Happy 2019, everyone!
I decided to do TWO Top Ten Board Games lists this year. One list is of the games that I own, and the other of games that I don't own.
As I was putting together these lists, I only had one simple rule -- I had to have played each game at least once during the course of the year. Also, these lists aren't necessarily of games that were released in 2018. These are simply this year's favorites.
Here are my favorites of the games that I own for 2018.
10. Operation F.A.U.S.T.
Published by Robert Burke Games
3 to 8 players - 30-60 minutes playtime
The first Kickstarter-funded game that I ever purchased, Operation F.A.U.S.T. scratches a hidden-role itch that can't be filled by too many other games. Sure, it doesn't have the dice rolling of Bang! The Dice Game, and it's a little more involving than The Resistance or Coup, but it's just a great little game with a lot of history rolled in.
You and the other players are charged with recovering artwork that had been confiscated by the Third Reich in Nazi-controlled Europe. The object is to recover $1,000,000 worth of art before anyone else, and the roles that you hold in your hand allow you to do that through various actions. Some actions allow you to keep your role cards, while others force you to discard them. And of course, you can try to bluff your way into the art collection game, but you can be challenged by your competitors and lose valuable intel if you're caught. It's a fun game that requires patience, a little luck, and the knowledge of when to accuse and when to believe someone.
The artwork in the game is based on real people from history who were instrumental in recovering actual stolen works of art during the Nazi occupation. A very cool piece of WWII-era gaming.
9. Scoville
Published by Tasty Minstrel Games
2 to 6 players - 60-120 minutes playtime
What a cool game! Planting peppers, harvesting peppers, and creating amazing chili recipes for victory points, all in the name of being the head honcho in the town of Scoville. This is one of the most colorful games I own, and it has a killer table presence -- you're definitely gonna need that real estate, especially with 6 players.
This game deftly combines worker movement, action selection, bidding, and resource management in a highly thematic manner. When you plant peppers, you're literally placing wooden pepper tokens inside pepper-shaped holes in the game board (and your lab, if you're playing with the Scoville: Labs expansion), and you harvest peppers by moving your farmer between peppers throughout the farm. There's something of a take that element, in that sometimes your movements can block other players, but options abound. It's a fun, thinky game that rewards strategic thinking, yet doesn't punish you if you choose not to be as strategic as your opponents. Plus, the art and graphic design is wonderfully whimsical, and just adds to the enjoyment.
8. FlipShips
Published by Renegade Game Studios
1 to 4 players - 30-45 minutes playtime
Some might refer to this as a beefed up version of Space Invaders: The Board Game, but with physical dexterity. You flip little ship disc tokens onto cards representing alien spacecraft that are threatening to enter the atmosphere and do major damage to the planet. Landing your flipped ships onto the aliens can remove them from the game, but the more that make it through, the more quickly you'll succumb to their attack, and you only start with 20 life points.
Then, once you've cleared all the aliens, you still have to destroy the mothership by flipping your attack ships INTO the mothership structure, which, trust me, is harder than it sounds. But man, this cooperative game is so much fun, and my only beef with it is that it can't play more than 4 -- something this exciting deserves to be played by as many people as possible.
7. Codenames
Published by Czech Games Edition
4-8 (or more) players - 15-20 minutes playtime
The party game is a weird thing -- you typically can only play it if you've got more than a certain number of players, and not all of them scale up to unlimited players (Two Rooms and a Boom is one of those rare games where the player count will work for pretty much any size group). The best party games are the ones that are so engaging that the majority of your players immediately want to play it again, and by that measure alone, Codenames is one of the easiest party games to play with any group of people.
With similarities to the classic parlor game Password, Codenames puts all the players into two teams as a Spymaster tries to communicate to their Spies by getting them to guess their codenames. 25 words are laid out in a 5x5 grid pattern, and The Spymaster gives a clue word followed by a number of words in the grid that might pertain to that clue (for instance, "Tree, 3" means that 3 of that team's words may relate to the word "tree"). The players point to the words they choose, and the Spymaster reveals whether they're correct or not. Choose a codename that belongs to the other team, or that hits an innocent bystander, and your turn ends. Choose a codename that reveals the assassin, and your team automatically loses.
