Here it is, my second Top Ten Board Games list of 2018. This list is of the games I played this year that I don't own. For the list featuring the game I own, check this out.
As with the prior list, my only rule was that I had to have played each game at least once during the course of the year. Also, these aren't necessarily games that were released in 2018, just ones I played this year.
Here we go!
(Oh, one more thing . . . the majority of the games on this list I played for the first time this year at the St. Louis area board gaming convention Geekway to the West. So if you want to try out some new things, and possibly win them just for trying them out, you should definitely check out a board game convention like Geekway. Tickets are on sale as of publication date, and over 1,000 tickets have already been claimed.)
10. Potion Explosion
Published by Horrible Games
2-4 players - 45-60 minutes
There's something really cool about the 3-dimensional action of playing a game. Instead of cardboard tokens, miniatures. Instead of plain wooden cubes, marbles. Instead of a game tray for the bits to sit in, a contraption you build that makes the process of picking out a colored item into something strategic.
Potion Explosion is the closest thing in the board game world to the PopCap web video game Zuma. You take out marbles that can cause gravity-driven collisions on a ramp. If like colors collide with like colors, you get to claim those as well. You use the colored marbles to fill potions, and the person with the most potion-earning points at the end of the game wins. Sounds simple, but there's a level of strategy built into the game to make it fun, and the big, bold colors of the components and the marbles bring a whimsical feel to the theme. A pretty simple set collection game that's got plenty of life to it.
9. Vegas Dice Game (formerly Las Vegas)
Published by Alea
2-5 players - 30-45 minutes playtime
On the surface, this is a pretty simple dice placement game in the same vein as Roll For It!, but with a slight gambling element. The production values of the new version of the game are great, even though it includes paper money instead of cardboard chits. The graphic design invokes the feel of the Las Vegas strip, and the dice rolling action actually does make you feel as though you're taking a gamble every time you place dice.
Instead of telling you how this game plays, my recommendation is that you get a copy, sit down with friends, and have a go. It's a fun, light game that contains more excitement than a mere description here will conjure. Roll dice, put them someplace, see if you win money. Most money goes home a winner. Seriously, that's literally all you need to know to play the game.
Sound fun? Of course it does. Go play it.
8. Ex Libris
Published by Renegade Game Studios
1-4 players - 60 minutes playtime
Bookworms, rejoice! Someone took the idea of a magical fantasy world in which gnomes are trying to acquire a Grand Librarian. Build your library so that you earn the most points.
Ex Libris combines worker placement, variable player powers, and tableau building with a wonderfully magical theme as you try to build a library in a particular shape. Follow the rules of library shapes and match symbols to condition cards in order to earn points, and of course, the highest point total wins. This game also has a unique mechanic in that the location where workers can be placed change from round to round, making decisions, and the timing of them, an important factor in each round. Adding to the fun are the unique player workers and the pun-filled book titles on the library book cards, which must have been one of the more satisfying aspects of designing the game.
Ex Libris is as much at home on the bookshelf as it is on the game shelf. Even if you're not a library lizard, you should definitely check it out.
7. One Deck Dungeon
Published by Asmadi Games
1-2 players - 45-60 minutes playtime
As a solo board gamer, I'm always looking for games that play well with an official solo variant, or with a variant created by users on BoardGameGeek.com. I've even come up with a couple solo variants myself for a couple games, and they've turned out to be quite fun. Then I opened up a friend's copy of One Deck Dungeon and lost myself in a great world.
Working absolutely beautifully as a one-player game, One Deck Dungeon follows a typical fantasy adventure -- enter a dungeon, fight beasts, avoid traps, and gain treasure, skills, weapons, and armor. Try to make it to the end to fight the dungeon boss. And do it all while rolling different colored dice and placing them in the designated areas on the dungeon card challenges you face.
Mitigating dice rolls is one of the more fun mechanics I've worked with in board gaming, as evidenced by my love for Roll Player and other games like it. With so much luck, chance, and strategy wrapped up in such a tiny box, it's a wonder I haven't seen this game in more places. A campaign mode even exists so that you can choose a character and build skills over the course of multiple adventures. A very challenging game that provides you with multiple ways to overcome your weaknesses, One Deck Dungeon is a definite winner.
6. Sagrada
Published by Floodgate Games
1-4 players - 45-60 minutes playtime
Dice games, if you haven't been able to tell, are pretty hot right now, and Sagrada has become one of the hottest dice placement games in existence over the last 2 years. Amazing artwork and graphic design bring the stained glass theme to life, and using translucent dice for the pieces of the mosaic you're meant to create was just a smart move by the publisher.
