TableTopTakes: Ganz Schon Clever
It’s been a while since I’ve done a board game review. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of Point of Order articles come up and go in that time because I can buy games, but I can’t play all that many of them. But one …
Tag: Roll and Write
Point of Order: Black Friday Time
So it’s that time of year again when everything goes on sale for Black Friday. This year, though, that looks different because with Covid, you don’t want hundreds of people rushing madly into your store, standing in long lines next to others and breathing the …
Holiday List: Games for the Casual Gamer
When buying gifts, sometimes I do that to try and improve someone’s collection of games, and by that, I mean to move beyond the likes of the Monopoly, Clue, Scrabble, Chutes and Ladders, and Candyland that most househoulds have had, and take those people who like games, but give them some more options to play. I’m going to be skipping Catan, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, and Carcassone for this list, because those are the most obvious options, and I highly recommend them all. But what are some other games that offer some interesting play?
Escape Room Games
With this, I’m mainly talking about Unlock and Exit, because I’ve played both of those series, and I really highly recommend Unlock. In fact, Unlock has a new Star Wars box that is out, so a theme that will even standout. These games are basically little escape rooms in a box. Now, that doesn’t mean that they are easier than an escape room since they are smaller, they can be really tricky with hidden clues and figuring out how to use the information that you’ve found together. But this is a great family activity sort of a game. You can only play each of them once, but they work really well for casual groups and are really engaging throughout. Unlock is nice because you could play it in your group and then pass it to another group because you don’t destroy anything. Exit you do often destroy part of the game to figure out a puzzle or two or three. I also like Unlock because while both of them are time based for how well you do, Unlock has an app with a count down timer that just makes it smoother, versus Exit where the time is counting up.
Draftosaurus
I’ve talked about a lot of roll and writes, and this actually isn’t one, but it has a bit of that feel to it. In this game, you are drafting a dinosaur meeple from a handful of them that you have, and then based on how a die is rolled placing it on the board into a pen. Some pens want all different dinosaurs, some want all of one type or pairs of dinosaurs. It’s a fast little game that works really well for drafting and is pretty easy to keep track of because everyone will end up with the same number of dinosaurs on their board. There are other drafting games out there that are solid as well. I always recommend Sushi Go Party! as well, but that one can, at times get muddled because if people don’t draft at the same speed someone can end up ahead or behind and it’s harder to count it out. Draftosaurus doesn’t offer the variety, but it is a very simple game that can be played with a wide variety of ages.
Splendor
I was torn on this one between Splendor and Homebrewers, I actually prefer Homebrewers by a fair amount, but it’s just a bit more complex and the theme won’t be for everyone. In Splendor, you are renaissance jewelers who are going out and getting the best jewels. You start out by taking one time use jewels, and then you can buy a jewel card for a cost of your one time use jewels. Those jewel cards then give you a permanent jewel of that color that you can use to buy more jewels. And your goal is to get the jewel cards that score points and be the first to fifteen. The game is simple and it works well. Generally, there isn’t anything that stands out as making this game amazing, but there is also nothing to knock about it. Something on par with it would be the city building game of Machi Koro that would work as well. If the people you know already have those games (or one of them) and might be looking for a step up, Homebrewers is great, or Century: Golem Edition, of the brewing theme doesn’t work.
King of Tokyo
Sometimes you just want some dice chucking fun, and King of Tokyo is that. In this game you take on being a Kaiju who is battle other Kaiju. Think Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Here, you are trying to be the king of Tokyo by either knocking out the rest of the monsters or by winning via victory points. While I have seen people win via victory points, most of the time, it’s smashing. If you are outside of Tokyo you can only hit the monster in Tokyo, if you’re in Tokyo you can hit everyone else. But the downside to being in Tokyo is that you can’t heal, so as you are getting hit by everyone, you need to know when to drop out and let someone else go into Tokyo so you don’t die. It’s a fun push your luck dice chucking game. You can also buy upgrades that allow you to do more damage, or a one time boost to victory points or something like that, so you have a lot of different strategies depending on what cards show up. They also have some expansions that add more monsters and more things to do in the game.
