San Francisco

3 Plays (3 & 4 Players)

San Francisco is one of the surprisingly few big box releases coming from Dr. Knizia this year (alongside My Island and the newest edition of Ra).  I say surprising because last year we got Whale Riders, Tutankhamun, Witchstone, Mille Fiori, The Siege of Runedar, and Equinox.  Don’t worry folks, he’s still putting out a ton of games this year and beyond.  That much I can assure you of 😉.

But an entirely new game from one of my favorite working designers is always a special occasion, and I was delighted to receive this review copy from publisher Rebel Studio.  Based on their previous work (most notably Meadow from 2021), I knew that San Francisco was in good hands.  As expected, the production here is charming and top-notch.

The components display the tall skyscrapers, colorful districts, and bright cable cars of sunny San Francisco.  The theme and presentation perfectly match the gameplay which is rather warm and laid-back for a Knizia game… at least on the surface.  Players each have their own city board where they’ll be building out a tableau of district cards, establishing a network of cable car tracks, erecting skyscrapers, and earning bonuses.

All of this is accomplished by claiming project cards from a shared market and then laying them out in their matching rows from left to right.  The pattern of card drafting and card market establishment follows in the footsteps of Coloretto: on your turn either add a card to a row or claim an entire row.  Yet the chill vibe of building out your own personal area of California and using cards to do so also reminds me of 2020’s Santa Monica.

Although San Francisco is kinda, sorta a combination of Coloretto and Santa Monica, it’s moreso neither of these games.  Even more interesting than that is the fact that San Francisco does not feel like any other Knizia I’ve ever played.

Coloretto is different in a couple key ways: 1st, the moment a player takes a row of cards, they are out of the rest of the round.  2nd, the decisions are much more cut-and-dry, meaning it’s easy to parse what is valuable to who and how to hurt others most.  With San Francisco, you’re still not able to abuse the action of claiming a row as much as you’d like because each row comes with a contract and you can only take a row that contains more cards than you possess contracts.  Basically the players who claim less rows on a regular basis will generally have more options available to them.

And while the scoring in San Francisco is not as simple or sharp as Coloretto, it’s also not as sterile and solitaire as Santa Monica.  With Santa Monica, I never knew (nor did I care) what was going on with my opponents’ tableaus.  Everybody just moseys along like heads-down sloths until the game finally ends, somebody ends up with the most points, everybody shrugs, and that’s a wrap.

No, with San Francisco the vast majority of your points depend heavily on what your opponents are doing on their city boards.  Players are racing to fill each district (colored row) first, competing to fill each district with the most valuable cards, wrestling over the coveted master builder medal by having the most skyscrapers, and aiming to have the largest cable car network by the end of the game.

You’ll have to claw your way to each and every point, as San Francisco awards out very little and the winner often squeezes by with a score like 9.5 to second place’s 9.  So while the actions and look and vibe of the game presents a laid-back attitude, the underlying competition is delightfully passive-aggressive.

Opponent boards are readable enough, even from across the table, to tell when a certain combination of cards is far too lucrative for a hungry competitor.  The two actions offer a refreshing challenge that few other games feature: that of valuing options for your opponents’ boards far more frequently than valuing them for your own board.  If you want to prevent someone from running away with the victory, then your group needs to have a trained eye on the entire table as they decide which drafting row to add their drawn card to.

Initially, the decisions are rather straightforward: add new cards to the empty rows first then the weakest rows next.  Take a row when it looks like the most valuable option available.  Yet in the second act, drafting decisions pivot to more of a race—a race to finish a row first or a race to erect the first skyscraper and keep that lead.  Finally, the third act transfers the spotlight to a contest of majorities—because the player with the most value in a row or the most cable cars on the board will score more points.  Second place still gets a point at least, third gets nothing, and fourth place loses a point.  Aside from their network potential or displayed value, you’ll also be enticed by foundation cards (where you can build skyscrapers if you surround them properly) as well as cards that offer significant bonuses and advantages.

There’s even more layers to this interesting arc.  For example, if Camille beats everyone to finishing the port district, then she claims a point that the rest of us can never have.  A 1 point swing is huge when the winning score could be 10 points.  Yet now any port cards that come up in the card market are suddenly entirely useless to her—she has no more space for them!  Not only will that devalue certain drafting rows for her, but she has also set an obvious bar for the rest of us to clear.  If I can build a port district that has a higher total value than what hers clearly displays, then I’ll be denying her valuable end-game points and calming them for myself.  In essence, claiming the first-to-finish point comes with the downside of putting an easy target on your back.

You’ll also be closely watching the number of contracts that your opponents collect.  If you don’t see the best cards for your board coming out of the deck, then you can simply sit back and let your opponents collect one, two, three contracts each while you bide your time.  Eventually a lucrative combination of cards will come along and you’ll have first dibs on it because everyone else is locked out by having too many contracts.  Milk this strategy too much, though, and you may find it hard to catch up to the other player boards which display more cards in general.

While the interaction is perhaps not as spicy as many other Knizias, and enough of the game is steered by luck of the draw where card reveals can occasionally have bad timing for you and great timing for others, that doesn’t take away from the engaging decisions and uniquely chill experience that San Francisco offers.

Where the competitive majority scoring is what keeps this interesting for me, I’m not keen to try it at 2-players, but I’d happily play it more with 3 and 4.  Then again, perhaps the contract drafting is even more interesting at 2.  Because the cards come out different every time, and the triggered bonuses can be situationally powerful, and (most importantly) the player interaction is poignantly present, I don’t see myself growing tired of this one.

Prognosis: Good

Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition

2 Plays (4 Players)

Cats are all the rage in the modern board game industry.  You’ve got adorable cats illustrated by Beth Sobel and lounging on cozy quilts in the puzzly Calico.  You’ve got colorful refugee cats stretching and bending into all kinds of strange shapes with the polyomino drafting game Isle of Cats.  You’ve got Cat Lady, Purrrlock Holmes (yes, that one is real), Spicy (featuring big cats), and our own upcoming Pumafiosi.  

