Honorable Mention Board Games

There are a lot that could go on here. Downforce has been great fun as well as Night Cage, I’m not sure, but I think I played Super Fantasy Brawl for the first time this year. So that one isn’t getting added to the list. Aeon’s End Legacy which I streamed. I’m not sure which all roll an d write games, but I think Metro X, for sure Deadly Doodles, Patchwork Doodle, and maybe Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade. Tiny Towns would be this year and has been played a number of times.

And I think that’s it, there might be more for the list as well. I have played a lot of new board games this year and I’m sure I’m missing some. Unfathomable is one I just saw on my shelf, as well as Similo or Ohanami. And I just did my Top 100, so I could just pull from that list, which you can see here.

5. A Gentle Rain

A small little solo game, this is one that I’m thinking might slowly drop on my list, which is a weird thing to say for a game that is my Top 5 for 2021. I got to game more with people this year, but not as much as I wanted. I didn’t get to cons and things like that, which gave different gaming experiences. So some small solo games got a lot of enjoyment this year.

A Gentle Rain is a very relaxing game to play. In it you are flipping out tiles trying to place them down in a way that all four sides can match. In fact, all four sides need to, to get fully surrounded – like Carcassonne. But if you get a square of four tiles, that corner you create you put in a disc matching one of the flower sides you matched.

It’s very simple, flip a tile and play it. It’s more of an activity in some ways as you are just trying to see how high a score you can get, or can you get all 8 discs out. But there is some strategy as to how you create your pond to optimize how you can finish those squares. So it’s not just luck.

4. PitchCar

This is a game that I keep adding more to. Whenever Eagle-Gryphon has some of it on sale, I buy more of it. I think I own all but one expansion which allows big PitchCar to connect to mini PitchCar, and I still want more. I wouldn’t mind another base set to just get more of some of the basic shapes.

But PitchCar is a simple racing game. You flick car discs around the board trying to be the first one to complete a circuit. The game play is simple but a lot of fun, and half the fun is building crazy tracks. I even have a loop for it that you can go around, and yes, flicking a disc around a loop is possible.

3. Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition

I love this vesion of Terraforming Mars. I still need to play actual Terraforming Mars, but this one works well for me. It’s still about Terraforming Mars, but it does so in a smaller package. You just keep track of resources and then playing out cards to raise the oxygen levels, flip ocean tiles and raise the temperature. So stuff you do in the bigger game.

But it does it with very slick card play and action selection. Each round everyone selects an action from five different actions. It can be building, doing research, getting resources, but it’s always done in a specific order. If I pick an action, I get to do it and you do as well, but I get a bonus. It’s a fun system that keeps everyone involved the whole time.

2. Orchard: A 9 Card Solitaire Game

Another solitaire game. I think I’m up to 110 plays of Orchard: A 9 Card Solitaire Game, just because it’s so fast to play. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t offer good decisions and isn’t fun. It’s a lot of fun and a really good puzzle as you try and beat your previous high score.

You are layering cards, matching the different fruit tree symbols of apples, pears, and plums. The higher you stack and overlap the more you get. So, for example, if I get a pear on a pear, that gives me one fruit, or one point. Another layer, I’m up to three fruit. And you can go as high as ten. But getting the cards, with nine cards, to overlap that much is hard. It’s a great little puzzle of a game.

1. Railroad Ink Challenge

Finally, I put down Railroad Ink Challenge. I really like this game, because it’s fun in person and great on the app.This is one where the app gives such a fast experience it’s almost as good as playing in person. I already liked Railroad Ink a lot. It’s a good roll and write game about connecting routes along the edge of the board. You get points for filling middle spots and lose points for having roads or train tracks not connect.

But Railroad Ink Challenge takes it up a notch. It adds in, well, challenges. These are basically things like, on turn three have a complete row or column filled in. On turn five have five spots in the middle filled in. I like that better than the base game as it gives something more to focus on. When a route doesn’t easily connect to an exit, now you know what to do with it.

It’s a great roll and write and really high quality. I own a ton of tiny little expansions that I really need to play with. Even the base game without mixing in any expansion is a ton of fun, though. Highly recommend this game and the app. It’s a roll and write that I think is accessible, but also very thinky, a really good combination.

