We’re onto a new month. That means new board games that have been played and rated. Let’s dive into all of those and see what board games are standing out on the list. This is all on my way to 1000 board games rated on Board Game Geek. Last I checked I’m at 964 board games and expansions rated. And that means just over 100 board games total to go without the expansions in there.

July Board Games (Part 1)

Azul: Queen’s Garden

Another version of Azul. And Queen’s Garden isn’t a bad game. I don’t think that any of the versions of Azul are bad games. But I’ll say, I think that’s not nearly as good a game as the original. They almost add more to do in the game and that more to do often is just extra work in the game without feeling like I get a ton of extra payoff. Queen’s Garden is maybe the worst offender for that from the ones that I’ve played.

Nacho Pile

Nacho Pile is a little push your luck tile drawing game, or nacho drawing game. It’s fine for what the game is. But like a lot of these push your luck board games they feel pretty similar to a lot of others. And for that I kind of bounced off of it, not in a bad way, just in the way that I’ve played games like this before.

TREOS

TREOS is an interesting quest completion game with some unique movement rules as to how you can move based off of the card that you can play. Both the compass on the card and the number there. I wish that it felt like it had more fun to the game. Yes, you program out your movement and then you wait for everyone to take their turns because they might move a bandit around.

Letter Tycoon

Letter Tycoon is a stock market word game, kind of. You make words that give you funds to buy letters from your word. If your opponents use those letters you get points or money or some benefit. Overall it’s an okay-ish word game that doesn’t work on BGA. Why doesn’t it work, because you can challenge words, which is fine in person because you can do that really quickly. When every turn there is a challenge phase that just draws out the game.

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game

Another Terraforming Mars game. I’ve played Ares Expedition and Terraforming Mars and this is the worst of them. That isn’t to say that it’s a very bad game, it’s a fine game. But when it comes to Terraforming Mars it feels like it’s lacking. And the game itself just doesn’t ramp the way that I’d like to see it do, especially when compared to the other two.

Twinkle Twinkle

Twinkle Twinkle is a lot of fun and does some things that I like a lot. I like tile placement or more tableau building where I maximize my scoring by how I place out my tiles. But beyond that, I really like the open drafting mechanism for this game. It uses the metho that I love in Floriferous where you draft and depending on where it is in the row in this case, that sets your draft order for next round. And you see what is coming up next. Scoring is simple and it’s a light game, but a good one.

RabbitZ & Robots

Not a fun game, in my opinion. This one is a lot of luck and randomness. Now, I will say, I played it on BGA. Why say that, because this type of game is going to be better in person with a group who is up for dumb fun. But it’s mainly just dumb, unfortunately, and doesn’t offer anything that I find to be worthwhile to checkout in person. Now, that’s really negative, but I didn’t like it.

Relative Space

Another game that isn’t that fun. You are trying to get things onto escape pods. But what you’re really trying to do is get rid of your cards first. To do that you need to play a higher value card than the last one. And sometimes you don’t know what value your card is going to be. So it’s lucky and yes, you can stick your opponent with a harder spot to get a card played out just by jumping a number more, but that’s not that much fun.

Penalty Challenge

Now another one that is a bad game. Relative Space isn’t bad, just not that much fun. This one is more like RabbitZ & Robots. This is a game of mainly luck that goes on way too long. You want to be the first person to score 5 goals. You pick a shot card, your opponent sees that and picks a goalie card, they then block off some spots and you need to roll a die to see if you score. This is a soccer game, you should score more often than not, but not in Penalty Challenge.

Seasons

I want to play Seasons again. That is a good sign for a game. I want to play it again because I think that I could do better and I think the more you play it the better that you do. Seasons is a game of building up points and an engine to get points. Playing it on BGA, I felt like I lacked the time/desire to fully dive into understanding the combos at all times. But when I did, it was good combos. And there is some messing with the other players as well, or more depending on what cards you have in there. Fun concept and execution of a game.

Which one of these games sounds the most interesting or would you want a review on? Let me know that down in the comment section below.

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