Among the OSR, Shadowdark is a household name already. An old-school style RPG built in the style of classic 1st edition B/X D&D but using modern 5th edition D&D rules. It won several Ennie’s including Best Design last year and stands as one of the premier OSR games for the modern era.
What makes Shadowdark special in my eyes is the fact that it brings back that classic “Dungeon Survival” playstyle popularized by classic 1st edition D&D, but without all the weird (funky) rules that make most modern gamers eyes roll to the back of their head.
This is for the most part a very stripped-down version of 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, which means that if you are a 5e player or have a 5e group, you could run Shadowdark with minimum explanation required.
Shadowdark is supported by the arcane library, a fantastic site with tons of great material already published for this specific game. If you’re like me and you need a bit more “umf” than most OSR games offer, here you can find tons of additional classes, races and options to give this very simple game a little extra juice.
Shadowdark also borrows heavily from the brilliant editing done on other modern OSR translations like Old School Essentials giving us this amazing book that is table-ready. An easy-to-use reference that allows players to go from “I know nothing” to “Having fun playing an RPG” with virtually no effort.
Considering modern games like the 2024 Edition of Dungeon and Dragons are going the other way with its 600+ page player handbook, personally I think the timing of Shadowdark is impeccable. Right now players and GM’s are faced with the daunting task of having to figure out another D&D ruleset that has more instructions than a Boeing 747 flight manual. In contrast, Shadowdarks pick up and play ultra-light ruleset is looks very attractive by comparison.
If you are a 5e player and you are looking for something a bit lighter, with a bit more focus on rulings over rules and some clear meta-game goals, Shadowdark may be the right game for you and since the basic book is a free PDF, it costs you nothing to check it out!
Hidden Gems is going to be a new article series that focuses on a “short articles” format and approach. This is a slightly new direction I’m going to take this blog where I, as it says on the tin, I will expose readers to some hidden gems (games) that they might not be aware of in a brief outline, short/brief article about it. The goal will be to produce more articles, more often but with a little less definition. It will not come at the exclusion of more robust articles but in addition to.
In today’s article, we will discuss a little PC game, Pox Nora, that you can pick up for free on Steam.
Released back in 2006, this game fell under the radar of most largely because of its rather unusual business model and playstyle.
Pox Nora is a collectible card game that is played as a turn-based strategy game that blends tactical gameplay, collecting and RPG-like combat and advancement mechanics. It’s wildly different than anything we are familiar with today, the closest thing that I can think of is the now-defunct Magic The Gathering Tactics.
Magic The Gathering: Tactics we had a lot of hope for, but Wizards of the Coast and Sony really shit the bed on this one by creating a business model that was so outrageous that people were boycotting it before it was released. It didn’t help that the game sucked some serious balls on top of it.
What is unique about Pox Nora is the overwhelming dedication its original developer has for the game. Even though back in 2009 Sony Entertainment swallowed up Octopi Media Design Lab (original developers) and almost brought the game to a destructive end, in 2014 Desert Owl Games picked it up which it turns out is a studio made up of many former members of the original development team.
Pox Nora is a highly balanced, very addictive, easy-to-learn, impossible-to-master tactic combat game with a huge focus on “deck building”, combining that addictive core of Magic: The Gathering with tactical combat. I imagine its what Wizards of the Coast probably hoped Magic: The Gathering Tactics would end up being. I personally think it’s one of the most overlooked games in PC gaming history. It has a great competitive edge for PvP action, and lots of potential, some of which came to fruition as a single-player (solo) game while simultaneously this very endless replayability on all fronts.
Pox Nora is a very basic-looking game, though I would argue very pretty considering its nearly 20 years old. For people who play tactical games, graphics are usually not your primary concern, most seek a challenging and fun game and Pox Nora is that if its anything.
This is a phenomenal game, It is free to play and actually, these days even building up your collection can be done very easily without spending a penny on the game and even if you do drop some real coin on it, you won’t be disappointed as Desert Owl Games is a very fair developer that doesn’t price gauge and has a long dedicated history of keeping this game going.
In the last 30+ years, I have experienced a wide range of role-playing games both from the perspective of the GM and the perspective of a player. Many were successful, but quite a few were not while some only marginally so.
Today I’m going to talk about what I think separates a great campaign from a mediocre one, the pitfalls and traps that lead to failed campaigns, and perhaps most importantly what a good GM should be doing to ensure their campaign starts and ends on good footing.
Now I will admit that I have a very unique take on running role-playing games, it definitely does not fall into the “normal” advice category. I would imagine in fact that the instinct of most GM’s as they read this article will be to disagree and that is fine, it’s just an opinion in a sea of opinions. More advice is better than less advice, so I humbly submit my take on the subject, do with it what you will.
Role-playing games are not about story
We start with the most controversial but in my opinion, most objectively true thing about role-playing games and the universally hardest truth to bare for GM’s. Good role-playing games are never about good stories. They are always about gaming systems.
So here is the thing, if you ask any player why they want to play a role-playing game almost all will tell you “for the story” and in large part, I would imagine it’s also why most DM’s would claim they want to run a role-playing game. It’s the greatest lie always told, but it is always pure, unadulterated, utter and complete bullshit.
The test is quite simple, pick a system a player or group doesn’t like and see if they still want to play. They won’t want to play that game and even if they do, the game will fail no matter how good the story is. Why? If the game is about a story, why would what system you pick matter or cause your campaign to fail if you have done a great job on the story? Why do so many people choose D&D and not GURPS? Why do people pick complex systems like Pathfinder 2e, rather than simple systems like 1st Edition Basic?
If role-playing games were truly just about the story, systems like Pathfinder 2nd edition could simply never find success. There is absolutely no reason anyone chasing an RPG for story would ever need a 650 page rulebook to tell it. Any pathfinder player who tells you they play RPG’s for story is completetly full shit.
The answer is simple, system is everything. Role-playing games are first and foremost games, it’s the systems that get people to sit at the table, it’s what is exciting about the gaming experience and hobby that is role-playing. If I propose running 1st edition Basic to a 5e group, they will reject that game and likely viciously attack me for even suggesting that their precious 5th edition D&D could be replaced by another system. Vice versus, if I walk into an OSR group of old school gamers and suggest that we play Pathfinder 2e their would be absolutely no chance. They would simply rather burn all of their books and never play a role-playing game for the rest of their lives again, than play in a modern gaming system. System matters a lot to people, its not just a game often times, its practically an ID card, your identity as a role-player. People don’t just have strong opinions about what systems and playstyles they like, they are irredemably loyal to them.
Why? I’m a great DM, I have been running games for my gaming group that they themselves without any prompting from me called “the greatest role-playing experience of their lives”. Why would my group with so much faith in my ability to run a great role-playing experience outright reject a game I want to run based on the system I’ve chosen if the game is in fact about story?
The reality is that story is a byproduct, an important albeit side benefit of playing a role-paying game. We all love story, I do not question that, it’s very much a core desire/outcome of the game and why we are drawn to the game, even so far as to stretch the truth and claim it to be the main reason for wanting to play to begin with. The harsh reality is that RPG hobbyists are gamers first and foremost and the game mechanic is a central component of what creates the experience at the table. The story lives as a layer that becomes the output/outcome of the experience, but no one can ever be excited about entering into a gaming social contract without a system they are excited to execute it with. The story will never save your game, a good system always will.
Realistically if story was the most important element of RPG’s to everyone, GURPS would be the worlds only RPG. It has the simplest and most consistent core mechanic of any game in existance, its completetly scalable and functions with all genres. You buy one book and you can write and play any story, any setting, anything you can imagine forever.
Why is this important knowledge for any GM? It’s very simple. Never, under any circumstance convince yourself that the system you want to run is going to create a good role-playing experience for your players unless they are excited about the system as well. Your players have to choose the system, they have to be excited about it, and they have to love it and bare its torch. If a group has even the most minor complain about the system you have chosen, your campaign is already dead and you will never be able to do resolve that. It’s the single most important decision you will make that will define whether your campaign will find success or failure. The system matters that much, more than any other choice you make.
System and setting are often synonymous in RPG’s because most RPG’s are designed for a specific setting, but the same rules apply. If a group isn’t excited and in love with the setting, nothing will save your game. Run a Star Trek Adventures for a group of trekkies and its magic, talk a group of non-trekkies into playing it and neither the system or the story will save the game. A hard lesson I learned first hand. No matter how good of a GM you think you are, no one is that good.
Remember that, accept it, and embrace it. You can write a shitty, linear story in a system your players love and it will be a booming success, alternatively, you can write a masterpiece for a system your players hate and the game will fail miserably. Never forget that, it’s the best advice I can offer after 30+ years of running games. There is no fix for this and the reality is that most games that fail, fail because of this one reason. Don’t let it happen to you.
The busier the system, the shorter the campaign
Most GM’s, when they sit down to create a campaign for their players imagine playing it for years, spinning an epic tale that puts the players on a journey of discovery with twists and turns, exciting reveals, epic battles, shocking events and so on. We all dream about running that Lord of the Rings epic for the ages.
The issue is that the overwhelming majority of systems out there are very specifically designed not to allow that and the reason is quite simple, there is no money in it.
To give an example, I ran a nearly 3 year Vampire The Masquerade campaign for which all I ever purchased was a core rulebook and a setting book. That was it, that’s all white-wolf managed to get out of me for what amounted to hundreds of hours of entertainment. If a gaming group of 5 only buy 1 or 2 books every three to four years, all role-playing publishers become completely unsustainable, and even if they are set up for a low volume, they are not getting rich doing it.