Final Thoughts on 2021 Board Games

It was so nice to play a lot of board games again this year. For my birthday I did a full day of board gaming. That is probably what I missed most in 2020, sitting around a game table and playing with friends. And I didn’t even start doing much in person gaming until almost half way through 2021.

If you’re reading this, you are probably a board gamer. But maybe you are here to see what new games might work well as a gift for a board gamer in your life. I really recommend all of them, though if they don’t play solo, I wouldn’t recommend Orchard or A Gentle Rain. But for a lot of us board gamers in the past two years, what we want is more time to play board games. And more time to play with people, so that’s a great gift to give.

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5 – Cross Clues

This was one of the games that I grabbed for digital game nights. Cross Clues, which I saw on The Dice Tower, is a fun game where you get coordinates on a grid, could be something like A2, and in the A column you have a word and the 2 row has another word, you have to come up with a word to get people to guess that intersection, and it’s just going to be one word. It might be something like banana and shoe, what would you give for that clue? I’d probably give the clue “slipper”. That makes a fair amount of sense, but what if in the columns you also have the word “grease” now does slipper mean a banana shoe or a banana grease? And you’re working together as a group, so it’s a cooperative party game. Lots of fun, and with a camera on a table, you can easily play it via Hangouts or Zoom.

4 – TIME Stories: Under the Mask

I have an expansion on this list, but I will say that I think the TIME Stories expansions/modules, almost count as their own game. You do need the base game to play it, but one story/scenario might be very different from another. I enjoyed this one a lot, I thought that it was an interesting story and an interesting challenge. Some of the modules are more puzzles and some have more story, and I felt like this one had a solid amount of both, but had more story than some. I also liked some of the new mechanics it introduced for it, which is another I really like about TIME Stories in general is that you can do some interesting and different things with it that are new for every scenario.

3 – Sonora

Another 2020 game release that made it onto the list, and Sonora is a very unique game in that it’s a flick and write game. So building off of a roll and write or a flip and write, in this one you are flicking discs onto a board and then depending on what section they land on the board, you then fill in specific areas on your board. It’s a clever idea that works well, and it is a bit of a twist on the genre. I also like how combo-tastic the writing part is. It almost feels bad when filling in something in a section just gets you more points and doesn’t allow you to combo into another area. I also think that the components are solid, and I could see some fun expansions or almost new versions of the game to come out with more flicking options.

2 – Lords of Hellas

This seems like ages ago that I played this, which would be accurate, I played it in February before most gaming went away because of Covid. Lords of Hellas is a really intriguing game by Awaken Realms that had caught my eye when it was on Kickstarter but that I hadn’t backed. In this game you take on the role of a hero in a cyberpunk, almost, Ancient Greece setting, where you are building temples, statues of the gods, trying to take over territories, and more. What I love about this game is how it has multiple paths to victory, controlling temples, controlling a tower once it’s built, taking over two areas, and killing three monsters all can cause you to win, and they are all viable. I think that we had 3 of the 5 of us within a turn of winning when the game ended, and the other players weren’t far behind. This is a table hog of a game but it’s so much fun to play.

1 – Marvel Champions

Now, this game I should have played sooner, but I got it just around the end of 2019, and I didn’t get it to the table until 2020. And it is still a game that I need to play more of, because it’s a really good solo game. Marvel Champions is a living card game from Fantasy Flight Games. That means that it has character packs released that you can add to the game over time. Unlike a collectable card game, you know exactly what you are getting. This is nice because that means if you don’t feel like you want Ant-Man, you don’t have to pick up Ant-Man. If you want Black Widow and Doctor Strange but no other heroes besides the base set, you can do that as well. But they are always coming out with more heroes and villains to face off against, and I really need to get this game back to the table sometime soon.

Those are the Top 5 games that I played for the first time in 2020. An honorable mention if you don’t want to include an expansion would be Silver Bullet or Silver Dagger, and also Hues and Cues, another one that I got for streaming. I wish I’d gotten a chance to play more games, as I’m sure everyone does who is reading this, but that wasn’t in the cards. Hopefully 2021 will be a year that I can get a lot more games to the table, and I’m excited for a few games, Star Wars Unlock mainly, that I hope to still play this year.

