to reach spots for your opponent, who must at least touch your disc in order for their shot to not be a scratch.  For Klask, that involves nudging the magnetic biscuits onto your opponent’s half of the board, surrounding them with booby traps that are hungry to latch onto their pawn.  Putting my opposition in these situations never ceases to delight me.  Yet I’ve seen people pull off mission: impossible by executing the perfect shot and turning the tables on me.  Touché, good sir/madame.  

When the Players are the Most Entertaining Part of the Game

It’s hard to be mad about losing a game when your friends harnessed its mechanisms to surprise and entertain you.  Games such as Wavelength (my all-time favorite party game) and A Fake Artist Goes to New York never fail to provide this type of experience.  Even when our team is falling hopelessly behind in Wavelength, I can’t help but laugh when our group ranks black licorice only slightly less unpopular than child labor.  Even when an innocent teammate is epically failing at proving their innocence in Fake Artist, I can’t help but appreciate their pitiful attempt at drawing a meaningful line.

When a Game Lets You Feel like a Genius

Deep down, I think I only ever wanted to be a wheeler and dealer.  Chinatown gives me what I’ve always wanted.  Chinatown is game where I get to dangle carrots in front of my opponents, carefully selecting the right carrot at the right time, to lure them in to my schemes.  Those moments when I can use the hot garbage under my ownership and convert it all into golden geese through crafty trades and clever negotiations make me feel like an absolute genius.  After that, it doesn’t matter all that much whether I win or lose the game, because in my heart, I’ve already won.

The same can be said of Decrypto, a game where players must give clues to their teammates that are neither too easy for their opponents to crack nor too hard for their comrades to misunderstand.  As the rounds march on, players are forced to be increasingly creative to keep the opposing team swinging and missing, and this game of cat and mouse can be even more satisfying than the victory.

When You Feel Yourself Improving

I love a great cooperative game that teaches and strengthens a group through their failures.  Games like The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine and The Mind are perfect examples.  Typically, when friends gather around the table to give one of these a go, everybody is out of sync, inexperienced, and/or rusty.  But after fumbling through a few rounds, the collective skill level at the table rises and the team finds a nice groove.  Things get even more interesting as the challenge ramps up and the players must increase their focus and determination to succeed.

I get the same feeling of growth and improvement from sprawling titles such as A Feast for Odin and deep puzzles such as Curious Cargo.  These games provide plenty of new paths to explore to help keep one from getting too comfortable.  Even when the scores are tallied and my total isn’t at the top, I love seeing the progress in my strategies and abilities from one game to the next.

When Rounds are Quick and Addictive

It’s hard to get salty about a loss when you only have a minute or two to wait before you’re back into the next round of play.  This is what makes Love Letter and Skull such addicting fillers, aside from being great fun, of course.  Shortening the playtime is one of the best ways to compensate for a high-luck or high-punishment mechanism (such as player elimination or luck-of-the-draw).  Eliminations and poor hands become funny instead of painful.

When Losing Earns You a Meaningful Pity Prize

Nobody likes being the loser of the group, but everybody likes prizes.  A meaningful pity prize can be a great way to dampen the blow of losing.  In My City, a competitive, polyomino legacy game, the player(s) who lose the round are often awarded with a bonus that permanently improves their board or tiles.  This functions as both a catchup mechanism and an exciting opportunity.

Tournament at Avalon takes a similar approach, but in a much more dramatic way.  This is the type of trick taking game where one person usually becomes the piñata of the round that everyone else takes a big swing at.  Only when this player-piñata is struck in Tournament at Avalon, instead of spewing out candy from their gaping wounds, they end up spewing out vengeance.  You can explore my review of the game for further details, but the long story short is that whoever is in last place (or close to last) from round to round gains more abilities and powers for them to gleefully unleash on their enemies.  Sometimes it pays to be in last.

When You Take Down Others With You

We’ll conclude this topic by looking at two more games: one that is still in the oven and one that has stood the test of time.  Bristol 1350 is a game that I had the pleasure of previewing through many play testing sessions during its development.  It’s a roller-coaster of a social deduction game where a few select players secretly start with the black plague, doomed to succumb to its wrath, and they are striving to bring down every other healthy player with them.  While it is absolutely thrilling to make it through the game healthy and unscathed, the opposite end of the spectrum is plenty of fun as well, even when you catch the plaque mid-game and must pivot to a new objective.  This is one form of losing that I look forward to experiencing more when it officially releases next year.

But when I think of losing with dignity—going out with bang, if you will—perhaps the best example that comes to mind is the battle mode in Mario Kart 64.  Yes, you know what I’m talking about.  That moment when you lose your last balloon and transform into a mobile bomb.  Few things in life are as good for the soul as when you kamikaze your bomb into an unfortunate player and their last balloon.

This concludes our exploration of games that are fun to lose, and why! Which games do you enjoy, despite your losses, and what keeps you coming back for more pain?

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!

The post Hurt So Good: Games that are Fun to Lose appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Tis the season to buy more board games for your friends and family! Our 2020 Holiday Board Game Gift Guide is here to guide you to some of the best options available. Whether you’re looking to get your significant other the best surprise or hoping to find the perfect game for your holiday party, we’re here to help you find the cream of the crop!

Browse all the lists by clicking through the page numbers at the bottom, or use the links below to take you directly to the most relevant list for your needs. If any game mentioned catches your eye, click on the provided link (on the game’s title) to find some options for purchasing it.

Note: This is a completely unsponsored article, and none of the information or links provided generate a profit for us in any way. This article is written purely as service to you from genuine fans of board gaming who love to share this awesome hobby. This list has been carefully assembled to be ultimate gift guide, whether you’re looking to buy the hottest new game or find a reliable classic. We sincerely hope we can help you and your gift receiver find your next favorite game.

• Gifts for the Hobbyist Board Gamer in your life
• Gifts for the Casual Board Gamer in your life
• Gifts for your Significant Other
• Stocking Stuffer Games (small & cheap!)
• Perfect games for your Holiday Party

Continue on to Page 2: Gifts for the Hobbyist Board Gamer

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