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

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

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

15. Cryo

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

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

14. MicroMacro: Crime City — Full House

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

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

13. So Clover

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

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

12. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

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

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

11. Kabuto Sumo

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

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

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

10. Brian Boru: High King of Ireland

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

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

9. Mille Fiori

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

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

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

8. The Siege of Runedar

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

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

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

7. Whale Riders

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

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

6. Equinox

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

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

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

5. Ark Nova

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

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

4. Kemet: Blood & Sand

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

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

3. Ankh: Gods of Egypt

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

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

2. Radlands

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

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

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

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

1. Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile

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

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

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

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

Biggest Snubs

Art Robbery

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

Coffee Traders

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

Best Reskin

Royal Visit

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

Best Games I Didn’t Love

Mind MGMT

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

Riftforce

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

Worst Games I Adored

Family Inc.

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

L.A.M.A. Dice

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

Best Expansion

Pipeline: Emerging Markets

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

Best New To Me Game

Yellow & Yangtze

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

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

The post Top 15 Board Games of 2021 appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Mille Fiori

2 Plays

Mille Fiori, a relatively abstract game of glass manufacturing and trade, is the next combotastic, point-salady Euro to come from the good Dr. Knizia.  It’s as if Witchstone was the start of a new design trend from Reiner where he’s taken a liking to the dopamine-inducing combos that are prevalent in modern gaming.  So where does Mille Fiori stand in this crowded genre, and how does it compare with Witchstone?  

There’s no point in beating around the bush here so I’m just gonna come right out with it: Mille Fiori is much, much better than Witchstone, and arguably the best medium-light point salad Euro to hit the market since Babylonia.  But mechanically, Mille Fiori has much more in common with Witchstone, so I think it’ll be enlightening to compare them here.

First, I think it’ll be helpful to revisit my thoughts on Witchstone.  After playing it twice, I said the following:

“[Witchstone is] fundamentally a point salad game where every action and every strategy results in roughly the same effect.  Where anything can result in more points and/or more actions, it’s as though everything you do in the game feels good.  But when everything feels good, there is a noticeable lack of tension and drama to the experience.  

“I’m used to Knizia games giving me painful decisions and unfolding dynamics, but Witchstone merely provides increasingly larger combos.  It trades potency for pleasantries.  So of course, with the right crowd, Witchstone will really hit the spot.  As for myself, I find that I quickly grow tired of ‘pleasant’ games.  Give me that raw, stinking potency, baby.”

While the point salady nature of the game brought the experience down for me, I still feel that the strongest aspect of Witchstone—the part that made it mildly enjoyable—was the action selection mechanism of arranging clusters of domino tiles in your cauldron to trigger increasingly bigger combos.  In a fascinating flip-flop of table turning, Mille Fiori manages to be a stronger design with an insanely generic action selection mechanism that supports a much more exciting and thoughtful game board of endless points and combos.

Mille Fiori comes with a large deck of 110 playing cards where each card represents a space on the board.  It’s not exactly that precise, as many card types can be played on multiple different spaces within its matching section, but you get the idea.  Each round players are dealt 5 cards where you’ll draft one from your hand, play the card to claim the space on the board, and pass your hand to the left to do it again.  The last card of every round does not end up getting played or discarded, but it actually ends up in the face-up market for players to potentially claim later on with bonus actions.

That’s all there is to Mille Fiori: pick a card, play it to claim the spot, and pass your hand clockwise.  This is what makes the game surprisingly approachable even for casual gamers.  Yet it’s the tough decision of which card to play and the result of what that claimed space triggers that propels Mille Fiori above nearly every other point salad game I’ve tried.  