The latest game in this cat craze is a twisty trick taker from a Japanese designer.  No, I’m not talking about 9 Lives (although that one will be releasing in just a few months).  I’m talking about Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition.

Just when you thought that no stone was left unturned in the land of trick taking, think again.  Cat in the Box found a big old boulder, and with a push of its paw it rolled that thing right on its back to expose a juicy underbelly.

Players are dealt a hand of cards ranging from 1-9 and featuring four suits: green, yellow, blue, and red.  Players must follow the lead suit if they can, highest number wins, but the red suit trumps all.  Earn points for winning tricks and try to bet how many tricks you’ll win in a hand for bonus points.  So… it’s your standard trick taking game. Nothing to see here, right?  WRONG.

All the cards in your hand and everyone else’s hands are always black.  Shapeless.  Formless.  Suitless.  A blank canvas of opportunity.  Each card only takes on a suit once it is played from your hand and designated as a certain color—all at your whim.  The only restrictions are thus:

1. You must mark off the exact card that you’ve played on a shared board… meaning the yellow 2 can only be played once by anyone during an entire hand.
2. The moment you don’t follow the lead suit, you can never play that color again for the rest of the hand.  X it off on your personal board and never look back.

And you’re not just trying to win exactly as many tricks as you had bet on at the start of the hand.  You’re also trying to play very specific cards that are orthogonally adjacent with each other on the shared board.  By playing the Yellow 4,  Blue 4, Blue 5, and Red 5 across four different tricks, I’ve now connected all of those spaces into a cluster of my own tokens on the board.  You’ll score as many points as your largest cluster if you hit your trick bid exactly.  This scoring challenge pairs perfectly with the freedom of choosing the suit of each and every card you play… Well, more like shrinking freedom.

The board spaces quickly fill as players claim every possible combination of suit and number.  If you’re not careful, you might end up with a hand of three 5’s and only one space left where you can legally play a 5.  There are more cards of each number than there are suits on the board, and other players might claim those suit spaces first, and you might regret locking yourself out of suit too early.

The moment a player is unable to legally play any card from their hand (because their numbers are claimed on the shared board and/or the available suits are X’d out on their player board) is the moment that player triggers a cat-astrophic paradox.  The hand ends immediately and that player’s won tricks now count as negative points instead of positive points.  It’s brilliantly poetic and addictively compelling across its multiple rounds.

Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition is yet another standout winner in the crowded field of trick takers and cat-astic games.

Prognosis: Excellent

Lost Cities: Roll & Write

2 Plays (2 Players)

Despite my repeatedly mentioned exhaustion toward the genre, roll and write games don’t seem to be going away any time soon.  You’ve got sprawling behemoths such as Hadrian’s Wall that are turning what once was a simple assortment of mini games into a full blown Euro.  You have titles such as The Guild of Merchant Explorers masquerading as big box games yet built on the same foundation as Welcome To or Cartographers.  You have interconnected cobwebs of bonuses triggering bonuses from the likes of Three Sisters, Five-and-a-half Times as Clever (undoubtedly coming soon), and others.  And we now see every publisher under the sun succumbing to its siren call as they cram their popular IP into this design space, giving us games like Rolling Realms, Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Charmers, and Lost Cities: Roll & Write.

While my eyes grow increasingly blind to this style of game, there are still a few titles here and there that manage to catch my eye, at least for a fleeting moment.  Games such as Super Skill Pinball—pinball in tabletop game form—as well as designs by Reiner Knizia that introduce a twist to some of my favorite games such as Lost Cities: Roll & Write or My City: Roll & Write.  I finally succumbed to the opportunity to play My City: Roll & Write when I stumbled across it for dirt cheap at a local game store.

This roll & write retains much of the feel, focus, and vibe of the 2-player card game that inspired it.  2-5 players are embarking on voyages where the first step into a new color has them clawing their way out of crippling point-debt before the end of the game.  Much like That’s Pretty Clever, you’ll take turns rolling a handful of dice, selecting some to keep for yourself, and leaving the scraps out for your opponents to pick at.  Also like That’s Pretty Clever, you’ll be progressing along various tracks and triggering bonus points and bonus actions as you reach them.

While the combos and bonuses here are less bounteous than most roll & writes, the player interaction is notably heightened.  The player sheets of your competitors are much more readable and vulnerable than most roll & writes, where you are likely to choose a die result that hurts your opponents more than it helps you.  You’ll also be racing to cross the bridge on each track where 20 points are awarded to the first player to cross.

Despite the opportunities for competition, players have plenty of flexibility in their strategizing.  You’ll always have multiple values to choose from and multiple columns where you can enter your chosen value (assuming the dice don’t roll the same result).  And if you don’t like any of your options, you can pass on all of them and score points by crossing your way up your pass track!  Of course, if you max out the pass track, then that track’s points drop back down to zero.

This wrinkle and others demonstrate the brilliant twists that Reiner infuses into the genre.  Offering players flexibility at a cost—just as the original Lost Cities does it.  The numbers you record in each column must be greater than or equal to the last number written in their column, and the higher you cruise up the column the less points you’ll lose (and eventually more points you’ll score).

Lost Cities: Roll & Write both soars and suffers by being so similar to its source material.  Most noticeably, the experience loses much of its tension.  Yes, it’s possible to lose up to 100 points from a single column that you started into and embarrassingly didn’t progress further along.  But the increased flexibility from the dice options and track bonuses means that this will basically never happen to anyone who plays with even an ounce of caution.

The 2-player experience of this roll & write especially suffers in comparison to it’s older sibling, as you’ll be able to cruise much further up all the tracks before the game end is triggered.  On the other hand, you’re more effectively able to zero in on the opposition when there are less player sheets to scan for vulnerabilities.  But of course, Lost Cities the card game already has this kind of tit for tat in spades.

