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?

If you appreciate our content (such as this post) and/or have any interest in our next publication, Trailblazers, then please consider subscribing to the Bitewing Games newsletter! Every two weeks, we’ll send you an email sharing our latest content and teasing new reveals about our upcoming publications. Bitewing Games is only made possible and kept alive through the support of fans and backers via our published games. Thanks for your support!

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.

Next to legacy games, roll & writes, crowdfunding, polyominoes, and pasting the Marvel IP onto a game system, solo gaming is perhaps one of the biggest recent trends in the board and card game industry.  This can be attributed to several factors including COVID quarantining, strong sales for solo-friendly games, and more.

Personally, it’s taken a fair amount of time for me to really dip my toes in the solo waters.  I was playing multiplayer board and card games years before I ever tried a solo game.  For me, the very act of playing a tabletop game was a social event, first and foremost.  It wasn’t until tabletop gaming took on a bigger role in my life—when it became a regular hobby—that I was no longer able resist the pull of small, simple, critically acclaimed solo games.  I’m still not the type who has the motivation or energy to break out a massive, complex solo game just for myself, but I’ve rapidly discovered that quick & easy solo games often hit the spot.

As Bitewing Games will soon be publishing a quick & easy solo game of our own—Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney (which also plays up to 8 players)—now felt like the right time to investigate, assemble, and share my Top 10 Quick & Easy solo games.  At the end of this list, I’ll also be sharing more info about the Epic Solo Mode that Ryan has developed for Trailblazers.  But regarding all of these games, it should be clarified that when I say “Quick & Easy” I mean quick to play and relatively easy to learn/setup/tear-down.  I do not, by any stretch, imply that these games are easy to win or master.  The compelling challenge is often the best part of a solo game, in my opinion, thus all of these games offer that in some form or another.

Under Falling Skies

As a 20-40 minute game that is filled to the alien gills with juicy decisions, there is perhaps no better way to start this list than with Under Falling Skies.

Under Falling Skies first existed in 2019 as a 9-card print-and-play game, but it was so popular that publisher CGE decided to acquire the license and supe it up with a Kwanchai Moriya coat of paint, a pretty plastic ship production, and a heaping of variety across a campaign of unique boards and challenges.  The experience is a mix between Independence Day’s alien invasion and clever dice worker placement and manipulation.

The gameplay features tense decisions where higher dice values increase the strength of the space they are placed on, but they also accelerate the invasion of the alien ships in the column they are placed in.  The key to victory is balancing risky bonuses against careful defensive manuevers.  You can select your difficulty by flipping the invasion boards between their harder and easier sides, and the campaign offers a wealth of new wrinkles to explore so you’ll always be on your toes with the next challenge.

MicroMacro: Crime City & MicroMacro: Full House

What better way to spend a wintery evening than with a steaming cup of Hot Cocoa and a sprawling map of criminal mysteries?

I recently shared how MicroMacro is another perfect game for couples, but it’s also a great game to enjoy solo.  In a tantalizing mix of Where’s Waldo and murder mystery, MicroMacro challenges players to uncover the truths behind strange and inexplicable deaths.

We recently finished up the 16 wild cases of MicroMacro: Crime City and had a blast solving each and every one. The good news is that the standalone sequel—Full House—is simply more of a good thing.  You can learn more about why we love MicroMacro in my full impressions post.

Friday

Confession time: Friday is the one of a couple games on this list I haven’t played. Yet it still ranks highly among many solo gamers, thus it earned a spot here.  This deck building game has you helping Robinson Crusoe through treacherous island hazards as he prepares for a run-in with pirates.  Overcoming encounters will add more abilities to your deck, yet intentionally losing certain encounters can be a key tactic as well.

Super-Skill Pinball (Roll & Writes)

Most the the roll & write genre is the epitome of quick & easy solitaire games, so I picked my current favorite of the bunch to be on this list.  While roll & writes typically go up to 4 or 8 or infinity players, they also tend to lack any significant element of player interaction.  So the most interaction you’ll get out of many roll & writes is, “Can I roll the dice again, yet?” as you wait for an opponent to fill in a box.

