What are your favorite board games of 2022? I think saboteur might be kind of old, but it ranks for my favorite this year (as I just found out about it)
Skull [1] has been my favorite one this year – it's basically a bluffing / negotitation game. The specific version I linked has particularly beautiful design of cards.
And while it's not exactly a boardgame, this year I finally got into DM'ing D&D campaign – it's more time consuming that I expected, but very satysfying.
I played seasons 1 and 2 before COVID. All our players loved season 1. Season 2 was more divisive for my play group (same players)... I loved season 2 even more, but the other players disliked it for its additional complexity (more RPG style character-building).
Now a few games into Season 0 (the third game to be released, but technically a prequel to the other seasons) with a different group and it's OK. It's "broader" in complexity as opposed to deeper, meaning it tries to merge several Pandemic subsystems together, like there are both Russian agents and disease cubes (hope that's not too much of a spoiler... it is a Pandemic game after all) but your characters evolve very slowly relative to the past legacy games. The upgrades feel really stingy in comparison so game to game there's not as much growth. The game is overall harder too because you have fewer options at your disposal, like they're trying to confine you to tactical location-based gameplay instead of min-maxing your characters optimally, which was the part I enjoyed more in S2 previously. Arguably the movement tactics are the heart of Pandemic though, so I don't fault them for doing that. The plus side is that Season 0 makes teamwork more critical, as you can't simply have an OP character do everything and take over the game.
A side gripe I have with Season 0 is the theme (set in Cold War USSR). It feels antiquated in tone, like I'm reading some shitty spy novel lol. There's not much of a sense of a threat, narratively, just a bog-standard "red bad blue good" story. Season 2 (post-apocalyptic) had much more narrative freedom and actually felt tense. The Season 0 story by contrast feels out of place, like grandma pulled the board game out of the attic 30 years later lol.
In order of personal preference only, of the ones I've played, favorite to least:
- Pandemic Legacy Season 2
- Regular non-legacy Pandemic with all (or most) of its expansions
This one's essentially Arkham Horror if it hadn't sacrificed so much of its mechanics to its flavor that it became, more or less, a bad game. Plays much faster and cleaner. Does lose some of the atmosphere in the bargain, but playing Arkham Horror was such a slog that I doubt anyone at the table will want it back after playing this.
> - Betrayal at House on the Hill
The Legacy version of this is excellent. IMO adding those elements effectively completed this game, which never felt like it was living up to its potential, before.
Oh snap, didn't know there was a new AH under the same name. Will have to check it out.
Yeah, I mean the old one. It made it to our table a few times on the strength of the fluff, but it seemed like every time everyone was kinda unhappy that we'd played it, by the time it was over. Like we just kept forgetting how not-fun it had been, and remembering how fun we wished it was.
I find that to be true of most games that are simultaneously complex and require one player to mechanically implement a bunch of the rules. The new Arkham Horror fixed that largely by having an app implement the rules.
(D&D and similar require one player to DM, but that player also gets to be subjective and improvisational and do storytelling and pull in player ideas, which is much more fun than being the mechanical interpreter of the rules.)
(I do think the new Arkham Horror still has some issues, notably an excessive opacity of mechanics sometimes that leads to "you just lose out of the blue for unforeseeable reasons". But it's still usually fun.)
Huh? Well, many games with complex rules can be accelerated by having a "master" player who knows the game well. You can't usually trust them in competitive games, but for a coop game like AH that's not an issue. I don't see how this should be a problem for AH, at least for us it never was with the older versions. (Same for EH, which my SO or I usually kept track of the overhead while the others could focus on playing).
I totally missed that a new AH was released in 2018. On BGG it's a 7.7 over 7.0 for the original, AND the expansions are ranked really well (obviously players who buy an expansion already liked the base game, so there is some bias). Fixing the randomness sounds really REALLY good.
Great. Due to this thread, I now have another ~200 Euros on my board game wish list. Thanks! :P
I had noticed FFG's move to include companion apps for their games recently but haven't had the opportunity to try any of the ones that do so yet - they sound pretty convenient to use.
I've had a lot of fun with Betrayal. It's got a really great cheesy theme. Huge glaring issue though is that the first half of the game is completely pointless and there are no decisions to make.
Yeah I get you, but I think a bit of random exploring/training/looting before knowing the haunt lends itself to a more dynamic experience when you play.
Spirit Island (and its extensions) remains a favourite of mine. Very cooperative, quite asymmetrical, fair but hard (at least if you play in harder difficulty levels).