It's like Azul, but with dice. And it's like Roll Player, but with smaller, prettier dice. You follow placement rules to create brilliantly colorful mosaics, but with plenty of tools at your disposal, and several endgame bonus point conditions to meet that will add to this game's replay value over time. It's easy to pick up on, but challenging to master, and it plays in about an hour or less, depending on the number of players.
You simply can't go wrong with this game, unless dice games just aren't your speed. In which chase, I will be building my own mosaic in your honor, lighting a candle in front of it, and saying a prayer for your wretched, diceless soul.
5. Xia: Legends of a Drift System
Published by Far Off Games
3-5 players - 2-4 hours playtime
So I attended a board game night that I'd only been to once before, and I wasn't in the mood to play
Le Havre, as I had no desire to play a worker placement game with a theme I didn't really care about. Also, I didn't want to spend 3 hours playing only one game. And then I spent 3 hours playing Xia with a couple of relative strangers, and I haven't been able to get this game out of my mind since then.
Xia: Legends of a Drift System is a meticulously designed sandbox style sci-fi game with a pickup-and-deliver mechanic built in, although it's not a pickup-and-deliver game, strictly speaking. There are many ways you can earn Fame Points. Yes, delivering stuff is one of those ways, but so is attacking other players, upgrading your ship, buying Fame Points for 5,000 in currency, rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die, fulfilling conditions on cards . . . you've got a lot of options.
The board is made of all sorts of specially-designed hexagonal tiles that come out as you explore, similar to games like Level 7: Escape or Betrayal at the House on the Hill, so every time you play this game, the spacescape is going to appear differently than before, giving you a unique experience with each game. As much as this game might feel like a slog when you're first learning, there's quite a lot you can do, and it all feels very satisfying, even when you fail, because you can respawn and come back on your next turn if you're shot down or, God forbid, fly into a star. So for a surprise 3-hour game, Xia: Legends of a Drift System is pretty darn sweet.
4. Downforce
Published by Restoration Games
2-6 players - 45 minutes playtime
One of the biggest drawbacks to racing games, especially ones with player counts up to 6, is the downtime after you've had your turn while waiting for your next turn to come around. Enter (or re-enter, as it were) Downforce, a classic racing game where the race is only PART of the experience.
Each player plays a racing company, who bids to own certain cars. You can own more than one car, but everyone at the table places bets on how they believe the cars in the game will place once they've crossed the finish line. There are three betting stages in the game, with better rewards if your early predictions come to fruition.
This is a brilliant turn on the boring old roll-and-move racing game. I can even see how people who love Formula D might look at this one in a new light, as there is relatively very little downtime between turns, and whole lot of strategy involved in advancing the cars on the track in a particular order. I only played Downforce once this year, but I want to play it again and again, because it's just so different, and it's so much fun.
3. Aeon's End
Published by Indie Cards & Games
1-4 players - 90-120 minutes playtime
A fantasy themed deckbuilder, Aeon's End sounds like it would be just like any other deckbuilding game in which you and group of people play cooperatively against the game's enemy. But when I heard about the no-shuffle rule, well, I had to give this game a shot.
Part of the fun of a deckbuilder is building the deck you play with throughout the game. What always kind of frustrated me, though, was the fact that when your deck is depleted, you take your discard deck and shuffle it, making the cards that you've so strategically purchased and added to you deck appear at random times, so there was no way to really strategize. Each turn was random. With Aeon's End, the rule is that when your deck is empty and you have to use your discard pile, you DON'T shuffle it. This makes the timing of the action you take on your turn just as important for the turns you will have in the future.
The one game of this I played with four players, and it took about 2 hours for us to get through, and that was with all of us having never played the game before. The rulebook was easy to navigate if we had questions to be clarified, and we played with a great sense of teamwork to accomplish our shared goal. The choices the game presents give you plenty of options to build up your weaponry, spells, and other means by which to defeat the enemy before you. In some way, I found the game a little similar to Sentinels of the Multiverse, but with WAY better artwork, and better game play and structure. Plus, you can play it solo a little easier than playing Sentinels.
2. Rhino Hero: Super Battle
Published by Haba
2-4 players - 30-45 minutes playtime
This is one of the simplest, easy to understand games that I've ever had the most fun playing. A very light, very challenging dexterity game where the structure is part of the fun, Rhino Hero: Super Battle builds on (no pun intended) the premise of the original Rhino Hero, but adds multiple heroes battling against each other, and the structure being built can sprawl wide instead of just vertical.