Credit to Reiner for making a game in this genre that benefits from a higher player count, where starting another expedition is a riskier endeavor; but at the end of the day, if I have a group of 4 or 5 players at my table, the last game I want to break out is a roll & write.  This one might have a bit of a kick to it compared to everything else in the genre, but that’s the equivalent of my grandmother calling Taco Bell’s mild sauce “spicy” when there’s a whole world of genuinely fiery, dramatic, and interactive games from other genres that I’d rather reach for.

Prognosis: Fair

The Golden Ages

1 Play (4 Players)

I spent perhaps the first 30 minutes of The Golden Ages (the rules teach and the initial stages of Era 1) expecting that I would thoroughly dislike this game.  While I showed up and sat down, willing to give it a try, I found my mood souring at the mess of iconography on my player board.  If there is any form of genuine burnout that I am experiencing in this hobby, it is undoubtedly related to the symbology vomit that so many Euro designers are happy to spew across their game.  Maybe it’s just me, but so much of it is starting to feel like 50 shades of economic management and resource conversion.

The Golden Ages is not easy on the eyes, that much is for sure.  And the graphic design certainly tries but largely fails to be of much use to novices or even relatively experienced players.  The game is jam-packed with tile and card symbols that rarely make sense and frequently require players to reference the player aid for clarification.  The aid itself is likewise atrocious, with a mess of cards that are difficult to track down or connect to their matching culture.  Yet the aid is basically mandatory because it does a better job of displaying the cost of wonder cards thanks to the 4 pt font used on the cards themselves.

Straight out the gates The Golden Ages is a gaming experience that lands flat on it’s face… yet somehow manages to keep rolling.  Apparently it doesn’t need to stay on its feet when it has the accelerating momentum and relentless gravity of zippy decisions and engaging strategies to keep it going.  Where it lacks a graceful presentation, it compensates by offering up a surprisingly solid civilization game within a tight 90-minute Euro.

The game manages to traverse massive time periods, embrace unique civilization traits, encourage technological diversification, foster regional competition, provide lucrative wonders, and more within an impressively condensed session.  It rewards players for careful planning, tactical pivots, and thoughtful gambits.  And while I have no desire to bring something so outwardly obnoxious and hideous into my own collection, I also would’t be opposed to playing it again.  Just like in real life, if you’re going to embrace civilization, then you have to be ready to embrace it all… the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Prognosis: Fair

Coloretto

2 Plays (4 Players)

The wisest and most battle-hardened among us hobbyist gamers would be proud of me—I only bought two games during my entire trip to Origins Game Fair.  Both were small box card games.  One was Longboard, and the other was Coloretto.  I probably spent $30 on games total.  If we leave it at that, then the facts show that I either have massive restraint or I only have a taste for light gaming.  Neither is true.  In reality, I already owned all of the other hottest games and feature titles of Origins that suit my tastes best.  The real truth is that Longboard and Coloretto were simply the latest games on my wishlist that I was finally able to get my hands on 😆.

Coloretto has been on my wishlist not because it is flashy or new or exciting (it’s none of those things).  I simply understand it to be a classic filler of a card game that many still tip their hat to.

All you’re doing here is building a tableau of colored cards.  There are seven colors in the deck, but you really only want three colors, and lots of them at that.  A few more cards in a fourth or fifth or seventh color will merely weaken your final score.  Play proceeds in quick rounds where your turn is either adding a card to a growing row or taking a row of cards to end your round.  

The fun lies in the fact that you can yuck the yum of a row by pairing an opponent’s favorite color with a color that they absolutely don’t want.  You can also swipe a perfect card early in the round, but you might end up squirming as the round continues on without you and even more valuable cards emerge from the deck to taunt you.

That’s really all there is to Coloretto.  It’s a simple as they come, yet it still manages to be compelling within its simplicity.  There are also two ways to play or score the game.  But here’s a plot twist: the ruleset recommended for beginners is actually the more interesting and dramatic of the two.  Trying both variants back-to-back made that clear as day.

Prognosis: Good

Poison

1 Play (3 Players)

I recently had the pleasure of trying Reiner Knizia’s Poison (aka Baker’s Dozen aka Friday the 13th aka Thirteen).  And you can probably guess that a card game with so many versions and such names is probably a solidly clever little design that has something to do playing numbers that relate to 13 (you’d be right).

The premise and vibe of the game reminds me in a lot of ways of a trick taker.  3-6 players are dealt a full hand of cards from a deck that contains 3 main suits and 1 wild suit.  The main suit cards contain multiple 1s, 2s, 4s, 5s, and 7s.  Meanwhile, the wild suit is poison made up of only 4s.

Also like a trick taker, you’ll be playing one card at a time and following suit (or playing poison at your leisure).  Only there are actually three tricks happening at a time, and each trick is only claimed when its numbers collectively exceed 13.  

In the center of the play area you’ll find three pots—each reserved for one of the main suits.  Your turn is as simple as tossing a card into a matching pot and avoiding the explosion that makes you take the entire pot of cards.  That’s because each card will count as a single point toward your score (poison cards count as 2 points), and the player with the lowest score wins.

The finishing ingredient to this concoction of cards is a perfect little rule with big ramifications: the player with the most cards of a single suit will score zero points for that suit.  So rather than try to avoid causing potion explosions entirely, it can be delightfully strategic to collect the most of a color and then try to feed other players a little bit of that same color so they score points while you score none.

So there is a little bit of chicken here in that you can get into a suit-specific competition with somebody else where one of you will get hammered at the end of the round and the other will get off scot-free. Meanwhile, when a player gets a strong lead in a color and is content to keep raking in that color, then this is the perfect time to start feeding poison cards into that suit’s cauldron, because there’s no getting rid of those pesky 2-point poison cards once they are in your pile.