I own it and played it once. We had to read the manual for two hours before starting, won and since then it hasn't been played. I don't think that will change anytime soon since nobody seems to like it.
- Mosaic (disclaimer, I know the designer), Bullet Star, Planet Unknown, Fjords, Long Shot: The Dice Game, Wonderland's War
2022 releases I have but haven't gotten to the table yet:
- Eleven (waiting for it to arrive), Vagrantsong, Resurgence, Caesar!, Mind Bug, Puzzle Strike II, Creature Comforts, Verdant
Best "New to me" games for 2022:
- Memoir '44, Imperium Classics, Ark Nova, Res Arcana, Trekking the World, Nemo's War, Scout, Downforce, First Class, My City
I finally played Memoir '44 for the first time, and man is it amazing. My new favorite game, edging out Spirit Island. I now have a regular person I play with online and have racked up 25 games of it just this year, working our way through all the scenarios (of which there's a ton). The online version at BoardGameArena is excellent.
Best board game-like video game I played in 2022:
Inscryption. Basically a "Slay the Spire" style deckbuilder mixed with a creepy vibe mixed with an escape room mixed with...well, you should play it and find out for yourself.
The Crew (2019). Approachable but interesting co-op trick taking with communication restrictions and 50 missions for replayability. If you liked Hanabi, you might end up spending more time on this.
Any tips for avoiding the, "you should have known to play X so that I could play Y" frustration that some players bring to the table with this game? I'm ok with the group tension the game manifests, but sheesh. This one seems to get people critiquing others' plays more than any other game.
After the hand finishes, reset the game to the state where somebody misplayed, and then talk it through. What information did each of the players actually have? How did the player who needed something to happen try to signal that's what they needed to happen? How did the other players understand that action (or lack of action)? Was there a way the signaling could have been clearer? If there were multiple possibilities for what the signal meant, could the other players have disambiguated it somehow?
This should not be an acrimonious process. Think of it as a blameless postmortem. The goal is not to decide who made a mistake, it is to understand how to get better as a group and avoid losing the game the same way again. It will also help everyone empathize with the other players, since they'll actually understand what information the other players had and what their thought process was.
As you get better as a group, you should quickly get to a state where either it's clear to the player who misplayed that they did in fact make a mistake (and they'll apologize before the hand is even over) or everyone agrees it was unavoidable.
Came here to say this. At like ten bucks it's not much of a commitment. I keep a copy in my bag just in case. You can teach it super quickly. I just got the newer version (the ocean one) but haven't played it extensively yet. It does seem like it'll spice things up though and I'm excited to try it.
Wingspan (2019) was my favorite new (to me) game. I like that you can strategize and compete without directly getting in each other's way. It's great if you're tired of making enemies during games.
Other long term favorites are Castles of Burgundy, Scythe, and Viticulture.
It's the type of game where you don't directly or fully interact with your opponents (at most, you can usually indirectly block one of their moves, but that's about it). People seem to like the less adversarial playstyle as there are many successful games in this genre: Catan, Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, Carcassone etc.
Not for competitive reasons (I tend to dislike hypercompetitive games and most of my favorite games are co-op), but in general I find games with this property really frustrating from a mental perspective.
Games of the style "everyone plays somewhat independently, with some interaction such as blocking, but mostly you race to score points" have the key property that you can do much better if you spend a lot of mental bandwidth carefully tracking the state of all your opponents (how many points they have, what they're doing), which also contributes to a strong "a computer, or computer-assistance, would make this better" feeling, which in turn makes a game feel less fun to me.
I actually really enjoy Catan, in large part because of mechanics like inter-player trading and the jostle for the 3:1 / 2:1 trading ports, which makes for much heavier interaction with other players. Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, is a textbook example of the mechanics I find frustrating and un-fun.
No, because chess has players directly interacting, rather than just playing independently.
I enjoy chess occasionally, with a player at a comparable skill level. That computers play it far better doesn't bother me in that context, the way it bothers me that a computer would be better at carefully tracking exactly how many points other players have in Ticket to Ride.
I really agree with you on this one. I often play eurogames with my friends and really, I enjoy it because I'm with my friends, not because of the game. I often feel like I'm playing a spreadsheet.
Bluffing games, guessing games, dexterity games are much more fun for me.
Try Hansa Teutonic or Tigris & Euphrates. Basically two different takes on area control and route building. Definitely has a lot of player interaction, of the good and bad.