When played solo, there’s zero downtime to Super-Skill Pinball, and you can roll dice and slide the silver balls as quickly as you please.  This design is all about simulating the experience of a pinball table, which it does incredibly well (aside from the speed and reflexes that are involved in real pinball).  Combos abound and tension ratchets up as you fight to keep your pinball from dropping down the center.  Best of all, the variety of tables (4 per game) keeps things fresh and interesting with unique themes and mechanisms including Gopher Gold Mining and disco Dance Fever.

Regicide

One of my favorite recent discoveries has been the brilliantly designed dungeon crawler cooperative game that exists completely in a standard deck of playing cards: Regicide.  Here, you’ll be taking on Jacks then Queens then Kings in a tight game of hand management.  Playing various suits grants abilities, and the aces known as animal companions come in handy as well.  Do yourself a favor and try one of the best card games to be invented in recent years.

The Search For Planet X

The Search For Planet X is one of our household favorite deduction games.  The production is everything I want in a deduction game: smooth, clear, useful, and pretty.  The icing on the cake is the companion app (something I’m not usually fond of in a tabletop game) that keeps the experience slick, quick, and flawless.  The race to figure out what lies in each sector—comet, asteroid, gas cloud, dwarf planet, or most importantly Planet X itself—is both challenging and satisfying.

Oniverse Games

The Oniverse is a solid line of solo games from mammoth publisher Z-Man featuring stylish art, simple rules, quick set-up, short playtime, compact boxes, and clever gameplay.  While there are now five games under this popular brand, I’ve only tried Aerion—the Yahtzee style dice management game.  But from that one game, I found there was plenty to explore between the compelling core loop and the six expansion modules.  For those who wonder where is the best place to start, many folks will point to Onirim and Aerion as two of their favorites.

Cascadia

The big-box titles from publisher Flatout Games tend to offer thinky puzzles with relatively low player interaction—meaning they tend to play similarly at all player counts.  Cascadia is their latest release that has taken the gaming world by storm, and many folks are saying it makes for a great solo experience.  Those who enjoy puzzly tile laying games will be right at home here in this design that celebrates the sites and creatures of the Pacific Northwest with lush art by Beth Sobel.  While it doesn’t venture into the solo rules, Kyle’s How To Play video shows us what Cascadia is all about in under 8 minutes.

Nusfjord

I recently shared my first impressions of a 5-player game of Nusfjord where I essentially said it’s a solid Rosenberg design, but not necessarily one I would play over A Feast for Odin, Agricola, or Le Havre.  Many commenters pointed out to me that Nusfjord is the type of game that really shines at 1-3 players.  I learned that Nusfjord packs a huge punch as a solo game that can be played in only 20-30 minutes.  If you can manage to get a medium-weight Uwe experience by yourself in that amount of time, then Nusfjord absolutely deserves a spot on this list.

Sprawlopolis/Agropolis

Of course I wasn’t going to forget about the quick & easy 18-card design known as Sprawlopolis (or its sibling Agropolis).  This critically acclaimed game has had a lot of mentions across our blog and podcast, including my Top 10 Spatial Puzzle Games.  So rather than retread the same ground, I’ll point you to two glowing video reviews from No Pun Included and The Dice Tower’s Tom Vasel.

Trailblazers—Epic Solo Mode… Playable TODAY on Tabletop Simulator

For Trailblazers, our next upcoming publication, designer Ryan Courtney had two core design focuses:

1. Maintain his high standard of satisfying puzzly depth, but make the rules as simple and approachable as possible
2. Develop compelling solo modes to make this a solo-friendly game as much as it is a family-friendly game

So Trailblazers is exactly the kind of design that fits the topic of quick & easy solo games.   I recently covered that first design focus of approachability, so today we’ll be exploring the solo features that have been on Ryan’s mind since day one.  But we’re not gonna spill the beans on all three modes today.  While the Standard and Adventurers Solo modes have their own exciting objectives that provide a distinguishing flavor, today we’re gonna talk about the biggest of them all: Epic Solo Mode.