You pick up a card and build it, using the pieces it shows you on the card, then you roll a die to determine if your hero climbs the structure or falls. The hero who ends the game in the highest position wins, but over time, the goal of the game becomes building the structure as much or as high as you can without knocking anything over.
And no joke, this game was probably the MOST FUN GAME I played (with 4 players or fewer) at Geekway to the West last year. It was cool to have to stand on a chair to place the final floor of the structure. Haba has a habit of publishing games that are easy enough for young children to learn, but still hold plenty of promise and entertainment for adults to be captured by them as well. And currently, Rhino Hero: Super Battle stands at #1 in the Children's game category on BoardGameGeek.com, so for a game that will capture people of every age, you simply cannot go wrong.
1. Cosmic Encounter
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
3-5 players - 1-2 hours playtime
When I heard that Cosmic Encounter was one of Dice Tower critic Tom Vasel's top games of all time, I was a little skeptical. I didn't know much about it, but I don't always agree with Vasel on his assessment of certain games, so I tend to find out for myself if a game is good or not. If the theme pulls me in, or if the mechanics sound fun and innovative, I'll give it a shot regardless of what critics think. But year after year, Vasel put Cosmic Encounter at the top of his yearly all-time greatest games lists, so I figured there had to be something to this.
When someone attending Geekway last May posted a Cosmic Encounter game on the BGG Game Planning Geeklist, I jumped in. Expansions to this game allow you to add players, and I believe we had 7 at the table, but it wasn't confusing in any way, because the game's hook is its core simplicity. You attack other worlds, negotiate with other players to either help you attack, or if they prefer, they can help the defending player protect their world. The first player to colonize on 5 different planets other than his or her own wins, which sounds easy, until you realize that negotiation and relationships are the keys to winning this game.
Alliances can be struck in such a way that more than one person can win the game, so it may be in your best interest to help out your fellow player, but you can also screw that person over. Or he may be waiting to screw you over at the most opportune time. The next level of replayability in this game happens due to the different alien races included in the game, which can give you and the other players special powers and abilities from round to round, depending on whose turn it is.
This game is one of the longest-running modern board games in existence, having been originally published in 1977, so it has quite a bit of staying power. If you play this with the right group, you're going to have a lot of fun. This game is a great way to discover who your friends are, and who just wants to win at all costs, but you'll have such a blast getting there that even when you lose, it doesn't feel all that bad.
Fantasy Flight Games has owned the rights to this game since 2008, and in 2018 they released a 42nd anniversary edition of the game, with updated components, streamlined rules, and new cards to add even more variety to a great game. Whatever version of the game you play, I guarantee you'll have a great time with it.
Will I eventually own some of the games on this list? Probably. I'm not in a major hurry to add them to my collection, but I definitely want to play them all again, and I hope I can soon. In the meantime, maybe you could try one of these out and see for yourself what kind of fun you can have with your friends and family at the table.
Until next time, have fun gaming!
There Is No Box.
Zach
As with the prior list, my only rule was that I had to have played each game at least once during the course of the year. Also, these aren't necessarily games that were released in 2018, just ones I played this year.
Here we go!
(Oh, one more thing . . . the majority of the games on this list I played for the first time this year at the St. Louis area board gaming convention Geekway to the West. So if you want to try out some new things, and possibly win them just for trying them out, you should definitely check out a board game convention like Geekway. Tickets are on sale as of publication date, and over 1,000 tickets have already been claimed.)
Published by Horrible Games
2-4 players - 45-60 minutes
There's something really cool about the 3-dimensional action of playing a game. Instead of cardboard tokens, miniatures. Instead of plain wooden cubes, marbles. Instead of a game tray for the bits to sit in, a contraption you build that makes the process of picking out a colored item into something strategic.
Potion Explosion is the closest thing in the board game world to the PopCap web video game Zuma. You take out marbles that can cause gravity-driven collisions on a ramp. If like colors collide with like colors, you get to claim those as well. You use the colored marbles to fill potions, and the person with the most potion-earning points at the end of the game wins. Sounds simple, but there's a level of strategy built into the game to make it fun, and the big, bold colors of the components and the marbles bring a whimsical feel to the theme. A pretty simple set collection game that's got plenty of life to it.
Published by Alea
2-5 players - 30-45 minutes playtime
On the surface, this is a pretty simple dice placement game in the same vein as Roll For It!, but with a slight gambling element. The production values of the new version of the game are great, even though it includes paper money instead of cardboard chits. The graphic design invokes the feel of the Las Vegas strip, and the dice rolling action actually does make you feel as though you're taking a gamble every time you place dice.