I think it really depends on the game, you can have your game with little interaction, and then the clashing of players type of euro.
Does "indirectly block" undersell that particular strategy in Ticket to Ride? Or maybe it's just a result of the limited paths available once one has more than four or five players especially mid-late game.
A lot of those games suffer from a kingmaker issue: where a player can't realistically play for first-place but can advantage or disadvantage players who can.
Catan is particularly bad at this; if you have 6 points and someone with 9 points offers you a trade, your decision will choose who wins.
It's bad in this dimension for being a popular "eurogame". All it has to avoid it is a few hidden points from development cards. But most of the non-eurogames are far worse in this regard (e.g. in monopoly, this is far more common), and Catan would never have gotten away with it today. It's from 1995 after all.
True that non-eurogames are pretty bad here; Vinci suffered from this problem so badly that its successor (Smallworld) made every player's points private.
That's not a good definition. In all games you interact with your opponent. Whether we call it "killing their units" or "taking the tile they wanted", is just cosmetic. Even in a game like Yahtzee, a strategy which takes into account what the opponent does will trounce a strategy which just tries to maximize score.
It's true that modern (that is, since 1994 or so) European games try to avoid "politics", e.g. individual dealmaking between players, or players having free choice over which other player to reward or hinder. European reviewers (and, say, SdJ judges) will typically consider it poor design if
1. Who wins can be decided by who gets targeted
2. Players don't get to play to the end (I.e. get eliminated)
3. Your win status can be certain and obvious long before the game is actually over.
But there is still plenty of room for that in older European games like Catan (1995)
What isn't, the text you are replying to, or the linked definition in that text?
The linked definition includes your point that "European reviewers will consider it poor design if ... players don't get to play to the end" for example, so your listing it doesn't work as a criticism of the definition.
The BGG definition seems quite comprehensive, and definitely not just "games you interact with your opponent".
From BGG:
Eurogames (or alternatively, Designer Board Games or German-Style Board Games) are a classification of board games that are very popular on Board Game Geek (BGG). Though not all eurogames are European and not all of them are board games, they share a set of similar characteristics. A game need not fit ALL the criteria to be considered a Eurogame.
Most Eurogames share the following elements:
- Player conflict is indirect and usually involves competition over resources or points. Combat is extremely rare.
- Players are never eliminated from the game (All players are still playing when the game ends.)
- There is very little randomness or luck. Randomness that is there is mitigated by having the player decide what to do after a random event happens rather than before. Dice are rare, but not unheard of, in a Euro.
- The Designer of the game is listed on the game's box cover. Though this is not particular to Euros, the Eurogame movement seems to have started this trend. This is why some gamers and designers call this genre of games Designer Games.
- Much attention is paid to the artwork and components. Plastic and metal are rare, more often pieces are made of wood.
- Eurogames have a definite theme, however, the theme most often has very little to do with the gameplay. The focus instead is on the mechanics; for example, a game about space may play the same as a game about ancient Rome.
- Eurogames are concerned with getting the most strategy from the least or minimal mechanics.
- Eurogames typically have multiple viable paths to scoring points or securing the win condition.
- Eurogames generally correspond to the BGG subdomain "Strategy".
Examples of Eurogames: CATAN, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, Tigris & Euphrates, Caylus, Power Grid, Ra, El Grande, Five Tribes
// As owner of the listed example games, I find the linked definition significantly superior.
I'm not a fan of BGG, and their definition is questionable in its own ways (little randomness is wrong) but either way I was reacting to the "interaction" part in the post I was replying to. All good games are interactive, but some people seem to miss it if the theme is wrong.
Viticulture, for me, is just a fun, quick game, not involving too much thought and a relaxing theme. It's actually a race game, so our plays tend to be very quick and competitive. We hang on to the purple visitor cards to make surprise end-game points.
I like the theming, making wine. I get that the game starts off a bit slow due to the build up, but that's what I like. There are so many choices, and I like that. Kinda, choose your own engine building path style of game.
I have the Tuscany expansion, playing with 4 seasons and the unique workers makes the game even better in my opinion. I can see why some wouldn't like it, as it's a choice salad style game, and on first play through can seem like you're really doing nothing expect putting meeples down.
I actually wish they made a beer themed version of the game, call Bavaria or something.
I’m a huge fan of Eurogames but I regret buying Wingspan, it is an absolute bore. After 5 or 6 games it became kindof a meme in my family. “What shall we do now? A round of bird game?”