Silver
This could be Silver Amulet, Bullet, Coin, or Dagger, you can take your pick. If you have a bigger group of people you can play with, Dagger would be very good, if you’d mainly just be playing with with two, I like Amulet and Bullet better for that. This game is a push your luck type and take that type of game, so it might not be for everyone. Everyone starts with a village of five cards face down in front of them. They can look at two of them, and the goal is to go down in the number of cards and have the fewest cards when a vote is called for. To do that, you will either draw a card or take a card from the discard pile on the turn. If you draw it and it has a flip ability, cards 5 through 12 have them in every game, you can either add it to your village or use that ability. Cards 0 through 4 have a flipped up ability, so if they are in your village facing up, you can use their ability. But how do you get down in cards, you can trade in two of the same number for another number. So you do try and rush that, if you can figure out you have decent cards so you can call for the vote before other people can change up their village too much. It’s a fun game, plays fast and all of them can be mixed and matched together, so get two and you have a ton of different combinations that you can play.
Now, there are a lot more games. I realized that I could have easily mentioned games like Marvel United, which I mentioned before by a list, Dominion or Ascension for a deck building game, Small World, Deception Murder in Hong Kong, a whole slew of roll and write games and more. There are plenty of really good options that can help encourage and engage new gamers to maybe look beyond the standard games that were a part of a lot of our youths, and that aren’t too intimidating.
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Holiday List – Stuff the Stockings with Board Games
Yesterday I talked about games that would work well for that just slightly too competitive person in your life. You still want to get them board games, but which ones, today I’m looking at smaller games. These are the games that are going to be …
TableTopTakes: Sonora
So, two posts today and not going to be doing Friday Night D&D, because I got a new game to the table a few days ago, and that’s the first ever flick and write game, Sonora by Pandasaurus Games. This game is split into two …
MY TOP 100 BOARD GAMES 2020 EDITION – 20 THROUGH 11
This is it, the penultimate list in my Top 100 games. What will have risen, what might have dropped out of my Top 10, you’ll have to see. If you need to catch-up, I have links below.
Plus a few notes on how I’ve put together the list:
- These are my favorite, you want what people consider best, see the Board Game Geek Top 100
- If a game you love isn’t on the list, it might be be coming, I might not have played it, and if I have, it’s 101
- If a game looks cool, I have links to buy it from CoolStuffInc or Amazon, or you can grab most at your FLGS
- There are a few games, Destiny 2 Player versus regular Destiny where if they are basically the same thing, I only do one of them
20. Letter Jam
Most word games aren’t cooperative and they tend to be the person who has the biggest vocabulary or maybe in some games it’s pattern recognition. This one has some of that in it, but it isn’t based off of who knows more words since everyone is trying to use deduction to figure out what their letters are and then unscramble them to figure out what word they have. This game is really clever in that you can see one letter from everyone else but you can’t see yours. So you are having to deduce what letters you have based off of the words that people are creating and the letters you can see. For example, if I have a “Z” and I can see that other players have an I, Px2, E, and R, I can now slightly to narrow down what letter I have. Granted, that’s not a great clue because I don’t know mine so it could be a “TIPPER”, “DIPPER” or something of the like. Plus, not only am I trying to figure out my letters so I can unscramble them to figure out my word, I have to be helping everyone else doing that as well. The game just works really well and it’s very puzzly. I also like the game because it can handle a larger group of players without it feeling bogged down because hopefully, everyone is in on the clue word being given to help deduce their letters. Finally, I really like how this game forces you to think about the clue you’re going to give and give a good clue. You want to make it so that at least someone can basically lock in a letter or at least really help them narrow it down so they can make an educated guess.