Why is it called ‘Epic’ Solo Mode?  Well, the standard game will see you drafting and placing 24 trail cards and 3 campsite cards over the course of 4 rounds or 30 minutes. Epic Solo Mode, on the other hand, can last up to three times as long where you’ll be arranging up to 72 trail cards and 9 campsite cards into one sprawling monstrosity of trails and loops.  While that sounds like absolute insanity (and in some ways, it is), the mode is actually broken up into three separate stages.

Epic Solo Mode utilizes the Animals expansion (included in the standard edition of the Trailblazers), and animal scoring will be your sole focus for the first two stages.  The key to scoring big animal points is to have several unique animal tokens placed along a loop; but the catch is that a trail card with an animal token on it can never be overlapped (partially or fully) by another card, which limits your spatial flexibility.  I go into more details about how the animals expansion works here.  

Stage 1 is simply called “Epic Solo Mode” where if you manage to scrounge at least 30 animal points after 4 rounds of play then you win the mode!  But 30 animals points can be quite challenging to reach—it took me several attempts to finally beat this stage.  

Once victory is achieved in Epic Solo Mode, you can simply call it a day and pack it away as you rest on the laurels of your 30-minute triumph… Or, you can continue on to the first bonus stage called Springer Fever.  The objective of Springer Fever?  Build off of the foundation you’ve laid in the Epic Solo Mode and win Springer Fever by scoring 80 or more animal points from loops after 4 more rounds of play.  If victory is achieved, you may continue on to the final bonus stage, if you wish.  This is the stage that I’ve yet to overcome, although my last attempt was quite close.

If you manage to beat Springer Fever, then the final stage you may continue on to is Triple Crown.  Once again, you’ll build off of the foundation you’ve laid in Springer Fever, but this time you’ll aim to get a high score by scoring only the single longest loop of each trail type after 4 more rounds of play.  By breaking up loops, extending them, and reconnecting them, you’ll be able to get a high score!  Although animal scoring no longer matters, the tricky part will be that you still can’t overlap cards with animal figures placed on them from the previous two stages.

The challenge that Epic Solo Mode and its two bonus stages provide is one with a dizzyingly high skill-ceiling that will keep folks coming back for many sessions.  While it certainly isn’t an easy mode to take on, I’ve found myself learning and improving with each attempt, and that satisfaction of progress far outweighs my failures.  Over time, you’ll go from a short-term focus of lunging for easy animal points to a long-term focus of planning how to make the longest loops for Triple Crown.

This mode is one that has been thoroughly tested and played by Ryan’s play testers, and it is one that Ryan and Tim even turned into a gnarly challenge for themselves to hit 165 points in Triple Crown (the final stage).  They even recorded many of their attempts on Youtube with Game 12 being their final triumph.

While learning about Epic Solo Mode is all good and fine, the real fun comes from actually playing it which you can do RIGHT NOW.  That’s right, Epic Solo Mode is available for you to play on TableTop Simulator (a game/app which you can download from Steam).  Simply use this link to find the Trailblazers mod, click subscribe to download it to your TTS app, and then open TTS and find it in your Workshop.

Follow Trailblazers all the way to its Q2 Crowdfunding launch! Subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter where we’ll be teasing out more details, art, and components over the coming weeks.

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 10 Quick & Easy Solo Games + Play Trailblazers Epic Solo TODAY appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Scout

2 Plays

Scout is an interesting mix of Bohnanza’s locked hand of cards and a ladder-climbing mechanism similar to Tichu.  The new version comes at us from publisher Oink Games who fittingly crams it into their classic tiny box with a colorful, minimalist makeover.  The only concession that seems to have been made here is the unusually thin/flimsy cards that were likely selected to ensure that everything could still fit in the box.