As such, most modern systems are setup to be complex, with tons of design space to create “options” and that is the name of the game for modern RPG’s. Selling option books requires you to be constantly re-starting new campaigns, so you can create new characters and buy new adventure books and so on, all so that you have a desire for more options. It’s a cycle.
Wizards of the Coast and TSR with D&D are probobly the most famous examples of companies that produce a game designed to make sure campaigns fail and have to start over so that they can sell more books. No version of D&D has ever produced a game in which characters of 10th level or more were sustainable in a campaign. The shelf life of a typical D&D campaign is extremely short.
The reality is that complex systems with tons of options will usually result in what I like to call “dead system stops”. This means the system kills your campaign because it lacks the stamina and structure to survive a long campaign as power advancement is at the center of the core mechanic. This is particularly true for most class/level systems that become unwieldy and unbalanced as you rise in level. It is particularly a problem with these systems not just because the increases in level creates unbalance, but because the players have an expectation to constantly level up. They effectively push for the inevitable power creep that will end the campaign early. Play D&D for three months without leveling up and your players are going to start complaining.
The best systems are those that have progression without major impact and are simple so that the character sheet is just a “log” of your character, rather than an elaboration of what your character is and isn’t, or what they can and can’t do. What I mean by that is that if your players are constantly looking at their character sheet to see “what they can do” they are also finding a list of things “they can’t do”. You are playing in a busy system that is designed to create options for players so that they can do stuff, out-level the game and start over.
Original D&D probobly could not have predicted how leveling up, the class structure and focus on experience points would years later become the reason long campaigns would become unsustainable for D&D. In big part it was because these older versions of D&D had a high mortality rate and the high levels where more a carrot than anything anyone had any expectation to actually achieve. In short, high level campaigns were never supposed to be a thing.
A good role-playing system is not going to be about what the system does or doesn’t let your character do, it should be about what your players want their characters to do. It’s not about action economy, but about telling a story, taking “actions” should not be a mechanic in a role-playing system. What characters do should be a story definition, a conscious thought of a player imagining a scene and doing what comes naturally to them with any mechanical elements being customizable and reactive rather than something governed by strict (you can and can’t) rules.
Such systems are becoming rarer and rarer these days, people simply don’t make them that much anymore, which is why we have the OSR because there was a time in the hobbies history when all RPG’s were designed to be free-flowing and free-form story games. The character sheet was an outline of the player’s imagined avatar and it did not define them in any certain terms, it was just a sort of categorization, a layer upon which a player would create their character’s story and what actions they took had nothing to do with the system.
You picked “Fighter” and that could be anything from a Samurai to a Swashbuckler. You did not pick background, you created backgrounds through direct writing or through gameplay. You didn’t select feats and fighting styles, you imagined those things and brought them to the table through the narrative of your character’s interaction with the world. What your character could do was as much an invention of the story as the plot created by the GM. We talk about players always claiming to want the game to be about story, yet, they often choose systems that deny them the opportunity to be creative.
A system like that has no beginning or end, your character is the person you imagine and create and while they will have subtle growth in such a system, it will not offer much in the way of unlocking powers, actions or other gaming gymnastics. Your character is your avatar in such games, the one you created at the start and their progression is their story in the world they occupy, not the mechanical power level they achieve.
In such a system, your campaign can theoretically run forever.
While most players want D&D to be the never ending campaign game, the truth is that D&D is the absolute worst of the dead stop games, in fact, even as early as 1st edition AD&D, the concept of a “long campaign” was dead in the water and impossible under the system. The closes you would ever actually get was 1st edition BECMI, its power progression and advancement was so slow that campaigns could go on for a decade before things got out of hand.
My suggestion is that if you want to run a long campaign that stays healthy no matter how long you run it, stay away from systems that see character progression as a “power” element. That is usually the sign of a busy game not made for longevity, if advancement = power, the game has a definitive beginning and end and the faster that power creep is, the shorter the campaign will be.
At the very least you should asses the system and calculate how much life it will have, at what point you reach the dead stop so that you can plan for the campaign’s inevitable end.
Meta Gaming Is Where Good Stories Come From
As a long-time GM, one of the oddest gaming culture developments that has taken place over the last 30 years is player and GM attitudes towards meta-gaming.
For posterity, we should define what Meta-Gaming is, as there are quite a few definitions and variations of the term. To me, meta-gaming is the act of the players using player information to influence results in the game world. Meaning, the player knows what a typical Orcs AC is and they use that information to their advantage to illustrate the most basic of examples. More commonly the use of meta-gaming is less about the game mechanic and more about the game’s story. For example, a player knows that the prince is secretly a vampire, but their character doesn’t, however, they use their player knowledge to expose him as a vampire breaking the continuity of the game world. Their character is behaving as if they have information that they don’t, because the player does. A more complex example, but typically more along the lines of what people mean when they say meta-gaming.
The modern attitude and culture towards meta-gaming is that it is associated with a really negative result. Meaning, people get pissed about it and the insinuation is that it’s akin to cheating at role-playing.
I’m here to tell you that meta-gaming is the most positive thing you can add to your game and here is why.
The object of a role-playing game is to tell a cool story, but cool stories can’t be told consistently out of a vacuum or through random dice outcomes. Cool stories come from our imagination and that requires a certain level of control. Meaning if you want to make cool things happen, you simply need to decide that they do and this is the collaboration that should take place at the table between players and between players and the GM.
There is a very natural resistance by both players and GM’s to simply side with the system, despite any insistence that the story comes first. Often players and GM’s alike want to side with the dice results or with realism (what would really happen in a situation) or worse of all, with the intent to control the path of the story so as not to derail the pre-ordained set of events. In this struggle, gaming culture has vilified meta-gaming as a negative, but it’s meta-game information that actually allows cool things to happen.
The meta game argument is really old, I was 10 years old and watching this cartoon the first time I had it and I’m 50 now and it still comes up at my tables all the time.
What’s more interesting, a player having to pretend and act intentionally ignorant to the fact that the prince is actually a vampire, or a cool scene where the character appears to be a brilliant investigator and makes the discovery creating a feel-good and heroic moment? Who or what is hurt by the latter?
I don’t know about you, but I love feel-good moments. I want the players to succeed, to do unexpected and fun things that create unique story’s and outcomes. I want large story progressions with each session, I don’t want to delay or make players impatiently wait session after session, sitting on information they have as players because things haven’t worked out for them as characters or worse yet make them feel like they are being punished for being or acting foolish in an RPG.
There is hidden meaning in this quote, but basically what he is saying is that role-playing games aren’t really games, they are storytelling tools. Rules I think are important and so did Gary, but they just don’t apply to GM’s who has the burden of making sure the story is fun.
This also ties into the concept of “yes” GMing. Meaning, creating a game in which the players, no matter how silly and outrageous the things they do are, let them progress, succeed, and move forward, let things work. I don’t want to punish players for doing something stupid, I want everything to appear to be smart, I want everything to be a “Han Solo” plan, something so crazy and outrageous that it works, no matter how unrealistic it is, no matter what the dice say. I want the characters to be the stars of the show, not the victims of circumstance.
My point is that meta-gaming is THE best tool that the GM and players have in their tool bag for creating a great story. Let the story happen and not just that, but push it to happen, resolve the story in such a way so that it’s always a feel-good moment. That doesn’t mean everything that happens is positive, but that the story feels good, like that feeling you get when you just watched a great movie, whether it’s Lord of the Rings or Shindlers List. You want that great storytelling impact at every session, in every scene. It should be happening all the time and meta-gaming is a fantastic tool that allows the players to help you on collaboration of creating that effect at the table.
The Game Has To Feel Threatening
Fear of losing your character has to be foremost on everyone’s mind, you have to make that fear real but you should rarely ever execute anyone. Make an example to prove the point if needed, but remember that the game is all smoke and mirrors,
This last point is short and sweet and self-evident, the question I think that needs to be answered is why I think this is critical enough to put on the list of advice.
Before I answer however, I will say that this advice lands in the “style of play” preference category more than the rest which I consider “general good practices and advice”. Still, I’m quite convinced that my preference here stems from my experience of trying all the different methods and landing on this one by default of it being the most optimal and practical for any RPG.
The other thing to note is that this is not a system thing, it’s not about “choosing” a deadly system, quite to the contrary, I would advise against using that as a crutch, this is more about perception which can be created with any mechanic. It’s a conscious choice as a GM to create an environment of high risk, not a gameplay thing, this danger should not be decided by dice.
Ok enough disclosures, why do I think players should fear for their character’s lives. The answer is actually quite simple, it creates tension and drama at the table that exists in the minds of the players. By creating an environment where the players have a legitimate reason to fear losing their character at the hands of their enemy every time they fight or face other dangers, these things become a tough, dramatic choice that comes with potentially the ultimate consequences and this tension rises up the longer the campaign goes on. The more attached the players are to their characters, the greater the drama.
More than that though, players will steer their characters very differently with such high stakes at the table and this draws the game that much closer to a role-playing environment instead of a mechanical one. Further still, when fights break out in a high-risk game, players will have the natural tendency, as will you as a GM, to elaborate on the events of the fight. You are going to want to squeeze out that last ounce of story when you know that the story of your character may very well end right then and there. You are going to want to make every in that fight a scene of deliberate and player-driven (rather than mechanic-driven) actions. It’s how you make fights less a miniature combat game and more of a role-playing scene, even if the system itself is a very tactically oriented one.
Setting Specific Games Are Better
The final piece of advice which I know most people will hate hearing, but systems made as generic genre games like D&D is for fantasy are never even close to as good as specific games with mechanics designed specifically to a setting, for example what The One Ring is to the middle-earth setting.