Last Year: 27
19. Hanamikoji
The highest pure two player game on the list, Hanamikoji is a really fun and fast abstract game. In this game you are trying to win the favor of Geisha so that they will visit your restaurant. Do to this, you are giving them gifts and winning their favor. But how you give gifts is what makes this game really shine. Each player has four actions they can do a round, and they have to do each of the actions once. So they can discard two cards, face down, and they won’t be used for winning favor. They can put a card face down that will be used for winning favor. They can put out three cards face up and their opponent picks one and those are immediately used for winning favor. Or you can put out two sets of two cards, face up, and your opponent picks one and you get the other set for immediately winning favor. The game has a great push and pull feel to it as you fight for favor, and you use your cards to hide some information from your opponent as well as let them make the tough decisions for you when you split and they choose or they pick one of the three. It’s a very thinky game and really is wonderful as a two player filler game.
Last Year: 13
18. Sagrada
Some games just look amazing on the table, and Sagrada is really one of those games. The translucent dice really give you the feel of the stained glass window that you are creating. And the game itself is a great dice drafting game. In this game you are making a stained glass window, and depending on the difficulty of your window, you need some certain numbers and colors in certain locations. And you can’t have the the dice orthogonal to the one you placed match the number or color, that is up and down and left and right. So you have to plan things out, you can’t place in the orthogonal spots a three if you are locked into having a certain number, a three, in a location on the board. There’s some strategy to the game, some luck, and the luck is actually mitigated quite nicely by the fact that you every game you have some tools out, there tools can allow you to draft two dice at once, or maybe move a die after it’s been placed, draw out a new die and use that one, there are a lot of different things all which help you mitigate the luck. Plus, the scoring is variable as well. You don’t get points for completely filling in your window, but you do lose points for empty spots, and you have a secret scoring objective as well as three public ones, which might be no repeated colors in a column gets you 6 points, or something like that, and you can score each column. The game is very variable and works really well.
Last Year: 20
17. Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Dropping all of 11 spots, this is mainly because I haven’t gotten this game to the table in a little bit, I really do need to as every time I play the game I really enjoy it. In this game you are playing through linked scenarios that tell a larger story, campaign style. You have a deck for an investigator, that you’ve constructed based off of deck construction rules, that you are using to fight monster, get clues, and figure out what it happening in the story. What works so well in this game is that the scenarios can vary wildly. Even n the base box, in the first scenario you are going to be fighting some and looking for clues, second scenario, you don’t want to fight much and you are trying to find as many cultists are possible. And depending on what you do, you might get access to certain cards, scenarios might be harder or easier, the game is just really well designed that way. And you can also change your difficulty level really easily as there is a modifier bag, and you can scale how difficult or easy you want it based off of what is in there. And the story can branch based off of what you’ve done, now it might not branch massively, but you can make a difference in how easy or hard or where the story goes based off of what you do in previous scenarios. This is one that I really need to play more of.
Last Year: 6
16. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
Now, I talk very often about how I don’t like social deduction games, this is one that I really like. There’s one huge reason that I really like the game and that’s because you can immediately start accusing people and trying to figure out what is happening in the case. In most social deduction games you’re basically taking a stab in the dark the first round or so as you guess who might be a traitor and who might not be a traitor. But in this one, the second the forensic scientist puts out the first report, you have something you can actually work with. In this game one person is a murder who picks from the four clues and murder weapons in front of them, one of each that they, the forensic scientist, and if there’s an accomplice know. The person playing the forensic scientist ends up then passing up reports, such as murder location, and with that, you can immediately start to talk and come up with what of all the clues and murder weapons would make sense there. So you are immediately doing something as players and immediately doing something meaningful. This game also lends itself to way more story that just comes naturally from the mechanics of the game which also make it more enjoyable. Dropped a little bit, but that’s more because other things have moved up, this is an amazing game for big groups.
