It’s almost April, which means that I’m properly late to the party in revealing my favorite board games of 2021!  Why wait so long?  Because I’ve been holding out for a few last-minute games to make their way to our table, particularly if my hunch tells me that they have a shot at my Top 15 Board Games of the year.  I’ve also spent the past few months revisiting many of these new releases with third or fourth or sixteenth plays to discern exactly how they compare against each other.

I’m not the type who shies away from including reimplemented designs on my list, but this year I decided that reimplementations must feature gameplay changes to qualify for my Top 15.  This includes anything from slight balancing tweaks to additional content, but those also tend to come with a new coat of paint (in theme and/or art style).

Ultimately, my list is a celebration of excellence in game design, illustration, and publishing.  The board games that made my Top 15 earned their place by bringing innovation, excellence, and (most importantly) enjoyment to our table and the industry.  2021 was a killer year for tabletop gaming; let’s explore 15 reasons why…

15. Cryo

Cryo is a well-oiled machine of a worker placement sci-fi game.  What it lacks in exciting new ideas, it more than makes up for in slim, trim, focused gameplay.  Each mechanism is tightly interconnected to the overall objective of scavenging the catastrophic wreckage of your space ship and rescuing your colony’s faction on a cold, threatening planet.  

Using only 8 unique cards and a small assortment of tile options, Cryo provides a wealth of strategic possibilities for customizing your engineering platform as you race for the most points.  Much like the experience of gliding down fresh powder with your well-worn skis on a snow-day, the smooth system that Cryo provides is endlessly satisfying to glide through, despite its familiarity.

14. MicroMacro: Crime City — Full House

This list contains a couple of standalone sequels to excellent original designs—sequels which merited their way onto my Top 15 through sheer enjoyment factor.  But these sequels certainly would have been even higher on my list if I hadn’t already played their predecessors dozens of times.  At any rate, MicroMacro: Crime City — Full House is the first such sequel.

While Full House features a little more nuance to its criminal cases and visual trickery, it doesn’t really bother to shake up the formula established in the original game.  Yet, that’s perfectly fine in this case.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  Full House simply offers more of what we’ve come to love in this cooperative Where’s Waldo murder mystery bonanza: kills and thrills.  I maintain that MicroMacro is one of the best 2-player cooperative games money can buy, especially for couples.

13. So Clover

I was initially dubious at the announcement of yet another word game where the objective is to get players to guess some words using another word as a clue (see also Codenames, Decrypto, Just One, and a gazillion others).  Yet, as Cryo’s reliable worker placement system and MicroMacro’s proven search-and-solve formula have shown, just because you’ve seen it before doesn’t mean it can’t delight you.

The important thing here is that So Clover manages to stand out from its crowded (and seemingly perfected) genre by engaging everyone for every second of its lighting fast 30-minutes with a novel production featuring donut cards and dry-erase clovers.  It wastes no time getting straight to the beating heart of what makes word games fun, and it uniquely does not require a large group of players to provide maximum enjoyment.

12. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

And here is that other commendable sequel I was hinting at.  Do you like yourself a tense card game?  A clean cooperative design?  A solid trick taking challenge?  The Crew: Mission Deep Sea might just be one of the very best games IN ALL THREE GENRES, ever.

I’ve found that with the cooperative genre in general, the key to my heart is through limited communication, low upkeep requirements, tense challenges, and meaningful variety.  The Crew effortlessly checks all of these boxes and keeps me unabashedly addicted to its gameplay loop from one hand to the next.  That’s why I’ve played 111 rounds of The Crew (between The Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea), and I still have no intention of stopping.

11. Kabuto Sumo

Speaking of games that I’ve played a ton of, Kabuto Sumo has proven to be another perfect 2-player game for my wife and I.  Having backed the Kickstarter campaign, we were among the first to receive and play it, and it was an instant hit at our table.  Thus, I’ve been frequently surprised to hear so many polarizing opinions on this one as the months have gone on.

Some folks, like us, are having a blast with this gorgeous little game of beetle wrestling and disc pushing.  Others have merely shrugged their shoulders and wondered what all the fuss is about.  Certain people have even come away claiming that there is nothing here in terms of meaningful decisions or strategic momentum.  I’d like to formally invite you naysayers into my home where we will show you the true ways of the Kabuto.  You must learn to wax on and wax off before you can master the art of the Sumo.

As far as dexterity games go, the disc-pushing of Kabuto Sumo is certainly more peaceful and nuanced than that of flicking discs or stacking blocks.  Yet if you’re willing to invest in that nuance and get lost in the weeds of predictive physics—where wood pieces of various shapes, weights, and sizes collide with one another as you try to direct and control this gentle chaos on a raised platform—then and only then will you uncover the alluring magic of Kabuto Sumo.

10. Brian Boru: High King of Ireland

Trick taking games have long explored and experimented with various incentives for both winning and losing tricks.  Few have gone as far as Brian Boru in grafting the clean mechanism of trick taking onto an entire board game and asking the question: What if both winning and losing a trick had unique, impactful consequences in an area majority game?

Brian Boru is a resounding success in its experimental combination of mechanisms.  Hand management remains impactful as players must decide which cards to draft, when to play them, and how to use them to gain the upper hand in this gorgeous depiction of old Irish culture.  This one is ripe with ripple-effect decisions thanks to its strategic flexibility and potent player interaction.

9. Mille Fiori

Thus begins the Reiner Knizia hot streak.  What do I mean by that?  Well, Knizia had one 2020 release (My City) that made my top 15 games that year with a second game (Schotten Totten 2) later earning a place among my ‘keepers.’  Not that my list actually means anything, but I’d call that a killer year for any designer.

Enter 2021… in terms of hot streaks, this year might rank among his very best in his 30 years of published games.  Mille Fiori is my first reason why.

There is something so undeniably joyous about the ramp up in tension, points, and combos that Mille Fiori provides from start to finish.  Yet where many point salad designs fail to have teeth within the competition, Mille Fiori is a real biter.  Both the drafting of cards and claiming of board spaces are deliciously interactive in this glass game of ornate opportunism.

8. The Siege of Runedar

I tend to not click with big box cooperative games unless they are focused, streamlined, and high-pressured.  Of course, keeping a design focused, streamlined, and high-pressured is Knizia’s specialty, thus The Siege of Runedar has been a good fit for our table.

What I love about this cooperative, deck-building, fortress defense game is that it strains and stretches you and your companions across several different wants and needs.  You want to acquire a stronger weapon, but you need to stop the approaching orcs.  You want to dig your way to victory by removing rubble, but you need to address the newly arrived catapult.  The “wants” can help you in the long run, but the “needs” will lead to failure if neglected for too long.

This type of tough trade-off is common in solid cooperative games, but Reiner takes things a step further through interesting deck management decisions.  And the icing on the cake is an ambitious production by Ludonova that brings the experience to life with raised walls and towers.

7. Whale Riders

Perhaps the only thing more breezy and joyous than Reiner Knizia’s Whale Riders is actually riding whales in real life.  Either way, you’re in for a great time when whales are involved.  Whale Riders makes for an excellent filler game in a gorgeous package.  Nothing here is necessarily new or innovative, but the quick pace and tense tempo of this action efficiency game is what makes for a fresh experience.

I’m still amazed that I’ve been able to teach and play this game in under 25 minutes, considering the large box and plentiful tiles and cards.  At such a short playtime for 2-6 players, Whale Riders is both highly flexible and endlessly approachable, making it easy to squeeze into any type of game night.  The various different play styles it offers—from meandering along the coast for cheap goods to rushing to the pile of pearls at the end—have all proven to be viable strategies.  There is something to be said for good, clean game design that pays no mind to trending gimmicks or excess bells and whistles.

6. Equinox

It was a tough toss-up to rank all these great Knizias against each other, but I ultimately found that Equinox just barely won out on my list by being the most deliciously cutthroat of the bunch.  Equinox gives me feelings similar to Reiner’s best card games including Lost Cities and Schotten Totten in that often I don’t want to play any of the cards in my hand—somehow each card feels like a golden opportunity waiting to be unleashed if I can just manage to hold onto them a bit longer.

Thanks to the poignant creature betting and elimination, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this tense hand-management game at every player count.  Equinox also features a couple key improvements over its predecessor, Colossal Arena.  One improvement being the two additional creatures that bring the total creature count up to fourteen and the setup combinations beyond three-thousand.  The other key improvement is found on the cards themselves, where Equinox uses clear graphic design to denote a creature’s ability rather than small, pesky text.

Where most betting games fall back on the convenient racing formula, Equinox stands out by honing in on interactive card-play and devastating creature elimination.

5. Ark Nova

A Feast for Odin has occupied a comfortable niche in my collection for the past few years by being a sprawling sandbox game perfect for long, cozy game nights with my wife.  When I started to learn about Ark Nova, I wondered if this hot new game could manage to scratch a similar itch.  After only one play, and continuing on through several more, I’ve been delighted to find that Ark Nova does exactly that.  This is especially impressive when considering the fact that my wife loathes most games that are heavy-weight in their complexity.

I don’t believe Ark Nova has one secret ingredient that makes it a success at our table.  Rather, I find that this epic zoo-builder is more than the sum of its parts.  Thanks to a brilliantly interconnected system of action selection, tableau building, tile placement, economic juggling, and hand management—all of which provide lovely thematic touches—Ark Nova keeps us fully engaged from start to finish.  It’s competitive Zoo Tycoon brought to our tabletop, and rarely is this board gaming hobby much more exciting than that.

4. Kemet: Blood & Sand

Kemet has long been a favorite of many area control connoisseurs since its initial release now one decade ago.  I was quite tempted to jump into the design and see what the fuss was all about, but I instead decided to wait until the release of its evolved version: Kemet: Blood & Sand.  The wait was worth it, my friends.

Kemet: Blood & Sand is essentially Kemet 2.0, with many changes and improvements brought to the system including a redesigned map, balanced powers, upgraded components, and fine-tuned gameplay.  The joy of Kemet remains the hyper-aggressive gameplay mixed with a buffet of powers and creatures.  No two plays of this game have ever felt alike as each player cobbles together a terrifyingly unique army.  The ever-present challenge is to discover and exploit your opponents’ weaknesses while avoiding their strengths.  The cherry on top is a tight combat system that is full of strategy and surprises.