It's a great twist on the word game, and while there have been several picture iterations of Codenames, as well as a 2-player version, I still prefer the original version, because the wonder of correlation to words is such a simple concept -- are you playing with people who are more literal than metaphoric, and how will you know unless you give your first few clues? I've never had a bad time playing Codenames, and neither has anyone I've played with. Can't fail with this game.
6. Azul
Published by Next Move Games
2-4 players - 45-60 minutes playtime
What a beautifully colorful game! You've got a tactile feel of working with these nice, weighty tiles, and placing them into patterns on your player board. It's solitaire play, but it's not, in that the tiles that you choose from the factory floor might screw up your opponent's strategy for that turn.
Honestly, I can't explain this one well enough except to say that it's a wonderfully colored game of laying tiles that you play by laying tiles. So, yeah. And you earn points every time you lay a tile, and you earn more points by connecting tiles you lay with other tiles that you put in place in previous rounds. Aside from a few other small placement rules, that's pretty much the game.
Its simplicity is its draw, and while hardcore gamers might pass this one over after a couple of plays, don't discount the power Azul has to draw in people who aren't into modern boardgaming yet. It's simple enough that anyone of any age can learn the rules in a matter of minutes, and they'll be trying to master it for as long as possible. Winner of the coveted 2018 Spiel Des Jahres award (presented to the game of the year at Essen Spiel in Germany), Azul deserves a place at your table, and it might just inspire you to redo the bathtub.
5. Tiny Epic Quest
Published by Gamelyn Games
1-4 players - 60-75 minutes playtime
What's tiny and epic and smells like a Nintendo game? Designer Scott Almes helped Gamelyn Games make their mark with their line of Tiny Epic games, set in a variety of thematic settings and with a range of game mechanics for every taste. Tiny Epic Zombies was released earlier in 2018, and it's quickly becoming a favorite, but it still hasn't been able to knock Tiny Epic Quest off its pedestal.
Many in the gaming community refer to TEQ as The Legend of Zelda on the table. While it may not have the scale of the classic video game, it does have the feel of adventuring, coupled with a great press-your-luck dice rolling mechanic that affects not just the active player, but everyone at the table. Add to that some really cute IteMeeples that can hold items, weapons, and shields. Complete quests, develop magic spells, and fight goblins to earn victory points while making your way across the land.
There's something whimsical about this game, and with so many options from turn to turn, many paths to victory present themselves, and replayability is near limitless. A wonderful game in a small package, but with huge potential.
4. Coldwater Crown
Published by Bellwether Games
1-4 players - 60-90 minutes playtime
Patience is key when it comes to catching fish. When it comes to playing a board game about catching fish, keeping an open mind is key -- if you can do that, then you'll discover just how wonderful fake fishing for flat fish can be.
When Brian Suhre, the designer of Paradox and Shadowrun: Zero Day, told me about his new fishing game, I wasn't interested. Only after I'd seen a couple video reviews of the gameplay did I realize my mistake. Even if the theme is one I don't care about, the gameplay is amazingly fun and simple, yet with the satisfaction of working through a puzzle-type process that gives a level of strategy equal to the level you're willing to go. Coldwater Crown emulates the act of casting and reeling through a placement mechanic that allows you to take an action when you place a token AND when you remove one.
The artwork and graphic design in this game is absolutely stellar, and it takes the whole experience to another level. There are multiple ways to earn points, and there's never really a clear runaway winner, so you never feel out of the running. This is one of those games that you can teach to someone, and then they'll go ahead and beat you soundly, which to me, is a sign of great game design.