Last Year: 10
15. Clank! In! Space!: A Deck-Building Adventure
Another one from the Top 10 that has dropped and this again has to do with it not being played all that often recently., I have an expansion for this game that I haven’t even used yet, so I want to get it to the table, but it’s been a hard year to play a ton of games, and deck builders are not games that work well via Zoom. in this game you are going into the most secure location on Lord Eradikus’ ship stealing his treasure. Along the way you’ll make noise, things will go clank, and he’ll realize someone is on his ship. Can you get in and out before he gets you and with the best and most valuable treasure so you will win? This game is an improvement, in my opinion out of the base box on the fantasy themed Clank!. The game definitely doesn’t take itself seriously, and it has fixed an issue I have with Clank! where you can rush in grab a treasure and leave and rush the end of the game, here you can do that kind of but not nearly as effectively, so it’s worth it to push for a better treasure, if you can. The theme is fun and they keep it super light, and I love deck-building, so an easy game to put high on my list.
Last Year: 9
14. Welcome To…
Highest roll and write or flip and write on the list. Welcome To… is just a fun game for me, I like the strategy that goes into it as you race for various scoring cards and you still building and upgrading your scoring the best you can. This game is all about building your perfect 1960’s neighborhood with white picket fences, 2.5 children and dogs, well, those last two aren’t in the game, but you are filling in streets, putting in house numbers, building parks and swimming pools. What makes this game really work for me is that you’re using one of three combinations of a house number and an ability on your turn. And you can see the upcoming abilities for the next turn, but you won’t know the house number. You’re trying to balance filling in streets, getting more scoring by having more parks or pools, but also getting the points from the objectives as well. There game isn’t complex, but it’s a good time and great for large groups.
Last Year: 12
Another deck building game and another one that has dropped out of my top 10, does that mean I like them less? Nope, there’s just so many good games. I really like XenoShyft: Onslaught because it is a cooperative deck building game where you are fighting off wave after wave of bug monsters with your force of troops on an alien planet. What I like about this game is that you have your hand of cards, but you always get a free money card to add to your hand every turn, so you are never short on money. But to go with that, you also are able to help other people as they prepare their defenses, so if I have the armory as my location that I’m defending, it means I can get weapons at a discount, so maybe I have too many weapons and not enough troops to deal with a wave, so I might give someone else a weapon from my hand, and maybe that person has the barracks and has more troops and they will put a troop into my row. I like how each role a person can take feels different and can help the group in different ways. And I like that you can bolster someone else’s deck as well. Now, this is a tough game to win, but one that is a lot of fun and for fans of deck building is working quite well.
Last Year: 7
12. T.I.M.E. Stories
Another dropper from the Top 10, and this one I have actually played several times since last year’s list, I think this is dropping more because of other games moving up than anything I have an issue with. This is still an amazing puzzle game where you are trying to go through the story and figure out everything that is happening and how to stop the time incursion that is threatening to change up the world. They do a great job with just basically using cards of making the game feel really different depending on the scenario that you play. And while the story isn’t always the strongest on a given scenario there is basically always something unique and different to try. I also like how you do multiple runs, sure that means you are repeating stuff sometimes, but it allows you to really explore the world and it feels thematic to how the world and the technology works. I know a lot of people way that this drops off in some of the scenarios, but through five now, I’ve enjoyed them all, and while there could be a better and bigger story unfolding through all of them, I like all the scenario stories.
Last Year: 5
11. Lords of Hellas
New game alert, now this is actually a game that’s been out a couple of years, but I just got it last year and got it to the table in February of this year. Lords of Hellas is a big minis game, but actually plays really smoothly with some euro style mechanics being blended in with amerithrash. In this game each player has a hero who leads their troops and moves around the board building temples, fighting monsters, building statues, and conquering lands. In this game you have a number of different ways to win, you could fight and defeat three monsters, you could hold five temples, you could conquer two regions and all their territories, you could control a completed statue, the game gives you a lot of ways to win, and even with that, in a five player game, we had three of the five a turn away from winning when the game ended, and the other two players were two turns away from winning. The game has a lot of fun mechanics, and your hero has their own unique ability and as temples are built, your faction gets more and more unique abilities that helps you focus how you are going to play the game and how you might win. This is game that I want to play more, it’s just a bit of a beast to get to the table and it doesn’t really play over something like Zoom, so it might have to sit on my shelf for a while, because I feel like there is a lot of variability and a lot of cool things to be done in the game.