The reasons are many but it boils down to the fact that a setting-specific game only needs to think about how the rules apply to that one world, theme and atmosphere. Generic systems need to have this broad coverage and you always end up with an overcooked system which despite being overcooked is missing a lot of stuff you may need once you choose the specific setting you will use in your campaign. Its the default problem that systems like D&D have.
Setting specific systems have such an overwhelming advantage over generic systems in the design space that even a really shitty system made for a specific setting is going to be overwhelmingly superior to the best generic system. When a system is actually good and for a specific setting like Alien RPG here, its pure fucking magic.
This is particularly true if you are using a setting that is pre-defined. For example lets say you want to run a campaign in Westeros, using the story of Game of Thrones as your backdrop. Now you have a lot of detail that whatever system you choose needs to cover. Could you run D&D for example using the Westeros setting? Sure, but there are no fireballs in Westeros, in fact, very little magic at all. How do you handle running your own house? Mass combat? You get the idea. The robust and complex system you picked, suddenly has massive gaps in the infrastructure you will need to run your setting and story.
A game designed to serve a specific setting is always going to give you much better results and what you will find is that most systems, even when they are in the generic category, serve a specific styleof play best. D&D for example is great for high fantasy adventure games, it is, its bread and butter.
My advice is always to do this. Figure out what world/setting and style of game you want and then pick the system that supports that, don’t try to squeeze shit into systems that are clearly not designed to support what your looking for. This advice is very much in turn with the opening advice for this article but this is a bit more specific.
Every year like clockwork, my crew and I get together for a 4 day super weekend of nothing but BBQ, beer, and board gaming. We call it the “Hassela Weekend”, named after the sleepy little Swedish town where the event takes place. It is always the gaming highlight of every year and this, our 8th year of the event was no different.
Today we talk about all the games that were played, how they landed with everyone, and what I think. Enjoy the article!
Bang The Dice Game
Bang The Dice Game has been a Hassela tradition since 2019 when it was first introduced and has become a group favorite filler, usually played before or after dinner. This year the weekend kicked off with it and as always the game was played several times with the usual chaotic antics and gaming group chemistry that comes naturally for us.
It’s about the most basic hidden identity game around, you have effectively three factions (The Sherrif and his deputies, The Outlaws, and The Renegade(s). The makeup of who’s who depends on how many players you have, but this is a game where the more merrier. It’s more or less a simple guessing game where everyone wants to appear to be whatever they think will keep them safe, long enough to figure out who everyone else actually is. You roll some dice and shoot people and hope you kill the right person who is not on your team.
It’s fun, quick, and quite perfect as an entertaining way to spend a half hour while you nurse a beer. It’s not something you want to take seriously and I would argue it’s only barely a hidden identity game as the revelations/discovery is pretty quick. For more robust hidden identity games that focus more on the hidden identity theme and mechanics, I would probably recommend Coup or One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Still Bang The Dice Game lands well mainly because you don’t have to go through any weird opening phases like you do in One Night Ultimate Werewolf which can suck up a lot of time nor do you need to fully grasp the powers of the hidden identities like you do in Coup. Here hidden identities are clearly just teams and the discovery is mostly just about trying to figure out who is actually on your team. If you get it wrong you are likely to shoot the wrong person and that is the punchline of the hidden joke within the game.
It’s silly and very basic fun, it’s universally loved in our group.
Jabba’s Palace – Love Letter
Love Letter is a staple filler for any gaming collection and has been for a couple of years for us. It’s got a bit more strategy and “umpf” in my opinion than most fillers. This is one you’re going to really want to win as it’s very satisfying when you do. I’m not at all surprised that Love Letter makes so many “favorites” lists out there.
For all intents and purposes, Jabba’s Palace is a standard Love Letter with Star Wars art, a basic game of trying to keep track of what cards are played and using the special abilities of the card you play on your turn and the strength of the card you keep each round to ensure you are as protected as you can manage to outlast all of your opponents.
There is quite a bit of luck involved in successfully navigating any round of play, but over the course of several hands that make up a full game, usually, the most clever player will win, so it’s definitely not just luck of the draw here, there is a reasonable level of skill and strategy involved.
Love Letter is a perfect filler game, find a theme you like and there is a Love Letter version out there just for you. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like the game, it’s one of those card games that works with everyone, gamers and non-gamers alike.
Game of Thrones: The Board Game
Game of Thrones – The Board Game is another Hassela tradition in my gaming group going back all the way to the early years of the event. In fact, I would say for most of us the term “Hassela Weekend” is synonymous with a round of Game of Thrones The Board Game.
It’s a brutally tough game to win with a lot of strategy and politics at its core. It handles the Game of Thrones theme with perfection, with all of the amazing feints and double-crossing you would expect. There are so many trick plays, subtle chess moves with big pushes, and usually big finishes. In particular, if everyone at the table has a firm grasp of the game’s many subtleties. Our game this weekend was no different, it was a struggle all the way to the bitter end with huge ups and downs, massive upsets and ultimately being decided in a single final battle in the last round of the game. It’s exactly how you hope a Game of Thrones game will go down.
The game does have a few lumps that can be both frustrating and can at times spoil the fun. For one, this is a 6 player game, practically unplayable in my opinion with any other player count. I say that with my group having tried and tried on my occasions, it just doesn’t work. It’s 6 players or bust.
It’s also an absurdly long game, your mileage will vary but you can count on a roughly 5-6 hour game like money in the bank, and if you go the full 10 rounds, you may very well exceed 6+ hours.
It also has some very obvious “balancing” flaws that are very difficult to massage out. For one, Lannister’s position on the board, their starting conditions, and early game options are extremely poor and limited. I would say if you can win as the Lannisters in Game of Thrones the Board Game, you are either a freakish master of strategy or playing against incompetence because they stand very little of doing much more than being a fly to swat at worse to kingmakers at best.
You also have some issues like the Grey Joys which opposite to the Lannisters just have outstanding options and starting conditions as well as a stupidly strong character deck. They are beatable so I wouldn’t call them broken as I definitely would the Lannisters, but it’s going to be a group effort to keep them under control. Starks are also very strong and the Baratheons can quite literally win the game in two rounds if people aren’t very attentive and actively invading them from all sides from the very start. They are like a time clock that tests your knowledge of the game, if you don’t know what to do, THEY WILL win.
Some of these things are just nuances of the game and are part of the charm and challenge. I might make a few changes, via some house rules to help out the Lannisters, but warts and all this is a fantastic strategy game even though it’s very tough to get to the table and is definitely a “once in a long while” type of game at best. I would not want to play this game with any regularity but it’s always welcome at Hassela (as long as we have 6!)
Game of Thrones Trivia
When it comes to judging or even speaking about trivia games, my feeling is that they are basically all the same. It’s a game of questions and you try to answer them, you either like that sort of thing or you don’t. Trivia games with a theme like Game of Thrones, challenge your knowledge in a specific area, so if you are into a show, book, movie or whatever and you can find a trivia game on that topic it can be fun.
I’m a bit indifferent to this sort of thing, I mean, I like trivia well enough so I have no issue sitting around a table and trying to test my knowledge for a bit in particular on a subject I enjoy, but I don’t think this sort of thing falls into the realm of “boardgame” in the same sense of the word in which I normally would use it.
Still, this particular trivia game has an area control mechanic, the questions had multiple choice answers, and the difficulty, at least for my gaming crew who are all Game of Thrones fans was relatively easy. I think about 80% of the questions asked were answered correctly so the game played quickly, it was fun to reminisce about the show, and as a group of fans, it went over pretty well.
I don’t know that I have much more to say about it, trivia games are trivia games. They neither surprise nor disappoint, they just do what they do and you either like that sort of thing or you don’t, the specific version or topic of a trivia game isn’t going to change your mind.
Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy
Eclipse was number 6 on my all-time favorite games list from this year and I was excited to bring it to Hassela for a big 4x game event, showdown. This epic level 4x game is a cross-over game between classic Ameri-Trash war games and modern Euro’s which might seem like a strange combination but is actually the norm for most 4x games in general. Twilight Imperium of course immediately comes to mind which also had classic Euro game mechanics like role-selection and token-based action economy mixed in with rolling handfuls of dice.
Eclipse I always felt should be great at bringing a Twilight Imperium experience to the table in a much more reasonable amount of time with a lot less nuance, but more “core gameplay”. The mechanics of Eclipse are very efficient and streamlined, there is a very quick progression toward conflict and the hope is that you end up with games filled with big battles and tight final moments as players try to squeeze out as many points as they can out of every aspect of the 4x civilization building experience.
Unfortunately, our experience this weekend was considerably less exciting than that in my opinion, in fact I would say it brushed up against being boring.
I think part of the problem with Eclipse is that many of the games mechanics don’t play out like you hope or imagine they should. The game is about controlling space with spaceships, expanding your civilization, building technologies and upgrading your ships and it tries to encourage conflicts between players through generous victory point rewards for fighting. All the mechanics and the play loops are there to encourage exciting games, but typically what ends up happening is just a lot of turtling and build-up to a very anti-climatic end.
There is just no push and pull on the territory control part of the game and because your economy controls your action economy, very often once you have built some ships, did some research and some upgrades, you are out of steam. Since the game is a race to build up and there is a lot of pressure to “keep up”, you end up getting the build-up without the release.
There are 8 rounds in the game and with a 5-6 player game, it can and does still take 5-6 hours to complete, so in the end the main sales pitch “Twilight Imperium – Light” really is very marginal at best. You shave off a couple of hours, but I’m not sure the investment of time is well spent. I think I would much rather play a 7-8 hour game of Twilight Imperium than a 5-6 hour game of Eclipse and after this weekend’s play, I’m seriously questioning Eclipse’s position on my best-of list.