3. Battlestar Galactica
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
3 to 6 players - 2-3 hours playtime
If you're looking for an experience in your gameplay, Battlestar Galactica may work for you, especially if you're a fan of the SyFy television series. You'll need the evening, though, because BSG puts you in the fabled Battlestar, among the crew of humans who are trying to jump 8 distances, while the Cylons are trying to stop them in whatever way possible. Social deduction comes into play throughout this game, in that one of you at the table is very likely a Cylon, and is working against the rest of the crew and personnel to sabotage whatever they can.
Run out of any valuable resources like fuel or food, and the humans lose. Reveal the Cylon or die. But the best part of the game is the interaction among the players -- accusations can fly with ease, whether founded or unfounded, and part of the fun is trying to convince everyone you're not a Cylon, or be convinced that someone else might be. Other games do the same thing that BSG does and in a shorter period of time, but when you're a fan of the IP, you might as well just pull the trigger and call someone a Cylon.
2. Roll Player
Published by Thunderworks Games
1-4 payers - 90-120 minutes playtime
I never grew up a fan of fantasy. I admired it and appreciated it for what it was, but I never read Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. I never cut my teeth on Dungeons & Dragons, and I didn't really have much interest in fantasy-based movies, except for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So Roll Player sounded cool to me because you got to roll big, colorful, chunky dice, and not because the game consists of you literally building a D&D-style character.
Seriously, that's the game. Each round, you draft dice and then place them into common attributes (like strength, charisma, wisdom, etc.) on your player board in order to meet backstory and class parameters. You can earn points by matching color to color, or achieving a certain score on each attribute. You can also add armor, gain weapons, develop skills, and other items that will provide you with points throughout gameplay. There are many ways to help mitigate poor dice rolls, so you're never completely hosed, even if you're stuck grabbing a die with a 1 on it.
The expansion, Monsters & Minions, adds another level to the gameplay and allows you to actually use your skills to fight for XP and potentially more victory points at the end of the game, but the base game is building a character and making it fit into the mold you want it to be in, which is engaging enough already. Roll Player was such a hit when it was released that it sold out of two print runs in short order. Once you try this game, you're going to really enjoy it, and you'll want to play it again and again.
1. Dead of Winter
Published by Plaid Hat Games
2-5 players - 2-3 hours playtime
Zombie games are a dime a dozen, so why would a zombie game be #1 on my list? Well, this isn't a game about zombies, per se. It's a game about what human beings will do in order to survive the cold winter months after a zombie apocalypse has already ravaged the countryside. And it's one of the best narrative-drive immersive games I've ever played.
You will control characters as they leave the Colony and head to abandoned establishments in search of food, fuel, medicine, and whatever else the game win condition needs. But the mere act of travelling from one place to another incurs risk, as you could take a wound, get frostbite, or even get bitten and die. Zombies could overrun the building you're in, killing you and potentially killing others. You have to keep everyone's morale up, because if the morale hits 0, the game ends, and everyone loses. It's just that morale goes down for so many reasons . . .
But then there's the betrayal aspect of the game. One of the other players could be a traitor, out for his or her own nefarious purposes, and eager to do whatever they can to subvert everyone else's efforts. If the tension of survival wasn't enough, the fact that a traitor may be among you might just send your anxiety spiking into unhealthy levels.
Here's the thing. You're not supposed to care about these little cardboard standees and their petty needs, but you do. You're not supposed to feel the weight of every decision, or the panic when you realize that you haven't cleaned out enough trash, or the tension when rolling the exposure die simply because you decided to move from the Library, which is about to be overrun with the walking dead, to the grocery store, where you're likely to find more food to feed the ever-increasing Colony population . . . but you feel it all the same. You're in this little town, doing what you can to set barricades, feed everyone, and just survive. And you feel like sometimes, it might not be enough. It's the best tension-filled fun you'll ever have.
So the next time you're thinking about adding a new game to your game nights, take a look at one of these. Maybe check one out at your FLGS' game library or jump into a convention game with someone who knows how to take you through all the ins and outs. Maybe even buy it sight unseen and add it to your collection. Invest the time and the money, and you'll find yourself having more fun with the people you care about.