The game board is divided into five general sections that match the various colors of the cards.  The workshop region is all about creating growing clusters of your diamond tiles to score increasingly more points on them.  The citizens area has players building pyramids with their diamonds where the higher up tiles score more points, but the lower tiles get scored again for everyone supporting the new addition.  The trade area contains another type of positive player interaction where adding your diamond to a column scores that column a larger number of points for everyone already there.  These friendly areas contrast nicely with the brutal housing row where one player can build up a nice chain of points that gets reset the moment somebody else throws their diamond in the row.  Meanwhile, adding to the harbor moves your ship along the water for bonuses, but it also represents an investment in later points based on what occurs in the trade rows.  Finally, every section presents a competition to complete a unique objective, and the first players to do so will claim the most end-game bonus points.

All this mechanical explanation, and yet nothing here sounds remotely more unique or interesting than what Witchstone or plenty of other similar point salad games have to offer.  So where’s the potency in Mille Fiori?  What is the secret sauce that makes this one a cut above the rest?  Honestly, I’d say it all has to do with the elevated importance of timing, variety, and interaction.  In games such as Witchstone and the like, it’s nearly always a good time to do anything, and everything you do amounts to roughly the same result.  It’s a good time to clear the gems off your cauldron, to spread your energy network and get more witches on the board, to race around the circular track, to get more bonus cards, and so on… and all these things net you a similar amount of points plus a similar style of bonuses.

Meanwhile in Mille Fiori, there are constant traps where you can set up your opponents for big plays if you’re not careful.  Likewise, there are opportunities for golden combos that are gone the moment someone claims them.  Your hand will tempt you with one option to execute a killer combo for yourself versus another option to hurt an opponent who is about to score big.  

Witchstone lets everyone set up neat chain reactions for themselves in a monotonous, self-congratulatory kind of way.  Mille Fiori tosses these enticing combos into the center of the table like it’s the start of the Hunger Games, and then it sits back and lets players lunge and claw for them across many quick rounds of card drafting and space claiming.

One important thing to note is that Witchstone is still the better option if you are only considering these games for 2-player sessions. Mille Fiori claims it can hold up at 2-players, but the general consensus among folks is that you should only play it with 3 or 4. Despite that, the reason Witchstone quickly left my collection while Mille Fiori is here to stay is because the latter brings meaningful timing and impactful interactions to the forefront of the experience.  The fact that it also comes in a pleasant production as a quick, approachable design is icing on the cake.  Now we just need to get a North American publisher to sign on with Schmidt Spiel and bring it over to this side of the world so folks don’t have to order it from Germany like I did.

Current Rating: 8/10

Pipeline: Emerging Markets (expansion)

1 Play

Emerging Markets is probably one of the most subtle expansions that I own.  I suppose I’m used expansions giving me an entirely new game board or fresh asymmetric characters and factions.  But when you layout the randomized action tiles and market tiles on top of Pipelines’s board, and when you mix in the new valuations and technologies, the changes don’t hit you until the gears start grinding.

Suddenly, you feel the impact of there being only one (expensive) option for grey crude market oil.  Next, you feel the effects of having all eight action spaces jumbled around and paired together in wonky ways.  Sprinkle in a new technology or more, a strange valuation or two, and before too long, you realize that these five modules really shake things up.

For fans of Pipeline who have come to know and love the game after several plays, Emerging Markets aims to shove them out of their comfort zone with a wildly randomized market setup.  It also dangles carrots over strategic paths that one may never have considered up to this point.  The new techs offer exciting possibilities for those willing to invest such as oil specialization, tech traversal, and crude oil crusading.

There’s not much else to say about Emerging Markets.  Its box is as slim as it is subtle, and the modules inside are both easily integrated and sneakily impactful.

Current Rating: 9/10

Furnace

2 Plays

I had an interesting experience with our home furnace recently.  Essentially, it decided to go on strike.  No matter how hard our thermostat told it to get going and warm up the house, it stubbornly refused to comply.  I think our home got down to 58 degrees Fahrenheit one night before the sun rose and started filling the freezing void that our rebellious appliance left behind.  That’s the kind of day where you wear a hoodie inside with the hood on, always.