3. Ankh: Gods of Egypt

2021 was a great year for Egyptian area control, apparently, because Ankh manages to be just as compelling as Kemet: Blood & Sand, if not more so.  Ankh brings so many brilliant concepts to the table that it’s hard to know where to start.  The action selection tracks are a fascinating feature that can strongly influence one’s tactics, particularly when an action reaches the end of its track thereby ending a player’s turn and triggering the next event.  The conflicts present exciting opportunities for scoring points, building monuments, weakening opponents, and replenishing your hand.  And the experience follows a dynamic arc where the two weakest players eventually combine into one insanely strong faction as everyone races to the end of the point track.

While Kemet kicks the doors open with an immediately impressive array of strategic opportunities, Ankh has been more sly and subtle with a streamlined system that grows on you from one play to the next.  Each session has revealed new challenges to overcome and new strategies to explore, making it an alluring experience that rewards repeat plays.  I haven’t tried Eric Lang’s other games, but I would be surprised and impressed if any of them were better than Ankh.

2. Radlands

While I’ve tried a good number of popular dueling games over the years including Dice Throne, Unmatched, Blue Moon Legends, Funkoverse, Riftforce, and Summoner Wars, I’ve never been majorly impressed with the genre.  Something about the overly tactical “I slap you, you slap me” nature of these games never fully satisfied compared to other 2-player games and genres.  But with Radlands, I’ve finally found an addicting and satisfying dueler.

Not only does Radlands raise the bar with a stunning art style and production, but it also hits the sweet spot of being blazingly streamlined yet surprisingly deep.  The water economy is balanced on a knife’s edge, as are the huge variety of card abilities.  

The flexibility allowed in the gameplay is perhaps Radland’s strongest feature… You can aim to hit hard and fast and hope to knock your opponent out before they have time to retaliate against your weak defenses, or you can carefully play the long game and slowly undermine your enemy while keeping your camps well protected and repaired.  You can invest in new characters and store a little extra water for a later big turn, or you can junk your cards and blow your water for instant gratification from powerful but fleeting effects.  Thanks to a brilliant system of action timing and event triggering, you almost always have time to anticipate and prepare for your opponent’s next maneuver.  

Rather than leaning on cheap tricks and random surprises, Radlands confidently plants its feet on more strategic soil without losing any of the drama and fun of overpowered abilities and asymmetric dueling.  

1. Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile

In an industry that cranks out thousands of new releases per year that makes hobbyists feel like they’re drinking from a firehose of recycled mechanisms and themes, it is rare to come across a game that brings true innovation to the table.  Yet when those rare gems emerge, and when one can manage to assemble the right group to properly embrace the experience, these games are transcendent.

Oath flips the conventions of tabletop storytelling by turning the players from the audience into the story tellers.  This game is not about recreating or reliving history, it is about writing it.  It’s not about discovering tactical paths or uncovering strategic ripple effects, it’s about paving paths and creating ripple effects.  It’s not about deciding the best player at today’s table, it’s about determining who will rule the next generation and how that kingdom will evolve or decay over time.

Oath demands much from its participants—namely a regular group of players who are willing to embrace both the highs and the lows of the experience—yet it gives even more in return.  I never know what my next play of Oath is going to become… a joint quest to overpower and overthrow the tyrannical Chancellor, a covert operation to undermine the empire as a traitorous citizen, a ruler’s mad scramble to put out the fires started by pesky exiles, a struggle for territory or favor or secrets or relics… the possibilities are seemingly endless.  In a game where the decisions of one play carry over into the next in an endless transformation of land, peoples, and power, I doubt I’ll ever grow tired of Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile.

Oath also wins my vote for Best Art and Best Production for having delightful art by Kyle Ferrin and excellent components (including top-tier rulebooks) from the team at Leder Games.

Biggest Snubs

Art Robbery

Art Robbery is another delightful Knizia design that ended up just outside my Top 15.  It’s not the deepest card game out there, but Art Robbery does hit the spot in terms of quick simplicity and clever thievery.

Coffee Traders

I really enjoyed my first play of Coffee Traders. But that’s the problem, I haven’t managed to play it since.  Unfortunately, this one requires a very specific type of group and a huge chunk of time to get to the table.  Due to its sprawling, complex nature, Coffee Traders possesses far too many barriers to entry to have seen enough plays or earn itself a spot in my Top 15.

Best Reskin

Royal Visit

Royal Visit instantly became a household favorite among our 2-player collection when we tried this new reskin last year.  And what a reskin it is!  While the original game was amusingly themed after some drunk folks in Times Square, this new one feels more fitting for the tug-of-war mechanisms of attracting the king and his court to your chateau.  The production is colorful, blocky, and serene.  But most importantly, the gameplay has aged like a fine wine.  This one would absolutely be in my Top 15 Games of 2021 if any part of the design was new.

Best Games I Didn’t Love

Mind MGMT

I still hope to revisit Mind MGMT eventually.  Perhaps with a few months time or a different group of players it’ll finally click for us and become a hit as it has with so many others.  Whether or not that happens, I still admire and respect this hidden-movement deduction game for the interesting tricks and clever twists that it has up its sleeve.

Riftforce

As I shared in my 1st impressions post, Riftforce does everything right save for committing one critical error in my book.  I’m referring to the flat game arc where the start, middle, and end of the game all feel roughly the same.  But even so, Riftforce packs a heck of a punch as a 2-player dueling game with neat asymmetry and tasty combos.  

Worst Games I Adored

Family Inc.

My goodness, whose idea was it to make this game box so offensively large?  This is one of the few times where I’m actually considering defiling the box and cutting it down to a proper size or replacing it entirely with more sensible packaging.  The gameplay of Family Inc. isn’t the most revelatory either, but Knizia knows how to make even the dumbest of concepts amusing.  This experience boils down to “flip a random tile and hope for the best,” yet it still manages to entertain a jaded gamer like myself.

L.A.M.A. Dice

I also get a kick out of Knizia’s other “dumb fun” game, L.A.M.A. Dice, and this one even comes in a properly small box!  I almost feel bad putting this one under the “worst game I adored” category, because I actually think it’s a very smart design appropriately wrapped in a silly package.  Most hobby gamers would likely shrug at it, but for us it is a blast of a filler game.

Best Expansion

Pipeline: Emerging Markets

Emerging Markets is the perfect expansion for Pipeline in that it brings impactful market variety to the experience.  It’s a great one to jump into after a few plays of the base game, as it will keep you from getting too comfortable with a specific strategy.  For being an expansion that I would never play Pipeline without, Emerging Markets takes that cake as my top expansion of 2021.

Best New To Me Game

Yellow & Yangtze

I thought this would be a much harder decision, but once I realized that Yellow & Yangtze was a “new to me” game last year, my choice couldn’t have been easier.  While this list is already littered with far too many Knizias (I’m fully aware ;), I’m not about to leave off one of the very best designs in his massive ludography.  Yellow & Yangtze is a triumph of a strategy game that I will never get enough of.  Now who’s going to pick up the rights to this one and give us the expansion?

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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, including the upcoming Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. 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 15 Board Games of 2021 appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Caesar!: Sieze Rome in 20 Minutes!

3 Plays

I finally got my hands on the first of my Most Anticipated Games of 2022.  The moment I heard that Caesar was the spiritual sibling to Paolo Mori’s Blitzkrieg, I’ve since awaited its release like a hungry hawk ready to swoop in on its prey.

Swooping predators is actually quite an accurate way to describe the game of Caesar itself!  The game board is littered with yellow bonus tokens across regions of Rome that are waiting to be claimed by the cleverest player—Caesar or Pompey.  In a scrumptious hybrid of gameplay between Blitzkrieg and Samurai, players take turns positioning their tiles on the borders of each region.  

Much like Samurai, the object of the game is to surround contested regions with tiles that add up to a higher sum than your opponent.  Only in Caesar’s case, every tile has two numbers that will affect the two divided regions that it sits between.  The highest power tiles go up to six, but those sixes are accompanied with a zero on the other side of the border.  And like Blitzkrieg, Caesar’s tile spaces have a specific suit designated to them, and only a tile of a matching suit (or a wild) can be placed on them.  Furthermore, Caesar borrows from its older sibling in offering juicy bonuses as an extra incentive to claim a spot.  While the strongest player in a closed area gets to control that region (and thereby progress toward victory), the player who actually closes the region by placing the last border tile is the one who claims the bonus token.

The bonuses here are impactful, plentiful, and varied (especially once you add in the included expansions designed by David Turczi), yet they still don’t reach the variety nor provide the same ramp-up in power as Blitzkrieg.  That’s not to say they that Caesar’s tactical opportunities aren’t exciting, they absolutely are, yet that difference might play a small part in why I feel that Blitzkrieg still has the slight edge between the two.  Add in the fact that Caesar’s first printing for the North American version has several production issues, and that doesn’t help its case either.

My understanding is that publisher PSC Games has used different manufacturers to produce Caesar, depending on the distribution region.  For the North American units, these were made by a US-based manufacturer and the results have been… less than ideal.  The main issue stems from the cardboard punch outs.  These punchboards were among the worst quality I have ever seen in a board game, and that unfortunately took its toll on my solo tiles.

Fortunately, I have no intention of playing Caesar solo, but even with my best efforts to do it properly, every tile that needed to be punched out felt like pushing down on an old land mine and waiting for the deadly outcome.  The production headache didn’t stop there, sadly.

Another difference in the North American version is found on the player control tiles—where both sides of the tile have the exact same icon.  This becomes a grating problem when combined with the fact that one bonus token, Might, instructs the player to flip an opponent’s control tile face down to indicate that it is no longer active.  So you have both the rulebook and the player screens instructing players to flip a token face down that has no face down direction.  Yikes.

Only those who are savvy or resourceful enough to overcome this issue (either by figuring it out or looking it up in the BGG forums) would discover that the best solution is to simply cover the control marker with the Might token to indicate the same effect.  The only problem with this fix is that it negatively affects the readability of the board; covering a control marker with a bonus token simply makes the space look like a bonus ready to be claimed rather than a space covered and nullified.