Poison was originally released in 2005, and I can absolutely see why it’s been reprinted in various versions by a dozen publishers over the years.  It’s good, clean card gaming from the reliable Dr. Knizia himself.  But where it’s been so prevalent over the years, I wonder if it directly or indirectly inspired some of the similar card games that other designers have created since.

You have Arboretum which is likewise a mean, tight, tactical hand-management game where players want to have the most of a particular suit at the end of the round.  Only in Arboretum, the point scoring is completely reversed (points are good and you only score for having majority of a suit) and the cauldrons of tricks are replaced with a spatial tableau.

Then there is Insider, where you’re likewise playing chicken with other players in an effort to have more cards of a suit than them.  Only in this one, the players with less cards of a suit pay points to the player with the most.

Finally, Parade is another great little game where, just like Poison, earning cards is bad because all cards will score you points and the lowest score wins.  But if you have to earn cards, you desperately want to have the most of each color you possess because the points for those colors will be drastically reduced.

So I have to give props to Reiner Knizia’s Poison for likely having at least some small effect on likely several games that have followed it.  Then again, perhaps Poison itself (and the above mentioned games) were inspired by even older titles like Stick ‘Em or 6 Nimmt!  But the real kicker here is that I would never choose to play Poison over Arboretum, Insider, or Parade.  Perhaps it’s because Poison feels a tad too similar to these designs as well as trick takers I’ve already enjoyed.  Maybe it’s because those other three games offer a pinch more strategy, drama, and flavor to their recipes that Poison lacks.  Probably a bit of both.  But that doesn’t necessarily undermine my enjoyment of this tactical card game.  It just means I don’t need to own it.  No doubt my overflowing shelves of Knizia games are relieved to hear it.

Prognosis: Fair

Catherine: The Cities of the Tsarina

1 Play (2 Players)

That Catherine is devious one, she is.  I don’t normally gravitate to these kinds of games, but somehow Crafty Catherine managed to seduce me with her short playtime and easy rules and touted clever card play.

This brand new release from DLP and Capstone (the publishers behind Orleans and many others) is one that feels most similar to Race for the Galaxy.  While Catherine does not feature action following, which is one of the key ingredients of Race, they do share much in the way of simultaneous action selection, hand management, a relatively quick playtime, and using cards in multiple ways.

So you could say that Catherine is like Race for the Galaxy minus the interactive action following… and the dynamic engine building… and the pressurized tempo…  and the focused scoring… and the small, portable box… and the more interesting space theme… and the massive deck variety… and the strategic game arc.

Alright, I admit, it’s not exactly fair to compare any game to the legendary Race for the Galaxy. But Catherine makes herself an easy target by largely trying to evoke the same style of decision making in a slightly different yet more generic way.

In Catherine, players are managing a hand of cards which is constantly in flux as you draw two from the deck and play two to your tableau each round.  One card will go above to your action row and the other will go beneath to your activation row.  Players reveal their two cards simultaneously and then activate whichever action card they played beneath.  The catch is that the deck has three colors, and you can only activate an action card with a matching colored card played to your activation row.  This system is pretty neat and it’s what makes Catherine bearable to play for a briny gamer like myself.

When activated, a card will earn you an action and a bonus that players will all execute simultaneously.  This is where the game starts to lose me but will likely excite others.  These actions include things like:

• Earn X points for having all four types of goods
• Draw one card for each of these specific types of goods you have
• Build 1 residence into a city on the board
• Discard a card to gain X points or move up the favor track

It’s not completely solitaire, mind you.  There are three times during the game where you look over at your neighbors’ cards and say, “Oh, looks like I have more cannons than you… that’s 4 points for me.”  Or “Oh, looks like you have more books than me, so I get nothing and you get to build a residence. Kudos to you, good sir/madam.”  But after interim scoring, more than half your tableau is tossed into the discard pile and you start over again.  

The only thing that changes from one decade to the next is that your hand size and resource collection slightly increase.  Otherwise, the three decades feel almost entirely the same.  Oh, did I mention that the objective is to impress Catherine?  She likes books and cannons and iron and caviar and food and fur and friends who own a large parade of vacation homes across 18th century Russia.

The game starts with a slightly novel action activation system and then relies entirely on common, solitaire, point salady set collection, resource conversion, and track advancement to get the rest of the way to a complete experience.  Some folks are going to love it.  And at its quick playtime and low complexity level, it certainly answers a lot of the same questions that many overly complex Euros aimlessly circle around for far too long.  But for me, those questions and answers are monotonous and overly familiar.

So I’m afraid it’s just not going to work out between us.  It’s not you, Catherine, it’s me.  I’d just rather spend my time with Race.  And to be honest, I never really wanted a serious relationship with either of you.  You’re both a little too introverted for my tastes.

Prognosis: Poor

Municipium

6 Plays (3 & 4 Players)

For months now, the following thought has repeatedly crossed my mind, “Man, I can’t believe Reiner Knizia hasn’t designed a game centered around the area majority mechanism… that would be absolutely killer.”  It turns out that I was both right and wrong:

• Wrong, because he already had designed one (and undoubtedly more) over a decade ago, I just hadn’t looked hard enough.  
• Right, because it is absolutely killer.

Municipium is one of those unicorn Knizias for me.  Not because the game is thrilling and agonizing—he has plenty of those.  Rather, it’s a unicorn Knizia because the game is thrilling, agonizing, and entirely overlooked by the industry.  It’s only been owned by roughly 1600 BGG users and rated by half that many.  Even worse, it took this Knizia super-fan years to stumble across the design.  And, like any old rock in the path, I would have simply stumbled over it and kept walking without a second thought if a fellow Kniziaphile (thanks Scott) hadn’t forced it onto my radar.

If I had to select one single factor that kept Municipium from getting the attention and acclaim that it has deserved since it’s 2008 release, I would place all the blame on the box cover.  In a vacuum, the art is actually quite nice.  But as a board game product, it doesn’t exactly scream play me 😆.  Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that Municipium came from a sketchy (and now dead) publishing company and featured an alarming swath of questionable production decisions.