What does this all have to do with Furnace, the board game?  Absolutely nothing… 

Furnace is a slim, focused combination of lucrative auctions, careful tableau building, and generic resource conversion.  Over the course of its 4 short rounds, players cycle back and forth between the auctioning phase and the furnacing phase.  The thing that elevates Furnace above its rehashed premise is the novel twist on auctions.

Players each receive their own set of discs valued one through four.  Each round, several furnacy cards are laid out in a row and put up for auction.  One at a time, players commit a disc to a card—the only restriction is that no card can have multiple of the same value or player color.  So you might bid your big bad four on a valuable card, but I can swoop in with my little two and place it on the same card.  How do you like them apples?  While it seems like a pointless underbid, it’s not so pointless when you consider the consolation prize.  Everybody loves a good consolation prize.

Furnace is all about using your discs to their fullest potential: acquiring the best cards to slot into your tableau, milking consolation prizes from cards that others really want, converting some coal into some iron or some iron into some coal or some coal and iron into oil and to ultimately convert your final product into points.  There’s also the chance to put your resources toward upgrades, get some of your cards flipped to their stronger side, and really heat up that furnace of yours.

Aside from the novel auctioning mechanism, perhaps the best thing about Furnace is that it knows exactly how long it should be: which is blazingly fast and blessedly short.  It hangs around just long enough for you to explore the interesting tension of where to place your auctioning discs and enjoy the satisfying arc of building an engine, and then it’s over as quickly as it began.  Any longer and it would be overstaying its welcome.

But not everyone will be able to overlook the comparatively cold and lonely production phase where cubes are pushed and friends are forgotten.  Not all folks will see the interesting auctioning phase as strong enough to carry the rest of experience on its back.  And not all gamers will find enough reasons to keep coming back for more.  I find myself trending toward this last of groups.

I’ve enjoyed both of my plays of Furnace, but it feels as though further plays will merely offer slight variations to my first two sessions.  Whenever I get to December and revisit the best and most popular games of the previous year—with a more seasoned perspective on the hotness of yesteryear—I like to categorize some games as “Flingers.”  Flingers are those games that were fun to try one or more times but that I ultimately don’t need to own.  These are the games that made for a fun ‘one night stand’, yet it won’t fill me with regret if I never play them again.  Furnace feels like it’s a strong contender for that category.  Although perhaps if the game box wasn’t so unnecessarily large I’d be able to talk myself into keeping it around longer.

Current Rating: 7/10

Merchants of the Dark Road

1 Play

Based on what little I knew about the design, I went into this play anticipating that Merchants of the Dark Road would not be my type of game.  The good news is that I ended up enjoying it more than I expected, but I suppose that’s faint praise considering the fact that I thought I was going to hate it.  Indeed, I was surprised to find myself carefully crafting elaborate strategies and executing thoughtful tactics throughout our first play of the game.  There was certainly a satisfying payoff to my competitive efforts, yet Merchants of the Dark Road remains the type of game that I’m not keen to play more of—especially if it includes teaching more newcomers.

The onboarding process for this game features a roughly 40-minute rules teach that equates to throwing a bunch of mechanisms in a blender, forgetting to put the lid on, and cranking the blender up to full blast.  Within the blink of an eye, there’s suddenly a mess of mechanisms flung out in every direction.  Resource gathering and contract fulfillment are dripping from the ceiling, polyominoes and dice are scattered across the floor, rondel actions and event cards are clinging to your hair and blinding your eyes, money tokens and tableau drafting are slopped on the walls, and worker placement considerations are embedded in every imaginable crevice.

The current Board Game Geek stats for Merchants of the Dark Road are a bit comical, if you ask me.  This one currently sits at a 2.98 complexity rating (Medium weight) with a 60-120 minute estimated playtime.  Our 40 minute teach plus 3 more hours of play (at 4 players) would suggest otherwise.  This is really where Merchants suffers the most, in my opinion.  It’s an unequivocal pain to teach and learn, it lasts too long, and it suffers from too much downtime.  To be fair, I’m sure that experienced players could shave off a bit of time, but even 2 hours for a 4-player session still feels like far too generous of an estimate here.