Beautiful packaging and pieces though! And it’s very cool that it works single player and two player. But nothing eventful at all happens, and nobody feels any compelling reason to rack up points.
It's one of my favorite board games, probably for the same reason you hate it. What's the reason to play a board game? To give a bunch of people sitting around a table something to do while having a drink and a chat. Bird game is great for that; it's got stuff to talk about and to think about, but it doesn't swallow up the whole conversation like Pandemic would.
The compelling reason to rack up points, if you're playing seriously, is to see if your engine works --- just like Race For The Galaxy, or games like that.
I agree with on the basegame. It was fun the first few games, becomes kinda boring when you don't play with a large group as the bird cards don't change often.
The expansions changed the game completely for me, it's more strategic and you're interacting with other player more (i.e. in-between round activation, end of round powers, more steal resource from other players, etc).
I personally love that the game play is very fast, as you have limited number of moves every round.
The Oceania expansion with the nectar tokens and new board really let you do more in the game.
I would give it another try with the expansions, it's truly a different game.
Ahh interesting. I played Wingspan before it came out and thought it was pretty good and talked about it. Then I got it and played it a few times and it hit me how uninteractive and solo focused the game is and I just got bored. You can't plan a strategy and instead have to just get random stuff. That also means it's terrible to try to counter your opponents strategies because you can't predict what they're going for. Agricola is the gold standard for me. You're focusing on your own goals but it's very important to see what your opponents want too. Wingspan is like playing darts. It basically doesn't matter if you even have an opponent. Yawn.
Upvote for Wingspan precisely for the reason stated. A competitive game, but without conflict. It has become the family favorite and there are so many different strategies to experiment with.
Its not a 2022 board game - but I would really recommend Carcassonne with these two expansions:
- Traders and Builders [1]
- Inns and Cathedrals [2]
The base itself is little limited - but with these two expansions you have one of the best sets for a nice evening with friends. You can also add River or River II expansion - but they only 'divert' the beginning of the game - so you can omit them.
The Carcassonne is really a simple game - yet it takes real thinking and strategy to really master it.
What I like the most about Carcassonne is its 'minimalistic' approach. There are roads/cities/grasslands/monasteries ... and nothing else ... yet taking someone else' city or road is very important strategic move - or splitting the work between X players.
You do not need cards, figures, notes, calculators, excel or dice. You just play and move the cones on the scoring board.
The expansions are great, but I don't find base limiting at all!
I don't know any game that simple as versatile as Carcassone: you can play friendly or cutthroat, tactical or strategic, conservative or risky, focus on or ignore farmers...
+ Almost no setup, fast turns, equally good at any player count, you end up with a good looking map... this game is a jewel
I tend to play with the River and Inns and Cathedrals. We also play with a house rule that you have a hand of 3 tiles to alleviate some of the draw-dependence of whether a strategy is successful or not.
Oh that’s a neat rule, I like that! It’s another level of strategy that you wouldn’t normally get. I can see it being fun in smaller groups, because there’s less to keep track of compared to a 5-person game
Definitely one of the best. I’ve played many many hours of this with and without expansions. Very playable with two, but best with 3 or 4 players - the negotiations between players is where the game really shines.
Going to second Carcassonne, and say that one thing I really like about the game is that's almost purely contextless, in that it doesn't require you to hold long-term strategy/ideas/concepts in your head for extended periods of time. If you showed up to the middle of the game, and were told to play the turn for somebody, largely you could. This makes it a great casual game with friends, as a long continuous attention span isn't really required.
They’re good expansions if you’re playing with more than 2 people. If it’s just 2 people, the base game without the river really is the best. The tiles are far more limited so there’s the strategy of making sure it’s impossible for your opponent to complete some of their features and trap their meeples for the remainder of the game
I don’t like carcassonne at all. I find it to have too much luck involved since you always get one random tile. Is it really possible to be good at? Whenever I have played most players score about the same.
Etherfields is one of the best board games I've ever played. Beautiful, thematic, exploratory, unique, great mechanics.
Seventh Continent is also fun from an exploratory point of view, though it has a bit more self-similarity in its gameplay loop such that the mechanics can get old, but the exploration doesn't.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jaipur is a two-player quick card game with great style and fun, great mechanics, and much of the "reading another player" of a gin/pinochle/etc style game.
They have faithful digital versions of many eurogames and you can either play with a public matchmaking group or host private games and invite friends for a remote game night.