How did this happen in one regional version of the game and not another? Apparently someone thought last-minute it was a good idea to make the control markers and influence tiles easier to separate by giving them different backs, unfortunately they opted for a solution that made matters worse by both conflicting with the instructions and reducing board readability.  I’m not sure why this was change was needed in the first place when it is already easy to keep these tokens separated from setup, into gameplay, all the way through tear-down and storage.

But alas, nobody is perfect, including publishers, and the key to life is learning from and fixing our mistakes.  In the case of these North American punchboard problems, PSC Games has already set up a form for customers to request new punchboards.  Hopefully these replacement parts will arrive swiftly and mend my wounded game.

The only other nitpick I had with our experience was found in the rulebook itself.  The first few pages detail the components and setup, yet no images are provided for all the components or a full setup.  Aside from showing players a couple different spaces on the board and an image of the influence token, there are zero visual cues as to what the bonus tokens look like, what the control markers look like, and most annoyingly, which tokens are part of the expansions.  Those who try to setup the game before reading through the entire manual will quickly find themselves confused as to which tokens should and shouldn’t be included in their first play and what tokens the setup section is even talking about.

The combination of all these gripes is certainly a disappointing way to dive into a brand new game, but I try not to let this kind of thing influence my enjoyment of it (as long as the problems don’t affect the actual gameplay).  In this case, Caesar is historically known to be a resilient one, and the design managed to survive its own production’s betrayals.  While I haven’t found the tactical decisions here to be quite as tense as Blitzkrieg, I have to credit designers Paolo Mori and David Turczi for cramming another juicy strategy game into a bite-sized 20-minute experience.  Caesar is absolutely a keeper in my collection and a solid companion design to Blitzkrieg.

Current Rating: 8/10

Kemet: Blood & Sand — Book of the Dead Expansion

1 Play

I’ve been fortunate to find myself a group of local Kemet fans and recently decided to spring on them the Book of the Dead expansion.  Aside from being mythologically historical, this expansion has a rocky publishing history all on its own.  When publisher Matagot first revealed this exciting new expansion featuring a new color of emerald power tiles, they wrapped it in a Cthulhu package to the outrage and dismay of many hardcore Kemet fans.  None of them wanted to see their pure Egyptian mythology game muddied with controversial Cthulhu lore.  Ultimately, Matagot decided to appease both sides of the debate by converting the expansion back to Egyptian mythology while offering some extra Cthulhu minis and tiles.

Besides offering a different flavor of power tiles, this expansion comes with another board to go beside the main game board (as if it wasn’t enough of a table hog already).  This side board is where you’ll dispose of your units whenever you sacrifice them to the Gods for useful benefits.  And if you want to retrieve your units back from the underworld, it’ll cost you extra precious prayer points.  Sacrificing your units also sends your honor point token tumbling down the honor track where you’ll eventually lose one to two victory points if you go too far.  While it hurts to lose any point when you’re trying to cross the 10-point victory threshold, the rulebook assures us that emerald tiles are the most powerful in the game.  The key is that you need to leverage your dishonorable methods to your advantage.

A player with less honor points (and thus less victory points) is also a player with a stronger putrefaction level.  Those of you who understand the definition of putrefaction (the process of decay or rotting in a body) would understandably interpret a “stronger putrefaction level” to be a bad thing.  But in Kemet, that is not so.  You see putrefied armies are like the marine corps of ancient Egypt.  The only problem is that there are only five emerald tiles that leverage your putrefaction level to your advantage, so if multiple players are gunning for the weird and wonky green strategy, then one or more of them may be left high and dry with all the dishonor and none of the benefits.

While the red, blue, and diamond power tiles are much more straightforward, it seems the emerald tiles require a very deliberate and crafty player to formulate a winning strategy.  I find that the most exciting part of this expansion is the addition of super creatures known as divinities.  Like all the other glorious creatures in Kemet, divinities are tied to and purchased with a power tile.  The thing that makes them special is that they function as their own troop of 4 or 6 strength with 1-3 more units of strength (worshippers) attached.  Where other creatures merely follow around and integrate into a regular band of soldiers, divinities are an army unto themselves.

Normally, Kemet allows each player 12 units that they can divide up into 2 or 3 roaming troops.  There are a couple tiles that grant you 3 more troops, but otherwise you’ll rarely be commanding more than 2 troops at once.  Divinities are a game changer.  Suddenly, you can bring your troop total to 3 or 4 with the acquisition of Thoth or Apophis.  Better yet, you’ll summon them directly onto a free desert space where you can spring them in next to an opponent before immediately moving in for the attack.  Controlling temples and opponents’ pyramids can often be the key to victory, and divinities make this an even more viable strategy.

I went all-in on emerald tiles with my first play while my two opponents avoided them due to fear of the unknown.  While they both caught an early lead on me, I found that I quickly closed the gap on victory points with the help of Thoth and Apophis.  What resulted was an extremely competitive game, but I ultimately fell in defeat to another who had a more stable strategy.  After seeing how emerald all came together, I would certainly give it another go, and hopefully I’ll have learned a thing or two about how to better combine these powers with the other colors.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

So Clover

3 plays

In many ways, So Clover is like the spiritual sibling to popular 2018 release, Just One: both are crowd-pleasing, chill, cooperative word/party games from publisher Repos Production.

In So Clover, each player gets their own dry-erase clover board where they’ll randomly slot 4 square word cards into the 4 clover spaces.  Each square card has four words on it, but the only ones that matter are the words around the outer border (next to the dry erase spaces of your clover board).  Well, that’s not exactly true… just like Codenames, all the words on display matter, because some of them may distract from the ones that you actually want players to guess.

You’ll secretly write 4 one-word clues around the outside of your clover board that connect to the two adjacent words.  Finally, you’ll pull your cards back off the board and shuffle them with a fifth card before putting everything on display.  The nice thing about So Clover compared to many other word games is that all players are doing these steps at the same time with their personal clover board and set of cards.

Once all players are ready, you’ll go through each person’s board and cards one at a time.  That person will sit back and writhe in pain while everyone else collectively and clumsily tries to recreate the exact arrangement of cards on their board that the player originally had.

Because you are lining up two sides of a card into a corner, you’ll have easy card placements just as often as you’ll have tricky ones.  Matching cards to corners can be tricky, but writing the clues can be even trickier.  “Princess” and “Saber” on two adjacent cards might make for an easy clue of “Leia”, but what kind of clue do you write for “Ramp” and “Bracelet?”  How about “Autumn” and “Lock?”

Just like all the best word games in the business, from Decrypto to Wavelength, So Clover captures that fun challenge of getting into your teammate’s mind and following gut feelings on clues.  It’s a design that is instantly engaging and effortlessly approachable.  While 2021 was understandably a slow year for party games, So Clover manages to hit the sweet spot as a great game for 3-6 players.

Current Rating: 8/10

Family Inc

5 Plays

If games like Family Inc. were as popular and widespread as Phase 10, Uno, and Go Fish—honestly, if Family Inc. simply replaced those games—then the world would be a much better place.  That’s because despite its oodles of luck and bare-bones simplicity, Family Inc. offers meaningful, tense decisions.

Family Inc. is another Knizia game that doesn’t currently exist in English—only German, Hungarian, Slovak, and Czech.  But the rules are simple and the components are just numbers, so that didn’t stop us from playing it.

The game comes with over 100 large chips numbered 1-10.  On your turn, you’ll simply flip one chip at a time until you decide to stop or are forced to stop via a bust.  You’ll bust if you flip a matching number that is already among your spoils, otherwise you can stop and steal all the matching numbers you’ve revealed that are currently in front of your opponents.

After that, you simply need to wait until the start of your next turn to score all of the chips that remain in front of you.  When the thievery is compounding, there is a stronger incentive to keep revealing chips until you find the number that matches the lucrative pile of tokens that another player is waiting to score.  Yet pushing further means you’ll run the risk of matching your own tiles instead and having to dump them all in the box.

Family Inc. even has an exciting mechanism to mitigate bad luck.  When a player matches their 1st or 2nd flipped chip with a 2nd or 3rd reveal, then their turn is over, but they get a diamond as a pity reward.  Earn three diamonds, and you’ll cash them in for 50 points!  That’s a huge payday when the first player to 100 wins the game.

Family Inc. balances speed, luck, and drama with effortless ease in a game that is guaranteed to please any casual crowd.  In our five plays, we saw a diverse range of paths to victory including the slow and steady low risk point collector, the big scoring thievery of piles of tokens, and the surprise double diamond cash-in.

It’s not something that I would want to play all the time.  But as a light filler with a casual group of friends or family, it really hits the spot.  The main thing that holds it back is the currently limited regional release and a box that is disgustingly oversized.

Current Rating: 6.5/10

Coloma

1 Play

Whenever I think back on all the games I’ve ever tried and all the plays I’ve ever had, the memories that stand out best are either the cream of the crop or the crap of the crowd.  My absolute best and worst moments of gaming are tied to strong emotions and poignant interactions, and thus these are most easy to remember.

So it is with genuine surprise that I look back on all those memories and I can’t recall a time where I was more agonizingly bored with a game than the two hours I spent playing Coloma.

I’m aware that there are oodles of games out there that many others enjoy, yet these games are not for me due to one reason or another.  Somehow, Coloma managed to aggressively recruit many of those reasons and assemble them into one design.

Have you ever had a soup where the individual chunky ingredients were pureed into a thick liquid—essentially becoming the texture of watery applesauce?  Coloma is like the board game version of that.  Perhaps the mechanical ingredients were chunky and interesting to start out, but they have ultimately been blended and liquified into a far less interesting meal.  

Players each get their own deck of cards, and at the start of the game you must cherry pick several of them into your starting hand before shuffling the rest into your own draw pile.  For newcomers, this is instantly an overwhelming decision thanks to all the possible bonuses and conversions these cards provide.  This would perhaps be forgivable if the cards were meaningfully diverse and interesting, but I quickly found that my entire deck of cards (…and the whole game board… and the complete game) offered nothing but superficial variety in the decision options.

Spend your workers and coins to play a card.  Play this card so you can earn some coins.  Play this card so you can earn some workers.  Play this card so you can discard some cards and earn some more coins or workers.  It gives the feeling of a dog chasing its tail in circles.  This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that literally all the cards have the same cost to play and provide the exact same amount points.  Apparently, even the creators understand that the cards have no difference in value or variety or flavor;  Thus, the costs and rewards have no need to be different or bring balance to the bland, uniform abilities.