Presentation aside, I wouldn’t exactly say that the gameplay of Municipium is for everyone.  Some hardcore gamers have accused the design of having a little too much luck to the outcome or chaos in the proceedings.  Others have claimed that the decision space is too arbitrary or the experience is too uninteresting.  That’s certainly fine, people are entitled to their own opinions, but I have no idea what these folks are smoking.  

Here’s my take:  Municipium is freaking phenomenal.  It’s the legendary Reiner Knizia’s response to the masterpiece that is El Grande by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich.  Yet it isn’t just El Grande with a twist… it’s El Grande completely turned on its head.  

You’re not progressively adding more of your figures to the board in a cyclical round structure to score dozens of points like in El Grande; rather, you are shifting and repositioning your fixed number of figures across the map in a race to earn five points first.  You’re not bidding to guarantee yourself the best powers from the available market of El Grande; rather, you are playing the odds and positioning yourself in the most promising institutions at hopefully the perfect time.  Instead of combining auctions and area majorities like El Grande, Municipium blends in worker placement where the blocking of space actions comes in the form of majority influence.  Where El Grande shines as a purely strategic and carefully methodical competition at 4-5 players, Municipium sings as a cleverly chaotic risk-management romp at 2-4 players.

As I mentioned, the goal of Municipium is to earn 5 points that look like coins but probably represent some kind of favor or prestige within Ancient Rome.  Each of these tokens is earned by collecting a complete set of four citizens—one of each color.  Players spend their turns chasing after the citizens on the board that appear to be the most likely to get awarded out next.  

You can start your turn by making two movements—scooting one family member each along a single path or transferring a single family member across two paths.  Family members can be positioned across seven possible institutions—all connected by a circular path with a central institution having two routes branching out from it to the circle.  After your figure movement comes a card event and then the end of your turn. 

Cards can trigger three possible events:

-Advance the praefect

-Pop a citizen bubble

-Activate institution powers

All three of these events will award the player who has the most influence (family members) in the triggering institution.  Yet the pattern for how each type triggers is deliciously dynamic.  The praefect moves around the circle in a clockwise motion—awarding the first-place player with a wild citizen and the second-place player with the citizen on display (which could be any color).  Meanwhile with citizen events, meeples are added to one of their matching institutions until the bubble pops (the third citizen is placed)—so that first place gets to claim two meeples and second place gets the remaining one.  Institution powers only go off when a card says they do, and the player with the most influence at that area then gets to use the power.

So Municipium is a constant juggling act where each player must determine what is most crucially important and easily opportunistic.  The thing that keeps the game from becoming completely computational is how the cards are activated.  Most often, you’ll end your turn by drawing a card from the facedown deck of twelve.  With only twelve total cards (and four types) within the deck, it’s easy to understand the odds of what event may trigger next, and playing those odds is half the fun.

So you’ll start your turn by placing your bet (in the form of positioning your family members) and end your turn by finding out how that bet payed off.  Yet the game also allows to you prepare for multiple turns ahead, as there’s just enough predictability to the system for long-perspectives to pay off.  You’re not totally victim to the randomized deck either, as each player has three one-time-use cards which act as a shot of adrenaline to your momentum if you save them for the opportune moments.

Beyond the tough decisions that each turn brings, I love the drama and insanity that emerges from the institution powers…

The temple determines the tie-breaker track—this is the beating heart of the game board, as power struggles often come down to a tie.

The tavern lets you  completely drag a player out of another site, as if their family members have abandoned their post to engage in some drinking and recreation.

The baths let you crown one of your family members and double its influence for the rest of the game, but you must completely leave the baths if you do so.

Three other sites offer powerful abilities for collecting citizens or transforming them into easy points.

And finally the Praetorium breaks the movement rules completely by allowing you to reposition any and all of your family members.

It’s the kind of thing where all of the institution abilities feel completely overpowered when used in the right moment and in the right way.

You won’t see Municipium solve all of the common complaints of area majority games—like when everyone bashes the leader or when overlooked players sneak away with the victory.  But none of that prevents me from having the most delightfully stressful hour of fun that a game can possibly provide.

Prognosis: Excellent

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Prognosis: a forecast of how the game will likely fare in my collection, and perhaps yours as well.

Excellent– Among the best in its genre.  This game will never leave my collection.

Good– A very solid game and a keeper on the shelf.

Fair– It’s fine. It’s enjoyable. But I’m not likely to seek it out or keep it around.

Poor– Really doesn’t fit my tastes; not one I want to revisit… but hey, that’s just me.

Hopeless– Never again. Run & hide. Demon be gone.

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 San Francisco, Cat in the Box, Catherine: The Cities of the Tsarina, and more board games! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

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

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

The post Top 10 Board Games for Couples — Podcast Exclusive appeared first on Bitewing Games.

It’s that time of year once more, my friends!  Now that the cardboard dust of 2020 has settled, as we find ourselves in the calm before the storm of 2021 releases, I’ve been reflecting on all the tabletop games I’ve ever played.  Within this mountain of ever growing titles, fifty designs have risen to the top.  These are the board games that have proven their quality over hours of play across many tables surrounded by friends, family, and strangers.  These are the games that I love and want to play more than any others.  Indeed, these are my current Top 50 Board Games of All Time.

If you’re even remotely familiar with my last Top 50 Board Games of All Time list, you’ll soon notice a DRASTIC change in most of the games and their rankings.  This change not only represents the many new-to-me discoveries of the past year, it also symbolizes a significant shift in my gaming tastes and preferences across the nearly 700 plays since my last top 50 list was created.