Being an Elf Creek Games production, Merchants at least knows how to be lavish (particularly for the fully deluxe Kickstarter version that our group tried).  The tokens are intricately designed, and the art is elaborate and evocative (as one would expect from the reliable Andrew Bosley).  The only part of the production that stumbles is in the graphic design that struggles to differentiate certain spaces on the board or similar looking resources.

Overall, fans of crunchy Euros and premium productions will have plenty to sink their teeth into here.  The best parts of the experience come from planning your actions with your worker dice, tailoring your resource economy to the tactical scoring opportunities, and chasing the two types of points (money and prestige) where your lower of the two will end up being your final score.  Yet one can’t help but feel that perhaps a slimmer, trimmer version of this game could have existed and still provided a similar level of satisfaction.  There were several board actions, entire animal tableaus, excessive bonus options, and tertiary resource tokens that were virtually ignored and untouched by our entire group.  I’m certainly the type who typically prefers a much cleaner design—one that doesn’t start with a messy explosion of rules requiring hours of playtime to scrub through.

Current Rating: 5.5/10

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

8 plays

I’ve already written loads about The Crew from my review of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine.  Everything I said there applies to Mission Deep Sea, the standalone sequel, so there really isn’t much more to add here.  The only difference is the objective cards—which are mind-bogglingly better than the original game in every conceivable way (and I already considered the original a masterpiece of a card game).

Rather than simply say that this player must win this exact card, and this player must win these cards in this order, Mission Deep Sea throws out the entire concept and replaces it with a massive deck of very specific requirements.  These objectives include things like “I must never lead a trick with blue, yellow, or pink” or “I must win the exact same amount of tricks as this player” or “I must not win any 9s” or “I must win the same amount of pink and yellow cards.”  The possibilities are limitless here, and the way these objectives randomly combine together from one round to the next is what keeps the game fresh and exciting.

Much more than The Quest for Planet Nine, Mission Deep Sea feels like a game I can endlessly revisit (even after beating all the missions) because I’ll never see the same combination of objective cards.  Essentially, you can astutely consider Mission Deep Sea the Toy Story 2, the Spider-man 2, or the Shrek 2 of card games.  It takes a bona-fide classic and does it even better.

Current Rating: 10/10

L.A.M.A. Dice

2 Plays

Unlike 2019’s L.A.M.A, the newer ‘Dice’ version of this light game from Reiner Knizia is one that I got off on the right foot with.  I introduced L.A.M.A. Dice to a couple different groups of 3 and 4 friends who don’t turn their noses up at a simple game of llamas, rainbows, and push-you-luck.  I still intend to introduce them to L.A.M.A. the card game (where I can really give the design a fair chance outside of my non-ideal 2-player experience), but I couldn’t resist showing them the dice game first because it was a recent arrival at our household.

Sadly, L.A.M.A. Dice is one that publisher Amigo has not officially brought to North America (although the rumor is that it’s coming this year, or you can acquire it right now from some online retailers, if you know where to look).  With the acquisition of a German copy and a simple download of the English rules, we were off to the races.

While L.A.M.A. Dice plays out similarly to L.A.M.A. the card game, it also has some key differences that make it the more lively, loud, and laugh-inducing game of the two.  Where the card game is more about quiet, subtle, and private hand management, the dice game is about clackety rolls, foolish decisions, public humiliations, and occasionally glorious triumphs.

Each player is dealt six small cards that they’ll display face-up in front of themselves.  These are worth their value in negative points (with llamas being worth a whopping negative 10 points), and your objective is to discard them from your tableau.  On your turn, you’ll either quit the round and eat the remaining negative points left in front of you, or you’ll roll three 6-sided dice in hopes of matching some of your leftover cards so you can get rid of them.  If nothing matches, you’ll have to take a matching card from the center market, but as the round goes on, these central cards dwindle and your risk of ‘blowing it’ ever increase.  Basically, if your roll matches nothing in your tableau and nothing in the central market, then you’ve ended the round for everyone and you get nailed with your cards plus the leftover cards in the market.