In Scout, you play as many rounds as there are players as you try to accumulate the most points by the game end.  Each round, the entire deck is dealt out, and immediately one of the most important decisions you will make is whether or not to flip your entire hand upside down.  The top of each card will feature a different number from the bottom of each card, with these numbers ranging from 1-10.  So the first thing you’ll have to evaluate is which orientation has the most potential.

Just like Bohnanza, you are not allowed to flip or reorder individual cards in your hand.  So once you commit to one of your two options, you’ll have to deal with what you’ve got.  The thing to look for is sets of the same number or runs of consecutive numbers that are either ascending or descending.  Sometimes you get unbelievably lucky with one or more sets of 3 or even 4 cards perfectly lined up together, other times you start a round with hot garbage, and this is undoubtedly the weakest link in Scout’s design.

Fortunately, there are a fair amount of clever plays you can make, regardless of the hand you are dealt.  And typically, consistent cleverness can really pay off over the course of multiple rounds.

While your first ever round or two might feel a little too rote, with some experience, some of the more subtle short-term tactics and long-term strategies start to reveal themselves.  On your turn, you may either Show or Scout.  Performing a show means that you must play a better set of cards than what is currently active from a previous player.  A set or run of two cards always beats a single card, three cards always beat two, and so on, while higher values beat out sets and runs of the same quantity.  You know, typical ladder card-play.

When you play a show, you claim the active set that you just one-upped and place it in your stash of points.  If the next player can’t beat your show, then they’ll instead have to Scout a card from your set, stealing one card from either end of the set and slotting it into their hand wherever and however they please.  Scouting is essential to improving your starting hand, yet it’s just as important as deciding when to play certain sets from your hand.  The nice thing about players scouting your own show is that you earn a point each time they take a card.  Better yet, if all of your opponents end up scouting from your show, this counts as consecutive passing which immediately triggers the end of the round.

Usually the round ends when one player empties their hand, but either way you always want to be the one who ends the round either with a grand finale of a circus show or with a show so good that nobody else can one-up it.  Either way, you’ll get zero negative points while everyone else takes 1 negative point for each card remaining in their hand.

The pacing and tempo of Scout is brilliant, because as the round progresses it becomes increasingly risky to save your best cards for a big play.  The round might end before you get the chance to play your big run of four cards, and now you have to swallow each one as a penalty point. On the other hand, if the opponents after you get down to only one or a few cards in their hand, then you can force them to scout by putting on a show which contains one more card than they can possibly play.

The final wrinkle that really makes Scout shine is the precious scout & show token that each player gets at the start of each round.  You get one shot to both scout and show in the same turn, yet even you save it for what feels like a special occasion, there is inevitably a later turn that makes you regret spending it so soon.  This token is often critical to turning the tide of a round in your favor.

Overall, I find that Scout makes for a solid addition to upper tier of Oink Games offerings.  I’ll slot this one alongside my favorites—Insider, Startups, Fake Artist, and Durian.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Imperial Steam

1 Play

As a Capstone train game that appears to be a hybrid between Brass Birmingham and Age of Steam, I was certainly intrigued by 2021’s Imperial Steam.  This one is a game that describes itself as a “highly strategic yet accessible economic and logistics game” of making “difficult decisions” amid “fierce competition”—at least that’s how the publisher puts it.

The problem with calling your game “accessible” is that this term kinda sets expectations for the entire experience.  Last time I checked, those expectations do not include a box crammed with 900 components that take 20-30 minutes to setup and a rulebook where the first 10 pages cover setup and the following 20 cover gameplay.  If this is what folks are calling “accessible” these days, then I’d like to nominate that word for public execution.

But alas, I’ve found joy in other designs that at first seem like board game vomit in a box… A Feast for Odin, Oath, Eclipse, and Coffee Traders all come to mind.  And speaking of joy, Brass and Age of Steam are currently in my top 10 games of all time, so surely their love child, Imperial Steam, is still destined for greatness, right?

Well, with my first play of Imperial Steam, I learned a valuable lesson.  It’s not enough to simply combine certain aspects of two things you love and expect something just as good or better.  With this game, I was hoping for a banana split, but I feel like I was instead served a banana peel swimming in melted ice cream and sprinkled with peanut shells.