The worker placement spaces are equally mind-numbing.  This spot triggers your card abilities which earn you stuff.  This spot lets you wagon around to different areas which also earns you the same kind of stuff.  Building rivers and bridges is just a vanilla way to spend your stuff for points.  Or you can dump your workers here to take on the bandits and earn—you guessed it—points.

I’m somewhat reminded of the ‘Taco Bell menu’ of action options that Witchstone provides where everything you do results in bonus actions and bonus points.  This shallow, point salad style of game has proven to be one of my least favorite genres, but at least Witchstone grafts it on to an intriguing action selection mechanism of arranging combo clusters with hexagonal domino tiles.

The most interesting aspect of Coloma is a spinning wheel made up of magnetic wedges which cover action spaces as they shift from one round to the next.  Yet even this part is undermined by the shoe-horned ‘player interaction’.

You see, players simultaneously select an action space to send their single worker each turn.  If one space ends up with more workers than any other, then that space gets the ‘bust’ wedge placed over it—meaning the action becomes half as good as it usually is because there are currently too many people there.  But for a game where all the action spaces are a samey mush that accomplish the same thing (unless you squint really hard…maybe), this bust mechanism essentially becomes Random Russian Roulette where half of the players get shot for picking the same spot.  These are the kind of bad-luck bombs that should not be found in a Euro game, especially one that can take 2 hours to play.  

To make matters worse, Coloma allows up to 6 players to play, and our game proved that even 5 was too many.  The benefits of simultaneous action selection have their legs cut off by an absolute slog of action resolutions that are 99% solitaire but just interactive enough that players can’t resolve them at the same time.  Instead, our playing time was doubled (and downtime was relentlessly unending) as each individual player in sequence had to trigger everything in their tableau or along their path or on their barrels.  It’s a not-so-merry merry-go-round that could even agitate sloths.

In other words, I drew no joy from Coloma.  It buried me in suffocating monotony from start to finish and overstayed its welcome for what felt like years.  But at least it has magnets in the cardboard wheel.  That’s not nothing.

Current Rating: 2/10

Sheepy Time

1 Play

With a quick glance at the box cover and title, one might guess that Sheepy Time is potentially a throwaway filler of a product that a big publisher like AEG used to pad their release schedule.  Yet it would be a shame to dismiss this one so easily, as Sheepy Time successfully provides an amusing push your luck experience in a charming production.

The game plays with the sleeping theme of counting sheep as well as the terrors that loom behind the closed eyelids of deep slumber.  Here and there you’ll be catching winks to race up the track to victory as you place and spend Zzzs that activate powerful dream tokens.  But the main objective is to race around the circular track with your sheep figure, trying to jump the fence as much as possible, as you avoid the terror the marches ever onward.

The problem is you don’t know exactly how or when the nightmare can strike.  Its cards are shuffled into the draw pile, just waiting to spring out at any moment.  All you know is what those nightmare cards could be and how that might affect you.  If the terror catches your sheep figure when it is stopped between your turns, then you’ll be on the verge of defeat and one more scare away from busting in the round.  Or if the nightmare makes it all the way around the board and back to the fence, then it’s an instant K.O. for everyone who didn’t call it quits yet.

Any time you jump the fence and score more winks (points), you can call it a night and remove your figure from the board, thereby securing the points you’ve earned for the round.  The catch is that just like in real life, any shut-eye you catch in a single night is completely erased by the exhausting events of the next day.  Your only victory is that catching more winks than others moves your pillow further down the point track than them.  In a future round, all you need to do is cross your climbing wink token with your descending pillow to win.

So pushing your luck to be the best sheep of each round is rewarding in the sense that it lowers the bar for you to personally obtain a victory.  Yet hitting a bust in a round doesn’t mean you are out of the game either.  As you progress through each round, players will have the opportunity to add more dream tiles to the board.  With the use of your Zzz tokens on these dream tiles, there are plenty of opportunities for massive combos that can help a player race back into the lead or even straight to an immediate win.

The nice thing about Sheepy Time is that it comes with a few unique nightmares that you can choose from to use for a specific game as well as a huge stack of dream tiles to mix up your experience.  For a quick filler game with amusing push your luck moments, you can’t ask for much more than that.  

My biggest gripe is that this game will rarely hit the table for us because I’m not inclined to play it at 2 players and it only goes up to 4.  Understandably, adding in more than 4 players would simply mean that you have less control and predictability over the experience, so I’m not saying it should play with more.  But I generally find that push your luck games often have a “the more, the merrier” vibe to them that we can’t fully embrace with Sheepy Time.  I suppose the best way to counteract that is to simply play with one or more people who bring a lot of heart and noise to the table.

Current Rating: 7/10

Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road

1 Play

Merv follows the tried and true recipe for modern Euros by offering a novel action selection mechanism bolstered by an assortment of tracks, actions, and bonuses in a tangled web of resource efficiency and point maximization.  For folks who live and breathe this style of game, there is plenty to enjoy here and honestly no reason why you shouldn’t welcome The Heart of the Silk Road into your heart and onto your table.  As for the rest of us, the question becomes whether or not Merv does enough to stand out and justify the investment to learn and play repeatedly.

To be frank, those who prefer their Euros fast-paced or easy to teach could do much better looking elsewhere.  Merv requires a hearty rules-dump right up front, and the tactical turns demand methodical crunching.  But what it lacks in elegance it makes up for in juicy payoffs and a crisp presentation from veterans Fabio Lopiano (designer of Calimala) Ian O’Toole (artist behind Lacerda’s heavy hitters) and Osprey Games (publisher of Undaunted, Brian Boru, and Cryptid).

Merv immediately gives off a confident aura from the big colorful box all the way down to the small wooden camels.  The design is packed with enough mechanisms that the efficiency puzzle here is firmly in control of the challenge cockpit while the competition between players is more of a back-seat driver.  Players are quickly tossed into a plethora of possible actions as they must decide which row to move their worker to, which tile to activate in that row, and how to best utilize the action on that tile.  The long-term implications of each turn are more layered than that, because selecting a virgin tile lets you throw your own building down on it, and matching buildings in the same row can help you accumulate even more valuable resources.

Things aren’t all silky-smooth in the silky city of Merv, as the Mongols threaten to erase your precious buildings and weaken your presence at the end of rounds two and three.  Players are encouraged to protect each other’s buildings with walls and soldiers in order to gain more influence and privileges.

Not every path is essential, as our play proved that the winner could completely ignore one action and still claim a comfortable victory.  It’s also rare to feel that a turn is wasted, as there are plenty of different opportunities to earn resources and score points.  You can draft cards from the caravansary and get points by collecting sets of spices, you can trade at the marketplace and score big from fulfilled contracts, you can cruise up the mosque track and rake in bonuses along the way, and you can milk the points from a specialized strategy with the help of your purposefully positioned palace courtiers.

There’s more than enough here for your brain to ricochet between to keep you min-maxing through to the finish line.  It particularly feels good to spend each turn of the final round scooping up a dozen points here and another dozen there.  Players hungrily scour the board for the best way to squeeze the most points out of their final cubes and camels.  Yet while the score markers gain momentum, the pacing slows to a crawl as each turn gets bogged down with more combos, bonuses, and importance.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s simply a trade-off that one must embrace to fully appreciate the experience that Merv provides.

While I’m proud of what I was able to pull off in Merv, I don’t find myself craving another go of it.  I could certainly come back another time and pursue a different strategy, but the quest to squeeze a few more resource cubes or bonus points out of the system is less exciting to me than the more old-school Euro experience that emphasizes opponents over puzzles.

Current Rating: 6.5/10

Ark Nova

3 Plays

You know, it’s funny.  After my first play of Ark Nova, I thought to myself, “This feels like Zoo Tycoon the board game for folks who enjoy sandboxy, long, sprawling games like A Feast for Odin.”  Several days later, Shut Up and Sit Down took the words right out of my mouth and made the exact same comparisons in their video review of Ark Nova.  Honestly, the comparisons are spot on.  The only thing that’s missing from Ark Nova is the ability to delete fences so you can watch your zoo predators escape their enclosures and terrorize your guests.  And I wish the box would play that catchy Zoo Tycoon theme song as I open it, of course.

I spent many childhood hours playing Zoo Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon 2, and Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs.  Indeed, the joy of the game was simply in sculpting and managing the ultimate zoo (and cleaning up all that poop so your animals stayed happy).  Ark Nova captures that same sandbox joy in tabletop form to the point where it could practically follow Zoo Tycoon’s product line with future expansions including Marine Mania and Dinosaur Digs.

Many folks have also compared Ark Nova to Terraforming Mars and Wingspan.  Like those games, you are building a huge tableau from a towering deck of unique cards in a relatively low-interaction experience.  The core ingredients are similar between all these games, but the resulting flavor varies widely thanks to different cooking design methods, mechanical spices, and thematic dressings.  

Everyone is going to have their preferences for which tableau building meal they like best—perhaps Wingspan for its approachability and presentation, or Terraforming Mars for its sci-fi engine building focus and expandability—but I’m firmly on team Ark Nova for having the most appealing theme and sandboxy vibe.  These elements are what keep Ark Nova interesting for me despite the game being largely a heads-down affair.

That’s precisely why I also compare it to A Feast for Odin, which has so many worker placement spaces and strategies that it’s more about exploring the possibilities and less about outwitting your opponents.  It’s harder to become bored with a mostly solitaire design when that game offers you seemingly dozens of exciting new paths to explore—either by loads of player boards, dozens of action spaces, or mountains of cards.

Yet, the variety isn’t the only thing that keeps Ark Nova engaging.  The core mechanisms at play are the wings upon which the game can really soar.  Selecting one of five cycling action cards that become more powerful as you wait longer to use them is a system that just hits the spot.  It offers a perfect blend of tough tactics and challenging planning.  The opportunity to upgrade these action cards to their stronger side is likewise thrilling.

The game is all about orchestrating a symphony of actions that are composed of building enclosures into your zoo, acquiring animals, gaining sponsors, claiming cards, and establishing associations.  These tasks take you on a tabletop journey through economic juggling and spatial arrangement, tantalizing bonus hunting, market drafting and hand management, and desperate point snatching.  You’ll also have the freedom to specialize in one point track or a mix of both—zoo appeal and animal conservation—as you try to make your two point markers cross first and furthest.