It's not guaranteed you'll like the game just because it's on that list but:
1. it's a good initial filter
2. they have pretty entertaining review videos for most of the board games
Sadly, I think you just have to try playing the games to see which ones you'll like.
By the way, if you're in a reasonably populated area, you can try an in-person board game group on meetup.com (or something similar). I've had good success with that, but I do live in an European capital, so YMMV.
You could try BoardGameArena or if you have Steam and don't mind dropping $10 or so, pick up Table Top Simulator. With TTS, you can download a bunch of fan-made (and sometimes publisher-made) digital recreations of popular games.
I'd also say to check out some of the bigger board game review Youtubers and just watch a mixture of their videos. Some games will appeal and others you'll bounce off of just hearing about the idea of them. Some of my favorites are:
Yet another expansion is coming out. It's like, what, the fifth after what Donald X said would be the last one? Can't deny that I'm happy about it, though. It remains an extremely well-designed game.
Ancestor of the entire "build your deck during the game" genre, and for every new entry in that genre I've tried, I've thought, "yup, now I know there's a good reason Donald X. Vaccarino didn't do it like that in Dominion".
Works equally great as an over the board family game with more than 2 players as a highly competitive online 2 player game, too. That's pretty amazing, really.
You can play the expansion now! It's available for a few days in preview mode, named Plunder. Very money focused, with a 'loot' pile that's essentially 30 golds with actions like Discard down to 4, play an Action from your hand, etc! Very good fun.
The best game I played in 2022 was probably Northern Pacific (which was made by Tom Russel, the creator of Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge.)
Northern Pacific is a surprising mix of train games (which are often long and complex) and a party game with surprising strategic space. You only have two options, but the impact on other players is real. However, as the game ends in 15 minutes, you don't get the same feelings of betrayal and anger that you'd get playing something like Chinatown.
I strongly recommend it. I also recommend Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge, but those require a bit more of a time investment (1-2 hours) and Iberian Gauge is a bit too complicated for even well-behaved children under the age of 10 or so.
-edit- I just realized it was released in 2013, but I bought it this year so :shrug:.
Note that the designer is now named Amabel Holland. I think the boxes for Irish Gauge all use her old name, though; they were printed a little too early!
Oh man, Letters from Whitechapel is so good. You either squirm for 40 minutes while dancing around the investigators as Jack with a devilish gleam in your eye or you get to play a super interesting deduction game of whack-a-mole searching for Jack.
The Slay the Spire board game, which launched a kickstarter to ship next year, has a Tabletop Simulator version and has easily worked its way towards the top of my board game list, even before receiving the physical copy. In fact, it's the first game that's made me willing to tolerate TTS to play it, my board game group during the pandemic tried to do some TTS sessions but it always fell a little bit flat.
There's plenty of info out there about it so I'll avoid giving a detailed recap, but since it's a coop game and it feels best with 3-4 players, if folks are interested in trying it out, I'd be happy to host a session. E-mail is in my profile.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadAnd while it's not exactly a boardgame, this year I finally got into DM'ing D&D campaign – it's more time consuming that I expected, but very satysfying.
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/92415/skull
If you like games which distill the notion of bluffing, you should also try Perudo. Very similar to Skull, but it uses dice.
It was intense and gripping every step of the way.
Now a few games into Season 0 (the third game to be released, but technically a prequel to the other seasons) with a different group and it's OK. It's "broader" in complexity as opposed to deeper, meaning it tries to merge several Pandemic subsystems together, like there are both Russian agents and disease cubes (hope that's not too much of a spoiler... it is a Pandemic game after all) but your characters evolve very slowly relative to the past legacy games. The upgrades feel really stingy in comparison so game to game there's not as much growth. The game is overall harder too because you have fewer options at your disposal, like they're trying to confine you to tactical location-based gameplay instead of min-maxing your characters optimally, which was the part I enjoyed more in S2 previously. Arguably the movement tactics are the heart of Pandemic though, so I don't fault them for doing that. The plus side is that Season 0 makes teamwork more critical, as you can't simply have an OP character do everything and take over the game.
A side gripe I have with Season 0 is the theme (set in Cold War USSR). It feels antiquated in tone, like I'm reading some shitty spy novel lol. There's not much of a sense of a threat, narratively, just a bog-standard "red bad blue good" story. Season 2 (post-apocalyptic) had much more narrative freedom and actually felt tense. The Season 0 story by contrast feels out of place, like grandma pulled the board game out of the attic 30 years later lol.