The list of games that I love is getting to be a crowded place.  To offer you a bit of context, I used the Pub Meeple ranking engine to pit individual games head-to-head against each other over and over until my I died of a broken heart for declaring so many of my beloved board game children to be inferior to each other.  Each game left outside of my top 50 hurt to leave out until perhaps the 89th ranked game.  There are still many designs beyond that which I truly enjoy playing, yet this low on the list is where I’m finally content with leaving them out of my Greatest of All Time post.  Perhaps next year we’ll have to extend this list to my top 75 or top 100, but it’s the excellent games which don’t make the GOAT list that give weight and credibility to the ones that do.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and wrestle with the rankings of the greatest games to grace my tabletop…

50. Watergate

Best suited for everyone

Watergate won’t be the last tug-of-war style game on my list, nor will it be the last Capstone Game here, but it was one of the very first of both categories that I had the pleasure of discovering.  This endearing 2-player game is far more accessible than it sounds or appears.  Yet the way each session plays out is consistently tense and refreshing.  My favorite aspect is perhaps the difficult decisions one must make within the hand management, between deciding whether to dispose of a card to use it’s powerful ability or retain it for its useful pull on the tug-of-war track.  Thanks to the asymmetric decks and objectives of the Nixon Administration vs. the Press and the dynamic unfolding of the pin board conspiracy, I don’t see myself tiring of this excellent design.

49. Arboretum

Best suited for mean, thick-skinned folks

I wonder if us hobbyist gamers sometimes take small box card games for granted.  These are rarely the games that I intentionally schedule a game night for, yet a really good one can often pack a bigger punch and provide more thrills and amusement than a longer and larger “event” game.  Arboretum is the first of these such titles on my list, and it’s as sharp as they come.  There is nothing quite like writhing in my chair because my cards are either too important to play so soon or too precious to discard.  Arboretum is a game where my entire hand feels this way almost the entire time.  I still adore this beautiful little design about trees, yet it’s probably fallen a bit since last year because it’s almost too bitter of a brutality pill for others to swallow when an opponent denies them the scoring on a tree type they’ve spent all game building towards.  If your group has thick skin, then Arboretum is a collection essential.

48. Modern Art

Best suited for any group of four or five people

If you liken an art museum to a snooze fest, then you should come and let Modern Art teach you the exciting intricacies of art valuations.  Modern Art is where my love for auctioning games was born, as the bombastic bidding takes center-stage here.  It’s essentially Dr. Reiner Knizia flexing his auctioning design muscles for up to an hour of richly thematic fun.  The mix of four auction types and the mystery of which artists will have the most valuable pieces hits the spot like a piña colada on a hot summer day.

47. Blue Lagoon

Best suited for everyone

Blue Lagoon is a bit of an unexpected hit of a purchase, despite that being a common theme with Knizia Games in my collection.  On the surface, it appears to be a generic abstract game with shameless Moana-like art.  You combine those two off-putting things together and only a name like Reiner Knizia and a cheap price of $20-30 could warm my icy heart enough to give it a chance.  Yet now here it sits among my Top 50 Games of ALL TIME.  I freaking love this family-friendly strategy game.  I very recently shared how it’s one of Dr. Knizia’s best designs thanks to its agonizing decisions and passive-aggressive opportunities across two subtly distinct rounds of play.

46. Irish Gauge

Best suited for everyone

Well, it’s not the third Knizia game in a row on this list, but it is a Knizia-like design.  What does Knizia-like even mean, you ask?  And why is that a compliment?  Much like the work of Reiner Knizia, Amabel Holland’s Irish Gauge is a vast wealth of deep and compelling gameplay born out of extremely simple rules.  So simple, in fact, that the rules fit onto a single sheet of paper.  It’s hard not to be drawn in by Ian O’Toole’s face-melting box art and clean graphic design, yet it’s the pleasure of placing trains, auctioning shares, and calling for dividends that keeps me thoroughly engaged in this cube-rail classic.

45. The Quest for El Dorado

Best suited for everyone

Phew, well I don’t know about you, but I almost had a panic attack straying from Reiner Knizia for so long.  Look, I get that his style of game isn’t for everyone.  And I can assure you that we won’t break into the double digits of Knizia designs on this list… but we do get awfully close (and you should probably brace yourself for a couple more of them in about two minutes).  Anywayyyyy, let’s talk about one of the best deck-builders ever designed!  Despite the miniature cards and sprawling components, The Quest for El Dorado marries deck-building to racing on a game board with seemingly effortless ease.  The game is so polished and simple that it can be easy to dismiss the genius mechanisms and satisfying flow hidden within.  This is a title that I can put down in front of my eight-year-old niece and thoroughly enjoy playing or break out with my fellow hardcore hobbyists for a charmingly cutthroat contest.

44. Great Western Trail

Best suited for hobbyist gamers

Allow me to be vain for a moment (if putting together this massive ranked list about cardboard leisure isn’t vain enough already) and share that the main thing that keeps me from loving Great Western Trail even more is the uncomfortable box art containing three massive faces of scowling, staring, soul-less men.  It’s like Mount Rushmore got lost in the Twilight Zone and landed itself in a dystopian Wild West.  Thankfully, publisher Eggertspiele decided that five years of heebie-geebies was long enough, and they’ve finally invested in a redesigned and drastically improved art style for the second edition coming later this year.  Yet I’m not so vain as to dismiss the intricate complexity that launches this heavy Euro game to greatness.  The mechanisms interwoven together include deck building with a herd of cattle, traveling with a cowboy along an action rondel, progressing economic potential along a railroad track, constructing buildings along the trail to help yourself and hinder your opponents, developing an engine within your evolving player board, and so much more.

43. Through the Desert

Best suited for everyone

As promised, we’re back with another irresistible adventure from the bottomless well of brilliance that is Knizia Games.  This time, we have pastel camels sprawling across a dry desert in search of lush oases, private piles of sand, and thirst-quenching watering holes.  Believe it or not, I was mildly underwhelmed with this game after my first play of it.  It was only with more plays at varying player counts that I uncovered my adoration of Through the Desert.  Once again, you can hear more about why I love this design in my recent Top 10 Knizia Games post.