Indeed, the joy is in the journey of how you craft your zoo engine and which animals (and their abilities) you pursue.  This sandbox entertainment helps to muffle the irritating noises that Ark Nova can’t help but emit including occasional luck of the draw, a long play time, and a fairly lonely competition.  This is admittedly one that I’m not keen to teach to newcomers (due to the hefty rules dump) or play at higher counts (thanks to the lengthy playtime) or break out at precious game nights with friends (because of the low interaction), yet it fills a cozy niche of being a game (one of the few heavy ones, notably) that my wife and I will happily enjoy playing together on a fairly regular basis when the mood is right.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

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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, including the upcoming Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. 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 1st Impressions of Ark Nova, Caesar, So Clover, Merv, Sheepy Time, & More appeared first on Bitewing Games.

My latest first impressions of new board game releases span from ambitious epics to Knizian comebacks… Let’s jump right into it!

Disclosure: Bitewing Games is publisher of Reiner Knizia (and eventually other designers) games, and any opinions shared on other games are subject to possible personal bias. As with all our content, we do our best to share our honest personal experiences & opinions as fans of the hobby, and we leave the rest for you to decide whether a game is a good fit.

Equinox

3 Plays

I was hesitant to experience my very first play of Equinox at only 2-players, but it turned out to be far more interesting and aggressive than expected.  It turns out that this one works well at any player count.

When I think of betting games, what first comes to mind is loud, bombastic, social activities such as Camel Up.  Equinox is none of these things, but what it lacks in noise and showmanship it makes up for in cutthroat cleverness.

Eight creatures, known as “Champions,” are competing to become legends, but only three will avoid fading into oblivion.  Players take turns adding one creature card to the current row from their hand, and the moment all the spots are filled in, the creature with the lowest value played into that row is eliminated for the rest of the game.  Then play moves down a row, rinse and repeat.

On top of that, you can start your turn by placing one of your five precious betting stones on any space in the current row that does not already contain a stone.  The higher up rows will pay out bigger points to the bets on creatures that survive to the end, but big early bets also make for big easy targets.  If you place a couple big betting stones high up on a cute little creature, you might as well be putting a giant target on its back and a hefty bounty on its head.  So it’s obviously best to save your bets for safer rows, right?  Well… not exactly.

Each of the creatures provides a unique special ability to the player who has the biggest bets on them, and that’s typically the player who bet earliest.  So every time I play a Funguy the mushroom card, he activates the power of another creature who has been eliminated—powers that are normally lost forever as their poor champion fades into a forgotten limbo.  Other creature powers include discarding a card that is currently in competition, claiming a card back into your hand, shifting cards around, pulling back your betting stone… basically all kinds of things to save or sabotage the creatures that you and your opponents have bet your precious stones on. 

With only eight of the fourteen creatures and their abilities utilized in a single game, there is loads to explore and agonize over in this colorfully cutthroat playground.  I find myself getting so invested in the success of one creature and the downfall of another that I sometimes forget that I still have more betting stones to place.  I feel so enticed by the champion’s abilities that I have to remind myself to save some of that creature’s cards for later rounds.  I get so greedy with saving the great cards in my hand for the best moment that I put the very safety of my own champions in jeopardy.

All this juicy goodness, and we’ve only scratched the surface of all the brilliant wrinkles in the gameplay including secret bets, wild chameleon cards, impactful tree cards, and more.  I could toss out some minor production complaints including the functionally pointless and confusing cloth bags (they’re merely used to identify a player’s color, not for storing the tokens in the box or touching ever during the game…), the far too large and unwieldy cards (this game takes up the whole table and requires thorough shuffling and sorting during setup and teardown), the wordy rulebook with a lack of succinct player aids, etc., but at the end of the day I still love Equinox.  

This is a beautiful betting game whose whimsically indulgent production expertly disguises the pile of daggers lurking underneath—meant for plunging into each other’s backs after using them to flay the adorable creatures who just want to be loved.  A fine game, indeed.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

Stellar

1 Play

Stellar is the tagalong younger sibling of The Search for Planet X in that they both came from publishing parent Renegade Games in the same year and they share a similar theme of astronomy.  Yet this quick, 2-player card game is not at all a deduction game and its drafting and set collection gameplay is entirely abstract.

The interesting challenge of Stellar lies within the turn structure where a player drafts a card into their hand and then plays a card from their hand into either their telescope or their notebook, and whatever number they play at one of those two locations determines which other card (from the drafting slots) must be played into the opposite area.  So if I play a 5 card onto my telescope, then I must take the card in slot 5 and play that into my notebook.

The notebook and telescope each contain their own restrictions and objectives.  The notebook is the more straightforward of the two, where you are simply trying to build a run of each card’s suit.  Each run will become a score multiplier for the matching cards that are played out onto your 12-space telescope.  Matching suits must be adjacent on the telescope, and the high value cards compete for majority points against your rival while the low value cards grant more star points for your multiplier.

The game becomes a puzzle of which card to play where and when to maximize points.  Every turn boils down to a very mathy exercise of sums and multipliers to find the optimal sequence of drafting and playing.  While mathing out efficiencies can certainly make for an engaging game, Stellar almost relies on it too heavily in hopes of disguising its dull arc.

The setup starts players on completely different trajectories, where each person has two different suits from their opponent in their notebook and telescope.  While I can certainly spend my turn snatching away golden opportunities from you, those types of drafts often accomplish nothing substantial for my own score.  The only tangible tension here comes from the majority competition for three separate sections of your telescope where the highest sum of card values in each section wins ten bonus points.  Otherwise, you’re simply drafting and playing what’s optimal for you and I’m doing the same for me.  Eventually we’ll get to the end and simply find out who had the more optimal options across their turns.

Any competition, tension, and push-your-luck card play here all taste too bland for Stellar to provide a distinct or addictive flavor.  Unfortunately, the recycling optimization puzzle of each turn isn’t strong enough on its own merits to keep us hungry for more.  We already have plenty of incredible 2-player card games to feast upon, and so I struggle to find a reason why I should reserve room on my plate for Stellar.

Current Rating: 5.5/10

Kemet: Blood & Sand

2 Plays

Kemet: Blood & Sand rounds out my journey through Matagot’s legendary trilogy of “troops on a map” games, and this journey of mine has certainly ended with a bang!  My introductory game was Inis, which quickly became my absolute favorite game for many months, and it remains in my top 15 of all time.  My next exposure was with Cyclades, which I certainly played and enjoyed a few times but ultimately purged from my collection due to the many other options that do area control or auctions even better.  But I was all in on Matagot’s updated version of Kemet when the Blood & Sand kickstarter launched.

With the long wait finally over and the game spread out on our table, we were instantly impressed with their ambitious vision now come to fruition.  Large chunky miniatures are complemented by interlocking pyramids, personal reference guides, convenient trays, and useful side boards.  As I shared in my Kickstarter Case Study, this campaign had it’s fair share of bumps and bruises along the path to funding.  And the final product isn’t without its flaws (significant rulebook errors and unimaginative game board art in particular), but the entire package still comes together extremely well, especially thanks to the juicy experience at its core.

Kemet remains a titan among area control games thanks to its slick, streamlined turns mingled with sprawling power tile possibilities across a relentlessly aggressive sandy canvas.  I’m not familiar with all the changes here, but I understand that the Blood & Sand reimplementation improves the end game victory condition, the turn order determination, and countless balancing aspects to make for a tighter gaming package.  Plus it includes parts of the original’s expansions, so what’s not to love here?

Unlike the passive-aggressive slow-burn strategery of Inis, Kemet opts for blinding, popping, crackling, and booming conflict like a relentless fireworks show of battles.  The fate of conflict isn’t left to mere chance… there’s not even a single dice to be found in this box.  Rather, players must outwit their opponents by navigating their identical hands of battle cards most efficiently with the help of purchased tiles, summoned creatures, recruited troops, and drawn divine interventions.  Blood & Sand includes a most welcome score board of growing permanent points and shifting temporary points as competitors inch their way to the finish line of 9 or more points.

The massively enticing spread of power tiles is blessedly accompanied by an exciting personal menu where players browse their purchasing options before claiming any of the wonderful abilities that always feel uniquely, terrifyingly overpowered.  One tile comes with a giant scorpion who acts as a your personal wrecking ball against other troops.  Another comes with the freedom to recruit as many units as you want at no cost—a mind-boggling ability.  From extra strength to extra mobility to extra actions to extra discounts, players quickly diverge and specialize into powerful factions bred for Egyptian dominance.  This endless array of combinable technologies means that no two games of Kemet will ever feel alike.

In our most recent game, I found myself gunning for a brutally defensive strategy. Early on I acquired a tile that let me look at the battle card my opponent would commit to a battle before deciding which card I would play. This made for a delicious combo with another tile that gave me an invaluable point for winning any battle as the defender—something that’s normally not possible. I also welcomed in a beastly snake to one of my troops that canceled out the powerful abilities of my opponents’ beasts. Finally, I acquired the freedom to recruit as many units as I desired for free whenever I took that action. This strategy meant that I could completely abandon my valuable pyramids and go on a hunt for the easiest points while not worrying about the massive target I was putting on my back. Players would frequently have to throw multiple battalions at one of my troops to break down my defenses, scoring me points for every attack they lost. Furthermore, blasting me off the map just meant that I would be right back on the board with my full force next time I recruited.

This is merely one of the infinite power tile combinations a player can pursue in this aggressively epic game. Every aspect of Kemet: Blood & Sand reeks with proud ambition, yet this arrogance is justified in every regard.  Kemet is the ultimate “troops on a map” game that all other flamboyant, miniature-based war games so desperately try to be.  It makes its players feel both insanely powerful and dangerously vulnerable with all the grace and ease of a strategic Euro.

Current Rating: 9.5/10

Tutankhamun

2 Plays

After our first session at two players, Tutankhamun wasn’t quite doing it for me. Fortunately, I was also able to try it at four players, where we found more of the magic within. This new reimplementation of an older design contains a similar core concept as Knizia’s Sumatra and Whale Riders in that it utilizes a one-way track for collecting sets of tokens.