In order of personal preference only, of the ones I've played, favorite to least:
- Pandemic Legacy Season 2
- Regular non-legacy Pandemic with all (or most) of its expansions
- Pandemic Legacy Season 0
- Pandemic Legacy Season 1
- Pandemic Iberia version
- Pandemic base (no expansions)
Season 2 got a bit convoluted mechanically and felt less smooth design wise. But it was fun.
About to play Season 0, we're excited for it.
- Eldritch Horror
- Fury of Dracula
- Betrayal at House on the Hill
- Nemesis
- Spirit Island
- Pandemic
And for the not-so-complex list
- Hanabi (more of a card game)
This one's essentially Arkham Horror if it hadn't sacrificed so much of its mechanics to its flavor that it became, more or less, a bad game. Plays much faster and cleaner. Does lose some of the atmosphere in the bargain, but playing Arkham Horror was such a slog that I doubt anyone at the table will want it back after playing this.
> - Betrayal at House on the Hill
The Legacy version of this is excellent. IMO adding those elements effectively completed this game, which never felt like it was living up to its potential, before.
Pandemic is another game vastly improved by the Legacy mechanics.
Yeah, I mean the old one. It made it to our table a few times on the strength of the fluff, but it seemed like every time everyone was kinda unhappy that we'd played it, by the time it was over. Like we just kept forgetting how not-fun it had been, and remembering how fun we wished it was.
(D&D and similar require one player to DM, but that player also gets to be subjective and improvisational and do storytelling and pull in player ideas, which is much more fun than being the mechanical interpreter of the rules.)
(I do think the new Arkham Horror still has some issues, notably an excessive opacity of mechanics sometimes that leads to "you just lose out of the blue for unforeseeable reasons". But it's still usually fun.)
I totally missed that a new AH was released in 2018. On BGG it's a 7.7 over 7.0 for the original, AND the expansions are ranked really well (obviously players who buy an expansion already liked the base game, so there is some bias). Fixing the randomness sounds really REALLY good.
Great. Due to this thread, I now have another ~200 Euros on my board game wish list. Thanks! :P
- John Company II edition
- Root: The Marauder Expansion
- Horse and Carriage, splotter games
I also played a lot of Flamecraft and is fun and cute. Doesn't scale up to large player counts well though.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284742/honey-buzz
I'm building a "roblox for online board games", and if anyone is interested in learning more then you can email me at boardgames@mathgladiator.com
This is all I talk about online, for the most part...
- Mosaic (disclaimer, I know the designer), Bullet Star, Planet Unknown, Fjords, Long Shot: The Dice Game, Wonderland's War
2022 releases I have but haven't gotten to the table yet:
- Eleven (waiting for it to arrive), Vagrantsong, Resurgence, Caesar!, Mind Bug, Puzzle Strike II, Creature Comforts, Verdant
Best "New to me" games for 2022:
- Memoir '44, Imperium Classics, Ark Nova, Res Arcana, Trekking the World, Nemo's War, Scout, Downforce, First Class, My City
I finally played Memoir '44 for the first time, and man is it amazing. My new favorite game, edging out Spirit Island. I now have a regular person I play with online and have racked up 25 games of it just this year, working our way through all the scenarios (of which there's a ton). The online version at BoardGameArena is excellent.
Best board game-like video game I played in 2022: Inscryption. Basically a "Slay the Spire" style deckbuilder mixed with a creepy vibe mixed with an escape room mixed with...well, you should play it and find out for yourself.
Great Western Trail Argentina(I have the 2021 reprint/update of GWT and this one seems even better)
Decorum
Woodcraft
Terracotta Army
Golem
Inscryption never grabbed me. Maybe I need to give it another go.
This should not be an acrimonious process. Think of it as a blameless postmortem. The goal is not to decide who made a mistake, it is to understand how to get better as a group and avoid losing the game the same way again. It will also help everyone empathize with the other players, since they'll actually understand what information the other players had and what their thought process was.
As you get better as a group, you should quickly get to a state where either it's clear to the player who misplayed that they did in fact make a mistake (and they'll apologize before the hand is even over) or everyone agrees it was unavoidable.
As much as i love medium and heavy weight games, the world needs good light games too.
Other long term favorites are Castles of Burgundy, Scythe, and Viticulture.