I think it’s a game with a lot of potential, but this last playthrough was disappointing, there just wasn’t any fire, and no memorable moments. It played like a stale and very uninspired cube pusher. It was a bit of a bummer because this was the game I think I was most excited to get to the table this year and ended up being the biggest disappointment of the weekend for me.
Red Rising
Red Rising was introduced to the crew at the event for the first time. It’s a relatively simple game of hand management and building combinations of cards to create a victory-scoring bonus at the end.
This was a tricky game because, in addition to the scoring points on the cards and the combo bonuses, you also had some secondary resources and tracks to manage which also scored points and were key to triggering the end game. It kind of made the game a race to build up your hand, but you had to keep up on the tracks because your hand was not going to be sufficient to win on its own.
One of the key features of the game is of course the setting and having read the first book (Red Rising), I had a connection to the game that not all the players shared, but as a whole, it was a very abstract card game that really focused on mechanics more then bringing the setting to the forefront. If you are looking to play a game in this Dystopian future, know that besides some familiar names and setting concepts like Hellium and The Institute, the representation here is pretty light.
There is a lot of timing and manipulation in the game that determines your decisions but the moves boil down to play a card and pick up a card from four different tracks. The “player choices” are fairly slim as is the impact of any single play. I would put this into the “light” game category, even though it takes about 45-60 minutes to play, it sort of felt like a fun little filler that went on a bit longer than most fillers would.
I thought it was a competent game mechanic but there really was no twist to the game, it kind of had limited energy that was mostly spent after the first play. I can’t see myself getting excited to have repeat plays of this one, though I would not object to either. It was a fine, middle-of-the-road card game. I will say, I thought the art style was great, it was very easy to learn and there was something very intuitive about how it played. It didn’t require anyone to explain the strategy of the game to me, it unfolded in front of you very quickly and obviously. There are many different routes to victory and I’m not sure I uncovered anything specifically that I could point to and say “do that and you can win”, but it was very clear which cards went with which cards and how you could combo them. The issue wasn’t understanding what cards you wanted into your hand, but manipulating the game to ensure that you got what you wanted.
Tapestry
Tapestry is one of those games that is difficult to define, you just know you like it and you want to play. In our gaming group, this one has shown up in the Hassela weekend lineup several times over the years and is one of the very few games that ever see’s repeat plays at the same event. We ended up playing it twice this year again.
I think if push comes to shove, the only thing I can say about it is, play it at least 3 times before you decide if you like it or not. It may seem strange but this is a game of subtlety and nuance, there is so much genius built into this very simple mechanic of moving cubes up a track. It’s absolutely fascinating to see the kind of growth and expansion you can create from such humble beginnings as the starting conditions of this game. 4 resources turn into a massive, sprawling empire!
There are no “big moves” in this game (usually). It’s a slow and methodical manipulation of resources to squeeze every last ounce of juice out of them. It’s a game about optimization of your actions and efficiency.
Frankly, it’s addictive, I play this game a lot on BoardGameArena and even though I have probably played it more than 30 times just this year, I still feel drawn to it.
To play it in person has its own charm because this is also one of the most beautiful games you could ever put on the table, the production quality is extreme. It’s Kickstarter magic and we are lucky that a member of our group is a super fan and has purchased all of the expansions.
If there is any drawback to the game is that experience = points. When you play with people who have taken the time to unravel the puzzle that is Tapestry, you can have very tight and competitive games, but new players, no matter how competent they are as gamers are going to struggle for quite a few games before they hit those 300-400 point scores that are pretty standard finishes for experienced players. I recall the first game I ever played of Tapestry I barely managed to score 60 points, these days I consider any score under 250 a complete failure. The road to experience is filled with brain-busting analysis and acquisition of micro experiences which for a gamer is basically “the juice” that keeps them coming back.
I love this game, I think it’s one of the finest examples of original and modern game design.
Dumber Than A Box Of Rocks
It’s a silly trivia game, we play it, we like it, and no one knows why. It’s the board game equivalent of a youtube video of a guy taking a golf ball to the balls, I don’t care who you are, that shit is funny and so is competing in a trivia game in which a literal rock can outsmart you.
Valor and Villany: Minions of Mordak
When we played this one, I was ready right then and there to call this “The Best of Hassela 2024”. It was so good.
When it comes to these “you get a character, let’s fight monsters” games, I’m usually not a fan and I have played a lot of them. The main logic is almost always the same for me…. Why are we playing this? Why not just play a role-playing game like D&D?
Valor & Villainy separates itself from the pack of “adventures fighting monsters” games in so many ways. I think its charm above all else is that it doesn’t take itself seriously, in fact, the game is, itself from the instruction book, to the spells, to the monsters, just a series of fantasy genre-driven gags that fit neatly into a well-executed combat mechanic. This is a game where you draw a loot card, read it and laugh, because whoever created that card, has clearly played a lot of D&D. They know the inside jokes and the silliness of the fantasy genre and just leans right into it.
Valor & Villainy is about as close as you can get to watching a comedy cartoon as a board game. Beyond silliness, however, you have very smooth mechanics with a ton of strategy and challenge. It doesn’t punish you for failure as so many of these games often do and so the game never pumps the breaks, it’s always full-force action sequences.
The combat mechanics in this game are perfectly tuned to the theme, the flow of the game is quick and the results are always fun. Right now if you asked me what the best fantasy adventure board game I have ever played was, even after a single play I would instantly point you to Valor and Villainy. It was just perfect.
The core premise of the game is simple, one player is the main villain and for the first 5-6 rounds, they are spreading “evil” in the land in the form of monsters and curses that the player characters, aka, the heroes have to deal with. The main purpose of these early encounters is the same for both the villains and the heroes. For the villain, it’s to try to kill the adventurers so the villain can gain power in preparation for the big fight and for the players it’s to kill monsters and find loot, for the same reason.
After a few rounds, the villain arrives on the battlefield and you have a big fight for the win. There are exploration mechanics, spell mechanics, and several distinctively different characters to choose from. Everything you want out of a fantasy adventure game.
So why is it not “The Best Game of Hassela 2024”? Well, the competition was pretty stiff, more on that later.
Suffice it to say if you love fantasy adventure board games, whip out the credit card, this one is worth every penny!
Condottiere
This 1995 classic filler shows up to the big Hassela weekend event every year like clockwork and this year was no different.
This trick-taking game with an area control element is all about trying to get the most out of your hand so that you can either win the battle, or exit it with sufficient strength to win the next one. You stretch your hand but you have to be careful about overcommitting because you might find yourself winning one hand, but then not even able to functionally participate in the next.
The decisions about which fights are important are driven by the area control mechanic which defines the lands you fight over and you need to pick your battles carefully. It’s not about winning every trick you can, it’s about winning the trick that matters.
It’s a straight shooter kind of a trick-taking game, no big bells and whistles, just play your cards right and know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em and know when to run.
Fun game, I think it’s a staple game that belongs in everyone’s collection.
Factory Funner
I’m a bit hesitant on this one, which is not to say I didn’t like it, in fact, I liked it quite a bit but…. there was something off about the sequence of the play that spoiled it a bit.
In Factory Funner you get some tiles that represent machines that produce things, requiring a couple of inputs of “fluid” of different colors and producing some kind of “fluid” output of different colors. As you lay out tiles and build connections between machines you score points for your efficiency. The fewer pipes and connectors you put down the more points you earn. It is effectively a puzzle game you have to solve on the fly without knowing what all of the pieces you will need to put down will be.
It’s a bit strange, but the factory building part and the stress of trying to make things fit and figuring out the puzzle was fantastic, I loved it right out of the gate. However, the method of how you get the tiles you are actually using has this live-action “grab it quickly or miss out” part, which sort of lacked fluidity and ended up kind of roughing up an otherwise good game.
I can see what they are going for here. You have to build a factory from a limited selection of tiles and you have to decide which tile you are going to take quickly to add extra stress to that key decision. I think that is fine, I actually like it, it reminds me a bit of Galaxy Truckers. I just don’t think they got the sequence of play right.
I would have preferred a drafting mechanic, or some sort of draw 3 tiles, you have 5 seconds to pick one, or some sort of turn-based thing. Anything but the “how fast can you grab the stuff you want before the other players do” thing which works fine in Galaxy Trucker but it’s because you have tons of tiles to pick from in Galaxy Trucker. Here you have as many tiles as there are players and you end up picking your own tiles most of the time just because you at least have some semblance of control that way.
I don’t know, for me the whole “grab a tile quickly” thing spoiled a pretty fascinating puzzle game of building factories. With this mechanic, I put it in the “ok” category without it, meaning the puzzly bit alone, I thought it was very good.
Hunt For The Ring
A hidden movement game based on the classic Lord Of The Rings story where Frodo (one of the players) and his companions make their way from The Shire to Rivendell while trying to avoid the pursuit of Nazgul represented by the rest of the players.
There are not very many hidden movement games out there and even fewer good ones. I’m reminded of another game on my shelf collecting dust with a similar premise called Fury of Dracula which I used to favor but have found over the years is just a bit overcooked in certain places.
Hunt For The Ring succeeds where Fury of Dracula fails in that they really focus on the “searching for them” part of the game and don’t try to overcomplicate the “finding them part”. In Fury of Dracula when you finally locate Dracula you have to fight him using one of the most convoluted combat mechanics I have ever seen put into a game. The result is this weird anti-climatic ending to this great first part of the game where you play hide and go seek with a pointlessly complex combat mechanic to resolve the winner of the game.
Hunt For The Ring keeps that “we found him” part of the game simple using a familiar corruption mechanic from War of The Ring (a game made by the same designer). The result is very satisfying and Hunt For The Ring ended up being one of the highlights of the Hassela weekend as a result for me.