Here, players are cruising along the Nile, picking up artifacts along the way to offer to the deceased Pharaoh’s tomb for points.  First person to hit the set number of points wins.  Player turns proceed in clockwise order, and you can either move your boat to the tile immediately behind you or as far forward as you’d like, and whatever tile you stop on is the one you’ll claim.  The proceedings are precisely as simple as you’d expect from the good Doctor.

Set collection scoring is a contest of majorities, where whoever has the most tiles of a type once the last one comes off the Nile will score the designated number of points, second place scores half, and ties go in favor of whoever is furthest behind along the Nile.  While there are three different types of artifacts that contain an 8 on them, this number means that there are 8 of that unique artifact and the majority possessor of each will score 8 points.  The same is true for the 6, 4, and 2 value sets.  So the big point tiles take longer to trigger their scoring and require more effort to claim majority over.

There are of course some interesting wrinkles here including ring artifacts that only score 1 point each but do so immediately when claimed and grant 5 bonus points to the person with the most.  There are also God Idol tiles which trigger an immediate ability when claimed, usually good for manipulating the position of tiles along the Nile or trading or discarding a tile.  Also, any tiles that get left behind by all players will end up in the Underworld which can trigger immediate scoring if the last tile of a type leaves the Nile.  The game even includes an essential 2-player variant where the Underworld tiles compete with the two players for majority points.  

Yet with all these interesting wrinkles, our initial experience with Tutankhamun was sadly too dull, too loose, and too slow.  This becomes even more blindingly apparent when contrasted against the similar 2021 release: Whale Riders.  

This is going to sound ironic, but Whale Riders maintains a tense tempo and a rapid pace due to the movement restrictions, while Tutankhamun features grinding gameplay and sluggish speed due to its movement freedom.  In Whale Riders, I’m not all that worried about which exact tiles my opponents want next because I don’t even know what contracts they are trying to fulfill; rather, I’m simply focused on maximizing my own action efficiency at my current space or the next one while applying a tangible pressure of pace on my rivals.  In Tutankhamun, I have to count the number of each tile type that I have, the numbers that my opponents have, and survey the entire river of tiles to determine where the next best spot is for me.  This makes Tutankhamun two-to-three times as long while being mechanically more basic than Whale Riders.  

That’s not a good look for what is otherwise a very good-looking game.  25th Century Games has done a nice job with the production and table presence, whether you have the basic or deluxe version (although the components do get pointlessly overindulgent in some areas). The use of score markers that slot along the box bottom and circle Tutankhamun’s tomb with the winding river tiles leading up to it make for a delicious table presence. The art is lush and vibrant, yet some of the clarity between different artifact tiles is sacrificed in favor of saturated colors, leading to more time spent surveying and differentiating the tiles. Whether the overall look is worth the extra hassle and cost will depend on one’s personal preference.

Perhaps the biggest surprise to me is how the God Idol tiles have floundered in our plays. The Kickstarter version came with eight different types of God Idol tiles, and in both games they have been largely ignored inconveniences. I label them inconveniences because they offer no visual aids or reminders to their unique and specific functions. Each tile is simply a god’s face, and these faces are also found across two different reference cards, one of them being double-sided. It becomes a hassle to look up the function of a particular God Idol multiple times in a game when it shows up once early on and again much later by scanning three different surfaces of cards and re-reading the paragraph of rules for the matching god. One might wish that the majestic faces of these gods could have been replaced with helpful iconography to circumvent the frequent reference card reading.

But the bigger problem here is how the God Idol tiles have been largely ignored. Perhaps there’s a deeper layer to them lurking beneath our current strategies, but at the moment it seems almost always a better move to simply take an artifact tile that will help you gain more points rather than take a tile that merely causes a minor manipulation of the board state. What results is a growing pile of neglected God Idol tiles in the Underworld of shame.

So I was reluctant to devote more precious tabletop time to Tutankhamun after an underwhelming start. But another opportunity presented itself in the form of a 4-player game with my sister and brother-in-law joining my wife and I. As I should have predicted, there was certainly more here than our maiden voyage presented. We found with four players that tile majorities and boat movement offered far more tense and interesting decisions than at two. Within this play, I could see why 25th Century chose to bring back Tutankhamun as a solid offering in the family game genre, even if it doesn’t click for us at two players..

Despite a pleasantly surprising comeback, the harsh reality is that Tutankhamun and Whale Riders are both family-weight 2021 releases about sailing along a watery route to collect sets of tiles and score points. Whale Riders presents a better tempo, tension, range, polish, and flexibility within a speedier package that makes it difficult for Tutankhamun to compete for attention in our collection. I suppose playing Tutankhamun feels a tad too much like I’m slowly meandering down a river with nothing extremely interesting to look at besides endless piles of sand… but at least it’s warm and sunny!

Current Rating: 6.5/10

Oath

4 Plays

Leder Games has removed the leashes from designer Cole Wehrle and artist Kyle Ferrin and let them run amok with the creation of Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile.  Fortunately, both of these legends of the industry knew exactly what they were doing when they concocted this strange beast of a game.

Oath takes the colorful, cutthroat charm of Root and mixes it with the vast strategic possibilities of Pax Pamir while amping up the narrative volume to eleven.  Cole Wehrle stays true to his design philosophy and even doubles down on it here by tossing out the industry playbook of maximizing fairness and fun in favor of broadening the game’s emotional range.  Collusion, cooperation, betrayal, kingmaking, savagery, politicking, secrecy, gambling, deflecting, destruction, thievery, prosperity, and more are interwoven with the gorgeous components of Oath.

There are plenty of hurdles to overcome if gamers wish to immerse themselves in this wacky, wonderful world.  A steep upfront price, a daunting learning and teaching experience, an astute rules referee, the perfect selection of compatible gaming friends, a clear opportunity for regular plays, and a collective enjoyment of the journey over the destination.  It’ll take a lot of sheer willpower for some gamers to find the pot of gold at the end of this rocky rainbow.

But Leder Games is one of the best in the business when it comes to giving broad appeal to a complex game.  Rulebooks, walkthroughs, references, and guides galore go a long way in smoothing out this game with intentionally rough edges.  Thoughtful, zany, hilarious, and mesmerizing art remind you that it’s ok to have a knife plunged into your back every now and then by those you once thought friends.  Screen-printed characters, masterful interlocking metal coins, gorgeous blue books of secrets, and a sprawling kingdom across a breathtaking neoprene mat make every penny spent feel unflinchingly worthwhile.

One can’t possibly pin Oath down to a single core mechanism, especially when every game is unbelievably unique.  While one play feels like an auctioning tug-of-war, the next feels like an exploration adventure.  The world can be ablaze with battles in one game before pivoting into a passive-aggressive game of chicken in the next.  The empire may grow into a seemingly insurmountable power with an endless reach after one session yet be completely obliterated by an exile-concocted apocalypse merely one generation later.  There is simply no predicting what will happen next in this game with so many impactful sites, and exciting cards, and devious relics, and tangling victory objectives… and that prospect of a genuine sandbox experience with dynamic ripple effects should make every other board game on this planet tremble in fear.

In Oath, players don’t recreate history, they write it.  They don’t follow a pre-planned trail, they pave it.  Legacy games hide their faces in shame as Oath provides true consequences for its actions and organic adventures for it participants.

Current Rating: 10/10

You’ve probably noticed that we explore and enjoy a lot of games by the legendary Reiner Knizia here, even if we don’t absolutely love all of them. Yet there are three Knizia designs that we’ve loved so much that we decided to devote our time, energy, and resources to bring them to life for YOU.

Next month, we are launching a Kickstarter project for Reiner Knizia’s Criminal Capers Collection featuring Soda Smugglers, Pumafiosi, and Hot Lead. We hand picked these three 20-minute card games from a treasure trove of fresh, unpublished Knizia designs because we love to play them, and we think you will to. But the only way these delightful games are getting published is with your help!

Subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter so you don’t miss out on the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. We deeply appreciate your support in helping us to create and share classy board games that bite.

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

The post Candid Cardboard: 1st Impressions of Oath, Kemet: Blood & Sand, Equinox, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kemet: Blood and Sand – Summer 2021

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

Hibachi – Fall 2021

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

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

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

Coffee Traders – May 2021

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

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

Whale Riders – Spring 2021

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

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

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

Undaunted: Reinforcements – August 2021

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

Anno 1800 – Q1 2021 (English Version)

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

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

Switch & Signal – 2021 (English Version)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ra (New Versions)- 2021

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

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

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

Tutankhamun – Jan 2021

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

Dead Reckoning – May 2021

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

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

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

Kabuto Sumo – June 2021

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

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

So, You’ve Been Eaten – 2021?

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

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

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

Bristol 1350 – April 2021

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

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

John Company (Second Edition) – 2021?

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

Railroad Ink Challenge – Q1 2021

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

Iberian Gauge – Summer 2021

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

Sleeping Gods – Q1 2021

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

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea – March 2021

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

Publishers To Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designers to Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Most Anticipated Board Games of 2021 appeared first on Bitewing Games.

“This your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Morpheus – The Matrix

It all started when I stumbled across Wavelength on social media. Talk of the game lead me to its active project on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website that I had heard much about but never actually delved into. Wavelength’s colorful, psychedelic art design drew me in like an unsuspecting Alice. I clicked play on the campaign video, and down the rabbit hole I fell.

Mad props to whoever made that video, by the way. If anyone needs a case study in how to hook potential backers and reel them in like a fish, just check out that whole page. After combing through the entire pitch, I wasn’t just excited about the concept, I was compelled to help bring about its existence.

This is the crux of Kickstarter… when a person or group dream up an incredible idea, pitch it to a crowd, and they collectively pledge their resources and efforts to make it a reality. This is old news to many backers and creators who have been using crowdfunding for years. We’ve even reached a point where many desensitized backers call Kickstarter a pre-order system, especially in the tabletop games category.

While that’s not entirely false, there is still something magical about joining a community of passionate dreamers and embarking on a journey of creation. When you support an exciting project and it fully delivers on its lofty promises, there is no better feeling. Fortunately for Kickstarter, Wavelength hit a homerun (just read my review of the game), and I’ve kept more projects on my radar ever since.

Projects that Earned My Pledge and How They Did It

Captivating Videos — Wavelength

Let’s talk a bit more about Wavelength’s campaign video. If you clicked the link above and watched it, you’ll notice something incredibly unique about it compared to most other campaign videos. How much time was spent showcasing or explaining the game? Practically none. You hardly even see a single game component in the entire video, yet it has a laser focus on what makes Wavelength special.