Instead of telling you how this game plays, my recommendation is that you get a copy, sit down with friends, and have a go. It's a fun, light game that contains more excitement than a mere description here will conjure. Roll dice, put them someplace, see if you win money. Most money goes home a winner. Seriously, that's literally all you need to know to play the game.
Sound fun? Of course it does. Go play it.
Published by Renegade Game Studios
1-4 players - 60 minutes playtime
Bookworms, rejoice! Someone took the idea of a magical fantasy world in which gnomes are trying to acquire a Grand Librarian. Build your library so that you earn the most points.
Ex Libris combines worker placement, variable player powers, and tableau building with a wonderfully magical theme as you try to build a library in a particular shape. Follow the rules of library shapes and match symbols to condition cards in order to earn points, and of course, the highest point total wins. This game also has a unique mechanic in that the location where workers can be placed change from round to round, making decisions, and the timing of them, an important factor in each round. Adding to the fun are the unique player workers and the pun-filled book titles on the library book cards, which must have been one of the more satisfying aspects of designing the game.
Ex Libris is as much at home on the bookshelf as it is on the game shelf. Even if you're not a library lizard, you should definitely check it out.
Published by Asmadi Games
1-2 players - 45-60 minutes playtime
As a solo board gamer, I'm always looking for games that play well with an official solo variant, or with a variant created by users on BoardGameGeek.com. I've even come up with a couple solo variants myself for a couple games, and they've turned out to be quite fun. Then I opened up a friend's copy of One Deck Dungeon and lost myself in a great world.
Working absolutely beautifully as a one-player game, One Deck Dungeon follows a typical fantasy adventure -- enter a dungeon, fight beasts, avoid traps, and gain treasure, skills, weapons, and armor. Try to make it to the end to fight the dungeon boss. And do it all while rolling different colored dice and placing them in the designated areas on the dungeon card challenges you face.
Mitigating dice rolls is one of the more fun mechanics I've worked with in board gaming, as evidenced by my love for Roll Player and other games like it. With so much luck, chance, and strategy wrapped up in such a tiny box, it's a wonder I haven't seen this game in more places. A campaign mode even exists so that you can choose a character and build skills over the course of multiple adventures. A very challenging game that provides you with multiple ways to overcome your weaknesses, One Deck Dungeon is a definite winner.
Published by Floodgate Games
1-4 players - 45-60 minutes playtime
Dice games, if you haven't been able to tell, are pretty hot right now, and Sagrada has become one of the hottest dice placement games in existence over the last 2 years. Amazing artwork and graphic design bring the stained glass theme to life, and using translucent dice for the pieces of the mosaic you're meant to create was just a smart move by the publisher.
It's like Azul, but with dice. And it's like Roll Player, but with smaller, prettier dice. You follow placement rules to create brilliantly colorful mosaics, but with plenty of tools at your disposal, and several endgame bonus point conditions to meet that will add to this game's replay value over time. It's easy to pick up on, but challenging to master, and it plays in about an hour or less, depending on the number of players.
You simply can't go wrong with this game, unless dice games just aren't your speed. In which chase, I will be building my own mosaic in your honor, lighting a candle in front of it, and saying a prayer for your wretched, diceless soul.
Published by Far Off Games
3-5 players - 2-4 hours playtime
So I attended a board game night that I'd only been to once before, and I wasn't in the mood to play
Le Havre, as I had no desire to play a worker placement game with a theme I didn't really care about. Also, I didn't want to spend 3 hours playing only one game. And then I spent 3 hours playing Xia with a couple of relative strangers, and I haven't been able to get this game out of my mind since then.
Xia: Legends of a Drift System is a meticulously designed sandbox style sci-fi game with a pickup-and-deliver mechanic built in, although it's not a pickup-and-deliver game, strictly speaking. There are many ways you can earn Fame Points. Yes, delivering stuff is one of those ways, but so is attacking other players, upgrading your ship, buying Fame Points for 5,000 in currency, rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die, fulfilling conditions on cards . . . you've got a lot of options.
4. Downforce
Published by Restoration Games
2-6 players - 45 minutes playtime
Each player plays a racing company, who bids to own certain cars. You can own more than one car, but everyone at the table places bets on how they believe the cars in the game will place once they've crossed the finish line. There are three betting stages in the game, with better rewards if your early predictions come to fruition.