42. Lost Cities

Best suited for everyone

Speaking of which, Lost Cities is the last I’ll speak of Reiner’s work for at least a dozen games, so you better eat up while you can!  Remember back when we were talking about Arboretum and how that is a painful card game where you don’t want to play or discard any of your cards?  Lost Cities takes those same hand management woes and cranks them up to ten!  The 20-point penalty for committing to a color is perfectly calculated to make you hesitate with every card you decide to play.  I especially love that you can start out a color with handshake cards that raise the stakes by doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your score, whether they are positive or negative points!  The temptation to commit to a color late can become strong as that color appears in your hand or in the draw piles, and the threat of a premature game end can make the final turns tight as noose!  I still stand by my previous statement that this is the chips and salsa of 2-player card games.

41. New York Zoo

Best suited for everyone

2020 was a great year for board games releases, and New York Zoo is the first one on my Top 50 games list to prove it.  Between the giant tray of animal meeples, the piles of polyomino enclosures, the emerging zoos on player boards, the bounteous breeding bonuses, and the roaming elephant action token, I find myself submerged in a colorful pool of play.  The race to fill your zoo first remains a refreshing change of pace from the common trope of gaining points for anything and everything.  Uwe Rosenberg and polyomino games pair together just as well as chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream…. Am I getting hungry or something?

40. Mandala  

Best suited for everyone

I’ve never been let-down by a play of Mandala.  The moments of difficult decisions and clever plays are a gift that keeps on giving.  The pleasant production consisting of a cloth “board” and colorful cards are merely a disguise for the confrontational gameplay that lurks beneath.  Your turns are spent essentially bidding for first dibs on the sets of colors in each mandala while feeding those sets for lucrative points.  Once a mandala is complete, the highest bidder chooses the first color to add to their scoring river, and frequently it’s best to take the cards that would help your opponent more than they help you.  

39. Jaipur

Best suited for everyone

Jaipur falls into the same category of simple, all-time greats within the 2-player card game genre.  It’s another one that doesn’t contain an immediate hook or obvious wow-factor, but it’s addictive flow grows on you over time.  I could tell you more about how Jaipur perfectly balances incentives against risks or goods against camels, but I wouldn’t be able to do it better than Kyle who put out a very slick 6-minute review of the game last year.

38. Cosmic Frog

Best suited for hobbyist gamers who appreciate the weird and wacky

We’re onto another one of my top releases of 2020 with Cosmic Frog!  Something about this punishing experience is so irresistible… sort of like staring at a sunset, or staying up past bedtime to watch another episode of your favorite show, or drinking soda while eating spicy food.  The more that Cosmic Frog hurts me, the more I want to play it.  Yet I’m far too greedy of a gamer to play the game defensively, and my greed continues to burn me.  Why send my frog groveling back to its vault with only one or two shards when I can load his gullet to the brim with goodies?!?  Why take only one action on my turn when I can spend a little oomph to double my productivity?!?  Why, you ask?  So my merciless opponents can come in and gut-punch me to another dimension and steal away everything I ever held dear.

37. The Estates

Best suited for mean, thick-skinned folks

While we’re on the topic of merciless gut-punching, we might as well transition to another one of my favorite blood baths, The Estates.  This one feels sort of like a sandbox game, where on your turn you have the freedom to auction off almost any piece still on the table, except players spend more time throwing sand at each other than building their own sand castles.  You may be the owner of the red company, but if I win the bid for that red building block, then you better believe I’m going to stack it in the negative point row to sabotage your score.  And if you let me get away with purchasing the Mayor token, then I’ll gleefully add it to your incomplete row where your buildings will now score you double negative points.  In The Estates, cruelty knows no bounds.

36. Lords of Vegas

Best suited for those who can tolerate a hearty dose of luck with their strategery

You know, it’s quite convenient that these games all ended up next to each other on my rankings.  Starting back with Cosmic Frog, we’re currently in the thick of some of the more polarizing games on my list.  It’s likely you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em, and Lords of Vegas is no different.  This is the game many have pointed to as “What Monopoly Should Have Been.”  Growing casinos, hostile business takeovers, big pay-days, gambling to steal money from others, and player turns spent blowing all your cash on greedy expansion schemes.  As an area control game with a flair for dramatic Vegas-style gambling, you’d be hard-pressed to find another game quite like Lords of Vegas.

35. Condottiere

Best suited for everyone

Kyle and I recently shared each of our Top 10 Family Games, and Condottiere was an easy one to add to this list.  It had proven it’s merit when I brought it on a vacation with relatives and they requested to play it multiple times over the many other games I had also brought and taught them that week.  Condottiere boils down to a card game of chicken where the last person to stay in gets to claim a territory if they committed the most troops, and the first person to control three adjacent territories or five total wins.  This game of chicken takes the form of an auction where you can commit troops from your hand to a battle, but that means you’ll have even less cards in the following round.  A major aspect of the strategy is to bluff your commitment and push others to spend too much for something that you don’t actually want, just so you can easily take a more important territory later.

34. Undaunted: Normandy & Undaunted: North Africa

Best suited for everyone

We’ve now arrived at my personal favorite deck-builder, the Undaunted series.  I’ve now played a combined total of 17 games of Undaunted (Normandy and North Africa) and we’re still going strong.  The many scenarios provided in these games help to keep each play fresh, and the asymmetry offered by each setup and faction make it doubly replayable.  The addicting loop of sacrificing a card to compete for initiative, deciding which actions to take with the remaining cards, and honing your deck in on the victory objective is as good as deck-building gets for me.  Just like in war, you’ll be sticking your neck out and taking big risks in hopes gaining the upper hand in this streamlined, 2-player, scenario-based war game.