While there is of course a big old dollop of luck to the game of L.A.M.A., the dice game transforms that luck into a collective experience of laughs, groans, and cheers.  And because it comes in at a breezy 20 minutes, that means that you can get in, have a colorful little riot, get out, and be on to the next game in the blink of an eye.  And who knows, maybe if you let the game stick around long enough, you’ll discover some sneaky strategies lurking beneath all the crazy chaos.  It is a Knizia design, after all.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Llamas Unleashed (Unstable Unicorns)

1 Play

Oh boy…  Speaking of llamas, L.A.M.A Dice is not the only llama game I’ve tried recently.  Llamas Unleashed (which is basically a reskin of Unstable Unicorns) is a game most akin to Cover Your Assets, Exploding Kittens, Munchkin, or the like.  Simple rules, cheap gags, copious take-that, the works.  It’s one of those games that somebody suddenly whips out and blindsides you with as you feel your heart drop to the pit of your stomach, crash through the bottom of your pelvis, and continue burrowing deep into the earth in an endless flee.  There’s nothing wrong with other folks enjoying these experiences, but I loathe these moments when I find myself sitting down to game that aggressively tries to commit every imaginable sin in the game design book.  A gathering for social entertainment suddenly transforms into a fight for survival as the game repeatedly bludgeons you over the head with a club as you desperately beg for a swift ending.

Of course, everyone has their own personal unwritten booklet of design sins.  In the world of hobbyist gaming, one gamer’s trash is another gamer’s treasure.  But to give you an idea of why Llamas Unleashed was a big miss for me, allow me to share the sins committed in my book:

1. Use roughly 6 pt font on all cards and cram them with as much gameplay text and flavor text as possible
2. Start players’ turns by drawing a card so they must then spend a minute or more reading the new card, internalizing the information, reanalyzing and rereading their entire hand, and then deciding to play one card or draw another card to end their turn.
3. Cram the deck with broken take-that cards such as this: For the rest of the game, half of the animals in the deck are now useless to you—you can’t use them anymore (playing seven animals into your tableau is how you win the game).  Have fun drawing garbage!
4. Widen the player count as much as humanly possible so that the “30-45 minute” game can actually last hours at higher counts
5. Devote the bulk of one’s design efforts into coming up with silly puns
6. Confuse players by putting pictures of animals on non-animal cards and make them figure out an animal card type by reading the smallest text rather than using a simple icon.
7. Use different shades of blue rather than unique icons to designate the differences between cards
8. Needlessly put a bland game logo on the back of the cards rather than utilize any of the semi-decent art
9. Make the experience feel like climbing up a merciless slip-and-slide where your progress is constantly wiped out by another person’s random gotcha card
10. Make strategizing feel so worthless that ending the game becomes more appealing than winning the game

As one who tries to be a champion of the hobby, I just can’t condone designs like this that tend repel and deter folks from board gaming for a cornucopia of reasons.  Of course, I say that with big rotten egg on my face, because Unstable Unicorns and its spinoff boxes have made millions of dollars on Kickstarter and beyond.  Meanwhile, L.A.M.A. Dice can’t even manage to earn itself a timely North American version.  Sometimes, the world is just a sick joke, but at least it has llamas in it.

Current Rating: 1/10

Brian Boru: High King of Ireland

2 Plays

I have an interesting history with games that graft trick taking onto a larger board game.  My first experience with such a combination was Tricky Tides by Steven Aramini (one of the designers of Sprawlopolis).  I enjoyed how Tricky Tides mixed trick taking with a pick-up-and-deliver objective of transporting goods on your merchant ship.  The main hang-up I had with the experience is that it was longer and slower-paced than I would prefer.