A little bonus, my most played this year:

Gloomhaven, Dice Throne, Point Salad, Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game, and finally Criss Cross and Marvel Champions tie for fifth most.

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I have played new games, and will things have changed much, you’ll have to see… but the answer is NO! So if you want to see my top 100 games of all time, check out that link above, and now onto this list, where I’m going to go with 5 games from 2019. This is a bit different than normal lists where anything goes, but I just did my top 100 games, so I thought, to make this more interesting, I should just go with 2019 games.

5 – Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale
A fun roll and write game that I really enjoyed this year. The scoring is a lot of fun as you score for A & B first, then B & C, C & D and finally D & A. And, it does something else that’s unique for a roll and write (flip and write) game that when a monster shows up to be placed onto the sheets, you pass your sheet to another player and they can put it into the worst position for them, while someone else does that for you. It’s a bit more interactive than a lot of roll and write games. The game plays fast, and while I wish the map making theme was more of a part of the game, it is lightly there, and the rest of the game is fun.

4 – Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl
Now, this game I only got to play a chunk of at GenCon an while it is a 2019 release, I expect it to get more of a release in 2020. But it was a blast to try out, and the mechanics of the game were interesting. A game where you’re exploring the irradiated lands around Chernobyl, but not in some grim way, but there is a secret in the heart of Chernobyl and you’re exploring ruins, fighting against mutant monsters and scavenging food. And you might be magical. The experience of playing this was great and the game seems to have some nice theme while engaging mechanics. I also like that it’s a competitive game, but it’s possible that the game will just beat everyone.

3 – Letter Jam – While Zona was a massive game, Letter Jam is a much smaller package as you are trying to figure out a word that is in front of you. However, you can’t see your letters, and the only way you can figure them out is if your letter is used in a clue where you can see the other letters of the word being formed. And, it’s a cooperative game, so you need to be helping people guess their letters and words while you are getting clues as well. This game scales up well and is a lot of fun, even with a rocky first experience playing it, I’ve had a lot of fun with it since then. The puzzle level of the game is good, and the fact that no one knows their letters means that if you have a larger vocabulary it doesn’t help you.

2 – Hats – An Alice in Wonderland themed abstract game, I really like Hats. In it you’re trying to collect the best collection of hats at the Mad Hatter’s tea party that is determined by what you have in front of you, but also by what is on the table at the end of the game. So it’s a push and pull game of playing down cards onto the table, trying to make it so that your opponent doesn’t score well, at the same time protecting where you are scoring so that they can’t screw you over. The game has a cute cookie in it as well. Now, that seems pretty cutthroat, and it can be, but the game is fast, and it is less direct in terms of feel of the conflict. It’s a well done game that forces you to think about how you play your cards in a different way than you’d normally do for scoring.

1 – Deranged – While the last two games have been small, this game is a big game that is coming to the US in 2020 from Ultra Pro, but it came out in 2019 technically in other places. I got a chance to play this at GenCon, and it was amazing. It’s a horror themed game where you go to a cursed town, end up cursed and you need to break your curse before time runs out. But along with that, you have other players who are trying to do that, and if they escape before you, you still lose. And, then, there is a chance that you’ll become deranged, which means you turn into a monster, and then you have to kill someone else to get your humanity back. The damage being done by cards that have multiple uses is great, and how everything works is done really well. I’m really waiting for this to come to the US so that I can pick up a copy, it scratches the same itch as Betrayal at House on the Hill, just in a tighter package, but with less story.

Now for some honorable mentions, I might have had one or two of them in my top 5 had I played it earlier because it’s a ton of fun. But the games above were all on the list from the top 100.

Honorable Mentions:
Point Salad
Cat Cafe
The Grimm Masquerade
Skulk Hollow
Draftosaurus

Are there any cool games that you’ve played from 2019 that you think I should check out. I’ve played more new games, and I have Tainted Grail sitting there ready to be played, I just haven’t found a time to play it yet. Let me know in the comments below.

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