33. Love Letter

Best suited for everyone

Love Letter might just be the best micro-game ever designed.  With only 16 cards and a handful of cubes, this design weaves together a tapestry of deception, deduction, drama, and delight.  Each player is holding one card in their hand, kept secret from everyone else.  On your turn, draw a second card into your hand and play one of them.  The goal is to be the last person standing or have the highest number when the deck runs out.  And the card actions and values are brilliantly crafted to where players can try to outfox each other with each quick round of play.

32. Treasure Island

Best suited for everyone

I adore how the pirate’s life comes alive in this island treasure hunt!  There is something so exhilarating about being Captain Long John Silver, marking the spot of your buried treasure on your private map, and then spending the entire game misleading the other mutinous pirates with vague, piecemeal information on your treasure’s whereabouts.  I also enjoy being one of those mutinous pirates, drawing on the large game board map, and scouring the island for the booty as I try to puzzle together the hints and clues before Long John escapes captivity and reunites with his treasure.  It’s been a while since I’ve played this wonderfully unique design, but that’s only because I’m waiting to receive my copy of the expansion which promises even more variety to the core experience.

31. Beyond the Sun

Best suited for hobbyist gamers

We’re back with yet another big 2020 release, and it’s really had an upswing in the rankings with my most recent plays of it.  In particular, Beyond the Sun was the very first game we played in our recent 2-part Board Game Birthday Marathon, and it ended up being the group favorite of the entire day.  We had a killer lineup of games that were played too, so that’s high praise indeed.  Beyond the Sun mixes tight resource management with branching worker placement actions on an evolving tech tree while providing a buttery smooth area control experience on the space exploration board.  The whole package comes together so beautifully that it’s all the more impressive to discover that this is designer Dennis K. Chan’s first published game.

30. Concordia

Best suited for everyone

As far as I’m concerned, Concordia deserves to be the real Catan of the board game industry.  It’s an accessible game all about getting your wooden settlements built onto the map, yet everything about Concordia is far more interesting and engaging than Catan.  You build up your hand of cards over time, and these not only serve as the action you take on your turn, but they also score you points at the end of the game according to how well you executed your game board strategy.  Concordia never fails to hit the spot, especially because you are not waiting for the dice to roll your numbers and trigger your resource production.  So maybe it’s time to give Catan the boot from your collection and introduce your friends to the REAL Catan which is the unbreakable Concordia.

29. Stephenson’s Rocket

 Best suited for Knizia fans and/or train game fans who plan on repeat plays

Like Beyond the Sun, Stephenson’s Rocket was another game we had the pleasure of enjoying at our recent gaming marathon.  While I can understand why it might be a bit polarizing due to the objective opacity and in-your-face nastiness, Stephenson’s Rocket is a game that really sings once you catch onto its crafty ways.  The opportunities for clever turns are subtle yet numerous in this design about extending rails, investing in industries, and bidding for control.  This game, in my opinion, is criminally underrated among Knizia’s designs and the board game industry itself.  To this day, I thank my lucky stars that I was able to discover it and snag myself a copy of Grail Game’s beautiful version.

28. Dogs of War

Best suited for any group of 4-5 players

Thus begins the reign of Paolo Mori on my top 50 games of all time list.  The man has landed himself not one, not two, but three spots among my top 30.  Dogs of War is the first that I have the privilege of acclaiming today.  While you could call this a worker placement game, I don’t really think of it as such.  Rather, I tend to think of it as a political tug-of-war strategy game.  Players act as Dogs of War who influence the battles that are taking place between noble houses.  The victor of each battle will be determined by whichever house receives the most support from players, and the players on the winning team will gain significant benefits.  The incentives to support a particular house on a particular round are many, and the challenge is to choose your allies wisely so that you benefit from the various battle outcomes more than any opponent.

27. Blitzkrieg!: World War Two in 20 Minutes

Best suited for everyone

For those of you who are unable to track down a copy of the out-of-print Dogs of War—or perhaps even more difficult is the challenge of gathering 4-5 players around one table—then Mr. Mori has just the solution: a new 2-player, 20 minute version of this game known as Blitzkrieg.  And what a heck of a 20 minutes this design is.  Those who dismiss Blitzkrieg for its generic look or plain production are simply missing out on one of the best new 2-player games in the industry.  The back and forth that occurs between two opponents as they attempt to conquer each theatre of war is a blast from start to finish.  Unlike most war games, there are no cards or dice involved here.  You simply select one of three tile options that are hidden behind your shield to play out almost anywhere onto the board.  The tile you choose and the spot you place it on may haunt you long after this 20 minute romp is over. 

26. The Mind

Best suited for everyone

I have to imagine that those who scoff at the simplicity of The Mind just haven’t uncovered the magic within.  The Mind captures the organic satisfaction of acting on gut-feelings and having those feelings confirmed by others without even word spoken between them.  It’s a cooperative game where the group must find an equilibrium, a rhythm, and a tempo together as they play numerical cards from their hands in ascending order without saying anything.  While it starts out laughably basic in round one, the difficulty quickly ramps up as more cards are dealt each round and the group loses more lives.  Some of the best board and card game designs on this planet attain such greatness because they trim away the fiddly supplemental rules and maintain a laser focus on what makes them special.  The Mind is one such design that remains a joy to play with the right people who are willing to invest in its unusual concept.

Continue on to the next post for the final 25 of my Top 50 Board Games of All Time!

Article written by Nick Murray. If you found yourself nodding in agreement to some of his favorite games, then keep an eye out for three upcoming games that he loved enough to publish! Nick’s first published design, Social Grooming, which will debut in a Kickstarter bundle alongside two games—Soda Smugglers and Pumafiosi—from critically acclaimed designer, Reiner Knizia! Don’t miss out on this killer filler bundle coming in 2021! Subscribe to the Bitewing Games monthly newsletter to stay in touch.

The post Top 50 Board Games of All Time — Games 50-26 appeared first on Bitewing Games.