Imperial Steam tries to wink at Brass and Age of Steam fans (such as myself) with things like orange iron cubes, black coal cubs, railway route building, goods pickup and delivery, crushing economics, and more.  The problem is that everything I love most about those two Martin Wallace classics is entirely missing from this mirage of a design.

Gone are the dynamic shared incentives and highly interactive gameplay.  Absent are the clean rules and focused options.  These things are all replaced by a grating mess of mechanisms across a nauseating spread of boards and tokens and cards.  

Imperial Steam, like many of today’s heavy Euros, is a design that desperately tries to compensate for its glaring lack of emergent player interaction with a firehose of variability in the setup and mechanics in the rules.  If players are too busy trying to avoid drowning as this firehose sprays them in the face, then perhaps they’ll never notice that they are merely standing in a shallow wading pool of a tabletop playground.

For a production that offers so much across its icons, tracks, pieces, and actions, I have rarely felt so restricted in my possibilities.  Would you like to build some railroad track?  Sure thing!  But, actually, you can only build up to two tracks per round… and you’ll need to buy some more workers to be able to reach those spots… but you can only buy workers from these locations, not those ones… and once you have them, you’ll have to leave them alone for a round or two before they’ll actually be worth using… But in the meantime you can stock up on the resources you’ll need for the track!  But, you can only buy two resources this round because this tile arbitrarily says so, even though you’ll need three resources to build more track… and once you purchase them, you aren’t allowed to use those resources this round, you have to wait until next round… and although you own these resources, and you’ve literally placed them on your train car tiles, you can’t actually deliver these ones to a location, these ones are just for spending on more track.  You see, you need to send a worker out onto the board in order to make some cubes that you can actually transport.  It’s simple, really.

The theme and graphic design here offer little assistance in making any sense of what you are doing and why you are doing it.  It’s largely a senseless, soulless Euro parading around in a train game husk.  While the majority of my top 10 games are also categorized as fairly heavy, it’s needlessly complex designs like Imperial Steam that put me through an existential crisis…  What kind of gamer am I?  Do I even like board games?  Do you remember the taste of strawberries, Mr. Frodo?

Current Rating: 3/10

Keyflower

2 Plays

Keyflower has been around for nearly a decade now, and it still retains a solid ranking in the top 100 board games on BGG, so it does feel like I’m preaching to the choir with anything I have to say about this game.  But it wouldn’t be the first time I gave a choir-directed sermon… 

The biggest question that I find myself continually asking about new-to-me resource conversion Euros is this: What makes this game stand out among the thousands of other options?  Is this game truly exceptional, and if not, why would I keep and play it over the dozens of similar yet superior dry strategy games?

Keyflower, being a bone-dry worker placement auctioning engine builder about settling your village, is another such design that must face my burning question.  Fortunately, Keyflower is the first game I’ve tried in months that manages to come up with a decent answer.

This game stands out most by the interesting combination of bidding and and worker placement that takes place during each of its 4 rounds.  New tiles are displayed at the start of each round.  Then, it is open season for players to take turns either bidding for a tile by placing workers around the border or gaining a tile’s benefit by placing workers directly on top.  Once a certain tile has a color committed on or around it, then other players can only bid on or activate that tile with the same color for the rest of the round.  Your red, yellow, and blue workers are hidden behind your screen, so you only have a faint idea of what others can bid based on the new workers they earn from a boat at the end of each round.

I found this hybridization of auctioning and worker-placement in Keyflower to be quite the treat.  You can activate any tiles on the table—your own, the central market, or the tiles in other players’ villages—but the catch is that the owner (or new owner) of that tile will earn the workers on it at the end of the round.  You’re allowed to activate a tile that has already been activated, but it will cost you extra workers.  The decision space and considerations to make with each turn are broad and consequential.