They nailed the hide-and-go-seek part of the game, they did a great job keeping the rules simple and interruption shinanigans to a minimum. It’s a straightforward game of trying to find and trap the fellowship.
I like this one, I would happily play it again. The great thing about hidden movement games like Hunt For The Ring is that they are generally very simple, Hunt For The Ring did have some complexity to it but most of it was there to serve the hide-and-go-seek game which is exactly where the focus should be in a game like this.
A+ from me on this one.
Hegemony
Last but certainly not least is Hegemony, the game I would put as the firm winner of the 4-day weekend and even a contender for my pick for game of the year.
Holy shit my mind was blown by this one. I don’t even know exactly how to put it into words, but this was without question one of the most unique games I have played in a long time. It’s fair to say the game is pretty complex, in fact, I know we did several important things incorrectly on our first playthrough, but even with that, it was abundantly clear that this game was going to be hitting the table in the future. There is a lot of juice to explore here and right now, I’m completely fascinated by the possibilities.
Essentially the game is about navigating the very real feeling issues of social economics from the perspective of one of the four asymmetrical classes (factions in the game) of society (Working Class, Middle Class, Capitalists, and The State). A concept so thematically executed in these mechanics, that it’s almost uncomfortable.
In the game each player has to navigate their social class to success by scoring victory points related to the class’s core function in society. The catch is that the requirements for success aren’t always crystal clear in the sense that there are many combined causes and effects that are not always in your control or fully predictable. The game has a lot of complex interactions in which you are trying to adjust society to serve you, while making sure your competitors are also served, because they are ultimately responsible for serving you in many regards as well (their success is often your success), even though by serving you they are also screwing you most of the time. I don’t know if that makes sense, it shouldn’t, but it’s how it works and the weirdest thing about it is that you end up feeling both the connection to the real world and a sense of compassion for the class you’re representing whether you agree with the abstracted political implications or not.
There is a kind of rhythm to the game that feels very personal in a way. You are hitched up to a mode of thinking depending on your faction and there are basic instincts and an almost belligerent-like execution of actions sometimes where you forget that you’re playing a game and your brain gets wrapped up in the abstracted politics of the fictitious world your playing in. Emotions can run quite high.
For example, the tax rate, a critical policy in the game has a wide sweeping impact on everyone, but there are both benefits and consequences for having a high or a low tax rate for everyone. Meaning it’s never exclusively good or bad. Make the tax rate too high and suddenly businesses start shutting down and creating unemployment, make the tax rate too low and the state might fail resulting in massive penalties for everyone including wage reductions, tax hikes, and potentially mass unemployment.
There are various policies like this each with their own very global impact, but managing these isn’t the only social issue to contend with. The economics of an always-growing population create all manner of issues for everyone and the working class in particular has a core reliance on everyone else’s ability to manage their faction. More to the point, if players fail to manage the society well enough the working class can create stiff consequences which include strikes and demonstrations that can cost everyone both production, money, and victory points.
As such there is a need to cooperate to a certain degree even between the most obvious competitors like the working class and the capitalists, but how do you cooperate with someone who wants the exact opposite thing as you do and neither side can win the game if the other gets what they want.
The whole game falls firmly into the “impossible to resolve” category and so the trick to the whole thing becomes one of maneuvering and clever and well-timed strategic moves in an attempt to simply out-pace everyone else on the victory point track as society is catapulted towards inevitable disaster. Failure in a word is imminent, but from the ashes, one of these classes will emerge to claim victory.
A big part of the game that sort of “breaks the rules” is in the action cards each player has, which are also asymmetrical decks unique for each class. These cards allow you to do things the basic actions don’t and it’s in the smart use of these cards that most players will find their victory. As a general rule, each time you are forced to take a basic action instead of leveraging the effects of a card, it is a step towards defeat as it’s only through the use of these cards you can get ahead. Basic actions are a recovery or corrective measure, not a plan. Playing these cards however, is tricky because you have to create just the right conditions in most cases to really get the most out of them. If you are constantly forced to take corrective measures by discarding cards for basic actions rather than focusing on the execution of a plan that involves the effects of your cards, your chances of success dwindle in the very esoteric and hard-to-see math behind how victory point acquisition works.
There is a natural rhythm to the game that creates inevitable hostility. Basically in a status-quo environment in which everyone cooperates and the game simply plays out at a “medium” give and take, the state is the automatic winner, this is by design as the state essentially wants to keep everyone at an even keel. No one can keep up on points with the state if they are simply collecting medium salaries, paying medium prices for goods, at a medium tax rate with the population growing at a medium level. For each class, there has to be some major advantage in the policies in their favor for them to get an edge in the victory point acrobatics.
Each class has its Achilles heel sort of speak, a single policy that when it’s in their favor to an extreme will guarantee that they will continually outscore everyone else during the scoring round. Manipulating circumstances to get that in place is difficult, usually unlikely as long as all the players are aware of the impact, but inevitably there are short-term gains to be had sometimes by siding with someone to give them what they want.
For example, having a low tax rate can help the working class to expand a little quicker and have some reserve cash so that they can react a little better to a constantly changing game state, but low tax causes problems for the state and the reserves of affordable resources dries up opening an opportunity for the capitalist to capitalize on a starving market. The result is a working class that goes plus-minus, a failed state while the capitalist and middle class score obscene amounts of points.
Often you have to make unfavorable decisions to keep a particular class from failing outright because each class has a failsafe response that screws everyone when they are pushed too hard. The working class can demonstrate and protest shutting down production, the state can fail and do a hard reset causing high taxation and the capitalists and middle class can sell off companies and cut deeply into everyone’s bottom line sending them to the unemployment line. The results are always pretty devastating to everyone when any class fails to remain stable and most often the person least affected is the person’s faction that failed, which is key to the balance of the game. It forces others to worry about your success to some extent. You don’t want to be too helpful, but you also don’t want to outright crush anyone either.
There is so much more to say about this game and its many nuances if you can imagine that all the above is from a single play of the game.
If there is a negative to Hegemony, it’s that the rules are quite intricate and it’s very easy to get them wrong and when you do, even if it’s just a small rule, it has a huge impact. For example in our first play-through, we did the check IMF test after paying taxes, but you actually do the IMF check first and the taxes second. This completely changes the game, yet there is only one line in the entire rulebook that mentions it despite it being a very critical rule. The rulebook however is well written and the cheat sheets that come with the game are very helpful, so once you learn to play the game properly, that initial difficulty of the game which coincidently adds a lot to the length, goes away. Our first game took the better part of 7 hours, but I’m 100% certain we will cut that time in half quite easily for our next playthrough.
Hands one of the best games I have played this year!
Conclusion
All I can ever say about our Hassela weekends each year is that it’s the gaming highlight of the year for me. A fantastic weekend of pure and uninterrupted fun time in the company of the best group of guys I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. It is pure bliss!
Every year I hope that when I return from the weekend I have made a new discovery and most years that ends up being true. This year Hegemony blew the doors off, but I think a big nod of approval has to go out to both Hunt For The Ring and Valor and Villany, two absolute gems.
It’s been a while since I updated my best-of-all-time list, so today we remedy that situation. I have been looking forward to making this list this year, but as is always the case, the choices where hard and it took almost as much time to decide as it took to write the article. Here we go!
20. Underwater Cities
A new addition to my list, this is a game that had an immediate impact on me the first time I played it and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I just saw, from the get-go, all the amazing possibilities and I couldn’t wait to start exploring it.
It might be infatuation, games usually enter my list that way and it’s only through many follow-up plays that I will determine as to whether or not a game is worthy to remain on the list. That said, I think it’s looking pretty good for this one.
This little Euro about building cities underwater has a lot in common with many other long-time classics on this list. It’s a tight little worker placement and resource management game with that simple design, but that deep gameplay combination that makes so many of my favorite Euros grace our tables on repeat. I’m looking forward to seeing if the hype holds up long-term. Could it be a challenger worthy of comparison to Terraforming Mars? Maybe with some expansion, for now, it’s got novelty on its side and that is good enough for me.
The brilliant part with Underwater Cities is that it managed a little magic trick very few Euros pull of which is that at its core all mechanics of this game are critical to winning. You can’t ignore or disregard any part of it, do so and you WILL lose. Everything on the board is part of your strategy, it all matters and I love that. So many games have key mechanics that are essentially pointless or victory point areas that simply don’t matter which is both a trap for inexperienced players and a boring element of the game that goes mostly unused. Few games manage to avoid such pitfalls but Underwater Cities ensures that everything included really matters.
More than that, Underwater Cities makes sure that every card in the game serves a purpose within some strategy, there are no useless cards you never play which is so common with card-driven games as well. I’m reminded of Terraforming Mars which has cards that are simply dead draws that you never use.
Great game with tons of potential.
19. Tapestry
Tapestry is something of a staple game in my group’s consciousness, but it rose and fell off our radar over time. We don’t play it often but every time it does come out, we are all reminded of its brilliant yet rather odd mixture of complexity merged with elegant simplicity. Simply put, this is a fantastic game we all love, we just sometimes forget about it in the mix of the hundreds of games we own and play between the seven members of my gaming crew.
I love describing the core rule of the game because it’s so simple. For each round, you move a cube on one of 4 paths (Science, Exploration, Technology, or Military). That’s it, that’s the game. What happens on those spots, how the mechanics and resource management converge to create strategy, is where the genius of this game stems from. It’s more than that though because there are lots of resource management games out there, What makes this game unique is the dynamic “cultures” you can play, each with its own angle on the game, its own advantages, and its own mechanical architecture. This mixed with the critical play of Tapestry cards creates infinite dynamics making each game a true white elephant experience.