There Is No Box.
Zach
I decided to do TWO Top Ten Board Games lists this year. One list is of the games that I own, and the other of games that I don't own.
As I was putting together these lists, I only had one simple rule -- I had to have played each game at least once during the course of the year. Also, these lists aren't necessarily of games that were released in 2018. These are simply this year's favorites.
Here are my favorites of the games that I own for 2018.
Published by Robert Burke Games
3 to 8 players - 30-60 minutes playtime
The first Kickstarter-funded game that I ever purchased, Operation F.A.U.S.T. scratches a hidden-role itch that can't be filled by too many other games. Sure, it doesn't have the dice rolling of Bang! The Dice Game, and it's a little more involving than The Resistance or Coup, but it's just a great little game with a lot of history rolled in.
You and the other players are charged with recovering artwork that had been confiscated by the Third Reich in Nazi-controlled Europe. The object is to recover $1,000,000 worth of art before anyone else, and the roles that you hold in your hand allow you to do that through various actions. Some actions allow you to keep your role cards, while others force you to discard them. And of course, you can try to bluff your way into the art collection game, but you can be challenged by your competitors and lose valuable intel if you're caught. It's a fun game that requires patience, a little luck, and the knowledge of when to accuse and when to believe someone.
The artwork in the game is based on real people from history who were instrumental in recovering actual stolen works of art during the Nazi occupation. A very cool piece of WWII-era gaming.
Published by Tasty Minstrel Games
2 to 6 players - 60-120 minutes playtime
What a cool game! Planting peppers, harvesting peppers, and creating amazing chili recipes for victory points, all in the name of being the head honcho in the town of Scoville. This is one of the most colorful games I own, and it has a killer table presence -- you're definitely gonna need that real estate, especially with 6 players.
This game deftly combines worker movement, action selection, bidding, and resource management in a highly thematic manner. When you plant peppers, you're literally placing wooden pepper tokens inside pepper-shaped holes in the game board (and your lab, if you're playing with the Scoville: Labs expansion), and you harvest peppers by moving your farmer between peppers throughout the farm. There's something of a take that element, in that sometimes your movements can block other players, but options abound. It's a fun, thinky game that rewards strategic thinking, yet doesn't punish you if you choose not to be as strategic as your opponents. Plus, the art and graphic design is wonderfully whimsical, and just adds to the enjoyment.
Published by Renegade Game Studios
1 to 4 players - 30-45 minutes playtime
Some might refer to this as a beefed up version of Space Invaders: The Board Game, but with physical dexterity. You flip little ship disc tokens onto cards representing alien spacecraft that are threatening to enter the atmosphere and do major damage to the planet. Landing your flipped ships onto the aliens can remove them from the game, but the more that make it through, the more quickly you'll succumb to their attack, and you only start with 20 life points.
Then, once you've cleared all the aliens, you still have to destroy the mothership by flipping your attack ships INTO the mothership structure, which, trust me, is harder than it sounds. But man, this cooperative game is so much fun, and my only beef with it is that it can't play more than 4 -- something this exciting deserves to be played by as many people as possible.
Published by Czech Games Edition
4-8 (or more) players - 15-20 minutes playtime
The party game is a weird thing -- you typically can only play it if you've got more than a certain number of players, and not all of them scale up to unlimited players (Two Rooms and a Boom is one of those rare games where the player count will work for pretty much any size group). The best party games are the ones that are so engaging that the majority of your players immediately want to play it again, and by that measure alone, Codenames is one of the easiest party games to play with any group of people.
With similarities to the classic parlor game Password, Codenames puts all the players into two teams as a Spymaster tries to communicate to their Spies by getting them to guess their codenames. 25 words are laid out in a 5x5 grid pattern, and The Spymaster gives a clue word followed by a number of words in the grid that might pertain to that clue (for instance, "Tree, 3" means that 3 of that team's words may relate to the word "tree"). The players point to the words they choose, and the Spymaster reveals whether they're correct or not. Choose a codename that belongs to the other team, or that hits an innocent bystander, and your turn ends. Choose a codename that reveals the assassin, and your team automatically loses.