While the rest of the game is rather generic in its ideas—earn, transport, and spend resources to upgrade your village tiles for points; compete to claim bonus scoring tiles; etc.—it doesn’t necessarily need to be anything more flashy and complicated.  The scoring objectives and secondary mechanisms are simply the oil that keeps this compelling core smooth and slick.  And even with us 3 newcomers, the game proved to be surprisingly fast-paced.

I do find it rather odd and slightly amusing that the creators have leaned so heavily into this “Key” branding of their games.  There appears to be about 9 games in this Key series with roughly that many expansions to some of those games.  From my amateur perspective, they all appear to be a tangled mess of roughly the same art style and theme with roughly the same ideas where I’m better off sticking to the cream of the crop (Keyflower) and ignoring the rest.  I fully realize that this is a barbaric oversimplification of this series, and I’m sure that it has a solid following of fans, but I can’t help but feel that the branding does more harm than good regarding attraction and approachability for the uninitiated.  

But alas, there I go again, letting the cold-blooded businessman within me get lost on an irrelevant tangent.  What’s most important here is that Keyflower remains a compelling offering in this over-crowded genre.  Perhaps the one feature of this game that has aged the worst is its dense rulebook, and even that is mitigated by a Watch It Played rules explanation video from the legendary, jovial (and 8 years younger) Rodney Smith.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Ankh: Gods of Egypt

2 Plays

Believe it or not, Ankh is the first game by legendary designer Eric M. Lang that I have ever played.  Based on the look and style of his games, I never would have predicted Ankh to be a streamlined, non-random, pure strategy game, but that’s exactly what it is!

The three pillars of Ankh are the following:

1. A buttery smooth action selection board
2. An event track that sets the game’s tempo
3. Battling for control of areas with your God, warriors, and guardians

On your turn, you can choose up to two different actions on the board, and they must be executed in descending order.  These actions are to move figures three spaces each, summon a figure to the game board, gain followers (the economy of the game), or spend followers to unlock an ankh power.  This action board is the spinning gears behind the posturing and positioning that players will take as they strive to earn the most points at each upcoming conflict event.

Any time a player selects an action, they’ll move the action marker down its row until it hits the last space of the track.  This space immediately ends your turn (meaning you may not get a second action), but it also triggers the next event, and everybody wants to trigger those juicy events for themselves.  Most events allow players to gain control of a monument, and monuments are central to how you score points.  But the two other possible events include splitting an area in two by drawing new boundaries with camels, or triggering a conflict.

Conflict is beautifully simple and wonderfully tense in Ankh.  Battles are resolved one region at a time.  Players add up their figures in that region to determine a base power, apply any unlocked ankh abilities, and secretly select a single card from their hand to hopefully sway the battle in their favor.  All players start with the same hand of cards that will be spent and recycled throughout the game.  While this mechanism is a shameless rehash of another Egyptian area control game (Kemet), it’s a system that never fails to provide tense decisions.  The conflict cards of Ankh even provide more opportunities for bluffing and point-mongering beyond the contest for a region victory.

You can score points simply by having your figures on the right spaces and in the right regions, even if you lose every battle, yet dominating regions also comes with its own batch of scoring opportunities.  Players will be scrambling up the point track in a quest to not only win, but also to avoid merging with another god or even suffer a late-game elimination.

The controversial merge mechanic of Ankh happens roughly two-thirds through the game and sees the last and second-to-last place players melting into a single faction that shares resources, actions, and objectives.  Some folks see this as one player essentially getting eliminated from the game because they lose all their figures and monuments from the board.  To me, it functions more like a late mechanical pivot where two players begin to play a cooperative game with significant advantages to help them make a come-back.

While each of the merged players becomes limited to one action per turn, this actually allows them more strategic flexibility for their faction.  They also have access to both players’ god powers, guardians, and followers.  Where this merge event is as guaranteed as the rising of the sun (no pun intended), and the game state is perfectly readable and non-random, it becomes important to anticipate, plan for, and even embrace the merge.  I’ve been anxious to take a test drive in team-merger myself, but I’ve found myself instead taking the early lead and putting a massive target on my back while my opponents merged with each other in both of our plays.