I would not argue all of these “cultures” are created equally, there are certainly winners (looking at you Historians) and losers (Mystics), but we have found over the years playing this game that anyone can win with just about any culture, it’s just about solving that immutable puzzle that lays within and the dynamic nature of how board state develops.
I think it’s worth taking a moment to pat the developers on the back for the expansions to Tapestry as well. Usually, I’m lukewarm on expansions, they tend to overcomplicate already great games and with little payout. With Tapestry the expansions service the game well, adding great new, alternative options that help struggling cultures and balance out the really strong ones. Well done!
Arts and Architecture in particular is a true gem so far as expansions go. It adds an Arts track that makes having a 5th player viable in the game. Until this expansion, being the 5th player and being last in the turn order at the start was a very tough position to win from and this expansion really remedies that.
Fantastic game, I’m happy to both recommend it and bring it back to my best-of list, it deserves the praise and honestly probably should have been on this list all along.
18. 1830: Railways and Robber Barons
Slipping some in recent years, the 18XX game that started an entire sub-genre of gaming is one I find fewer and fewer opportunities to play this one with only a single play in the last 24 months (roughly). That is not a reflection of its quality in any way shape or form, it’s just a bit tough of a game to get to the table.
I still think this is one of the best economic games ever made, in fact the entire 18XX game genre is amazing with wonderful handling of the stock market and company management, a great system for creating and running railways with a deep and meaningful, albeit cutthroat, strategic core gameplay. It’s just a great game, but it does fall into that “takes a long time to play” category of games for most people, so it’s hard to get a crew together to play it.
I can strongly recommend the 1844 and 1854 variants as well, what is cool about this one is that you have two games with two very different focuses. One is more focused on stock markets and investment elements, while the other is more focused on train operations and company management. Both are fantastic.
It’s also not particularly easy to teach so unless you are playing all the time, it can be a bit rough to remember all the rules and pass them on to players even if they are coming back for a 2nd or 3rd run. In fact this one is kind of guilty of having some gotcha rules, so knowing the games mechanics in great detail is critical to success and this can frustrate less attentive players. Suffice it to say it’s just a “difficult” game for a number of reasons and it’s hard to muster up the strength and excitement to get it to the table. It’s definitely a lifestyle game, but fortunately, if you learn one 18XX game like 1830, you are pretty much ready to play any of them.
Even with all that said, I get requests for this one from select members of my gaming group so it is in our consciousness and there is a desire to play it, but yeah, it’s a tough one to recommend to the average gamer. You really need to have an affinity for economic train games, the obvious being obvious. It’s a classic favorite of mine, but it’s getting harder and harder to justify its existence on this list and it drops on this list as a result of the “I must be playing it” rule that I have layered over this list to ensure that everything on here is everything I’m actively still playing.
17. Star Trek Fleet Captains
I’m happy to see this game still make the list, but it’s been quite a while since I was excited to get it to the table. This is a great 2-3 player game for Star Trek fans only which I’m finding fewer and fewer people are these days, though I definitely think its the best Star Trek game I have ever owned or played.
The premise is quite simple, it’s a kind of competitive adventure game with everything you know and love about Star Trek crammed into one game, you get the characters, the ships, the missions, the stories, and the atmosphere you know and love. It’s about the same feeling I get as watching classic Star Trek from any era without the edge lord bullshit of modern Star Trek which by the way, I hate, a stain on an otherwise perfect franchise!
Great game, a great theme, a great look, it has everything you want out of a Star Trek and is the only Star Trek game you will ever need once you have played it. It covers the original series, next-generation series including Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and the Enterprise series. In my view, when Star Trek was at its absolute best.
Unfortunately, this one is out of print and what is available on the secondary market is crazy expensive. It’s kind of a bummer for someone reading this today and wishing to get their hands on it. Before you ask, no I will never sell this one, it’s a permanent fixture and a pride of my game collection.
17. Tides of Iron
Despite having not played this one in quite a while, I will still stick to my guns here and say that this is the single, best tactical World War II game ever made. It’s got simple rules with deep meaningful gameplay without that historical “edginess” a lot of historical war games can have. This is a historical war game made so that anyone can play it without that “war gamer” mentality of most historical war games jammed in there.
Not only that, Tides of Iron uses a lot of very familiar historical war game mechanics so if you want to sort of explore the genre further, it’s a really great ground floor, a sort of entry level into the larger world of historical war games. For a long time, I had a regular opponent for this game and I played the crap out of it and I never felt any need for the many expansions that were put out for it. These days Tides of Iron is played mostly online through various virtual tabletops but it has a niche, but loyal audience and it’s not difficult to find them.
Sadly I don’t think this one is in print right now either, so it can be difficult to find but it was nicely supported for a very long time so there are plenty of copies out there on the secondary market unlike many out-of-print games, this one is very much “gettable”. If you are looking for a great two-player World War II game, this is a fantastic one, well worth the investment
16. Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan
New to the list, for as long as I can remember I have wanted to try a war game using a “blocks” system, reminiscent of classic games like Stratego where you have a sort of dynamic fog of war in which each player can only see their own units. Somehow I knew I would love this sort of game and my instincts were quite right.
I love medieval Japanese themes, probably among my favorite historical and cultural eras so this game in particular fit like a glove. I waited a long time for an updated printing, picked it up and it did not disappoint.
This is a card-driven game (which is another genre I love) combined with a “block” game in which players fight over Japan in a bid for the shogunate in a very straightforward war game.
It does have that “historical war gamer” feel to it, but the mechanics are relatively simple and straight to the point, the gameplay is deep, the strategic elements refined and as a whole the game is perfectly balanced. This game has been around for a long time and for good reason, It truly is a game of skill, but it’s not so involved that a player needs multiple plays to be competitive. Most people I have introduced the game to took to it right away and put up a good fight even on their first run. It’s ranked 200 on Boardgamegeek which is pretty decent for a historical war game, but notably, it holds a very prestigious 5th highest-ranked war game on BBG which is a pretty big deal.
I highly recommend this one for fans of war games, looking for a great two-player experience and though it’s the only block game I have ever played, I would imagine it does quite well by comparison to others in its genre. This is a game with awesome replayability, a new fixture in my collection, and one I always look forward to getting to the table.
15. Terraforming Mars
Putting Terraforming Mars on this list at this stage may seem quite odd, why has it never made the list before? The answer here is quite complex, but it is worth pointing out that this was Gamersdungeon 2016 Game of The Year and scored a 3.65 on its review which is quite decent for a Euro on this site. I’m harsh with Euro games probably because I find games that are not interactive to make for a weak experience and many if not most Euro games are practically solo games you play simultaneously. That is not he case for Terraforming Mars however and not the reason it has been excluded from this list before.
The main reason for it never making a list is because frankly I just didn’t really play it after the initial novelty of it wore off. It had collected dust for the better part of 4 years and I never felt motivated to get it to the table. It is a well-designed game but it is excessively long with a slow, boring start and it’s not particularly fun to teach or even play with people who don’t already know how to play it well. This is one of those games where if you are new, I’m going to beat you senseless for the first dozen or so games until you figure it out.
Over the last few years, several things have changed in my gaming group and for the game in general. For starters, they released several expansions for the game that all targeted the thing about the game I disliked the most which was its slow start and length. The Prelude expansion in particular cuts out that first full hour of the “nothing happens” period at the start of the game. In addition, everyone in my group continued to play the game and they all got good at it, so now when we sit down to play, everyone knows the rules and everyone is very competitive and the game moves at a reasonable pace.
The Prelude expansion for Terraforming Mars is quintessential, I would not play this game without it. It single-handedly cuts an unnecessary, boring first hour out of the game and probably should just be a standard inclusion in a future edition.
Those two things combined have catapulted this game to the front of the line and it got a massive resurgence in my gaming group. Under such ideal conditions, Terraforming Mars shines and is without question what I recognized about it early on, a true gem in the rough that takes a bit of work to fish out. I love this game, I always have but there are lots of games on my shelf I love that rarely see play for various reasons. War of the Ring for example is among my favorite games of all time but it’s a complex two-player game that takes many hours to play. It’s an absolute bear to teach, and like Terraforming Mars sucks balls when playing against new players who don’t know what they are doing, so it’s nearly impossible to get to the table and I haven’t played it in years.
Terraforming Mars earns its rightful place on this list and I’m happy to add it and I’m especially happy to be playing it again.
14. Great Western Trail
This Euro about running cattle in the old west resurfaces on my list for several reasons, but perhaps only one matters which is that I’m playing it all the time online and at home. This game started to run cold for me for a long time but it just keeps coming back around because it is so replayable, so fun, and challenging. It’s just a really good game and I’m happy to welcome it back to my top games list.
I think this is the only game that has ever completely dropped off my top games list and then made a comeback. This is a game that I recommend to all hobbyists without any caveats, for me it’s almost like the new Settlers of Catan, just a staple of my gaming collection worthy of a wide range of situations.
There are two new variants of this one now which give fans even more cowboy for their buck, Great Western Trail New Zealand and Argentina, as well as the Rails of the North expansion.
I haven’t tried the new variants of Great Western Trail, so I have no opinion to offer there, but I have tried the expansion and like most expansions, I find it completely unnecessary. All Rails of the North does for the game is extend its length and makes an otherwise very elegant game, messy, adding needed complexity to the rules.
This expansion adds an entirely separate mico-game with where trains can go, pretty much ruining an otherwise perfect game. It’s a very hard pass.
I personally saw no reason to upgrade to the 2nd edition of the game, but I do find that it’s a bit more streamlined, so if you can get the 2nd edition, it’s probably the way to go. The changes are extremely minor though, so if you already own the 1st edition, there is no reason to get the 2nd edition.