Last Year: Not Ranked
So, we have a bunch of movement here. 5 from the 2019 Top 10 are now in this section of the list, and we have at #11 a game that I hadn’t even played last year that has rocketed up the boards. This of course means with the Top 10, we have 5 new games to that section of the list, are they new games, or are they games that are just on the rise as I’ve played them more, we’ll have to wait to see. But your guesses for my Top 10 games in the comments below, and let me know your favorites on this part of the Top 100.
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MY TOP 100 BOARD GAMES 2020 EDITION – 30 THROUGH 21
We’re getting down to it, getting close to the Top 10 games, only a few more of these lists. It’s been a blast as always putting these out and I’m glad that people are enjoying them. I’d be very curious to know what your top …
MY TOP 100 BOARD GAMES 2020 EDITION – 40 THROUGH 31
Getting close to the end, the top 100 are all games that I really do love and would want to play basically whenever someone asks but as we get higher in the list, and I think about and write up about these games, I always …
Back or Brick: Cartographers Heroes
Make a map of the lands in this flip and write game based off in the Roll Player world by Thunderworks Games.
Pros
- Established company
- Established Game
- Good Price and Great Shipping (to US)
- No Stretch Goals
Cons
- No Stretch Goals
- Pseudo Kickstarter Exclusive Content
The Page
This is a well laid out Kickstarter. Thunderworks Games has done a lot of them before with their various games in the Roll Player line and universe. So it’s expected of them.
Also expected is that there won’t be any stretch goals, which is something that is interesting. Now, I don’t think that stretch goals are needed on a campaign, and in fact sometimes Stretch Goals don’t work well, such as when they are an additional buy that is unlocked at some point in time or along those lines. But I find it a little bit interesting that they don’t do any. Again, they never do, so it’s not a surprise, this game just feels like it would be easy enough to add in a few simple ones, like alternate art monsters or heroes that wouldn’t affect timeline but would be a kickstarter bonus. But I’d prefer no stretch goals to lots of them that inflate the cost.
Overall, though, well laid out page, they explain what the new things are, they do a solid job of telling you what you get in the different levels and they lay out what shipping is.
The Game
I already know that I like the game, or at least I like the original, Cartographers. So what I’m really looking at is additional content for this game and what this adds.
It is adding heroes, which are interesting because they are defeat monsters. Normally there was only one way to deal with monsters, just building around them, so now it’ll be interesting to see how the heroes interact, it’s a simple addition though, and they work very similar to monsters in how they are added into the game, so it doesn’t make the complexity go up massively.
The other thing is additional maps. Each of them adds an additional element to the game. One adds in volcanos that will destroy spots you can fill in or possibly have filled in. One has islands, so you can’t create as big groups potentially and will change scoring that way. The final one has an undercity, so you have normal rules for above ground, but underground, everything has to branch/tunnel out instead of being able to be put anywhere. These seem like nice little variations on the game.
Back or Brick
This is an easy back for me, after seeing what was going to be “exclusive” to the Kickstarter. If nothing had been exclusive, I would have been less likely to back. And even that, I put quotes around stuff, because Thunderworks themselves will be selling some of it, while supplies last. So, for me it made a lot of sense to back. Especially with the big box that will store everything. That’ll be nice because it’ll take up less space on the Kallax for me. I also know the track record of the company with their other games, which I’ve played Roll Player and Cartographers as well as Roll Player Adventure playtesting at GenCon, and I like them all.
How about for you, is this game a Back or a Brick?
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Point of Order: Parade and Pinball and more
It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these, mainly because what I’ve grabbed has been immediate from my FLGS the last few times and mainly been expansions for Marvel Champions. Though, I did pick up Yggdrasil Chronicles when I was there, as …