It's a great twist on the word game, and while there have been several picture iterations of Codenames, as well as a 2-player version, I still prefer the original version, because the wonder of correlation to words is such a simple concept -- are you playing with people who are more literal than metaphoric, and how will you know unless you give your first few clues? I've never had a bad time playing Codenames, and neither has anyone I've played with. Can't fail with this game.
Published by Next Move Games
2-4 players - 45-60 minutes playtime
What a beautifully colorful game! You've got a tactile feel of working with these nice, weighty tiles, and placing them into patterns on your player board. It's solitaire play, but it's not, in that the tiles that you choose from the factory floor might screw up your opponent's strategy for that turn.
Honestly, I can't explain this one well enough except to say that it's a wonderfully colored game of laying tiles that you play by laying tiles. So, yeah. And you earn points every time you lay a tile, and you earn more points by connecting tiles you lay with other tiles that you put in place in previous rounds. Aside from a few other small placement rules, that's pretty much the game.
Its simplicity is its draw, and while hardcore gamers might pass this one over after a couple of plays, don't discount the power Azul has to draw in people who aren't into modern boardgaming yet. It's simple enough that anyone of any age can learn the rules in a matter of minutes, and they'll be trying to master it for as long as possible. Winner of the coveted 2018 Spiel Des Jahres award (presented to the game of the year at Essen Spiel in Germany), Azul deserves a place at your table, and it might just inspire you to redo the bathtub.
Published by Gamelyn Games
1-4 players - 60-75 minutes playtime
What's tiny and epic and smells like a Nintendo game? Designer Scott Almes helped Gamelyn Games make their mark with their line of Tiny Epic games, set in a variety of thematic settings and with a range of game mechanics for every taste. Tiny Epic Zombies was released earlier in 2018, and it's quickly becoming a favorite, but it still hasn't been able to knock Tiny Epic Quest off its pedestal.
Many in the gaming community refer to TEQ as The Legend of Zelda on the table. While it may not have the scale of the classic video game, it does have the feel of adventuring, coupled with a great press-your-luck dice rolling mechanic that affects not just the active player, but everyone at the table. Add to that some really cute IteMeeples that can hold items, weapons, and shields. Complete quests, develop magic spells, and fight goblins to earn victory points while making your way across the land.
There's something whimsical about this game, and with so many options from turn to turn, many paths to victory present themselves, and replayability is near limitless. A wonderful game in a small package, but with huge potential.
Published by Bellwether Games
1-4 players - 60-90 minutes playtime
Patience is key when it comes to catching fish. When it comes to playing a board game about catching fish, keeping an open mind is key -- if you can do that, then you'll discover just how wonderful fake fishing for flat fish can be.
When Brian Suhre, the designer of Paradox and Shadowrun: Zero Day, told me about his new fishing game, I wasn't interested. Only after I'd seen a couple video reviews of the gameplay did I realize my mistake. Even if the theme is one I don't care about, the gameplay is amazingly fun and simple, yet with the satisfaction of working through a puzzle-type process that gives a level of strategy equal to the level you're willing to go. Coldwater Crown emulates the act of casting and reeling through a placement mechanic that allows you to take an action when you place a token AND when you remove one.
The artwork and graphic design in this game is absolutely stellar, and it takes the whole experience to another level. There are multiple ways to earn points, and there's never really a clear runaway winner, so you never feel out of the running. This is one of those games that you can teach to someone, and then they'll go ahead and beat you soundly, which to me, is a sign of great game design.