For a game where all information is open and readable, the victories in Ankh can certainly sneak up on you.  Thanks to various ankh abilities, cards, and dividing regions, scoring points has a snowball effect throughout the game where one player can suddenly hit the top of the point track to claim the instant win.  Our second play of the game with four players saw everyone ganging up on me, the runaway leader, while overlooking the second-place faction.  Through crafty upgrades and cardplay, she flew under the radar long enough to quickly shoot up the point track and snatch victory from my grasp, even while the merged players were making a significant comeback of their own.

While I resent her stealing my thunder, I’m even more grateful that she and her husband own Ankh—kickstarter goodies and all—so I don’t have to.  No matter how you slice it, Ankh is a costly game to dive into.  The retail version comes in at a whopping $100 MSRP, and that one doesn’t even come with plastic monuments and tokens that make the game board much more readable.  The Kickstarter all-in pledge provided a glorious amount of plastic, expansions, and content, but it also costed folks who pledged for it two limbs and a whole bookshelf.

I’m lucky to be the moochy friend who shows up and sits down to a table already set up after somebody else painstakingly wheelbarrowed all the boxes into one room and fetched a hundred components from a thousand locations.  So perhaps my pampered experience should be taken with a grain of salt.  I’ve been known to condemn plenty of other games to exile simply for how bloated they are (see Gloomhaven: JotL, Catacombs, Sleeping Gods, Pandemic Legacy, etc.).  But I can’t deny that Ankh is one of my favorite surprises of the past year.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

Rialto

1 Play

Rialto is one of many Stefan Feld designs that sit in the shadows of his most popular work (The Castles of Burgundy, Trajan, Bora Bora, Bruges, etc.).  Despite this, I found Rialto to be a stand-out game for a few reasons:

1. It’s more poignantly interactive with area majorities and auctions galore.
2. It can be played with up to 5 people where many other Felds cannot.
3. It is being reimplemented this year by Queen Games as New York City.

In Rialto, players are drafting cards into their hand to put toward auctions for various benefits, bonuses, and of course points.  The central focus of the game is to place your council members into six districts of Venice to score area majority points.  Everything else ties back to the area competition and/or auctions.

This design actually reminds me a bit of the classic Knizia Euro, Taj Mahal.  In both games, each round takes place in a new district where players commit cards from their hands and hope to bid the most.  Yet where Taj Mahal is a tense game of chicken, Rialto is more focused on efficient drafting and engine building.  That’s not to say that Rialto isn’t tense.  

In Rialto, it’s always beneficial to bid cards from your hand, but the winner of each auction gets a significant bonus.  One auction has players scrambling for the favor of turn order and tiebreakers, another provides tantalizing building abilities, but those building abilities are only useful if you are also bidding for money, yet none of those things will win you the game if you aren’t also bidding to influence the game board of contested districts.

I found that all six types of auctions were alluring at one point or another during the six rounds of the game.  The key to success is to know which ones are most important (and most easily winnable) during which rounds.  It helps to observe which cards other players draft so you can plan and execute your bids accordingly.

Despite being an increasingly jaded gamer—especially toward generic looking Euros such as this one—I found Rialto to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience.  Time will tell if next year’s New York City will improve upon this formula… it seems to be a more streamlined and balanced design at first glance.  But it also tosses out the fifth player option and a whole handful of core mechanisms from Rialto; so it could be one step forward, two steps back just as easily as it could be a fully realized design.

Current Rating: 7/10

MicroMacro: Crime City

10 Plays

MicroMacro is what happens when Where’s Waldo meets homicide detective.  In other words, it’s a blast.

I remember when MicroMacro was first announced.  I was actually put off by the concept initially.  I didn’t love the sound of hunching over a massive colorless map with tiny drawings that required players to crowd together for excess squinting.  While my first impression wasn’t too far off from what you actually do in this game, I underestimated how fun it could be.