13. Hansa Teutonica
This 2009 Euro about building trade routes first made an appearance at our big board gaming weekend a few years back and has been a staple of that event ever since. The more I played it the more I wanted to play it and at this point, I have come to realize that this one belongs on my list.
This is a tight little action economy type of game about building trade routes in Germany and I will grant you, so far as the theme goes it does not sound exciting because it’s not. This is a thinker, one of those games that will make your brain hurt but win you over on mechanics. It’s a highly interactive Euro with a lot of take that kind of moves and just fits perfectly with my gaming crew of sociopaths who love to watch the world burn.
There is nothing particularly “special” about this cube pusher on a high level, it’s very traditional victory point salad-style game, but it has this really clever interaction and tension from start to finish and the games are always close. I find when my group plays this one, everyone is highly attentive and contemplative with each move. It’s a thinky and clever game that draws out the competitive nature between players and ultimately creates a great gaming experience.
I find this game is far better with more players and though it can run a bit long, on the 2-3 hour side, I find that during the end game, everyone is wishing there were just a couple of more turns so that they could finish this or that route. It is long but in a good way.
Great game, I definitely recommend it if you’re already a fan of Euro games.
12. Western Empires
This one made my TOP 5 BOARDGAMES THAT WERE ALMOST GREAT, BUT HAD A FLAW THAT RUINED THEM list in the number 1 spot for one very critical reason and that is that it has player elimination, made more egregious by being a 12+ hour event game. It’s a terrible sin, especially given that Western Empires is a remake of the 80’s classic Advanced Civilization and 999 games did not take the opportunity to correct this one game-breaking flaw.
Still, it would be a stone-cold lie to pretend like the game is not extraordinary even if it is a product of its time (aka a remake of Advanced Civilization for better or for worse).
Western Empires is not just a game, it’s a gaming experience, an event game of epic proportions that allows for a large gaming group (even larger if you blend it with Eastern Civilization to create Mega Civilization able to support up to 18 players). In fact, the more the merrier, this game really shines with a full table.
While elimination is a part of the game, it’s not exactly a likely scenario with players who are even moderately competent, but it’s a tough game to get any experience with because how often do you have 9 players willing to spend 12+ hours at the table?
I love it, I would love to play it a hell of a lot more than I get an opportunity to, and I do think if you have a group that can get this to the table, this is a gaming event on a scale of which nothing ever produced can match. It’s a one-of-a-kind, white elephant and it earns its place on the list of best games of all time if for no other reason than posterity!
11. Spirit Island
When it comes to complex, intricate, and deep cooperative games, there is only one game that rules the genre today and that is Spirit Island. Easily one of the most elaborate and dynamic cooperative games I have ever played with infinite replayability as well as one of the most challenging games in existence. Be prepared to lose…a lot.
It boasts a massive library of expansions, each one better than the last, Spirit Island is practically a hobby in its own right, certainly a lifestyle game. You can play this one solo, though I think it’s a much lesser experience. This game is best played in a group of 3 or 4.
It’s a long and very contemplative game, you spend a great deal of the time discussing how to approach the constant influx of micro puzzles that need to be solved and there is nothing quite as satisfying as coming up with an answer to seemingly impossible-to-solve situations. In fact, the satisfaction of winning a game of Spirit Island is so rich, I can’t think of a game I’m more eager to play.
It is a time-consuming game though, even with a group well versed in the rules, Spirit Island is an absolute minimum of a 3-hour experience and will usually hit that 4-5+ hour space which means it borders on an event game. I would argue it’s actually a great game to build an event around, though it’s not the sort of “everyone is laughing and having a good time” type of event, more of a “serious gamers” type of event, which is not my personal favorite way to run big gaming events. I rather have everyone drinking beer and giggling at my events and this game doesn’t really produce that kind of atmosphere.
Fantastic game, destined to become a classic.
10. Paths of Glory
I will be the first to admit that this is not a game for most people, hell even among historical war game fans this game falls into a rather niche genre. For one it’s based on World War I which is a historical period that isn’t exactly well-known, in some ways it almost feels like you’re playing some sort of historical fantasy game. It’s a card-driven game, it has a point-to-point map and it’s driven by some quirky mechanics to flesh out the history you probably don’t know that much about. Suffice it to say, it’s peculiar from most perspectives.
That said, I find it to be an establishment in its own right, this is a game you can study, learn its intricacies, and really dive deep into the many implications of strategies and counter strategies. It’s absolutely one of the most beautifully designed games I have ever run across, but it demands a lot from a player, a true commitment to find its genius and if you can find a regular opponent that enjoys all of these amazing nuances as much as you do, you get magic at the table.
Hands down one of my favorite historical war gaming delicacies, this refined masterpiece is a piece of gaming history no true hobbyist should pass up. Historical war games simply don’t get better than this, it’s a historical war game that is itself a piece of gaming history by which all others are measured in my opinion.
9. Through The Ages: Story of a New Civilization
Through the Ages in one form or another has been on my top gaming list for many years, at one point even rising to the number 1 spot. I’m a huge fan of Vlaada Chvatil, I find him to be a completely uncompromising and highly original game designer. By being that however, he tends to make very niche games that for most gamers fall into either the “love it” or “hate it” category with little in between.
I consider Through The Ages Chvatil’s Mona Lisa, but he has brought other amazing original titles like Mage Knight The Board Game, Codenames, Galaxy Trucker, Dungeon Lords, and Space Alert most of which grace my shelves, all distinctively unique and classics in their own right. Each one is more ingenious than the last, he is an absolute miracle worker. You want to be a great designer, play his games, and learn how it’s done.
Through The Ages is more than just a brilliant original design, it’s one of the most intriguing, robust, and challenging games I have ever played. It’s definitely far too long falling into that “pretty much all day” category, but I can’t think of another game on this list that I would happily call in sick to work and spend 8 hours in a chair playing. This is a game that keeps you busy, you are constantly trying to assess and reassess your situation, formulating your grand strategy, and trying to find that narrow line to victory. It feels very much like a race in a lot of ways.
It’s an engrossing, full-bodied Euro game that treats you with intelligence and respect. You always know what you want to achieve, but finding the route to victory is difficult yet so satisfying. No game have I ever played that I enjoyed both winning and losing as much as Through The Ages, it is an absolute masterpiece of game design.
If you lack the time or players to get this one to the table, I highly recommend the digital adaptation. It shaves a couple hours of the gameplay time and its a perfect translation of the table top game.
8. Dune Imperium
At this point, I consider Dune Imperium a staple of my gaming collection and a default option for any board game night. I have spoken about this game endlessly and with how popular it is, it’s pointless to recommend it as anyone reading this has probably already played it. If you haven’t, you’re being silly, this is your next purchase, no gaming collection is complete without this one on the shelf. Its perfectly suited for any gaming group of any level and being a Dune fan is just a candy-coated toping and is not mandatory to enjoy this title.
Its clever combination of deck building and worker placement is flawless, its balance a perfect diamond and it looks amazing on the table. I adore the Dune setting and as a fan, I can tell you that the theme sticks the landing made even better with perfectly executed expansions. It’s a tight, strategic and dynamic Euro that basically perfects every mechanic it uses. There is nothing wasted, nothing overcooked, it’s effectively a perfect game.
If I have any complaints about Dune Imperium is that I don’t get to play it often enough.
7. Twilight Imperium 4th edition
Twilight Imperium has been swimming around on my top 10 list for more than a decade at this point, I have played it so much over the years I have lost count. It is one of my all-time favorites, one of the greatest epic civilization builders ever made and one of the best event games I have ever owned. It is pure magic in a box but any recommendation comes with some caveats.
It’s a very long and complex game that requires a fully committed table of 4 to 6 players ready to give up their day and fully engross themselves in this 4x game that is as much about game state as is player state of mind. That is not an easy table to fill. It’s also a tough and not always fair game, equal footing is not a thing here with various dynamics that are only leveled by player interaction and game knowledge. In a way its both a test of your skill and your character, with a lot of take the mechanics and sometimes even mean-spirited moves that are required to win. It takes a mature audience with the ability to handle this style of competitive game, definitely not something for everyone. Over the years I have found far more players that are not suited to the game than I have those that are.
The more years pass the fewer TI4 games I have as a result and though I dare not say it is fading out of existence, over the last couple of years I have found much easier games, less in-your-face games of its ilk to get to the table and so I find myself sort of replacing it.
I think Twilight Imperium is a masterpiece, an experience that cannot be matched, there is no doubt in my mind it’s one of the best games ever made, but I would say you want to make sure you have at least 4 players ready to take on this beast. It’s a lifestyle game without question.
6. Eclipse The 2nd Dawn for the Galaxy
Eclipse, though I would argue is not a replacement for Twilight Imperium by any stretch of the imagination, certainly is the game I would pull off the shelf in most company to get a 4x experience. Eclipse is a Euro-style game, with clear rules and considerably less punchy mechanics. It’s also a lot shorter game than Twilight Imperium by at least 2-3 hours, so it’s a hell of a lot more accessible and easier to get to the table. You don’t get the same experience mind you, but you do get a great, full-fledged 4x experience nonetheless.
Aside from its obvious comparison to Twilight Imperium, it has its own thing going on. There are a lot of unique handling of classic 4x mechanics, in particular in the area of technology development and fleet building. It’s a diverse and interesting system that allows players a great deal of freedom in customization over the units they will conquer the galaxy with.
It also has a much easier-to-digest point-scoring system so there is a lot less meta-explanation required to understand the difference between knowing the rules and knowing how to play as is the case in Twilight Imperium.
The result is a much lighter, very entertaining, and very approachable 4x game that doesn’t require you to do a lot of event planning. Like any other board game, you can just pull it out and play.