Instead of explaining to us how the game plays, the creators of this video opted to show us the game through the players’ emotions, reactions, and interactions. It paints a very clear picture to its viewers of what they can expect to experience with their family and friends. Most importantly, it briefly and succinctly shows the viewer the exact outcome they want from this kind of game and then leaves the rest of the project page to fill in the details of how they’ll get to that outcome.

Contrast this to many other campaign videos that quickly lose me… Usually they get caught up in fancy thematic narratives with fluffy animations and take far too long to get to the point of why I should back their project. In my opinion, if your campaign video is the first thing people see on your project page, then it should absolutely feature the hook of your concept and nothing else. Let the rest of the page take care of the details, once the hook is set.

I had never even visited Kickstarter.com before encountering Wavelength, but that campaign page had my pledge within minutes because it knew how reach me on a personal and emotional level.

Low-Risk Rewards & Credibility — Tussie Mussie / Sprawlopolis / Seasons of Rice

Wavelength was my form of taking the red pill and falling down the rabbit hole into Kickstarter Wonderland. Button Shy’s affordable, low-risk wallet games kept me hanging around for more.

I initially heard of all three of these games in unique ways:

• While enjoying our recently acquired copy of Wingspan, I heard that Elizabeth Hargrave’s next published game (Tussie Mussie) was on the way with another presentation that would appeal to my wife. Tussie Mussie was also the winner of the 2018 Gen Can’t design contest.
• Separately, I watched Tom Vasel’s raving review of Sprawlopolis that put it on my wishlist.
• Finally, I listened to the Board Game Design Lab’s episode with Corry Damey about How to Win a Design Competition, and of course the competition winner (Seasons of Rice) piqued my interest.

These above encounters were critical for getting these projects on my radar. Each game had an underlying credibility to it that allowed me to put my trust in a design I had never played. Perhaps more importantly, the pledge levels were all at a reasonable price ($10 per game) that gave me little reason to hesitate when clicking the pledge button.

Quality & Consistency — Dice Throne Adventures & Season 1 ReRolled

I was already an owner of Dice Throne Season 2 when this project went live. Having been blown away by Season 2’s character variety and production quality, there was little resistance left within me when Roxley tempted me with more Dice Throne goodness. But there is something to be said for making each little detail of a production a premium feeling experience. When publishers display a high standard of consistency and quality from one project to the next, backers will notice and they’ll return for more.

Alluring Presentations & Illuminating Playthroughs — Sleeping Gods

Sleeping Gods was Kickstarter’s biggest challenge yet in successfully acquiring me as a backer. The $70 base pledge is a tall order coming from a publisher and designer that I have no prior experience with. On top of that, this is a style of game that I have never even played before. The art and presentation are certainly alluring, but the pessimism was strong within me.

How am I supposed to know whether I like a storybook adventure game? Won’t this just feel like a more clumsy, fiddly version of a video game, book, or movie? What if I start playing and quickly discover that I blew $70 + shipping on a game that is clearly not for me?

I had plenty of reasons to stand my ground and let this campaign ship sail, yet I ended up backing Sleeping Gods. Ryan Laukat, you sly dog. So how did he do it?

Well, that dang artwork and concept was so well imagined and executed that I wanted this unique game to work for me. I think this kind of thing happens all the time to us gamers. Just look at something like PARKS, Camel Up, Horrified, or plenty of others. Strip away the gorgeous artwork, the inviting theme, the killer components, and much of what makes those games shine is lost. PARKS becomes a generic resource collector, Camel Up becomes a luck-infused dice roller, Horrified looks like an off-brand Pandemic copy-cat . Moral of the story: don’t underestimate the value of a unique theme, quality art, and thoughtful production.

The stellar presentation of Sleeping Gods wasn’t enough on its own to get me to bite. I still needed to find something within the gameplay that made me say, “Ooo, this looks fun!” Who helped me to uncover that fun? None other than Rahdo, himself.

Oddly enough, my opinion on games hardly even aligns with Rahdo’s. Usually when he says, “Too mean,” I say, “Just right.” Yet, I’ve found Rahdo’s run-throughs to be extremely valuable in communicating the puzzly tension of certain games. It took me a lot of deep digging into the project page and beyond, but Rahdo is exactly what I needed to push me over the edge on both Sleeping Gods and the next game I backed, Calico.

Alluring Presentations & Illuminating Playthroughs — Calico

Like Sleeping Gods, Calico is game that tempted me initially but required more effort to earn my pledge. I could tell it filled a similar niche as Azul and Sagrada, which have been big hits with my wife. But on the surface level, I had no way of knowing whether this one would measure up to its competition and justify its place on our game shelf.

Once more, it was Rahdo’s runthrough that uncovered the excruciating tension lurking within Calico’s gameplay. Before watching his play-through, this was just a cute puzzly quilting game with cats, and I was mildly interested. After watching his play-through, this was an agonizing feline challenge with colorful, crunchy decisions, and I was a backer.

These kinds of video previews that not only show how a game plays but how a game feels to play are often critical factors in earning a dip into my wallet.

High Standards & Hot Streaks — Loot of Lima / GPS / Sequoia / Mountain Goats

Perhaps the most important thing a publisher can do for long-term success is maintain a high standard of design from one title to the next. A mediocre game can often do more harm to a small publisher’s library than its short-term sales are worth. When I catch onto a publisher or designer that is on a hot streak, I will preorder and pledge to every title they throw at me until they lose my trust. If I’m burned by a design team, it’ll take a lot of convincing from critics to get me to take another chance on future games.

My current list of auto-purchases include any Capstone Games’ light-medium weight titles, any Cole Wehrle design and/or Leder Games titles, and games published by BoardGameTables.com. I’ll also seriously consider every new game put out by Matagot, Roxley Games, Stonemaier Games, Facade Games, Reiner Knizia, and Osprey Games due to their several hits of the past few years.

BoardGameTables.com have proven themselves with both On Tour and QE. I appreciate their attention to detail and love of quirky designs. My fingers are crossed for their next batch of games coming soon including Loot of Lima, GPS, Sequoia, and Mountain Goats.

IV Marketing — Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile

If you’ve ever been an in-patient at a hospital, you’ve likely had an IV in your arm drip-feeling your body fluids and medications. An IV (intravenous therapy) is a highly effect route of medication. It delivers drugs directly into your blood stream, bypassing any need for absorption or digestion. In the board game industry, if drugs equate to hype and medicating a patient equates to marketing, then companies like Stonemaier Games and Leder Games have perfected the IV Marketing technique.

When I started following these companies on social media, I noticed a pattern in their techniques. Leder Games publishes regular posts on their designer diaries leading up to a game preorder or Kickstarter launch. Stonemaier Games does the same thing on their website as well as creating Facebook fan pages for each game. Through regular updates and social media posts that tease out more juicy information and tantalizing images, these companies drip feed hype directly to their fans and potential customers. By the time the pledge/preorder button goes live, many people are eager to click it.

Meaningful Upgrades & Add-ons — Railroad Ink Challenge

Horrible Guild got me good with this one. It started out simple with a nice pair of roll & writes with a new coat of paint, improved gameplay, and unique variants. But things quickly got out of hand with more expansion dice, epic boards, and giant box to fit everything into. I often roll my eyes at the endless extras that publishers try to cram into their project, but I couldn’t resist these extras.

Often, these crowdfunding campaigns will try to milk their backers by merely offering fancier components, meaningless variety, and questionable add-ons. When I see a publisher trying to tempt backers to purchase 20 colors of player components for a 5 player game, I begin to question their judgment of customer-focused value.

With Railroad Ink Challenge, Horrible Guild kept offering me more of precisely what I wanted. With roll & writes generally being a low-interaction genre, I look to variants and expansions to give me more replayability and keep my brain on its brain-toes. Thus, I can’t resist new challenges within this familiar favorite.

Reliable Brands & Try Before You Buy — Bristol 1350

If you’ve played any of Facade Games’ Dark Cities titles before, then you already have a solid idea of what you are going to get with Bristol 1350. That’s exactly what makes this series so reliably solid. Facade Games has a playbook that their fans love and they have no reason to stray from it. While their productions continue to get prettier and more polished, a Dark Cities game will always be a Dark Cities game.

To help matters further, I had the opportunity to play Bristol 1350 several times as it was being developed. When a publisher knows they have a solid design on their hands, there is no better way to sell it to potential backers and earn their loyal support than giving them a chance to try it before buying it. This often happens through Print & Play, Tabletop Simulator (or equivalent software), or live demos. After having a blast playing a cheap, ugly version of Bristol 1350, you can bet I was absolutely ready to fork over some cash for a gorgeous, polished version. I even went so far as to write a preview for the game because I believed in it that much. The best evangelists are firsthand witnesses, so why not let people get their hands on your game?

Listening & Responding to Backers — Kemet: Blood and Sand

Kemet: Blood and Sand had a controversial campaign journey, to say the least. Loads of backers had seemingly dozens of different complaints as the Matagot’s campaign trudged from one problem to the next. These complaints included confusion about pricing and value, questionable graphic design and iconography, awkward miniature figures, theme-breaking expansions, and more.

These many problematic ingredients seemed like a recipe for crowdfunding disaster. While the campaign was messier than intended, Matagot weathered the storm well. Each major complaint was met with proposals, polls, adjustments, and solutions as Matagot listened and responded to their backers. While some backers abandoned ship, many more chose to ride out the waves or even join in on the crazy journey after seeing the commitment and care from the team behind Kemet. The end result was a nearly 1 million dollar campaign and a game that is much more likely to reach its full potential.

The Importance of a Hook — Whale Riders

Whale Riders has been another interesting project to follow. I’ve recently become a huge fan of Reiner Knizia’s designs, so this one was easy for me to get behind. The part that has caught me off guard is how little support this game received on Kickstarter. The game quickly funded and hit the $20,000 mark, but it seemed to plateau after that and was barely crawling higher every day since (until the typical last-minute bump).

Grail Games’ project seemed to have the complete package for a mega hit (at least in my naive eyes). It combines a legendary designer with an exceptional artist and a proven publisher. The game is accessible, the theme is whimsical, and the price is reasonable. I’ve also come across plenty of advertisements for it in the usual places. I would have placed my money on this game at least hitting six figures. Yet that didn’t turn out to be within reach.