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
3 to 6 players - 2-3 hours playtime
If you're looking for an experience in your gameplay, Battlestar Galactica may work for you, especially if you're a fan of the SyFy television series. You'll need the evening, though, because BSG puts you in the fabled Battlestar, among the crew of humans who are trying to jump 8 distances, while the Cylons are trying to stop them in whatever way possible. Social deduction comes into play throughout this game, in that one of you at the table is very likely a Cylon, and is working against the rest of the crew and personnel to sabotage whatever they can.
Run out of any valuable resources like fuel or food, and the humans lose. Reveal the Cylon or die. But the best part of the game is the interaction among the players -- accusations can fly with ease, whether founded or unfounded, and part of the fun is trying to convince everyone you're not a Cylon, or be convinced that someone else might be. Other games do the same thing that BSG does and in a shorter period of time, but when you're a fan of the IP, you might as well just pull the trigger and call someone a Cylon.
Published by Thunderworks Games
1-4 payers - 90-120 minutes playtime
I never grew up a fan of fantasy. I admired it and appreciated it for what it was, but I never read Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. I never cut my teeth on Dungeons & Dragons, and I didn't really have much interest in fantasy-based movies, except for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So Roll Player sounded cool to me because you got to roll big, colorful, chunky dice, and not because the game consists of you literally building a D&D-style character.
Seriously, that's the game. Each round, you draft dice and then place them into common attributes (like strength, charisma, wisdom, etc.) on your player board in order to meet backstory and class parameters. You can earn points by matching color to color, or achieving a certain score on each attribute. You can also add armor, gain weapons, develop skills, and other items that will provide you with points throughout gameplay. There are many ways to help mitigate poor dice rolls, so you're never completely hosed, even if you're stuck grabbing a die with a 1 on it.
The expansion, Monsters & Minions, adds another level to the gameplay and allows you to actually use your skills to fight for XP and potentially more victory points at the end of the game, but the base game is building a character and making it fit into the mold you want it to be in, which is engaging enough already. Roll Player was such a hit when it was released that it sold out of two print runs in short order. Once you try this game, you're going to really enjoy it, and you'll want to play it again and again.
Published by Plaid Hat Games
2-5 players - 2-3 hours playtime
Zombie games are a dime a dozen, so why would a zombie game be #1 on my list? Well, this isn't a game about zombies, per se. It's a game about what human beings will do in order to survive the cold winter months after a zombie apocalypse has already ravaged the countryside. And it's one of the best narrative-drive immersive games I've ever played.
You will control characters as they leave the Colony and head to abandoned establishments in search of food, fuel, medicine, and whatever else the game win condition needs. But the mere act of travelling from one place to another incurs risk, as you could take a wound, get frostbite, or even get bitten and die. Zombies could overrun the building you're in, killing you and potentially killing others. You have to keep everyone's morale up, because if the morale hits 0, the game ends, and everyone loses. It's just that morale goes down for so many reasons . . .
But then there's the betrayal aspect of the game. One of the other players could be a traitor, out for his or her own nefarious purposes, and eager to do whatever they can to subvert everyone else's efforts. If the tension of survival wasn't enough, the fact that a traitor may be among you might just send your anxiety spiking into unhealthy levels.
Here's the thing. You're not supposed to care about these little cardboard standees and their petty needs, but you do. You're not supposed to feel the weight of every decision, or the panic when you realize that you haven't cleaned out enough trash, or the tension when rolling the exposure die simply because you decided to move from the Library, which is about to be overrun with the walking dead, to the grocery store, where you're likely to find more food to feed the ever-increasing Colony population . . . but you feel it all the same. You're in this little town, doing what you can to set barricades, feed everyone, and just survive. And you feel like sometimes, it might not be enough. It's the best tension-filled fun you'll ever have.
So the next time you're thinking about adding a new game to your game nights, take a look at one of these. Maybe check one out at your FLGS' game library or jump into a convention game with someone who knows how to take you through all the ins and outs. Maybe even buy it sight unseen and add it to your collection. Invest the time and the money, and you'll find yourself having more fun with the people you care about.
There Is No Box.
Zach
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