You may be aware of this - this genre is called Eurogame
https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Eurogame
It's the type of game where you don't directly or fully interact with your opponents (at most, you can usually indirectly block one of their moves, but that's about it). People seem to like the less adversarial playstyle as there are many successful games in this genre: Catan, Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, Carcassone etc.
Games of the style "everyone plays somewhat independently, with some interaction such as blocking, but mostly you race to score points" have the key property that you can do much better if you spend a lot of mental bandwidth carefully tracking the state of all your opponents (how many points they have, what they're doing), which also contributes to a strong "a computer, or computer-assistance, would make this better" feeling, which in turn makes a game feel less fun to me.
I actually really enjoy Catan, in large part because of mechanics like inter-player trading and the jostle for the 3:1 / 2:1 trading ports, which makes for much heavier interaction with other players. Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, is a textbook example of the mechanics I find frustrating and un-fun.
I enjoy chess occasionally, with a player at a comparable skill level. That computers play it far better doesn't bother me in that context, the way it bothers me that a computer would be better at carefully tracking exactly how many points other players have in Ticket to Ride.
Bluffing games, guessing games, dexterity games are much more fun for me.
I think it really depends on the game, you can have your game with little interaction, and then the clashing of players type of euro.
Catan is particularly bad at this; if you have 6 points and someone with 9 points offers you a trade, your decision will choose who wins.
It's true that modern (that is, since 1994 or so) European games try to avoid "politics", e.g. individual dealmaking between players, or players having free choice over which other player to reward or hinder. European reviewers (and, say, SdJ judges) will typically consider it poor design if
1. Who wins can be decided by who gets targeted
2. Players don't get to play to the end (I.e. get eliminated)
3. Your win status can be certain and obvious long before the game is actually over.
But there is still plenty of room for that in older European games like Catan (1995)
What isn't, the text you are replying to, or the linked definition in that text?
The linked definition includes your point that "European reviewers will consider it poor design if ... players don't get to play to the end" for example, so your listing it doesn't work as a criticism of the definition.
The BGG definition seems quite comprehensive, and definitely not just "games you interact with your opponent".
From BGG:
Eurogames (or alternatively, Designer Board Games or German-Style Board Games) are a classification of board games that are very popular on Board Game Geek (BGG). Though not all eurogames are European and not all of them are board games, they share a set of similar characteristics. A game need not fit ALL the criteria to be considered a Eurogame.
Most Eurogames share the following elements:
- Player conflict is indirect and usually involves competition over resources or points. Combat is extremely rare.
- Players are never eliminated from the game (All players are still playing when the game ends.)
- There is very little randomness or luck. Randomness that is there is mitigated by having the player decide what to do after a random event happens rather than before. Dice are rare, but not unheard of, in a Euro.
- The Designer of the game is listed on the game's box cover. Though this is not particular to Euros, the Eurogame movement seems to have started this trend. This is why some gamers and designers call this genre of games Designer Games.
- Much attention is paid to the artwork and components. Plastic and metal are rare, more often pieces are made of wood.
- Eurogames have a definite theme, however, the theme most often has very little to do with the gameplay. The focus instead is on the mechanics; for example, a game about space may play the same as a game about ancient Rome.
- Eurogames are concerned with getting the most strategy from the least or minimal mechanics.
- Eurogames typically have multiple viable paths to scoring points or securing the win condition.
- Eurogames generally correspond to the BGG subdomain "Strategy".
Examples of Eurogames: CATAN, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, Tigris & Euphrates, Caylus, Power Grid, Ra, El Grande, Five Tribes
// As owner of the listed example games, I find the linked definition significantly superior.
I know it's well-loved, but when my wife and I tried playing it we found it dull and tedious. I'm curious if we're just missing something.
I have the Tuscany expansion, playing with 4 seasons and the unique workers makes the game even better in my opinion. I can see why some wouldn't like it, as it's a choice salad style game, and on first play through can seem like you're really doing nothing expect putting meeples down.
I actually wish they made a beer themed version of the game, call Bavaria or something.
this is what my family needs.
also, i heard this is a good game. might get it.
Beautiful packaging and pieces though! And it’s very cool that it works single player and two player. But nothing eventful at all happens, and nobody feels any compelling reason to rack up points.
So many other great games in the genre though.
The compelling reason to rack up points, if you're playing seriously, is to see if your engine works --- just like Race For The Galaxy, or games like that.
No, that's one of the reasons.
The expansions changed the game completely for me, it's more strategic and you're interacting with other player more (i.e. in-between round activation, end of round powers, more steal resource from other players, etc). I personally love that the game play is very fast, as you have limited number of moves every round.