This is a brilliant turn on the boring old roll-and-move racing game. I can even see how people who love Formula D might look at this one in a new light, as there is relatively very little downtime between turns, and whole lot of strategy involved in advancing the cars on the track in a particular order. I only played Downforce once this year, but I want to play it again and again, because it's just so different, and it's so much fun.
Published by Indie Cards & Games
1-4 players - 90-120 minutes playtime
A fantasy themed deckbuilder, Aeon's End sounds like it would be just like any other deckbuilding game in which you and group of people play cooperatively against the game's enemy. But when I heard about the no-shuffle rule, well, I had to give this game a shot.
Part of the fun of a deckbuilder is building the deck you play with throughout the game. What always kind of frustrated me, though, was the fact that when your deck is depleted, you take your discard deck and shuffle it, making the cards that you've so strategically purchased and added to you deck appear at random times, so there was no way to really strategize. Each turn was random. With Aeon's End, the rule is that when your deck is empty and you have to use your discard pile, you DON'T shuffle it. This makes the timing of the action you take on your turn just as important for the turns you will have in the future.
The one game of this I played with four players, and it took about 2 hours for us to get through, and that was with all of us having never played the game before. The rulebook was easy to navigate if we had questions to be clarified, and we played with a great sense of teamwork to accomplish our shared goal. The choices the game presents give you plenty of options to build up your weaponry, spells, and other means by which to defeat the enemy before you. In some way, I found the game a little similar to Sentinels of the Multiverse, but with WAY better artwork, and better game play and structure. Plus, you can play it solo a little easier than playing Sentinels.
Published by Haba
2-4 players - 30-45 minutes playtime
This is one of the simplest, easy to understand games that I've ever had the most fun playing. A very light, very challenging dexterity game where the structure is part of the fun, Rhino Hero: Super Battle builds on (no pun intended) the premise of the original Rhino Hero, but adds multiple heroes battling against each other, and the structure being built can sprawl wide instead of just vertical.
You pick up a card and build it, using the pieces it shows you on the card, then you roll a die to determine if your hero climbs the structure or falls. The hero who ends the game in the highest position wins, but over time, the goal of the game becomes building the structure as much or as high as you can without knocking anything over.
And no joke, this game was probably the MOST FUN GAME I played (with 4 players or fewer) at Geekway to the West last year. It was cool to have to stand on a chair to place the final floor of the structure. Haba has a habit of publishing games that are easy enough for young children to learn, but still hold plenty of promise and entertainment for adults to be captured by them as well. And currently, Rhino Hero: Super Battle stands at #1 in the Children's game category on BoardGameGeek.com, so for a game that will capture people of every age, you simply cannot go wrong.
1. Cosmic Encounter
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
3-5 players - 1-2 hours playtime
When I heard that Cosmic Encounter was one of Dice Tower critic Tom Vasel's top games of all time, I was a little skeptical. I didn't know much about it, but I don't always agree with Vasel on his assessment of certain games, so I tend to find out for myself if a game is good or not. If the theme pulls me in, or if the mechanics sound fun and innovative, I'll give it a shot regardless of what critics think. But year after year, Vasel put Cosmic Encounter at the top of his yearly all-time greatest games lists, so I figured there had to be something to this.
When someone attending Geekway last May posted a Cosmic Encounter game on the BGG Game Planning Geeklist, I jumped in. Expansions to this game allow you to add players, and I believe we had 7 at the table, but it wasn't confusing in any way, because the game's hook is its core simplicity. You attack other worlds, negotiate with other players to either help you attack, or if they prefer, they can help the defending player protect their world. The first player to colonize on 5 different planets other than his or her own wins, which sounds easy, until you realize that negotiation and relationships are the keys to winning this game.
Alliances can be struck in such a way that more than one person can win the game, so it may be in your best interest to help out your fellow player, but you can also screw that person over. Or he may be waiting to screw you over at the most opportune time. The next level of replayability in this game happens due to the different alien races included in the game, which can give you and the other players special powers and abilities from round to round, depending on whose turn it is.
Fantasy Flight Games has owned the rights to this game since 2008, and in 2018 they released a 42nd anniversary edition of the game, with updated components, streamlined rules, and new cards to add even more variety to a great game. Whatever version of the game you play, I guarantee you'll have a great time with it.
Will I eventually own some of the games on this list? Probably. I'm not in a major hurry to add them to my collection, but I definitely want to play them all again, and I hope I can soon. In the meantime, maybe you could try one of these out and see for yourself what kind of fun you can have with your friends and family at the table.
Until next time, have fun gaming!
There Is No Box.
Zach
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