Despite that reservation, I still used Tricky Tides as the initial inspiration for a design that I began working on several years ago called Balloon Jockeys.  I settled on trick taking as the best way to recreate the feeling of piloting a hot air balloon where the restrictions of the cards in your hand and the lead suit of the trick would simulate the restrictions of being a floating balloon that is victim to the wind.  The concept was exciting but, wouldn’t you know it, the main issue with that first design was that it was slow-paced.  

Trick taking games are meant to be quick, snappy, and breezy, and bogging them down with supplemental mechanisms can suck the juices out of the fruit.  I eventually found a way to speed up the proceedings of Balloon Jockeys, and the result was a big improvement.  Perhaps eventually I’ll get around to actually finishing the design instead of taking thrilling detours publishing outside designs from folks like Reiner Knizia and Ryan Courtney, but that’s a matter for another time.

The reason I start with this long prologue is that I was well aware that Brian Boru was a trick taking game blended with card drafting and good old area majorities.  Part of me worried that Brian Boru would have the same sluggish pace as Tricky Tides and Balloon Jockeys 1.0 because of the ambitious way it was attaching a quick card-playing mechanism onto a full-blown board game.  After spending some quality time with the game, I’m both relieved and delighted to find that Brian Boru handles this mechanical mixture extremely well.  

Each round proceeds through a phase of drafting cards into your hand followed by a phase of playing tricks to claim towns, forge alliances through marriages, garner favor with the Church, and tussle with invading vikings.  If you lead a trick, you must decide which open town is in contention.  As most trick takers go, the player with the highest number of the lead color wins the trick and in this case claims the town.  Thereafter, they start the next trick in a new town of their choice.

The first wrinkle here is that nobody is forced to follow suit, but there are plenty of trick taking games with this wrinkle.  The wrinkliest wrinkle of them all is that each card has a winning effect and one or two losing effects.  So there is much more here than simply managing your hand to save the high value cards for the right moments.  The main horse you’ll be strapping your brain to is the one that gallops through all the card effects as you decide which one you need right then and there.

In Brian Boru, it’s common to find yourself aiming to lose tricks because winning costs money you don’t have or want to spent and losing grants bonuses you desperately need.  This is especially true when the chosen town of conflict lies in a region where points are pitiful or an opponent already has a commanding majority lead.  Yet the fact that the winner of each trick gets to choose the next focal point of the map means that this person can have a major influence on region competition and hand management decisions.

The game starts out open and opaque… which cards should I draft?  Which bonus do I need next?  What regions should I gun for?  In rounds one and two, the answers to these questions are more slippery and wispy.  Yet as more discs go out on to the board and players start marching up the point track, things really start to come to a point.  This is especially true when one remembers that coming in second or third place in a region amounts to absolutely nothing.

All the card effects are wonderfully alluring, yet you’ll have to prioritize them against each other because they all have their own form of majority competition.  Only the most earnest suitor will gain the benefits of a glorious marriage, only the most aggressive viking combatant will earn renown and determine where the next dastardly viking token goes, only the most faithful Church followers can double their influence in a town with a coveted monastery.  There are still plenty of incentives to pursue these tracks even if you can’t snag first place, but decisively exploiting the weaknesses of your opponents in the right tricks, rounds, tracks, and regions is what will ultimately determine who gets crowned the High King of Ireland.

From both Brian Boru and The King is Dead, the thing that I’ve come to appreciate about designer Peer Sylvester is that he can create a dynamic, shared experience between players where the strategies aren’t immediately obvious and the best decisions depend heavily on your opponents’ moves.  Much like the legendary Dr. Reiner Knizia, Mr. Sylvester comes from the classically German game design school of thought that complexity should emerge from the collision of simple mechanisms and unique minds.  For gamers like myself, this philosophy of ludology results in consistent satisfaction at the table.  No amount of smoke and mirrors resource crunching will ever supplant the purity and potency of a player-driven design like Brian Boru.

Current Rating: 9/10 

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

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