After hearing great things about MicroMacro from other gamers, I decided it was worth trying together with my wife, Camille.  Rather than spread the map out on our table, we decided to get extra fancy and hang it on our wall.  The game does come with a cheap little magnifying glass, but we haven’t needed it at all.

The thing that makes this game map special is that it is not just a still image of a single point in time.  Rather, it’s tangled spaghetti of timelines where each individual noodle tracks the movement and actions of a unique character throughout their day.  So if you spot a woman with a pointy nose and small handbag who is walking down the street, then you might look further down the street in the direction she is headed and spot her boarding a bus, or you can look in the direction she came from and see her lounging on her porch earlier in the day.

So, this map is essentially a stalker’s cocaine.  But more accurately, it’s a playground for investigators.  Many horrors can be found littered across this deceptively playful map of illustrations including fresh corpses, vengeful killers, poison shops, and dangerous jealousies.  While Where’s Waldo is unquestionably a kid-friendly activity, MicroMacro dives right into the deep end of adult themes ripe with murder and seasoned with infidelity, sabotage, thievery, and more.

But such is the life of a criminal investigation game.  Those who have dabbled in other games of this genre such as Chronicles of Crime, Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, or Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective will feel right at home here.  I’ve tried some of these including Chronicles of Crime in the past, yet MicroMacro instantly and easily becomes my favorite of the bunch for one simple reason: It’s all fun and no fuss.

In MicroMacro, there is no fiddling with antisocial phone apps and endless QR codes, there is no mandatory recitation of exhausting paragraphs of poorly written dialogue that require you to read between the lines, and there is no heaping of components that players must dig through to setup and play the game.  This one only requires a few case cards, a map, and your natural detective sensibilities.

Each case begins with a new crime: “Mr. Cabbage was found shot in the back alley behind the pharmacy!”  And a starting prompt: “Find the scene of the crime!”  From there, you can continue to follow the prompt cards as you complete one after another.  Once you find the crime scene, the next card will say something like: “What was Mr. Cabbage doing before he was shot?”  As you scan the perimeter of the pharmacy, you may spot Mr. Cabbage across the street buying himself a tasty sausage at the sausage stand (yes, the game does have a sausage stand, and yes, the game is made by Germans).

Each prompt card will point you in the direction of where to look next on the front while confirming the answer to the prompt on the back.  For each case, you are supposed to hand all the cards to one player who spoils the answer for themself after the group makes their guess and either confirms the correct answer or tells everyone else to try again.  This system works well, as the back of each card only offers a minor spoiler for the current plot thread that you are following, and the lead detective can still participate in each step until the group settles on their answer.

But I didn’t spend my childhood watching hours of Psych and Monk—training in the ways of a detective—just to have prompt cards hold my hand through criminal investigations.  Nay, I’ve been preparing my whole life to take on the advanced mode of MicroMacro: Crime City.  You see, in the advanced mode, the prompt cards are cast aside and ignored.  For each session, you simply look at the first card to discover your next case, and then you get to work combing over the map for clues.  This is where things get really fun.

What starts out as the scene of a rabbit-man crushed beneath a piano quickly unravels into full-blown investigation:  Who was this rabbit-man victim?  Where did he live?  What were his hobbies?  Who came in contact with him on the day of his death?  Where did the piano come from?  Was this a coincidental accident, or something more sinister? (Spoiler: It’s never a coincidence.  This is Crime City we’re talking about, after all.).

Formulating these questions and uncovering the answers—completely unaided by prompts—is where MicroMacro is at its best, especially as a two-player game.  With two players, you can put your heads together, bounce ideas off each other, and bask in dramatic discoveries.  The box says MicroMacro plays up to four, but you’ll spend most of your time scanning one small section of the map, meaning that the third and fourth person will likely be crowded out and too far away to see the area of interest.  Personally, I find it to be an engaging cooperative game that is perfect for couples.

Current Rating: 8.5/10

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite, 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 Candid Cardboard: 1st Impressions of Scout, Imperial Steam, Ankh: Gods of Egypt, MicroMacro: Crime City, Keyflower, and Rialto. appeared first on Bitewing Games.