There is a ton of strategy in the game so you get the full robust 4x experience, You’re not trimming any fat here, it’s just a lot more streamlined, and perhaps it’s fair to say more focused on letting the mechanics do the talking. Great game, definitely deserves the win over Twilight Imperium if for no other reason than it sees far more table time.
I will say this about the Twilight Imperium to Eclipse gaming experience comparison. Twilight Imperium is to Eclipse what fine dining is to Taco Bell. Meaning, it is not a game of which one can become a connoisseur, you are not going to turn Eclipse into a lifestyle game or plan events around it. Your exploration of the nuances of this game is relatively shallow by comparison to Twilight Imperium. In short, Eclipse is a fantastic game, but it’s not a unique gaming experience.
In a perfect world, I would pick Twilight Imperium over Eclipse always, but as I live in the real world, Eclipse is a far easier game to get to the table and far more approachable by the overwhelming majority of gamers. If you are looking for a truly robust and heavy 4x game that you can really sink your teeth into, Twilight Imperium has no equal.
5. Star Wars Unlimited
I will be the first to admit that I’m smitten with this game and its addition to the list notwithstanding, putting it in the number 5 spot is presumptuous at best. Still, I cannot deny how addictive this game, how clever the mechanics are and what a joy it is to build decks and play Star Wars Unlimited the CCG. I can think of no game I played this year that has had this much pull.
Not since Magic The Gathering when it was first released have I bought into a CCG with so much excitement and gusto. I really hope that Fantasy Flight Games continues with this CCG with the delicate and precision it requires, because right now after the core game release and its first expansion, I can say without reservation that they nailed it.
In theme, mechanics, the business model, the right mixture of rarity and the delicate balance are all nearly pitch-perfect. It’s on such a great track and if FFG can keep the momentum going, I can see this game making a big, long-term splash in the competitive CCG genre and in my gaming group. It’s without a doubt one of the best CCGs I have played in a great many years.
4. Imperial Struggle
There is no game on this list that I long to play more than Imperial Struggle, the absolute king of the influence control card game genre. The little brother to Twilight Struggle, this quasi-card game takes a side step from its forebearer, and rather than focusing on the card play itself, it instead shifts the focus of influence control to a far more elaborate and complex area control game and in my humble opinion, nails it.
Imperial Struggle handles the history of the 100 year war between England and France splendidly, while creating a complex and highly replayable card-driven area control game that offers tons of dynamics, but retains that “strategic pre-planning” you got with Twilight Struggle hand management. Unlike Twilight Struggle however you don’t need to memorize the decks in order to be competitive, this is far less a game resolved by player knowledge and far more on player strategic execution at the table and it’s why I find it a far superior game to its predecessor.
You might notice that Twilight Struggle is not on my list, but that is not meant as an insult, I really do love playing Twilight Struggle, I think it’s a fantastic game, but it’s one that is incredibly difficult to get to the table in good form. What I mean is that the game is difficult to teach, it takes many plays to be proficient at it and its an absolute chore to play against an inexperienced opponent. The only way to get experience is to lose tons of games and that is neither fun for the teacher or the student.
Imperial Struggle suffers from a high learning curve as well, but the game is played on the table, not in the nuance of card management and that just makes it a lot more approachable and a lot easier to offer advice and teach as you play. I find it much easier to get someone into a competitive state and you can be off and running with this game with great competitive matches after no more than a game or two.
I love Imperial Struggle, I think it’s hands down one of the best games ever made and earns its rightful list at the top of this list.
3. Lord of the Rings The Card Game
Lord of the Rings the living card game to me is the single best solo game ever made and this is how I play it almost exclusively. Not to say it’s not also a great cooperative game, because it’s outstanding when played in 2 or 3 players, but the game requires a high-level commitment to deck building and that is not an easy thing to get into if you’re not collecting. Building decks for others to use works ok, but this is not a casual pick-up-and-play game either so without that full buy-in from everyone at the table it’s not going to deliver on its potential.
As a solo game, however, LOTR is an absolute beast and a masterpiece of the highest order. I adore this game, I have been playing it with considerable consistency for the better part of a decade and I’m as excited to get it on the table today as I was the day I got it.
It has tons of expansions with amazing versatility and is unquestionably one of the most challenging games on this list. Every victory in this game is so satisfying, it feels fantastic, but it’s a brutally tough game. Every quest is a self-contained puzzle to be resolved and it’s truly a rare deck that is up to the challenge of conquering all of these. You spend a lot of time rebuilding decks and it’s just pure joy for card players like me. Every build is designed to target a specific puzzle presented by the countless quests and that moment when you figure it out and beat something that seemed simply impossible to overcome is an experience no gamer should live without.
If you like card games and are looking for something for solo play, in particular, if you love the Middle Earth setting, this game is perfect for you and comes with my highest recommendation.
2. Empire Of The Sun
I can’t lie, while I love all sorts of games to me there is nothing quite as engrossing and as addictive as a big, epic, historical war game and I’m completely fascinated by the war in the Pacific which I think is one of the most strategically complex conflicts in all of human history. To replicate it in perfect detail in a card-driven war game, especially one designed by the master himself, Mark Herman, the Chuck Norris of historical war game designers is absolute bliss.
Empire of the Sun has a learning curve so high, that there is nothing to compare it to, it is one of the most involved and intricate games I have ever learned to play. It took me the better part of a full year before I was playing the game correctly. Hell, it’s an achievement in its own right just to understand how to play, let alone learning how to play it well. Teaching it is an absolute nightmare but when you find someone who has taken the time to learn, the result is table magic.
This game is a masterpiece of historical war game design, You feel powerful and in command of the entire war from one of the two sides (Allied Forces or The Nation of Japan) and you get a sense of rewriting history. it is in a word, one of the greatest games ever made.
1. War Room
War Room is a unique entry to my list, it’s unquestionably my favorite game of all time, but it’s unique in that I don’t normally recommend it to most gamers and gaming crews.
The reason is simple, this massive game that comes in a box larger than classic Milton Bradly master series games is a 12+ hour epic level war game. To call it niche is an understatement. It takes a gaming group with very specific tastes to really get the most out of this one.
As an event game I think it’s quite perfect. It’s a team-based game so you don’t have this “I’m doing badly but still have to play for 10 hours” thing a lot of event games have which is a huge boon. There is a sense of camaraderie and interest in the stuff going on, on the board even if you’re not involved and it has these great moments of planning and contemplation with exciting “let’s see what happens” resolution.
You also don’t need to grind games out to a finish, at any time either side can surrender and you still end up with a satisfying resolution as there are no victory points, you either win the war or you don’t.
Mechanically the game has hidden orders (ala-classic diplomacy) and a clever use of initiative so each round you put in your orders and then later discover how it all plays out. There is a lot of risk management and mitigation but the board is so big and the number of orders you can give is quite limited so you have to pick your battles carefully. It’s all about strategy, making feints, long-term and short-term planning and glorious combats that play out on a semi-tactical battle board for those exciting dice-chucking moments. Its just the perfect game for a big gaming event, but I would always caution gamers considering the purchase that no matter how enthusiastic you are to play this game, and believe me I understand the pull. There is nothing worse than owning it and watching it collect dust so make sure you have the gaming crew ready to put in the hours on this one.
One of the best gaming experiences you will have ever, bar none.
Conclusion
Comparing the list to the one I did in 2022 a few games have dropped from the list.
Root was hanging on in the number 20 spot, but doesn’t quite make the cut this time around. I still think it’s a great game, but it has two core and related issues that are really tough to get around. Its an absolute bear to teach largely due to its most prominent feature, the asymmetrical sides which leads to the second issue which is that it never makes the table because playing against people who are learning really spoils the game. It’s one of those games where everyone needs to know what to and not to do, else a weak link can king make someone pretty quickly and kind of ruin the game for everyone else. It’s a bummer, I love playing this game, but only with people that are already proficient at the game. It’s actually a surprisingly quick game when everyone knows how to play and one of the longest and most painful ones to bring the table when people don’t.
War Of The Ring also drops off the list. Over the last decade, this game has been dropping from my radar and collecting a lot of dust. Much like root, the issue isn’t the game, it’s teaching the rules and that combination of playing against someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is really boring. The fact that it’s a two-player game also doesn’t help in my situation as a 2 player game night is pretty rare around these parts these days. I love it and hope I will get to play it in the future, but for now, it goes the way of the Dodo bird.
The U.S. Civil War also makes an exist. I love historical war games, especially big epic ones but this one is just not to the tastes of most of my gaming crew. The good news is that its a fun solo game and I do pull it out once a year to have a run at it and I do enjoy it, but that is not the stuff of a best-of-all-time game.
Peloponnesian War also exits but just barely. It was a battle between a stone-cold classic that I love to play and a new lover (Underwater City). I chose Underwater City less so because it was new and more because games are generally more fun to play against opponents. Peloponnesian War is an amazing and very unique solo game, I love the hell out of it and I expect it might even resurface on this list in the future but for now it sleeps in the unregistered 21st position on this list.
Washington’s War was largely replaced by Imperial Struggle. These are two card-driven influence games and though I think they could happily live on the list together, the truth is that since I got Imperial Struggle when a two-player opportunity comes up, I have a heap of games that I would rather play, in particular Imperial Struggle. The same thing for Caesar: Rome vs. Gaul, I love it and will happily play it but given the opportunity, I’m more likely to jank of Imperial Struggles chain instead.
The Big Board Gaming Weekend!
In less than 48 hours the annual big board gaming weekend begins and for 8th year in a row, my crew will get together for a 4 day fun-filled and non-stop gaming weekend. There are sure to be new games that will show up and as I do every year, there will be a thorough blog post!
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