The Oceania expansion with the nectar tokens and new board really let you do more in the game.
I would give it another try with the expansions, it's truly a different game.
I find the returns to skill in it are, if anything, greater than in Agricola, which is also one of my favorites.
The tension is all about the competition for a complementary strategy to what your opponents are doing.
Some people just don’t like weakly interactive engine builders, which is a fair objection to it, but it’s quite deep.
One weakness is that the Corvidae are too strong; many experts seem to have converged on either removing them or nerfing them.
- Traders and Builders [1]
- Inns and Cathedrals [2]
The base itself is little limited - but with these two expansions you have one of the best sets for a nice evening with friends. You can also add River or River II expansion - but they only 'divert' the beginning of the game - so you can omit them.
The Carcassonne is really a simple game - yet it takes real thinking and strategy to really master it.
What I like the most about Carcassonne is its 'minimalistic' approach. There are roads/cities/grasslands/monasteries ... and nothing else ... yet taking someone else' city or road is very important strategic move - or splitting the work between X players.
You do not need cards, figures, notes, calculators, excel or dice. You just play and move the cones on the scoring board.
Regards.
[1] https://carcassonne.fandom.com/wiki/Traders_%26_Builders
[2] https://carcassonne.fandom.com/wiki/Inns_%26_Cathedrals
I don't know any game that simple as versatile as Carcassone: you can play friendly or cutthroat, tactical or strategic, conservative or risky, focus on or ignore farmers...
+ Almost no setup, fast turns, equally good at any player count, you end up with a good looking map... this game is a jewel
1. http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Calvo%201998.pdf [pdf]
Seventh Continent is also fun from an exploratory point of view, though it has a bit more self-similarity in its gameplay loop such that the mechanics can get old, but the exploration doesn't.
On the other end of the spectrum, Jaipur is a two-player quick card game with great style and fun, great mechanics, and much of the "reading another player" of a gin/pinochle/etc style game.
How do I figure out what I like? Is there a bluffers guide to board games? A top-3 covering set
They have faithful digital versions of many eurogames and you can either play with a public matchmaking group or host private games and invite friends for a remote game night.
Different people like different things.
However, I did find some success browsing the ShutUpAndSitDown recommended list:
https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/games-page/
It's not guaranteed you'll like the game just because it's on that list but:
1. it's a good initial filter
2. they have pretty entertaining review videos for most of the board games
Sadly, I think you just have to try playing the games to see which ones you'll like.
By the way, if you're in a reasonably populated area, you can try an in-person board game group on meetup.com (or something similar). I've had good success with that, but I do live in an European capital, so YMMV.
I'd also say to check out some of the bigger board game review Youtubers and just watch a mixture of their videos. Some games will appeal and others you'll bounce off of just hearing about the idea of them. Some of my favorites are:
* Shut Up & Sit Down
* Actualol
* Three Minute Board Games
* Dice Tower
* GameBoyGeek
Also competitive Settlers of Catan has skyrocketed in 2022: https://colonist.io to play for free against friends or ranked.
Ancestor of the entire "build your deck during the game" genre, and for every new entry in that genre I've tried, I've thought, "yup, now I know there's a good reason Donald X. Vaccarino didn't do it like that in Dominion".
Works equally great as an over the board family game with more than 2 players as a highly competitive online 2 player game, too. That's pretty amazing, really.
Northern Pacific is a surprising mix of train games (which are often long and complex) and a party game with surprising strategic space. You only have two options, but the impact on other players is real. However, as the game ends in 15 minutes, you don't get the same feelings of betrayal and anger that you'd get playing something like Chinatown.
I strongly recommend it. I also recommend Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge, but those require a bit more of a time investment (1-2 hours) and Iberian Gauge is a bit too complicated for even well-behaved children under the age of 10 or so.
-edit- I just realized it was released in 2013, but I bought it this year so :shrug:.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/138704/northern-pacific
- I dissent
- Panamax
- Pandemic Legacy, Season 2
- Root
- Dice Hospital
- Cthulhu: Death May Die
- Food Chain Magnate
- Letters from Whitechapel
- Terraforming Mars
- Space Base
- Dominant Species
- Cockroach Poker
There's plenty of info out there about it so I'll avoid giving a detailed recap, but since it's a coop game and it feels best with 3-4 players, if folks are interested in trying it out, I'd be happy to host a session. E-mail is in my profile.