As I’ve thought about it more, I can only come up with one reason why the game hasn’t received more support. The one thing that Whale Riders seems to be missing is a hook. Don’t get me wrong, Whale Riders looks like a solid game on all accounts; that’s why I backed it. But for comparison’s sake, let’s try to find the hook of the above mentioned kickstarter projects:

• Wavelength: That big, beautiful plastic device that allows for grand reveals and dramatic moments
• Button Shy’s Wallet Games: Pretty-looking, dirt-cheap games that pack a punch and fit in your pocket
• Dice Throne Adventures & Season 1 Rerolled: A premium production of a remodeled season 1 and a cooperative expansion to a beloved Yahtzee combat game
• Sleeping Gods: An epic, hand-crafted cooperative story-book adventure
• Calico: A colorful, Azul-like puzzly game with recessed player boards and cats!
• Loot of Lima: A clever deduction game with interactive player shields
• Oath: A quirky strategy game with a gorgeous production and an innovative system
• GPS / Sequoia / Mountain Goats: A bundle of fancy 10-minute filler games that are easy to teach and addictive to play
• Railroad Ink Challenge: The ultimate roll & write package with dozens of custom dice, maps, and objectives
• Bristol 1350: A thematic social deduction racing game that plays 1-9 players and fits into a compact book box
• Kemet- Blood and Sand: A mega hit game reborn and reimagined with improved gameplay, art, and components

Whale Riders has solid gameplay and fantastic art, but the above mentioned games contain all of that plus more. They stand out in at least one major way, while Whale Riders struggles to differentiate itself. Whether its a novel component, fresh concept, killer production, convenient feature, or something else entirely, the more hooks a project has, the stronger its campaign will be.

Jamey Stegmaier understands the importance of a hook. If you are wanting to pitch a game design to his company, the hook is a must. This philosophy has helped Stonemaier games to become the indie publisher juggernaut that it is today.

Just to be clear, I’m not just saying that I want our games to have an interesting theme or a unique mechanism. Being interesting and unique are interesting qualities, but they’re different than the hook. The key to a great hook is that it grabs your attention. It stands out in a crowd.

Jamey Stegmaier

Rabbit Hole Review

Kickstarter projects have used many effective tools to earn pledges from myself and many others. These tools include:

1. Get straight to the point with your campaign video and page. Why should I be excited about your project becoming a reality? (Wavelength)
2. Low-risk rewards and strong design credibility makes the pledge button easier to click (Button Shy’s wallet games).
3. Quality and consistency earns attention and loyalty (Dice Throne).
4. Alluring presentations and illuminating playthroughs are critical to influencing hesitant backers (Sleeping Gods, Calico).
5. High standards and hot streaks are the fastest route to super fans (GPS, Sequoia, Mountain Goats, Oath).
6. Meaningful upgrades and add-ons are the best shovels for digging deeper into my wallet (Railroad Ink Challenge).
7. Reliable brands and try-before-you-buy is a great way to earn unsolicited volunteers and proactive supporters (Bristol 1350).
8. Listening and responding to backers will gain the trust of current and prospective supporters (Kemet: Blood and Sand).
9. A solid game will be successful (Whale Riders), but a solid game with a hook will flourish.

This concludes my series on How to Win Backers and Crowdfund Projects – A Case Study. Thanks for tuning in! Do you have any personal examples of how a Kickstarter project won you over? Share below!

Article written by Nick. He is inspired by the stellar work of all the individuals involved in the Kickstarter campaigns mentioned above. He is looking forward to playing these games plus many more (including those on his most anticipated games of 2020 list).

The post How to Win Backers and Crowdfund Projects – A Case Study appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Curious about my most anticipated board games of 2020? Read on to find out more.

I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time researching a wishlist of existing and upcoming games. 2020 will be an exciting year for gamers, with so great options hitting the market. Amidst all the hype of many new games, there are a handful of already published gems that I am itching to experience for the first time. After discovering my personal tabletop tastes and preferences, I’ve begun to recognize the familiar scents of a surefire hit from the games listed below. Here you will find my current cream of the hype crop…

All Aboard the Hype Train!

Caylus 1303 Released 2019

If you only told me that Caylus was one of the very first worker placement games ever published, I would likely be scared away from trying it… surely worker placement games have evolved from Caylus! What’s the point in going back to something so aged and basic? But this is no simple reprint of an old game; rather, it is a careful reimagining and modernizing of a beloved classic.

The positive buzz from Tom Vasel and So Very Wrong About Games have put this one on my radar. I’m hungry for a tight worker placement game, and this one appears to fire on all cylinders. It’s an added bonus that this one seems to be streamlined down to a widely accessible level. Present to me a juicy hour-long Euro with tense interaction and I’ll gobble that up.

Lowlands Released 2018

I can’t resist a Shut Up & Sit Down approved Euro for forever. Their taste has been impeccable so far. I dig the look of the sheep farming and the supposed interdependence between the three core strategies (recruiting sheep to establish a delightful farm, building the dike to prevent catastrophe, gaining buildings to improve your engine). I believe Z-man is doing another reprint of this soon, but it seems as though they’ve now removed their information page about upcoming reprints (crosses fingers for reasonably priced copy). Though this game isn’t new this year, it is still one of my most anticipated board games of 2020

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion 2020 Release Date

As much as I want to try the #1 game of all time (as ranked on BoardGameGeek), I think this more accessible version will suit my group MUCH better. Hopefully this can retain the fun and trim the fat when it releases to retail this year.

Root: The Riverfolk Expansion Released 2018

Root: The Underworld Expansion 2020 Release Date

You can never have too much Root. I still haven’t managed to try two of the base Root factions (the Cats and Vagabond), but that likely won’t stop me from swooping down on these expansions when they become available. A Root expansion feels much different from any other board game expansion, as the core game itself is all about how players are traveling wildly different paths to arrive at the same destination… and the prospect of entirely new paths is beyond exciting.

Fort 2020 Release Date

A deck builder from Leder Games? Please and thank you. I trust that these guys can take the deck building genre and put their own charmingly unique spin on it. If you appreciate the art style or quirkiness of Root, then this is certainly one to keep an eye on. It is supposedly releasing directly to retail later this year. Fort is definitely one of my most anticipated board games of 2020

Container: 10th Anniversary Jumbo Edition! Released 2018

I may never get the chance to play this… But in my wildest dreams this publisher will suddenly realize that good artists exist in this world and they will have the sense to hire one to redo their game before republishing it for me. My interest in this game is entirely thanks to Shut Up & Sit Down’s video review; they always know how to communicate the scrumptious taste of a good game.

Undaunted: North Africa 2020 Release Date

A deck-builder where each card represents an individual soldier in your army, one which must be removed completely upon its death at your opponent’s hand. Shut Up and Sit Down gave Undaunted: Normandy a raving review. You have my attention, Mister Quinns. I’ll wait it out and opt for version 2.0 (North Africa) which will hopefully refine and improve the formula. This publisher also made the excellent Cryptid, so I’m already a fan of their work!

Ra Released 1999

The legendary designer, Reiner Knizia, is 3 for 3 in my collection! Of course, I only stick to his best ranked games out of the millions that have been published… but his cream of the crop is on a whole different level. I’m so hungry to try his famous auction game, Ra, it hurts. We’ll see if I can survive until it is back in stock. At least we are loving Modern Art in the meantime.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine Released 2019

If there is any game that I wouldn’t hesitate to tell any human to get hyped for, it would be this one.  

The cooperative trick-taking that this game presents sounds like a blast. I’ve preordered it already, as it is supposed to release Q1 of 2020! That’s what you do when your trusted Geekbuddies sing its highest praises. Check out Tom Vasel’s review if you want to know more.

I’m most excited to see how the game uses trick-taking to force unique and tense cooperation between players. If I could successfully integrate cooperative modes into my hot air balloon trick taking design, it would likely be thanks to The Crew paving the way for me.

Kemet: Blood and Sand 2020 Release Date

The majestic Inis (my favorite game) has put Kemet (a similar style of game from the same publisher) on my radar, and a new version of Kemet is all I need to hear to start throwing my money at Matagot. They plan to put this area control game up on Kickstarter later this year, which means I’m in for a long wait.

Treasure Island: Captain Silver – Revenge Island 2020 Release Date

The very existence of this expansion has me all aboard the hype train. Treasure Island is the most delightfully unique game in our collection, and I can’t wait to see how this adds to the fun of treasure hunting and pirate bluffing.

Calico 2020 Release Date

I was skeptical at first, but I’ve since seen enough gameplay to change my mind… I’m optimistically convinced that Calico will sit perfectly next to Azul and Sagrada on our shelf. This casual, puzzly style of game is right up my wife’s alley, so I’m betting it will be a hit at our house. Keep an eye out for this one at retailers when the Kickstarter fulfills later this year.

Sleeping Gods 2020 Release Date

Never tried a Red Raven game, but I’m pumped to see this epic kickstarter reach our doorstep. I did a lot of research into the game before deciding to back, and I think it will make a great cooperative game replacement after our Pandemic Legacy Season 1 quest is over. The theme and artwork are carefully crafted, and the combat system looks especially fun.

Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile 2021 Release Date

Cole Wehrle’s other designs, Pax Pamir 2e and Root, are both in my top 10. This one is a no-brainer for me to join the most anticipated board games of 2020 list. It combines the art style of Root with the Wehrle-style tableau gameplay of Pax Pamir into a game with a built-in meta. Can’t wait!

Spirit Island Released 2017

Early on when I researched potential board games to try, I was incredibly tempted by the mega-hit game, Spirit Island. It’s unique cooperative theme of playing as island spirits to repel relentless colonists was instantly attractive to me. Ultimately, the heavy complexity scared me off a year ago, but now I’m ready to dive into this one.

 The Estates Released 2018

As I’m still surfing the wave of fun provided by our stellar auction games including Modern Art and QE, I couldn’t resist putting this game on my wishlist. I read through the rulebook and I’m now salivating to dive into its cutthroat nastiness.

What games (existing or upcoming) are you hyped to try? If you need some suggestions, check out my current top 50 games or our 10 recommendations that everyone should try!

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